Ecology and Society: Exploring Yasmina Khadra's The Swallows of Kabul

Ecology plays an important role in social life. The purpose of ecology is to provide knowledge about the way the world works and to bring evidence on the interdependence between the natural world and people. A better understanding of ecological systems allows the society to predict the consequences of human activity on the environment. The physical earth and the life-sustaining qualities of the biosphere are the very foundation of human life. The elements that make up the human body are derived from the earth and the atmosphere. Any kind of change in the ecology brings changes in the life of human beings. The concern with the environmental risks created by modern society has emerged against a background of a major geopolitical change. Over the past decades, there has been a traceable shift in the issues, range and nature of concern about the environment as they are expressed in international political concern. These perspectives relate to a theoretical discourse about the nature of modern society and the sources of change. Within the social sciences, it is not only just emerging as a central topic of concern, but also been recognised as the issue that should be dealt with both physical and social dimensions. The social sciences are joining the natural sciences for the analysis of the implications of environmental change on the social lives of people and also attempting to find solutions to the problems. There has been a consistent thread of literary writings taking initiatives to bring together the environmental issues and their relation to the society. Onesuch attempt is by Yasmina Khadra through his novel The Swallows of Kabul. Yasmina Khadra explores the hot, dusty streets of Kabul and offers a compassionate insight into a society that violence and hypocrisy have brought to the edge of despair. The paper aims to explore the environmental issues taken up by the writer that affects the personal and social lives of the characters. It also sets out to examine how far environmental change has become a central issue both in social discourse and in political strategy. In particular, it seeks to answer the question as to whether environmental change is capable of being absorbed through adaptation or whether it provokes entirely new or different ways of organising, managing and living in society. The social implications of environmental change are being taken up in the paper in order to depict the relation between ecology and society through an intensive study of the novel.