The Impact of Environmental Damage on the Inuit Community as Depicted in Melt by Ele Fountain: An Ecocritical Reading

Henki, Setya Budi (2023) The Impact of Environmental Damage on the Inuit Community as Depicted in Melt by Ele Fountain: An Ecocritical Reading. Diploma thesis, Universitas Andalas.

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Abstract

This thesis analyzes the issue of environmental damage and its impacts on the life of the Inuit Community in Ele Fountain’s middle-grade novel entitled Melt. The focus of this research is to find out the attitudes shown by the characters to their environment and to scrutinize the impact of environmental damage on the life of the Inuit community. The researcher applies ecocriticism as the main theory provided by Greg Garrard on the concepts of “wilderness” and “animals” and is supported by a mimetic approach by M. H. Abrams. The method of analysis is based on a qualitative descriptive method by using the novel Melt written by Ele Fountain as the primary data and other relevant sources as the secondary data. As a result of the analysis, Melt by Ele Fountain clearly represents the reality in Alaska, as proven by the similarity of data. The researcher discovered two categories of attitudes shown by the characters, which comprise the natives and the outsiders. The first category is human as preserver, which consists of loving animals, recognizing environmental change, becoming self-restraint, and respecting a mutual relationship with nature. These attitudes delineated the struggle of the natives to protect their environment from oil drilling in Alaska. The second category is human as destroyer, which comprises greedy, ignorant, abusing, and disrespecting animals. These are depictions of President Trump’s policy of oil drilling in Alaska in 2018. The natives mostly express the preserver attitudes, meanwhile, the destroyer attitudes are mostly presented by the outsiders. The researcher also found that four impacts of environmental damage affected the life of the Inuit community in Alaska. The impacts involve a food crisis, collapse of tradition and customs, reduction of land and settlement, and increase in mortality. The researcher recognizes that these impacts are the portrayal of the environmental crises that have occurred in recent decades in Alaska and the Arctic.

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