Abstract
Kalpita Bhar Paul’s Ecophenomenology and the Environmental Crisis in the Sundarbans is a powerful and unconventional contribution to the study of organizations, environment, and ethics. Although written in the language of philosophy, the book has implications that resonate deeply with management and organization scholars confronting the limitations of the contemporary sustainability paradigm. Paul’s central claim is that the environmental crisis is not only a biophysical condition but also a crisis of meaning and imagination: a breakdown in how humans understand their relationship with the more-than-human world.
Working from the tidal landscape of the Indian Sundarbans, where cyclones, rising seas, and erosion threaten both humans and ecosystems, Paul invites us to reconsider the modern project of “controlling” nature. As she writes, the “image of controlling and conquering nature has become synonymous with human progress” (p. 1). But in an era of planetary instability, this ideal of human mastery has turned back on itself, producing new forms of vulnerability, displacement, and moral disorientation.
Paul’s contribution lies in moving beyond the technocratic and managerial vocabularies that dominate sustainability debates. What is needed, she suggests, is a new moral imagination that situates economic and organizational life within an ontology of interdependence.
The book unfolds across eight chapters, combining phenomenological philosophy with grounded narratives drawn from Paul’s fieldwork among island communities in the Sundarbans. Chapter 1 introduces her engaged-philosophical method, positioning ecophenomenology as a corrective to both positivist environmental science and abstract moral philosophy. Chapters 2 through 4 examine the phenomenology of land, water, and place, showing how colonial and postcolonial efforts to fix a fluid delta through embankments, boundaries, and bureaucratic categories have generated new crises. For example, in Chapter 2, Paul describes conversations with islanders who witness how the concrete embankments that were constructed to protect their homes from floods are literally devouring the land they were meant to safeguard. One fisherman, Subal, calls the embankment a “land-eater” (p. 24), explaining that the large concrete structures now swallow fertile soil, while electrical poles marking development make land unaffordable to locals. Islanders recognize how each new adaptation, justified as protection, creates new forms of loss: “They say, the sea is swallowing the land, but it is a half truth” (p. 40). Paul interprets this as a phenomenological moment in which human attempts to control expose the fragility of mastery. The very technologies designed to secure stability amplify instability. Chapters 5 and 6 develop her central ethical framework, reinterpreting the Sanskrit term saṃsāra to articulate a “community-based ethic” (p. 105) in which self- and eco-consciousness co-emerge. Chapter 7 extends this framework to environmental behavior, exploring why awareness does not automatically translate into ethical action. The concluding chapter, “Beyond the Crisis of Imagination” (p. 137), proposes an “ethos of letting be” (p. 146) as an attitude of dwelling with, rather than mastering, ecological flux. This notion is illustrated in an encounter that Paul recounts earlier with an island woman, Parul, who captures this way of life in the delta when she says, “We are the people of a floating land” (p. 61). For Paul, this phrase encapsulates an alternative ontology: an understanding of being that accepts impermanence as intrinsic to existence. Unlike the technocratic view that seeks to fix and stabilize the environment, islanders conceive of land and water as a cyclical relationship. The “floating land” thus becomes a counter-metaphor to Western notions of stability and mastery.
While Paul does not write about organizations or management, her work nevertheless offers an important corrective to the managerial rationalities that shape corporate sustainability. In business discourse, nature is typically rendered as capital or risk, or a set of assets and variables to be optimized, priced, and controlled. New frameworks such as “natural capital,” “ecosystem services,” and “carbon accounting” have helped to make ecological dependencies visible to managers and markets, but they do so within the same epistemic frame that produced the environmental crisis. When forests, rivers, and wetlands are valued only for their services, the moral relation of care, reciprocity, and humility remains unexamined. Paul’s ecophenomenology helps to expose this “epistemic limitation” (p. 2) and “poverty of thought and imagination” (p. 13).
One core implication of Paul’s argument is the recognition of nature’s agency. Nature is not passive matter to be managed but an active force that responds to and resists human intervention. By dismantling the modern myth of mastery, her work challenges the belief that technological innovation can insulate business from ecological limits. I find that her argument resonates with my own research on climate change in the Alps, where ever-more sophisticated snow-making systems fight melting glaciers and disappearing snow. Artificial intelligence-managed snow systems integrate weather forecasts, humidity sensors, and machine learning, turning snow into precision engineering. Paul would call this a “bonsai strategy” (p. 125), a metaphor for humanity’s compulsion to tame natural uncertainty and cultivate it into perfection. Yet, as Paul’s philosophy reminds us, humanity’s quest for control over nature generates the very crises it seeks to avoid. Like the embankments of the Sundarbans, which slowly devour the land they were meant to protect, the snow cannons of the Alps sustain an illusion of mastery while amplifying vulnerability. From vineyards across southern Europe where irrigation networks reach ever deeper into depleted aquifers, to coastal developments where concrete seawalls rise to defend property but accelerate erosion, the more we attempt to tame natural volatility through innovation, the more vulnerable we become to its consequences.
Paul’s analysis provides a philosophical vocabulary for understanding the paradoxes of adaptation in climate-exposed industries. Without a transformation in the meaning of the human–nature relationship, approaches that treat nature as a resource, a risk, or a service are likely to fail to resolve climate vulnerability. By reinterpreting saṃsāra as relational ontology, Paul’s work offers an ethical foundation for organization and management scholars. This foundation moves beyond compliance and measurement and toward a community-based ethic in which “our being is always in relationship with other beings” (p. 134). In this reframing, organizations are not separate from their environments but are co-constituted with them as dynamic participants in ecological systems. Like the islanders of the Sundarbans, they must learn not to dominate the forces that sustain them but to dwell with them.
Yet, this call to let go may appear too contemplative and insufficient amid the accelerating crises of climate change, biodiversity loss, and social inequality. I suggest that we could read Paul’s philosophy less as withdrawal and more as an invitation to redefine agency. Her work gestures toward a shift from managing over nature to managing with it. Firms, in this view, operate within rather than on ecological systems, engaging nature as a partner in value creation, capable of agency and response. Leadership in the Anthropocene would therefore mean cultivating sensitivity to how ecosystems co-create resilience and possibility, aligning governance and strategy with natural limits and rhythms. Patagonia’s decision to make Earth its sole shareholder and the natural skincare company Faith in Nature’s initiative “Nature on the Board,” which grants formal representation to nature in corporate governance, point to such shared governance, whereby business acts alongside, rather than above, ecological systems. Paul’s work thus provides a generative lens for reimagining what it might mean to co-manage with the living systems that sustain organizational life, foregrounding humility, attentiveness, and moral imagination.
Paul’s methodological innovation, ecophenomenology, further extends her overall critique into research practice. Rather than treating human–environment relations as objective data, she approaches them as lived experiences that reveal the ontological conditions of co-existence. Rooted in Heidegger’s phenomenological view that “all phenomena are relational and experiential” (p. 10), ecophenomenology urges researchers to attend to the relations through which meaning arises: how humans, rivers, tides, and land collectively constitute a shared world. Working with islanders as “co-researchers” (p. vii), Paul transforms fieldwork into an act of philosophical engagement, treating narratives as invitations into another way of perceiving the world. Through this relational inquiry, Paul generates metaphors that capture lived experience in language otherwise unavailable: the “land-eaters,” the “hungry tide,” and “thirsty land” (p. 19), which embody the delta’s rhythms of loss and renewal. For organization scholars, this offers a methodological provocation: Research should study organizations and institutions as part of, rather than apart from, the living environments that sustain them. Ecophenomenology thus becomes more than a method of inquiry. It is an ethical stance that redefines fieldwork: not the extraction of knowledge from a setting but attentiveness to interdependence and shared vulnerability.
Ecophenomenology and the Environmental Crisis in the Sundarbans is an intellectually ambitious and beautifully written book that bridges philosophy, ecology, and social inquiry. Paul succeeds in reframing the environmental crisis as an existential question that reveals a deeper metaphysical forgetting: the separation of human agency from the more-than-human world. In a field saturated with frameworks, metrics, and tools, Ecophenomenology stands out for its moral depth and conceptual originality. Thus, for a management audience, the book’s greatest contribution lies in its challenge to the prevailing assumption that more data, more control, and more technology will solve the environmental crisis. Instead, Paul calls for an ethical imagination attuned to our interdependence with nature, which requires us to learn to dwell with, rather than dominate, nature’s uncertainties. This interdependence demands that we see climate change not only as a technological challenge but also as an ontological turning point, which requires nothing less than rethinking not only how we act upon but also how we belong to nature.
