This paper argues that in his novel The Hungry Tide, Amitav Ghosh stages some of the key environmental debates of postcolonial India—issues of conservation, animal rights, social justice and ‘internal’ as well as ‘external’ human refugee resettlement. The novel is set in contemporary Sundarbans, a vast swathe of tidal mangrove forests in southern Bengal, where borders between land, water and (newly-independent) nations are ever-shifting—shaped by the peculiar and specific environmental forces of tidal wave and cyclonic weather systems. It is also a territory that is haunted by some of the most brutal massacres and expulsions of human refugees undertaken by the government of Bengal in the name of ‘nature conservation’ and ‘save the tiger projects’. Ghosh brings his three central characters—an ‘international/cosmopolitan’ conservationist, a ‘national’ elite translator and a ‘local’ subaltern fisherman—together in these tidal forests and shows how their lives are inevitably marked by a confluence of the ‘natural’ (the tidal/cyclonic systems) and the political/historical (the refugee expulsions). The narrative thereby exposes the blindspots in any ‘green’ theory that seeks to position ‘nature’ as being against/different from ‘’history/culture’, and ‘human rights’ as being distinct from ‘animal rights’. As such, the novel argues for the ‘social ecology’ paradigm that has emerged as self-consciously relevant to the global south, and that proposes to argue against the excesses of the ‘deep’ ecological paradigms.