Environmental Issues and the Human Society in the Niger Delta Landscape: An interrogation of Inno Ejike’s Oil At My Backyard and Helon Habila’s Oil On Water

Abstract

Literature reflects and represents life and events in a given society. It is employed by the literary artists to explore and document the realities of man and his environment. This paper explores how literature explores and exposes the environmental degradations that face humanity in Africa, especially in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. These degradations range from pollution of water, destruction of trees, contamination of farmlands, loss of pastoral beauty, the pollution of air through the emission of carbon dioxide among others. The selected texts adopted the ecocriticism theory. This theory studies the relationship between literature and the environment. The aim of this work is to project that the selected authors through commitment to the realities of their immediate environment show how literature as a product of the environment can be used to rescue, preserve, and conserve the ecosystem from being destroyed and degenerated completely. This paper reveals that man through his actions and inactions is responsible to the degraded environment that poses severe danger to humanity. The findings show that man is the architect of his environmental status and realities whether good or bad. It further shows that the degraded environment is caused by man and it is only man that can also make frantic efforts to rescue and revamp it for the benefit of man and the entire creature.