Prospecting Climatic Hazards in Whitley Strieber’s The Day After Tomorrow: An Eco- Critical Perspective

Abstract

Meteorological hazards are actually the constant changes in the atmospheric patterns due to human alteration of the land. However, the weather processes include heat waves, cold waves, cyclones, hurricanes and freezing rain. As a matter of fact such changes occur particularly in temperature and wind. Resultantly, due to these natural hazards caused by human land changing activities will form another ice age in the upcoming future. Conclusively an ice age is basically a long period of climatic shifts in the reduction of Earth atmosphere which leads to melting the ice at poles. Furthermore, the ice age is actually the coldness of global temperature and the large areas of the earth are covered by continental ice sheets and alpine glaciers. The main objective of this study is to investigate the impact of human activities causing meteorological hazards. This study is delimited to meteorological hazards which are extracted from the novel The Day After Tomorrow. The nature of this research is qualitative and uses eco-criticism theory to examine meteorological issues which are caused by human alteration of the land. The primary source for this study is the text of Whitley Strieber’s novel The Day After Tomorrow. However, for the secondary source other research articles and web based links carefully gathered to understand and analyses the story and applied theory. The textual analysis technique is used for the analysis and interpretation of the selected text of the novel The Day After Tomorrow. For the identification of the meteorological issues the eco-criticism theory by William Rueckert has been used. The analysis of the study gives us results that the meteorological issues are caused by the human’s alteration of the land that includes deforestation, burning of fossil fuel, building infrastructure, transportation networks, agriculture and industrial pollution. To conclude our study we found that the meteorological hazards are actually the results of the human pollution which has shown the massive temperature reduction in recent years as per other reports as well as the concerned news agencies. However, we have learnt scientific theories are really working to control these hazards. Therefore, we as humans needs to be disciplined as well as treats nature the way it is rather than changing it according to our needs. Furthermore, we should remain as species rather than nation so that we may control the upcoming ice age.

Key Words: Super Storms, ice age, freezing rain.