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I can see the participant this is sort of expanding as people are joining in.

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We will give it a minute or two before we begin. So.

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Are you guys able to see the participants? I mean, the list? No. OK.

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I can see that, like fifty one have joined so far, but I think they have about a hundred glass on

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and 50 who signed up. So we just wait for.

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We'll wait for a couple of minutes.

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OK, I think you're got to begin now because it's a minute after the start time, sort of

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a warm welcome to everyone to the Cyclone Unfun webinar. My name is Manickam

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Arthur and I'll be chairing today's discussion. The Spaniard emerges from a research network entitled

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Climate Crisis Thinking of the Humanities and Social Sciences that I Can Win, along with my colleague from

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the history faculty here in Oxford. Professor Amanda Barr, I'm going to say a few words about our network objectives.

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Before moving on to introduce today's incredible panel. So the Climate Crisis Thinking Network

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is supported by the Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities Torch, as well as Oxford Martin School.

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Officially launched in October last year with several objectives that can be found reflected in today's discussion

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as well. So the first was to forge a truly into discrete conversation in Oxford and

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hopefully more broadly around the climate crisis, especially one whereby

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we can get humanities scholars and social scientists to speak to one another and even

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B hope right and think collectively across disciplinary divides. Another

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ambition related to the forging of truly into the spring conversations around the Anthropocene and the climate

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crisis was a finding new ways to make academic research more potential matters of the day,

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or finding ways to communicate and somehow translate a longstanding academic research in more creative

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ways. So the battle to the on the Super Cyclone Unfun emerges from this collective thinking

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on the climate crisis. I'm absolutely delighted to have these five scholars gathered together

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today, as well as only a few have signed up to participate in this conversation.

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I'm going to very briefly introduce the panel in the order in which they're speaking. So alphabetically,

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as it happens, we're going to begin with Professor Jonny Bhattacharya, who is assistant professor

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of history at Drexel University. She's the author of Imbibed and Ecology and the Bengalla Delta.

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The Making of Kalkadoon that was published back in Britain was depressed in twenty eighteen. This

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book tells the history of dramatic ecological changes in the Bengalla dead from 1760 to 1920,

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involving land, water and humans. It traces the stories and the struggles that link them together.

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But Johnny is currently working on a new book, tentatively entitled Monsoonal Landscapes, Credit,

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Climate and Calamity. After the journey began, Professor Jason Collins,

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who is associate professor in anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin.

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His first book was Sensitive Space Anxious Darity at the India Bangladesh border. It was published by

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the University of Washington Press in 2016. His current research is situated in the Southern Bundes

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and the Southwest Delta region of Bangladesh addressing climate change. It addresses

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his new book, addresses climate change related development, conservation, industrialisation, piracy and security.

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And it explores the ways that imagination's of future climate change are shaping the Delta and the

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India Bangladesh border in the present. After Jason, we're going to have Professor Unusually,

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Uno's assistant professor in Salvacion studies at the National University of Singapore. She's

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the author of Forest of Tigers, People, Politics and Environment and the Sunderbans,

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which directly explores the human non-human interface. And it looks at how people live

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in these impoverished islands and how did how they interact with the tigers of the region and

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how the perceptions of Tigers and Lochiel articulate contradictory understandings of sociality.

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I know is also the co-author of the Bengali Diaspora Rethinking Muslim Migration,

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and she's currently working on the Indian Anthropocene, the body as well as on cost

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after. I know we're going to have Dr. Meqdad Martha, who is a research associate at the University of Sheffield

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Miguna, has recently completed a APHC from the Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics.

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Just earlier this year, in fact, her doctorate research based on Long-Term Ethnographic Fieldwork in the Sundarbans

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Forests of India, interrogated what it means to conserve life for those living

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alongside a submerging global conservation hotspot. Magnus, currently working on a

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book manuscript that is tentatively titled Conserving Life Political Imaginative from a Forest.

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And finally, we're going to have Professor Cash up approach. He was assistant professor in environment at the Department

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of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics. Current Book Project, which is based on over two years

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of ethnographic and archival research. And Salvacion Europe, examines the political ecology of climate change adaptation

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in coastal Bangladesh. She has also published several articles on the anti politics of climate

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change on climate justice, as well as the broader contribution of the climate crisis in Bangladesh.

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So I'm not going to hand over to the Bjarni, just a few words on the format.

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Everyone is going to speak for about 10 minutes approximately, and then we're gonna open up

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the binder for Q&A from all of you. So ordered the Bjarni.

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Thank you so much, and Annika. And also thank you so much to Dortch for organising this conference,

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organising this conversation. And I'm really also very honoured to be here

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amongst anthropologists and geographers who are doing very critical work in this

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under. But I as a historian of Calcutta and environmental. I am also very

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appreciative of Nyoni for including a historian. Thank you so much to talk about the current moment. I think it

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is kind of important. So in some ways I would make a few comments

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and please, I'm funding a longer historical trajectory. And also think

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a little bit about forgetting and remembering and attention that we've paid for to this. I'm fun.

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It was fun happened. It made landfall in the

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in Bengal, in eastern India. Meanwhile, Bangladesh on 20th me and

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the casualties were not as high as it has been in the in the last

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few years, though in both India and Bangladesh, government has gotten better about actually relocating

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people to shelters. So I. One hundred and twenty eight is the latest count that I checked.

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People who've died because of the fun money, many of the deaths

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were because of fallen trees, but also land loss and a diving surge.

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It's also, though but the damage that has been estimated so far is

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about cutting billion U.S. dollars. And this is a damage that covers both Bengal and Bangladesh.

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So this is the event we're talking about. But it also happened as

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migrants who were coming back to Bengal in at least in the

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Indian site following the code red lockdown, like harshly imposed, Gobin logged

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on and they were walking back home. So they were walking back to a very uncertain kind

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of a future into this decimated landscape. So, so unfun is

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has to be seen as something like embedded in this epidemiological event that is

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unfolding in South Asia at the moment. The other thing I also want to mention

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is it was also an event which some of us who live or work in that area were surprised

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at how little it global or even one might even see. National attention it received in India,

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at least, and how far Tribune regularly covered it in ways. I don't think we can say that

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about the national media in India. So so that's why I really appreciate Manicka

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wanting to actually not forget that event. And I really want to thank you because I think

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creating board the archive and I'm a historian, I worry about creating icons with creating both the archive

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and the historical memory and knowledge at the same time is really, really important. So

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let me just to Doc Doc see a it a few things. So climate scientist

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Rocsi Matthew Cole, who works in Chennai, he said he called the iPhone a compound event.

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That's meteorologically that's what it's called multiple extreme's come together. And I think

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for us social scientist, it is also a compound event in the senses. We can never just look

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at it as a cyclone because what Unfun did. Like many other cyclones before, is it pulls back

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the curtain on the many modes of forgetting we've done, forgetting in our planning, in our design,

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in our legal and economic structures within which such cyclones are actually embedded. So

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I want to talk a little bit about that in some ways. For one small example, I'll begin with about

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Calcutta, because I know most of my panellists will talk about Sunderbans as we all won, but we can't get lost

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between 20 to 30 percent off its tree cover because of the landfall. And one of the things

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we realised is that sort of bubbled up into our consciousness, not that we didn't know is

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we had not been tending auburn trees. So every time we were laying down lines or putting down

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footbath, we were cutting, severing their roots. And as a result, the trees became imbalanced. And suddenly now

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the road department, the Transport Department is wondering who should they be talking to next time they want to do

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road work? And this is what I actually looked at in my book, Empire Ecology is how we forget

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and what sort of political economy within which are forgetting is embedded. And I said one comes from

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siloing of knowledge and policy knowledge is get created in various different departments.

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And I said and I showed how that siloing of knowledge is actually driven by

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various kinds of lobbies and stakeholders. That is, once the league the building builders

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lobby, if you can think about it, in a much larger framework, which is not a, as I say, build a syndicate and

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lobbies are not a 1980s or both neoliberal like neo liberal thing in South Asia, but actually goes

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back to the late 18th century, if one might even want to stretch it that far. So there's

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that there is that kind of forgetting. There's a forgetting that happens within law where the legal architecture

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of property will make certain forms of living with land, water and human in it.

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Look at recalcitrant, recalcitrant or sort of eatery's certain kinds of relation that don't

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fit into the regimes of property. So this forgetting is also.

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We need to pay attention to the political economy of forgetting this. We're getting as deeply linked with our ability

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to imagine, imagine alternative futures. Imagine our path forward. Imagine how we move forward,

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because what Unfund has revealed is if we cannot go back to business as usual and in the greed

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derangement, Mr. Bush has actually spoken about how the failure of imagination in the face

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of such compound events, which is a force, a tone that comes out of meteorology. But we need to look

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at these events as acts in this manner. So this

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is one thing I want to stock about. And then let's I hope as a panel we can

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think together what the work of forgetting does in cases like this, what lessons we remember,

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what we choose to forget and what lessons we cannot see because we've forgotten certain strands of

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thinking and living with land and water. What prevents us also from seeing those kinds of lessons?

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And and so I ended my book with trying to imagine what urbanisation

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might look like in these climate changed world. What sort of lessons is that? Urbanisation

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is going to proceed through concretisation of the city and that's what we are doing in Calcutta.

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We're just pouring concrete in the wetlands, which which actually protects

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not just Calcutta, but also the also the sun Durban. So one of the things I want to think

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a little bit about is also the relation between the top one conversation I have seen emerge,

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especially Borst Eila and in Fun is Sunderbans of them. The mangroves need to be protected

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and that's a good lesson to learn. It's a lesson we've learnt that Matt Lake's Calcutta and the mangroves that are connected

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space. That's not how one historians often look at it when the rural comes. It comes mostly in terms of

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migration and not as our ecological unit. So that's been a very good thing

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to think about. But we've learnt the absolutely wrong lesson because the next thing we say is we need to

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protect the mangroves to protect Calcutta, and we need to change that equation. And we need to seek Alpha

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as ecological pressure on the mangroves. Not that mangroves need to be protected to protect Calcutta

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because the next thing we see is we need to then depopulate the mangroves in order to

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protect Calcutta. But never the other way around. So that's something I want to put on the forefront in thinking

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through what makes a problem, a compound problem. And that's a very, very important category. But let's turn

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to some other kinds of natural disasters and put this in context. So a couple of things

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that are happening. We had the 2005 floods in Mumbai. We had the 2015 floods in Chennai.

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And I want to just remind him through what McDonough and Nick Cannon. I'm told,

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reminded us after the Chennai floods of the Japanese water crisis. And he said Chennai ran

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out of water more than a century ago when the British began centralising water projects in 1876,

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according to Jazira. These projects should a new paradigm that say what? Any relation between

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human land and water. And I think this this is the paradigm we are seeing also in the case

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of how we react to these cyclones, especially by the policy and think tank

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policy think tank and government officials and the bureaucrats and the irrigation department, the road department,

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transport relief disaster, all of that that's happening. So let me go briefly

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back to one other thing that happened in eighteen six seventy six. And that's being covered

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by Benjamin King's various excellent book, The Imperial Disaster. This was a cyclone that struck

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Bengal bad. It was a pretty devastating cyclone. And what happened

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was just like, I'm fine, but in a slightly different temporality,

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it was followed. One hundred thousand people almost died in that cyclone. And that was because of

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the second. But the cholera that the cholera outbreak that have in the current outbreak haven't precisely

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because the impeded development completely bypassed this one. But when it came to infrastructure,

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so it really couldn't go to the places that were affected, which were primarily bucket of Gonta, and she'd

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gone down that area normally, primarily in the Bangladesh side of this one, that one really couldn't

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actually go there in time. And the cholera just spread devastatingly. And

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for us, it's trying to really understand. So what he basically says is this is a human, human

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historical event and we need to understand what the human loss, but the history of what who

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was screamed. And he said if we look at the longer imperial policies that actually

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eviscerated the people, these immiseration and the people who were claimed finally

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by the cyclone was embedded in the social hierarchies of the political economy. NBC, a similar thing

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happening. The people who were at what actually affected by cyclone unfund is are

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also people who are affected by a longer history of land lost through

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Eila and Embankment Building, who had to leave the Sunderbans to become migrants

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in other cities, will now come back to a completely decimated landscape. Whereas fields are

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the agrarian fields as alienated, their embankments are broken. So there is a longer history.

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So we have to see this as a kind of a human historical event. We Kingsbury's work

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helped us understand. And then I want come to one final point of similarity between the 1876

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moment and now. It's following the 1876, a cyclone.

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The imperial government responded by disbursing aid in the form of loans.

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And ah. And basically establishing a security regime.

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So the two things that the summer months got at the end was loans,

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as well as a police force all over this area. And they came together. Money

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and policing always goes together. We know that. And the loans are often the people who got

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the loans were the wealthy or landlords who also doubled as moneylenders in the area. So

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what happened that people who actually had the ability to produce security and collateral got the

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loans which created pockets so far, inequality and wealth accumulation

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and the poorer people became overdependent on these moneylenders. Second

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time over. And now the Imperial Police was used to actually extract higher amounts of rain,

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higher amount of rent from the poor, the poorest of the poorest population in the Sunderbans.

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And like as of yesterday, what Rihad is known has been disbursed in the Indian side in

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Bengal. But we now have, Forni, people who've gotten the loans and now we are going through

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entire bureaucratic machinery has been set in place to now look at who are the deserving of

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aid and who is not deserving of it. And that is that entire bureaucracy of corruption within which it is embittered.

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And this has a very, very long history. So these are the two similarities,

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I think, that comes out, which makes us wonder what are the lessons we learnt in the last

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hundred and fifty years? Almost, we can see between 1876 and this present moment.

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And what are the lessons we failed to learn or chose not to learn is kind of important. And then I want

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to come back to one minor point is when I say if we forget and I know some of

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my panellists, fellow balance will speak on this when we forget, we forget precisely because there are very, very

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strong lobbies that that aid in the production of this forgetting.

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So there have been some anthropologists, sociologists who have been saying there

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are other ways of banking, for instance, and there are. And it's

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ultimately surprising, as I was reading, about the kind of in banking that's happening in the John Gita, which is

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Brahmaputra tributary, where they use bamboo Poles, they call it bundling, they use bamboo footfalls

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to do up in banking. What happens is silk gets to collect in it and life grows around

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it. Trees take root and crabs and fish and biota can thrive

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in it. And that has often been ignored in the face of concrete embankments because

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builders like concrete brings in money. Concrete creates economy of circulation.

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Builders lobby make money. The art movies make money. The irrigation department people

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get to make money and dish. Most of this work actually shows the politics within which these

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builders lobbies are located. So we have to understand it's not that we don't know the lessons.

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It's the lessons. What kind of solutions make money and don't make

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money and greed ultimately decide what happens and how we respond. So with that,

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I'll give it over to Jason.

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Thanks to a giant and thanks also Manicka and all the folks at Tortue of organised, this is a really exciting

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conversation to be part of. I, I have the luxury

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of saying something that's going to be a little bit more narrow than what some of my other panellists

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are going to talk about, in part because they're doing such a wonderful job of setting the stage. I'm going to skip

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over some of that and try and just say some make

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three fairly general points about the response to Cyclone Unfond and the way it plays into

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our imaginations of various different kinds of both humanitarian and development responses

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to climate change, particularly in Bangladesh. Although I think

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that some of what I have to say speaks more broadly to development at a more global level.

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I my research is focussed on various different projects of making the future

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in the Bengal Delta and specifically in the Bangladesh side of it. And so the observations

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that I'm going to make today are drawing largely on an area that I've been doing work in for quite some

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time now in Southern Shop. And

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I'm going to try and make these points in a general way, but I will reference some of what's going on

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in that area and specifically in an island which has become sort of a notorious island in discussions

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of climate change in Bangladesh called Guevarra. So

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the basic point that I want to make is that disaster and disaster response are one form,

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one kind of project of making the future. And so it's instructive to think

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about Psychon unfond and the ways that people have responded to it in trying to sort

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out what those projects mean and how those work. So the area that I work in was badly affected

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by cyclone unfun embankments broke throughout the region, leading to fairly widespread

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flooding and damage of not just homes, but also crops and fields. The damage

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was especially bad in southern shut, Kara, especially in Gobert's, which is a space

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which has been in perpetual need of and waiting for the government to rebuild some of its critically

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weakened embankments, essentially since Cyclone Eila in 2009.

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So the points that I'd like to make about this events are threefold.

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And the first is maybe to amplify something that Johnny said, which is to give

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some credit to some of the work that's been done in terms of creating

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more sound disaster preparedness in the region. I think it's really critical to acknowledge,

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especially as scholars who are often the position of critiquing development,

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that there is in some ways Cyclone I'm fine can be read as a tremendous success

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of both the early warning and the cyclone shelter system. There is

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a comparatively shockingly, shockingly low rate of mortality coming out of cyclone on fun.

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And I think that's something that we all need to acknowledge and think about and think about in some sense, what

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miraculous structures, cyclone shelters, especially multis, use cyclone shelters are

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now to be clear. That's not to say that there are not major issues that need to be confronted

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around the cyclone shelter system, especially questions around the spread of

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covered 19, especially with the timing of unfun, essentially at

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the height of the of the pandemic crisis. There are still large gaps

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where it takes a very long time for people to get to cyclone shelters. There are ongoing reports that cyclone

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shelters have become sites of domestic violence or violence against women. And there continues to be a crush

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around lack of space for livestock, which also need protecting main events of floods. However,

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I think that there is a really meaningful transformation. So comparing,

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say, cyclone comparing cyclone unfond to the super cyclone that hit Bangladesh

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in 1991, also super cyclone, which left over 140000 dead. There have been really tremendous

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steps forward here. The second question,

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the second point I'd like to raise is that if the actual preparedness

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around cyclone shelters is good, I think that we could say that maybe the response has not been so wonderful and in fact,

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has been extraordinarily problematic. It's been slow. It's left many, many

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people in the lurch. People were left without access to food or water throughout the EED holiday and for

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weeks following. Indeed, in the regions that I work, many people are still without

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access to reliable clean water. Their houses are still damaged. Embankments have yet to be repaired.

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And I think what's instructive to think about here is to reflect back on the response

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to Cyclone Eila in 2009 and to see what that kind of slow response

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did. So to think with Guevarra as a case in point, the islands.

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This is an island which is essentially situated quite close to the India Bangladesh border and affected. Right across

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the right, across the river from the sugar bonds. That was an island that became quite

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well-known in the wake of Cyclone Eila, in part because there was a critical

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failure to repair the embankments there in a meaningful way for years to come. And

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what that failure to repair the embankments not did was not only did it cause ongoing

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damage to agricultural land and people's livelihoods on that island, but it also allowed for a new

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kind of imagination of what Guevarra, in fact, is and represents and both caution. I have written

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about this in various ways. Gbara effectively became this island, which was imagined as a place

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where climate change had already happened and subsequently became a space that was good,

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that was good to think with for development professionals were interested in putting it together experimental projects

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designed to increase climate adaptation and climate resilience.

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Now there are a range of effects of those kind of projects, but very few of them were actually transformative

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to the lives of the people who are living on those islands. Instead, what they did is sort of they they

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transformed Guevarra into sort of this new place to sort of future anteria of what climate change

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may look like in other places around the world. And as as

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I've argued elsewhere, effectively, this is really that in many ways sort of looked over

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the head of a lot of the actual much more grounded projects that people inside of Guevarra were trying to get up

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and running to deal with ecological change as they encountered it on a daily basis. So

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effectively, these kind of slow responses have to speak

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with Johnnys language of the political economy of forgetting tend to have an effective

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erasing the memory that what's actually happening is the result of a particularly bad

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response to a disaster and instead recasting these spaces as zones of climate

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change that can be treated in different sorts of ways than zones of humanitarian relief. So they

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move from spaces of acute vulnerability to climatic events like cyclones to spaces

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that seem to be zones of disaster foretold, where this sort of doomed nature of the land

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and the people that live there open up various kinds of possibilities for experimental intervention with

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little serious concern for the actual dynamics of vulnerability that people face on

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a daily basis. And I worry that that that often is effectively

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going to be a sort of the next wave and recasting this region and that in that particular way.

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So the third and related point that I want to make is to think

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a little bit about the actual responses by people who lived in that region to cyclone on fun

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as possibly a more hopeful way to think about the conditions of life in Christ

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in the context of climate crisis. So first, one of the things that emerged

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in this region is that the actual risk, the actual effective response in terms of providing much needed

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aid, in terms of access to food, water, shelter and so on and so forth, actually emerged within communities

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in this region, particularly local collectives. Some of them led

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by groups of women who had organised themselves around this new emerging softshell crab business

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in the region, sprang into action to provide some much needed and immediate relief for the most severely

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affected members of the community. So that kind of response, of course, is not that surprising.

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But it's worth noting, nonetheless, that the most immediate and effective responses too often emerge

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not from development or humanitarian organisations, but from the communities that were most affected by it,

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and especially people who are already organising within that community to think collectively about how to address

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the transforming environment. Second, the impact of

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unfond within Guevarra motivated a resurgence of a protest that's been popping up there for now

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several, several years, where people gather on the islands to canning embankments

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in the wake of storms. This happened after Cyclone Bubel. That happened after funny and start

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protesting, calling not for relief, but for the government to repair the island's weakened embankments.

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So now I want to qualify that a little bit and say it's worth noting that that protest itself is

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political and is part of the dynamics of a local chairman

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who is a member of not the ruling party, trying to sort of press the Awami

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League for for a response. And also, of course, raises some questions about

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the extent to which embankments are effective infrastructures to keep people safe in the first place.

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Questions that I know some of my colleagues will be responding to. But nonetheless, these protests, I think, offer

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an occasion to reflect on how we might think about anticipatory responses to climate

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change in a slightly different way. So people protesting in Gabeira are asking for

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a more proactive infrastructure that might provide protection from storms like I'm fine in the first

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place, as opposed to the kind of weak response that they're getting in terms

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of relief now. Now, whether or not such infrastructures are possible, and I think that that's very much an

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open question. The protests in Guevarra and community based responses

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to providing relief highlight kind of a classic problem in development, not just in Bangladesh but elsewhere.

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I mean, that is that people who are most directly affected by things like climate change and who have

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also. And who also have some the Sprouter responses to the vulnerabilities that climate change produces

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are rarely at the centre of conversations about addressing their own futures. So

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I think I'm fun on the one hand offers a fairly grim portent of what climate change could

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look like in the delta and what the climate crisis could look like in the delta. But it also offers, I think, some hope

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and brings us to the point of needing to say the often repeated but little heated thing

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about climate change and development, which is if I think we are to think seriously about

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life lived amongst this climate crisis in places like the Bengal Delta on both sides of the border

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as something more than just a window onto future catastrophe, we've got to continue to support and prove things that

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already work like cyclone shelters. And we also have to continue to advocate for more democratic,

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consultative and community engaged responses to climate preparedness. And

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that both of these, I think, are fundamental to imagining a more just and perhaps effective

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way forward in addressing the unfolding crisis. Thanks

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very much.

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And want to get to you next. Thank you so much for inviting

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me. And thank you, George, and thank all of you.

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More than 100 participants listening. So what I thought I'd do is actually

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look back on my kind of relationship with cyclones

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in the region. So I think I'm going to talk

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just about the various cyclones that I have witnessed and

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migration. I think I'm just going to focus on on this. So

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in 1998, I was in class seven and we had gone to the junior one

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for a nature study camp with our school. And that was

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our. Just a couple of weeks before the big cyclone,

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off nineteen eighty eight from Durban, which killed more than 8000 people.

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And it was after that cyclone that my father and

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his friends show one lullabye Energy was an architect,

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built the first cyclone shelter of the Schruder, which is in a place called Charcoaled today.

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So it was, you know, this this this idea that they were there to sink.

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There wasn't a single cyclone shelter in the entire region before 88.

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So I think it got built by by 19 and by 90.

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So a couple of years to raise money and then to build this huge big cyclone shelter. Anyway, so

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what do you want to say is that, you know, two eight thousand people killed are

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the next big cyclone happens. When I was in the shelter, I had just arrived.

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That was in 99. And initially, the stronger

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one, we're going to be hit. The government had sent three boats

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to Shagger Island to do something about the cyclone that took to help people out. Nothing else

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had been organised. Nothing. That cyclone hit or that about 10000

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people. But I think that from 2000 onwards,

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because there are many more schools that are built in concrete and brick.

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People have been now going into, you know, schools that have become sort of

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cyclone cyclone shelters. And in Bangladesh, there are perhaps a few more cyclone shelters stand

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than investing. But investing goes to schools taken over that that

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has been repurposed as cyclone shelters when when cyclones come.

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So. I love killed

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less than 500 people. However, eight thousand people disappeared,

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and I think this is a friend from the Shandor one who was telling me

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a thousand people disappeared. We don't know where they are. We can assume 10, 11 years

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after the cyclone that they are probably dead. So it's not as if

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so whether they're dead, whether they migrated out. And this is what I really did last

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year. I was doing some fieldwork to mark my 20 years in the Schumer one. So I was there

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for a long time in August and September. And what I noticed

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was that there weren't new homes.

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So basically 20 years ago, the number of huts I had surveyed

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in this little village were more or less the same. And this

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is strange for a place where, you know, people have had kids and now

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it's in the same place in the outskirts of Kabul that, for example, you have you have twice

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as many Hudson and people now. So where where did those people go? So

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people said, you know, most of the islanders say we tried to send our kids away. We tried to

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to to get them to leave the place because there isn't really a future

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here. And even what was interesting to see was that even those who had done

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well were trying to buy lots of land in the outskirts of Tibet

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to send their children there. So do those who have done well try to buy a plot of

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land and then had, you know, install the sort of small shop for them.

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And those who did not have land and whose father were actually fishermen were

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construction labourers in Tamil Nadu, in trucks and in Punjab,

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Kerala. The underline that the places where people are migrating out.

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And so this is this is this is what happened with Eila and with

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I'm fine. Actually, the opposite has been happening. So even though the Libyan

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whose house I lived is twenty one years back, her

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two of her sons had returned because of the fact them losing their

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jobs. OK. There's nothing for them to do apart from. They have a little bit of land. So

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it'll it'll be know them for, for maybe a few months. But after that

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they will have to return and and work again outside this region. So I

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think that people in this region, on the one hand, are very aware of the fact that

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there isn't much to be done. But on the other hand, I also think

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that there is a complete mismanagement and there could be a lot more cottage

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industries that could be, for example, you know, beekeeping.

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So people from Bari will come and put their beehives all along the

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the the river in front of the forest in people's homes. And I've been

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here for the last 20 years. Why don't you guys start doing the same. And buy your own

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house and then organise yourselves around, you know, selling the honey. But

410
00:37:05,700 --> 00:37:11,400
but nobody has really talked of sending them to Bari to get

411
00:37:11,400 --> 00:37:16,720
a course on how to become proper.

412
00:37:16,720 --> 00:37:21,970
You know, honey collectors and how to perhaps do this job.

413
00:37:21,970 --> 00:37:27,160
Similarly, there are very few alternatives. And,

414
00:37:27,160 --> 00:37:32,230
you know, sort of cottage industries where people could be organised. They're very, very few of

415
00:37:32,230 --> 00:37:37,510
these. There are some congeals. But what is surprising to me is that what has also

416
00:37:37,510 --> 00:37:43,100
happened in the last few years, two things that have really caught my attention,

417
00:37:43,100 --> 00:37:48,430
that you have a mushrooming of hotels all along the

418
00:37:48,430 --> 00:37:53,590
forested islands. And these hotels are never, ever owned by

419
00:37:53,590 --> 00:37:59,920
people from the front. So they're owned by people from Calcutta. So those then employ

420
00:37:59,920 --> 00:38:05,050
people from the area to manage the place. And the other thing that has

421
00:38:05,050 --> 00:38:10,240
happened is that apart from apart from these little

422
00:38:10,240 --> 00:38:15,820
hotels, again, you know, the government here could be

423
00:38:15,820 --> 00:38:20,950
having a system where it would be local people who could be a lot

424
00:38:20,950 --> 00:38:25,990
more organised into, you know, owning these places, or at least

425
00:38:25,990 --> 00:38:31,510
the taxation could be higher. These hotels could also be

426
00:38:31,510 --> 00:38:36,580
a lot more eco friendly than they are now. And so

427
00:38:36,580 --> 00:38:41,740
so so this is really what is happening. The other thing that is happening is

428
00:38:41,740 --> 00:38:46,840
that a lot of people who are from originally from the

429
00:38:46,840 --> 00:38:51,880
schruder Boeing have started to lend geos and are no longer living there. So

430
00:38:51,880 --> 00:38:56,950
they live in Ann Arbour and more like four in Borya. And so I've

431
00:38:56,950 --> 00:39:02,090
been meeting quite a few of them and they say, no, you know, originally Evander's from there,

432
00:39:02,090 --> 00:39:07,420
but now we we want to do something for the shingled, which but they are not living there. And I think

433
00:39:07,420 --> 00:39:13,000
if you are not living there, you get you forget what the priorities are.

434
00:39:13,000 --> 00:39:18,310
And again, this is something very, very interesting, you know. So is it linked to a certain

435
00:39:18,310 --> 00:39:23,440
idea of what a place is and your own standing?

436
00:39:23,440 --> 00:39:28,780
So, for example, if you are educated, you are not going to live in gobbled up or shut in yet,

437
00:39:28,780 --> 00:39:34,090
but you are going to try and go a little higher up. And when I wasn't here.

438
00:39:34,090 --> 00:39:39,130
For example, when I found out was that entire tracts of the borough were full

439
00:39:39,130 --> 00:39:44,390
of Muslims who had migrated from West Bengal in the 60s. So

440
00:39:44,390 --> 00:39:49,570
it was very interesting to see that these were people that had, you know, been kicked

441
00:39:49,570 --> 00:39:55,340
out and had been given the worst kind of land.

442
00:39:55,340 --> 00:40:00,430
So so this is it's the same. So basically, your geography,

443
00:40:00,430 --> 00:40:06,850
in a way, is what tells the world who you.

444
00:40:06,850 --> 00:40:11,980
So even within the island, as I as I wrote in my book, you know, when when usually

445
00:40:11,980 --> 00:40:17,110
you are around, you live on the periphery of the island. You are a

446
00:40:17,110 --> 00:40:22,120
Fisher Fisher and, ah, somebody who depends on the

447
00:40:22,120 --> 00:40:27,220
forest. Whereas when you are inside, you own lunch and you are

448
00:40:27,220 --> 00:40:32,290
a lot less susceptible to have your land

449
00:40:32,290 --> 00:40:37,570
submerged by the river water. So what

450
00:40:37,570 --> 00:40:42,790
what the government has been doing, actually, the new government has been doing quite a lot in

451
00:40:42,790 --> 00:40:47,920
this one when they have the honour guard and they receive 1000 rupees

452
00:40:47,920 --> 00:40:52,930
every month for just being the farmers. And if they do

453
00:40:52,930 --> 00:40:58,000
go and perform, they get two thousand rupees per month. So at least there is something

454
00:40:58,000 --> 00:41:03,160
so that, you know, one government has also started a scheme where

455
00:41:03,160 --> 00:41:08,590
widowed women get a thousand rupees per month, where the elderly get a thousand rupees per month.

456
00:41:08,590 --> 00:41:13,720
And I think that, you know, that people are not dying of hunger. You

457
00:41:13,720 --> 00:41:18,790
can see it in people's bodies. Twenty years ago, bodies were a lot thinner than

458
00:41:18,790 --> 00:41:24,370
they are now. You can see that you don't have the kind of malnutrition that you had, know

459
00:41:24,370 --> 00:41:29,710
all those years ago and 20 years ago. People talked a lot about starvation

460
00:41:29,710 --> 00:41:34,870
and how it had been so difficult for them to eat. Whereas this

461
00:41:34,870 --> 00:41:39,970
is no more, the rhetoric to people today speak a lot more about safety, about

462
00:41:39,970 --> 00:41:45,130
the fact that they fear the river breaking up and then losing their houses. They

463
00:41:45,130 --> 00:41:50,260
also fear a lot of the local politics and how basically

464
00:41:50,260 --> 00:41:55,420
to get anything done, you need to have contacts, you need to know people. And it doesn't always work

465
00:41:55,420 --> 00:42:00,460
to to their benefit, which is why they prefer just leaving and trying at

466
00:42:00,460 --> 00:42:05,720
least to make money outside the region. I haven't

467
00:42:05,720 --> 00:42:11,560
looked at have I have I extended my SO.

468
00:42:11,560 --> 00:42:16,660
So this is so I really feel just like Jason was saying, you know,

469
00:42:16,660 --> 00:42:21,700
there is a failure of imagination in relation to this region because

470
00:42:21,700 --> 00:42:26,740
on the one hand, nobody wants to do anything. You know, recently people have been talking

471
00:42:26,740 --> 00:42:32,590
about the fact that constructing concrete or brick embankments

472
00:42:32,590 --> 00:42:37,770
really does not help because. But what

473
00:42:37,770 --> 00:42:43,480
I also wanted to highlight is that what these people are going through today and

474
00:42:43,480 --> 00:42:49,510
is basically because these rivers are the silt is increasing.

475
00:42:49,510 --> 00:42:54,520
And so therefore, they they need to they need to change their courses. And this is

476
00:42:54,520 --> 00:42:59,530
because of the Frucci Dam. This is because of all the dams that India has built

477
00:42:59,530 --> 00:43:04,990
around Bangladesh. These are because of the dams. China has built

478
00:43:04,990 --> 00:43:11,440
along the Brahmaputra just, you know, on on its very. And so basically

479
00:43:11,440 --> 00:43:16,480
you have a lot of silting and a lot of that. The way the river

480
00:43:16,480 --> 00:43:21,880
was flowing is not what is happening anymore. So, so,

481
00:43:21,880 --> 00:43:26,920
so this river is going to increasingly break embankments and try

482
00:43:26,920 --> 00:43:32,020
to find ways of slowing down because the silt is making it,

483
00:43:32,020 --> 00:43:37,210
you know, just just rice. So so this is this is what has been happening

484
00:43:37,210 --> 00:43:42,290
really from a geographical point of view. And this is going to increase. And

485
00:43:42,290 --> 00:43:48,960
I've been talking to a lot of people I know in the shoulder one and.

486
00:43:48,960 --> 00:43:54,360
You know, they were saying that really this is what is happening.

487
00:43:54,360 --> 00:43:59,840
One of them was telling me how his bond was dying. And I said, is it because of the

488
00:43:59,840 --> 00:44:05,040
saltwater that has just come in? Because I know his house is inside. He's one of the richer

489
00:44:05,040 --> 00:44:10,560
people. And he said, no. And I said, you know, you live next to the school.

490
00:44:10,560 --> 00:44:16,230
And last time I visited, I saw all the school kids throw plastic packets

491
00:44:16,230 --> 00:44:21,300
on the side of the road. And this pond is just on the side of the road and the entire pond on one side was

492
00:44:21,300 --> 00:44:26,400
covered in these plastic packets. So I said, you know, maybe you should just dredge out and pull out all these

493
00:44:26,400 --> 00:44:31,590
plastic packets and you're just we often would start breathing again. So these

494
00:44:31,590 --> 00:44:36,600
are all the problems that some parents are facing. It is not just one thing. It is also,

495
00:44:36,600 --> 00:44:41,970
you know, the kind of food people are buying for for the richer

496
00:44:41,970 --> 00:44:47,430
ones, how they dispose of plastic. You can the forest is full of tourists

497
00:44:47,430 --> 00:44:52,490
on Styrofoam plates. If you go visit in winter, for example. So it's

498
00:44:52,490 --> 00:44:58,800
it's it's a much bigger problem. But again, I would I would say that there is a

499
00:44:58,800 --> 00:45:03,870
a crisis in imagining a better future for

500
00:45:03,870 --> 00:45:11,800
this place. Thanks.

501
00:45:11,800 --> 00:45:16,900
Thank you, I know. Thank you, Nancy Gerfaut bringing us together

502
00:45:16,900 --> 00:45:22,090
today. And actually, I've been following Vinita Damodaran and Richard Grove, who just passed

503
00:45:22,090 --> 00:45:27,130
away recently. Their work. And even though the bingo there does such a small

504
00:45:27,130 --> 00:45:32,290
part of the world, they actually argue that the Indian Peninsula is crucial for

505
00:45:32,290 --> 00:45:37,540
understanding just environment and climate at the planetary

506
00:45:37,540 --> 00:45:42,640
scale. So it's sort of important to understand what's happening in India in terms of climate,

507
00:45:42,640 --> 00:45:47,720
not just for India, but for for the rest of the world. And also, I've spent the past

508
00:45:47,720 --> 00:45:52,810
five years drawing on each of my co panellists walk. It really is an honour to

509
00:45:52,810 --> 00:45:58,060
be here talking alongside them. So one of the things that I suppose we know

510
00:45:58,060 --> 00:46:03,070
about scholarship in terms of cyclones is that they

511
00:46:03,070 --> 00:46:08,290
are not exactly natural disasters. And I think they've Dani touched on this a little bit. And I just want

512
00:46:08,290 --> 00:46:13,550
to firstly begin by saying that both historically and often

513
00:46:13,550 --> 00:46:18,880
are actually disasters by design, which means they're disasters because of particular

514
00:46:18,880 --> 00:46:24,220
forms of development and particular forms of war, leaving places underdeveloped.

515
00:46:24,220 --> 00:46:29,320
So they're sort of all too human as disasters. And so scholarship has shown that

516
00:46:29,320 --> 00:46:34,420
these are shaped by inequalities, inequalities in society, which is both cost

517
00:46:34,420 --> 00:46:39,430
atrocities that were taking place in the Indian subcontinent and how we build. So what

518
00:46:39,430 --> 00:46:44,490
materials we build with how we damaged dredge rivers, how we sort of changed

519
00:46:44,490 --> 00:46:50,230
the courses of rivers. And we kind of continue to disregard particular forms of knowledge,

520
00:46:50,230 --> 00:46:55,270
both scholarship and archival, but also of the people living there. So I

521
00:46:55,270 --> 00:47:00,660
think just to repeat that, what they've done is said in the beginning that there's a narrow narrative

522
00:47:00,660 --> 00:47:06,150
of the Sunderbans being saved for callcott or for Bythewood biodiversity.

523
00:47:06,150 --> 00:47:11,290
But I think there needs to be at the centre of these conversations that the importance

524
00:47:11,290 --> 00:47:16,300
of saving the Sunderbans for itself. So not there are people who live there that are animals

525
00:47:16,300 --> 00:47:21,340
who live there. And it's not just a site for climate adaptation elsewhere. And it should not be conceived

526
00:47:21,340 --> 00:47:26,500
of that because there are people's life projects that have to be put at the centre of what it means to conserve.

527
00:47:26,500 --> 00:47:31,690
So that's what my work has been focussing on. And that's what I would like to talk

528
00:47:31,690 --> 00:47:36,820
about. That can be reconceive conservation from what it means for people

529
00:47:36,820 --> 00:47:41,980
who live in the Sunderbans or what is it that they might want to conserve for their own lives and who

530
00:47:41,980 --> 00:47:47,080
chooses what to conserve and why. And so I guess it's

531
00:47:47,080 --> 00:47:53,170
already been mentioned. But just very briefly, the Sunderbans is disentanglement not just of saltwater,

532
00:47:53,170 --> 00:47:58,540
freshwater, monsoon, water, land and and forest, but also

533
00:47:58,540 --> 00:48:04,150
of Hindus, Muslims and other devices who live there. So there's religious influences from Sufi Islam

534
00:48:04,150 --> 00:48:09,160
as well as version of Islam, share of Islam. There's entanglements of birds, fish, crabs, mud,

535
00:48:09,160 --> 00:48:14,350
skipper. So there is a sort of interconnectedness that a planetary level and that interconnectedness is very

536
00:48:14,350 --> 00:48:19,360
much with people who live there alongside non humans.

537
00:48:19,360 --> 00:48:24,370
So do I think the role of the humanities and the social sciences in understanding climate

538
00:48:24,370 --> 00:48:29,830
crisis is crucial because it does put people back into the picture

539
00:48:29,830 --> 00:48:34,840
in a way. I think it's not very easy. What it means to put people's life

540
00:48:34,840 --> 00:48:39,880
projects back at the centre. So I think in trying to interrogate what it might mean

541
00:48:39,880 --> 00:48:44,890
to live better or notions of of living better, it's quite complicated.

542
00:48:44,890 --> 00:48:50,140
And so I think I'm going to unpack what that means. I'm going to do that with two points.

543
00:48:50,140 --> 00:48:55,330
And they're sort of very banal points. But I guess from the ones it's quite complicated

544
00:48:55,330 --> 00:49:00,550
how each of them play out. When we think about implementing how we might rebuild

545
00:49:00,550 --> 00:49:05,590
lives or reconstruct lives Borst to cyclone. So if we try and think about what

546
00:49:05,590 --> 00:49:11,020
are people's hopes and aspirations of people who live there, they're not homogeneous.

547
00:49:11,020 --> 00:49:16,090
And so, as from everything we've heard so far and what Unruh said, what

548
00:49:16,090 --> 00:49:21,220
kinds of houses they want, where do they want to live, where do they want, whether they want to live

549
00:49:21,220 --> 00:49:26,520
and leave the Sunderbans or actually in the cases of some, they might not want to be rehabbed,

550
00:49:26,520 --> 00:49:32,020
lifted out of the Sunderbans, even though it's a very precarious landscape environmentally.

551
00:49:32,020 --> 00:49:37,060
And so these are different sort of choices that different people in this in their bones based on

552
00:49:37,060 --> 00:49:42,670
generations. So that's young and old. Whether you are landed or not landed,

553
00:49:42,670 --> 00:49:47,800
all of those kind of choices of what one wants is not homogenous. And that's very different. And we need to

554
00:49:47,800 --> 00:49:52,840
understand what people might want for themselves. And I think the second thing about

555
00:49:52,840 --> 00:49:58,030
what people might want in terms of just diversity, not just based on religion and cost,

556
00:49:58,030 --> 00:50:03,460
is that in rebuilding life. And I think I know you and others have touched on this, is that local politics

557
00:50:03,460 --> 00:50:09,220
really matters. And so party politics matters, political sort of patronage.

558
00:50:09,220 --> 00:50:14,810
And this is not just. Relation to, I suppose, neighbours being, you know, Frank,

559
00:50:14,810 --> 00:50:20,390
of friends and showing mutuality in times of disasters, but there's also a lot of envy, there's a lot of infighting.

560
00:50:20,390 --> 00:50:25,410
People do poison each other's bonds and do those kinds of local politics

561
00:50:25,410 --> 00:50:30,660
need to be taken into consideration? And I think the last point in terms of putting

562
00:50:30,660 --> 00:50:35,760
people's life projects at the centre is taking into consideration how they relate

563
00:50:35,760 --> 00:50:40,890
to this landscape. So how do they think of these storms and disasters? And,

564
00:50:40,890 --> 00:50:46,170
you know, one of the things that is woven into the sort of everyday

565
00:50:46,170 --> 00:50:51,990
fabric of life in the Indian subcontinent, but definitely also the bingo data is religion.

566
00:50:51,990 --> 00:50:57,210
So there are Hindus, Muslims and devices in this region. There are several gods, goddesses,

567
00:50:57,210 --> 00:51:02,580
deities that are worshipped. We might call in some senses, it's an animistic society

568
00:51:02,580 --> 00:51:07,670
where people worship from Margon Gods or the goddess of the Ganges, to William Beebe,

569
00:51:07,670 --> 00:51:12,780
who is the sort of Islamic forest deity to mom on a show, who is the snake goddess

570
00:51:12,780 --> 00:51:17,910
or Lord Vishwakarma, who's the Lord of Iron. And they're sort of another kind of Hindu Banten.

571
00:51:17,910 --> 00:51:22,980
And there's dotted with mosques and temples. So most books on

572
00:51:22,980 --> 00:51:28,110
Brazilian's or climate change adaptation, disaster and risk will say,

573
00:51:28,110 --> 00:51:33,110
let's put participation at the centre, let's put people at the centre of these approaches. But what

574
00:51:33,110 --> 00:51:38,190
they can completely disregard sometimes is how people actually live. And what might

575
00:51:38,190 --> 00:51:43,320
they conceive often make sense of these disasters in their own sort of my theologies,

576
00:51:43,320 --> 00:51:48,330
in their own memories and through stories. So I think to scholarship in the

577
00:51:48,330 --> 00:51:53,430
humanities might contribute to these conversations with economists,

578
00:51:53,430 --> 00:51:58,650
climate scientists, environmental economists, basically, because this is sort

579
00:51:58,650 --> 00:52:03,660
of trying to think about how people in the Sunderbans are

580
00:52:03,660 --> 00:52:08,880
thinking about these disasters and the monsoons and just everyday life. So it's not

581
00:52:08,880 --> 00:52:14,400
just organisations necessarily like the World Bank that

582
00:52:14,400 --> 00:52:19,620
don't necessarily put the way that people relate to the landscape, but even development

583
00:52:19,620 --> 00:52:25,080
work and kind of so-called secular activism. So whether it's the rights

584
00:52:25,080 --> 00:52:30,180
activists in India or people who are thinking about rights to livelihoods

585
00:52:30,180 --> 00:52:35,280
really completely disregard the way in which then the ones people relate to the landscape themselves.

586
00:52:35,280 --> 00:52:40,590
And so I think we really do need to, as people who are in the social sciences, think about

587
00:52:40,590 --> 00:52:46,470
mythology stories as being a part of adaptation and resilience as well.

588
00:52:46,470 --> 00:52:52,920
And I think one example to elucidate just the ways in which these local politics

589
00:52:52,920 --> 00:52:58,380
and people's politics are so complicated is. And I'll do that to the embankments.

590
00:52:58,380 --> 00:53:03,420
And maybe Garcia will speak a little more about this. So at the time that I was in

591
00:53:03,420 --> 00:53:08,460
the field, Dr. Armitage, Merkabah there's this book on him back when

592
00:53:08,460 --> 00:53:13,650
politics came out. And as I was reading his book and it was sort of the nitty gritty details

593
00:53:13,650 --> 00:53:19,050
of, you know, land compensation and party politics and just how

594
00:53:19,050 --> 00:53:25,440
these embankments are built in and how what it takes to to build in the Sunderbans

595
00:53:25,440 --> 00:53:31,260
with, you know, peoples, you know, all the sort of disaggregating different people's

596
00:53:31,260 --> 00:53:36,840
relationships to where they live on the island and who gets compensation or not. And simultaneously

597
00:53:36,840 --> 00:53:42,210
to reading his book, where I was based, these modern kind

598
00:53:42,210 --> 00:53:47,580
of Dutch style [INAUDIBLE] were coming along and these were concrete embankments

599
00:53:47,580 --> 00:53:52,710
that were much bigger and they were supposed to withstand the cyclone better.

600
00:53:52,710 --> 00:53:57,840
And in some ways, as they've Dani's work also assures these

601
00:53:57,840 --> 00:54:03,570
sort of so-called modern embankments, which came after Cyclone Eyeline 2009.

602
00:54:03,570 --> 00:54:08,760
They've all cracked right now after cyclone unfund. And as Jason said, they've cracked in parts of Bangladesh. They've cracked

603
00:54:08,760 --> 00:54:14,370
in many parts of this in their bones in West Bengal. And so they completely

604
00:54:14,370 --> 00:54:19,530
disregard not only history and what we know in terms of sort of this

605
00:54:19,530 --> 00:54:26,070
landscape not being a fixed landscape. It's a moving delta. So they've misread the local ecology,

606
00:54:26,070 --> 00:54:31,260
but they've also kind of mr they'd older histories of how

607
00:54:31,260 --> 00:54:36,270
the desire for said in translation was linked to taxation, to tools,

608
00:54:36,270 --> 00:54:41,910
to creating states. And these were moving communities. There was much more nomadism

609
00:54:41,910 --> 00:54:47,400
than is allowed for both because of the sort of border we have between Bangladesh and India, but also of creating

610
00:54:47,400 --> 00:54:52,860
fixity in a landscape which is which is shifting. So my proposition,

611
00:54:52,860 --> 00:54:57,930
I suppose, for the future in terms of going ahead after rebuilding

612
00:54:57,930 --> 00:55:03,210
from cyclone arm fine is to forward. And so as cyclones and densities

613
00:55:03,210 --> 00:55:08,460
are increasing. One is that reground reconstruction work. Of course,

614
00:55:08,460 --> 00:55:13,720
in the current context, in the specific. Cities of the Bingguo Delta. But I think alongside

615
00:55:13,720 --> 00:55:18,820
that, we also really need to learn from interesting examples elsewhere. And there are

616
00:55:18,820 --> 00:55:24,190
just so much more imaginative kaat happening in different parts of the world. So China, for example,

617
00:55:24,190 --> 00:55:29,500
is thinking about sponge cities where the idea is to be able to absorb floods

618
00:55:29,500 --> 00:55:34,570
instead of create walls against floods. And landscape architects like Andrado Mathurin

619
00:55:34,570 --> 00:55:39,730
delivered a corner have prompted us to think about flood plains. And so not just sort

620
00:55:39,730 --> 00:55:44,920
of fixed boundaries and separations between land and water. So I suppose one proposition

621
00:55:44,920 --> 00:55:49,930
about really taking into consideration the local gritty integrities undermine due to

622
00:55:49,930 --> 00:55:55,000
differences in the bingel Delta is not necessarily just

623
00:55:55,000 --> 00:56:00,460
thinking about the bingo they're dying. I think this is something is really fascinating in this banner

624
00:56:00,460 --> 00:56:05,680
to maybe get into is that even within the bingo world out there, so many differences. So I think

625
00:56:05,680 --> 00:56:11,110
in the Bangladesh side, it's there, you know, lots of diversity. It's a different scenario

626
00:56:11,110 --> 00:56:16,120
within the West Bengal side. There's deep differences based on, you know,

627
00:56:16,120 --> 00:56:21,160
monsoon backdowns, differences based on accretion and erosion and sanitation. There

628
00:56:21,160 --> 00:56:26,200
are certain islands which are more low-Lying than others. So I think what

629
00:56:26,200 --> 00:56:31,540
I'm proposing is that actually the future could look like with very decentralised,

630
00:56:31,540 --> 00:56:37,330
very localised plan. So it needn't be that there's one plan for the entire bingo data,

631
00:56:37,330 --> 00:56:42,400
but actually within the landscape and the ecology, it could have very specific

632
00:56:42,400 --> 00:56:47,440
interventions based on the specificities even within the West Bengal side or

633
00:56:47,440 --> 00:56:53,830
the Bangladesh side. And so it could be a really sort of radical decentralisation of how one rebuilds

634
00:56:53,830 --> 00:56:59,170
from where we are right now. And so even within this area,

635
00:56:59,170 --> 00:57:05,020
the idea of extremely decentralised approaches would then have to take into consideration

636
00:57:05,020 --> 00:57:10,480
the kind of local politics that is to do with, you know, panchayat

637
00:57:10,480 --> 00:57:15,670
level, BDO level, state capacities, patronage, politics. Who is getting them mean

638
00:57:15,670 --> 00:57:20,980
post unfun people who are getting compensation for damage. And as I mentioned

639
00:57:20,980 --> 00:57:26,170
it all, it's all based on, who knows, political party members who, as you know, does the DMC

640
00:57:26,170 --> 00:57:31,900
party who doesn't. So I think it cannot be at

641
00:57:31,900 --> 00:57:37,240
at at a remove at all because those those they nitty gritty

642
00:57:37,240 --> 00:57:42,930
details, Enza, end up mattering in in how one rebuilds.

643
00:57:42,930 --> 00:57:48,120
So just a day, I suppose. And my comments, I think, again,

644
00:57:48,120 --> 00:57:53,230
the there's so much work around the differences. And again, and I'm thinking

645
00:57:53,230 --> 00:57:58,510
about here cameleer the ones work on flooding and she sort of breaks

646
00:57:58,510 --> 00:58:04,570
down the ways in which not all floods are bad. There is some flooding which has existed

647
00:58:04,570 --> 00:58:09,730
and has existed forever and has very good flooding and there's other floods that are bad. So I think just sort

648
00:58:09,730 --> 00:58:14,830
of disaggregating the nitty gritty of what's going on. But

649
00:58:14,830 --> 00:58:19,930
again, beneath that more drone and Richard Grove has been working for

650
00:58:19,930 --> 00:58:25,210
a very long time on long environmental histories. And I think the Centre

651
00:58:25,210 --> 00:58:30,880
for World Environment has been documenting and archiving our historical database

652
00:58:30,880 --> 00:58:36,010
of climate history. And it's really an incredible database. And it's incredible

653
00:58:36,010 --> 00:58:41,110
work to think about the archives of climate and of monsoon.

654
00:58:41,110 --> 00:58:46,180
But I think one of the things that might be interesting alongside that kind of an

655
00:58:46,180 --> 00:58:51,220
archive is also an archive of some of what

656
00:58:51,220 --> 00:58:57,340
has been said in this panel, that everybody's sort of beginning from their journey of just memory, of recalling

657
00:58:57,340 --> 00:59:02,400
what it means for people who live in this in their bones to face

658
00:59:02,400 --> 00:59:07,420
a stock Dido's storm or to face a cyclone. And these

659
00:59:07,420 --> 00:59:12,730
are just kind of documenting things like those sort of very mundane fears

660
00:59:12,730 --> 00:59:17,740
of children when they encounter cyclones and what it means for them to what

661
00:59:17,740 --> 00:59:22,870
it means to protect their livestock when a storm is coming. Or do

662
00:59:22,870 --> 00:59:27,910
I think just that a mutuality between neighbours, but also in and envy between

663
00:59:27,910 --> 00:59:33,310
neighbours? So I think what I'm saying is that there really is the need for a database

664
00:59:33,310 --> 00:59:39,100
not just of longer climate histories, but also of oral histories, of people living with

665
00:59:39,100 --> 00:59:44,320
precarity and an end and not a new form of climate, bigger data or

666
00:59:44,320 --> 00:59:49,810
people as a new set of in their lifetime, people in this in their bones. This is the sort of fourth

667
00:59:49,810 --> 00:59:54,970
or fifth time they're rebuilding their home. So this is not the first calamity at all that they

668
00:59:54,970 --> 01:00:00,040
have seen on. And I think this is why and I sort of end here. But

669
01:00:00,040 --> 01:00:05,380
this is why people like the rest of you on this panel and sort of especially

670
01:00:05,380 --> 01:00:10,460
Unau with your two decades of engagement in the Sunderbans, is sort of invaluable to. Be able

671
01:00:10,460 --> 01:00:15,500
to kind of have that long, good reflection on a region and its memory. So

672
01:00:15,500 --> 01:00:24,090
thank you.

673
01:00:24,090 --> 01:00:29,400
Well, yeah, I guess I'll just start by thanking the nine ECA and all of

674
01:00:29,400 --> 01:00:35,220
these brilliant friends. It's really exciting to be in conversation with all of you. And

675
01:00:35,220 --> 01:00:40,560
to follow all of these really important

676
01:00:40,560 --> 01:00:45,600
reflections. A lot of what I have to say

677
01:00:45,600 --> 01:00:51,240
follows, I think, in important ways on each of each of their

678
01:00:51,240 --> 01:00:56,790
comments that we've heard so far. But also

679
01:00:56,790 --> 01:01:02,820
something that I want to talk about and kind of centre is that in addition to

680
01:01:02,820 --> 01:01:08,130
interrogating these in many ways violent,

681
01:01:08,130 --> 01:01:13,260
imagine areas of climate change future for this coastal

682
01:01:13,260 --> 01:01:18,360
region, I think that it's important also to pay attention to the fact

683
01:01:18,360 --> 01:01:23,400
that there are progressive imagined areas of redistribution in

684
01:01:23,400 --> 01:01:28,470
the region that we absolutely should not ignore and that

685
01:01:28,470 --> 01:01:34,580
are important, in my opinion, to imagining what

686
01:01:34,580 --> 01:01:39,750
an alternative kind of adaptation could look like. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to talk

687
01:01:39,750 --> 01:01:44,760
about. I'm going to talk about the political economy of

688
01:01:44,760 --> 01:01:50,000
climate change adaptation in coastal Bangladesh specifically.

689
01:01:50,000 --> 01:01:58,670
And I'm going to situate that in relation to how.

690
01:01:58,670 --> 01:02:05,090
How on time played out in one particular community recently. So,

691
01:02:05,090 --> 01:02:10,100
I mean, we're thinking about cyclones and climate change. It's clearly

692
01:02:10,100 --> 01:02:15,590
important to understand that these kind of extreme weather events

693
01:02:15,590 --> 01:02:20,720
are being made more frequent and more extreme

694
01:02:20,720 --> 01:02:26,900
because of climate change. And so I'm fine. Is in some ways

695
01:02:26,900 --> 01:02:32,510
sort of a harbinger of the future. Right. We're going to see more of this. And it's going to make

696
01:02:32,510 --> 01:02:37,790
communities more precarious. But also, what's really important to centre is

697
01:02:37,790 --> 01:02:43,100
that strategies for adapting to climate change, these specifically strategies

698
01:02:43,100 --> 01:02:48,860
for response, have also made communities in the coastal region more vulnerable.

699
01:02:48,860 --> 01:02:54,800
And so that's what I want to talk about, is how

700
01:02:54,800 --> 01:03:00,650
development agencies are responding to climate change, how communities have responded to climate change. And then

701
01:03:00,650 --> 01:03:05,690
what that means for this vulnerability. And

702
01:03:05,690 --> 01:03:11,130
I think that what's really important in understanding this is.

703
01:03:11,130 --> 01:03:17,380
It and especially I mean, I think that Deb John is sort of starting us off by talking about

704
01:03:17,380 --> 01:03:22,390
this sort of intentional work of forgetting. It's really valuable.

705
01:03:22,390 --> 01:03:27,490
I think that's something that's really important to remember, is that people

706
01:03:27,490 --> 01:03:34,300
in this region have had have developed over centuries

707
01:03:34,300 --> 01:03:39,520
really robust strategies for living within this fluid

708
01:03:39,520 --> 01:03:44,800
landscape. Right. And so for those of you who aren't familiar with the Delta,

709
01:03:44,800 --> 01:03:50,050
as you know, my co-pilot sort of alluded to the

710
01:03:50,050 --> 01:03:55,060
Bengal Delta is the youngest and most active river delta in the

711
01:03:55,060 --> 01:04:00,400
entire world. And so it's constantly shifting and that means that the rivers are shifting and also that the landscape

712
01:04:00,400 --> 01:04:05,440
itself is shifting. And the communities that have lived here

713
01:04:05,440 --> 01:04:11,350
since it was settled, which started in the precolonial period.

714
01:04:11,350 --> 01:04:16,570
They have developed strategies for living with this. And starting

715
01:04:16,570 --> 01:04:21,670
in the colonial colonial period, new development interventions have attempted to

716
01:04:21,670 --> 01:04:27,280
fix the landscape in ways that have been at odds with these sort of local strategies

717
01:04:27,280 --> 01:04:32,410
for living in this of landscape. And so some of the ways that they've

718
01:04:32,410 --> 01:04:37,660
done that, for example, there are indigenous

719
01:04:37,660 --> 01:04:42,880
rice varieties that people have cultivated that are

720
01:04:42,880 --> 01:04:47,920
naturally adaptable to salt because the land floods with salt regularly,

721
01:04:47,920 --> 01:04:53,230
like we've seen, like we sign off on some of these rice strands also grow rapidly

722
01:04:53,230 --> 01:04:58,390
with floodwaters, which means that, you know, when the land floods,

723
01:04:58,390 --> 01:05:03,400
it doesn't matter that a rice paddy gets flooded because the rice can just shoot wrap

724
01:05:03,400 --> 01:05:08,410
with the floodwaters. These, you know, traits

725
01:05:08,410 --> 01:05:13,570
for living with the floods have been sort of selected out as

726
01:05:13,570 --> 01:05:18,670
new hybrid varieties have been introduced. And ironically,

727
01:05:18,670 --> 01:05:23,830
now there are sort of scientific efforts to develop climate adapted rice

728
01:05:23,830 --> 01:05:30,250
strains which mimic exactly these traits that indigenous

729
01:05:30,250 --> 01:05:36,190
rice varieties had already sort of had embedded in them and

730
01:05:36,190 --> 01:05:41,980
sort of contra. This sort of scientific practise, some communities on both sides of the border

731
01:05:41,980 --> 01:05:47,390
have said, you know, we're just going to try to resuscitate these varieties that we already

732
01:05:47,390 --> 01:05:53,170
could use, which we can grow from season to season your year like.

733
01:05:53,170 --> 01:05:59,120
And then another another strategy that has historically been really important

734
01:05:59,120 --> 01:06:04,260
for living in this fluid landscape is

735
01:06:04,260 --> 01:06:11,400
a management of embankments that are not cement. Right. So

736
01:06:11,400 --> 01:06:16,500
I'm not going to get into a lot of the specifics of the differences on either side of the

737
01:06:16,500 --> 01:06:22,280
landscape. But Bangladeshis in a really different position from where the shoulder bonds is right now

738
01:06:22,280 --> 01:06:27,560
in India, because is this massive system of concrete embankments

739
01:06:27,560 --> 01:06:33,110
was built in starting the 1960s in Bangladesh. And so

740
01:06:33,110 --> 01:06:38,210
the negative effects that are friends have been

741
01:06:38,210 --> 01:06:43,250
talking about of these concrete embankments in India. Those negative effects started

742
01:06:43,250 --> 01:06:48,390
to be seen in Bangladesh in the 1960s. And today we see that

743
01:06:48,390 --> 01:06:53,480
sort of 50 years on a really sort of extreme form of of what happens when

744
01:06:53,480 --> 01:06:58,640
you build these kind of embankments, which isn't just the kinds of vulnerabilities that we've heard about,

745
01:06:58,640 --> 01:07:04,280
but it's also that the landscape has the toe

746
01:07:04,280 --> 01:07:09,350
because the landscape is so dynamic. As I said earlier, when you

747
01:07:09,350 --> 01:07:14,510
build concrete embankments like this, it cuts off the estuary. And that means

748
01:07:14,510 --> 01:07:19,550
that the land can no longer continue to be built up. And the result of that

749
01:07:19,550 --> 01:07:24,680
is that the land is literally sinking. So sometimes that's called sea level rise, but it's different

750
01:07:24,680 --> 01:07:29,990
from the drivers of sea level rise because of climate change, because literally the land

751
01:07:29,990 --> 01:07:35,720
is falling down because of embankments that have been built. And that has

752
01:07:35,720 --> 01:07:42,470
just a tremendous amount of negative effects before these embankments were built.

753
01:07:42,470 --> 01:07:47,900
At least on the Bangladesh side and presumably also in the sugar bonds,

754
01:07:47,900 --> 01:07:53,150
local communities had a system that they call Ozio Musher Bodh, which is like eight month

755
01:07:53,150 --> 01:07:58,490
embankments. And that means that they have embankments

756
01:07:58,490 --> 01:08:03,530
that are not concrete. They're made of mud. But

757
01:08:03,530 --> 01:08:08,540
during the monsoon, they let them sort of dissipate and the land is

758
01:08:08,540 --> 01:08:13,580
built back up with the silt. And that means that they sort of can't they

759
01:08:13,580 --> 01:08:18,890
they can protect the land while they're growing rice. But they also can counteract this problem

760
01:08:18,890 --> 01:08:23,960
with subsidence. And the upstream offshore bodh system was intense when the

761
01:08:23,960 --> 01:08:29,180
Polders were built in in Bangladesh. So it's been a lot more difficult

762
01:08:29,180 --> 01:08:34,520
for local communities to sort of redevelop new strategies for managing these embankments

763
01:08:34,520 --> 01:08:39,710
themselves. When you build the concrete embankments, only people who have the technology to build the concrete

764
01:08:39,710 --> 01:08:44,810
can manage that embankments. OK. So now I going to tell you about this community that I that

765
01:08:44,810 --> 01:08:50,570
I mentioned before. So

766
01:08:50,570 --> 01:08:55,880
Poller 22 is so sorry. As I mentioned, this system of embankments, it was built across the

767
01:08:55,880 --> 01:09:01,940
across the coastal zone. And now all of these islands that are surrounded by these concrete embankments

768
01:09:01,940 --> 01:09:07,010
are called by their names within this system. So there's like pulled or one pulled or two pulled or

769
01:09:07,010 --> 01:09:12,410
three and pull there. Twenty two is one very unique

770
01:09:12,410 --> 01:09:17,660
island in the coastal zone of Bangladesh because whereas

771
01:09:17,660 --> 01:09:22,670
in the last 40 years or so.

772
01:09:22,670 --> 01:09:27,860
In particular through structural adjustment programmes, many of these islands have transitioned away

773
01:09:27,860 --> 01:09:33,140
from traditional rice agriculture toward shrimp aquaculture. Holder 20 to has always

774
01:09:33,140 --> 01:09:38,330
resisted the this transition to shrimp aquaculture.

775
01:09:38,330 --> 01:09:43,460
Shrimp aquaculture is ecologically

776
01:09:43,460 --> 01:09:48,530
devastating for the region. It also requires much less

777
01:09:48,530 --> 01:09:53,810
labour than rice farming requires, which means that we see these massive migrations

778
01:09:53,810 --> 01:09:58,880
out of the coastal zone because it doesn't sustain the kind of agrarian political economy

779
01:09:58,880 --> 01:10:04,090
that agriculture sustains. And so

780
01:10:04,090 --> 01:10:09,220
in Polder, twenty two, they had a they've always had a social movement that has resisted this

781
01:10:09,220 --> 01:10:15,040
transition and that means that they have continued to farm rice in a landscape

782
01:10:15,040 --> 01:10:20,890
that was surrounded by other islands where they have

783
01:10:20,890 --> 01:10:27,120
transitioned to shrimp. And the thing about the shrimp is that it.

784
01:10:27,120 --> 01:10:32,420
It requires sailing water and it it's necessary to bring that sailing

785
01:10:32,420 --> 01:10:38,570
water into the into the islands to be contained. Which weakens the embankments.

786
01:10:38,570 --> 01:10:43,600
And so in order to support ongoing

787
01:10:43,600 --> 01:10:48,800
grain production there, 22, in addition to mobilising

788
01:10:48,800 --> 01:10:54,230
against often quite violent encroachment by land grabbers

789
01:10:54,230 --> 01:10:59,240
for shrimp, the people in Polders wanted to have organised for

790
01:10:59,240 --> 01:11:04,790
decades to continue farming rice and also to protect

791
01:11:04,790 --> 01:11:10,220
the embankments around the islands themselves. So there are cement

792
01:11:10,220 --> 01:11:15,320
and holders. Then on the outside of that, they've built an additional ring of what

793
01:11:15,320 --> 01:11:20,570
they call the very bad. And that is essentially embankments that are built

794
01:11:20,570 --> 01:11:25,610
up by hand, much like this sort of historical ocean much or bad system. And

795
01:11:25,610 --> 01:11:31,070
those embankments have protected the islands. And they

796
01:11:31,070 --> 01:11:36,920
were allowed to do that because of. Because they had advocated

797
01:11:36,920 --> 01:11:42,380
in the 1970s and 80s to the government to essentially allow landless people

798
01:11:42,380 --> 01:11:47,390
to have access to the land in between the the rings

799
01:11:47,390 --> 01:11:52,670
of embankments and to farm that collectively themselves. And this is

800
01:11:52,670 --> 01:11:57,860
this is in part due to this

801
01:11:57,860 --> 01:12:03,200
unique and I think really important provision in the Bangladeshi constitution,

802
01:12:03,200 --> 01:12:08,420
which allows for the distribution of common lands to lands people. It hasn't always

803
01:12:08,420 --> 01:12:13,700
been implemented effectively. But it is

804
01:12:13,700 --> 01:12:19,820
it is there as a piece of leverage for social movements like the one that I'm talking about.

805
01:12:19,820 --> 01:12:25,420
And so these Lambis people farmed this land collectively and they maintained

806
01:12:25,420 --> 01:12:31,910
this system of embankments themselves. And so after cyclones

807
01:12:31,910 --> 01:12:37,520
SIDOR and Iola in 2007 and 2009, when all of the rest of the islands

808
01:12:37,520 --> 01:12:42,890
around Polder 22 were devastated by the embankments being broken

809
01:12:42,890 --> 01:12:48,020
and causing this massive flooding, the embankments

810
01:12:48,020 --> 01:12:53,600
in Polder, twenty two were fine. And

811
01:12:53,600 --> 01:12:58,700
people say that during those cyclones, the rice laid down for

812
01:12:58,700 --> 01:13:03,710
a couple of weeks and then it came back up and they did not experience

813
01:13:03,710 --> 01:13:08,960
the same flooding. And they were incredibly resilient to the impacts

814
01:13:08,960 --> 01:13:14,000
that that we saw. And all these other polders and in fact, people from

815
01:13:14,000 --> 01:13:19,060
all over the region came to pull their twenty two to seek refuge at this time, even though

816
01:13:19,060 --> 01:13:25,370
they're trying to, unlike other islands in the area, does not have a second shelter

817
01:13:25,370 --> 01:13:30,770
a few years ago, like 2015.

818
01:13:30,770 --> 01:13:35,870
This massive Dutch climate change adaptation

819
01:13:35,870 --> 01:13:41,750
programme started developing plans for several polders in the region

820
01:13:41,750 --> 01:13:47,240
that were aimed at creating new markets

821
01:13:47,240 --> 01:13:52,250
for cash crops in this coastal region. And they

822
01:13:52,250 --> 01:13:57,560
targeted Polder 22 as one of their sort of primary sites

823
01:13:57,560 --> 01:14:02,570
for new adaptation interventions. And as part of this sort

824
01:14:02,570 --> 01:14:08,900
of development of new cash crops, this Dutch programme, which is called blue gold.

825
01:14:08,900 --> 01:14:13,900
They took control of the land between the colder

826
01:14:13,900 --> 01:14:19,150
and the very bad. And they said

827
01:14:19,150 --> 01:14:24,640
that the groups that we're going to manage this land would be essentially

828
01:14:24,640 --> 01:14:29,710
a mixed class groups. They said, well, what that meant is that a lot of the people who

829
01:14:29,710 --> 01:14:35,390
are included in these sort of newly constituted collectives

830
01:14:35,390 --> 01:14:41,750
were. People who did not reside and pulled out twenty two, so they were sort of

831
01:14:41,750 --> 01:14:46,970
absentee landlords, and that meant that not

832
01:14:46,970 --> 01:14:52,100
only the system of farming this land collectively broke down, but also the system

833
01:14:52,100 --> 01:14:57,290
of maintaining the embankments itself broke down

834
01:14:57,290 --> 01:15:02,900
and months before unfun. These local

835
01:15:02,900 --> 01:15:08,540
social movement groups that had been working this land for four decades

836
01:15:08,540 --> 01:15:14,150
said the embankments are breaking down. Please, you need to fix them. And

837
01:15:14,150 --> 01:15:20,400
they did not. So during unfun

838
01:15:20,400 --> 01:15:25,760
embankments deteriorated. Of course they broke. And

839
01:15:25,760 --> 01:15:30,950
the entire island was flooded. And they lost all of their winter crops.

840
01:15:30,950 --> 01:15:35,990
Watermelon is like a very lucrative winter crops. It's

841
01:15:35,990 --> 01:15:42,650
sailing tolerant. And it was devastating. It was devastating the way that

842
01:15:42,650 --> 01:15:47,930
it hadn't been hit, that it had been resilience

843
01:15:47,930 --> 01:15:54,170
to these previous cyclones. And so in the aftermath of that,

844
01:15:54,170 --> 01:15:59,480
people said, we need the government to rebuild this embankment. It had deteriorated to an extent

845
01:15:59,480 --> 01:16:04,670
that it was not possible for people to rebuild

846
01:16:04,670 --> 01:16:11,470
it by hand. The way that there are accustomed to this means

847
01:16:11,470 --> 01:16:17,210
the government says that they will rebuild the embankments and

848
01:16:17,210 --> 01:16:22,530
the blue gold. This climate change adaptation programme somewhat fortuitously ended

849
01:16:22,530 --> 01:16:27,680
in June 2020. And so now there is a hope that that these

850
01:16:27,680 --> 01:16:32,720
groups will be able to regain control of the land and be able to maintain

851
01:16:32,720 --> 01:16:37,760
it themselves. The boat, I think, is important about

852
01:16:37,760 --> 01:16:43,010
this particular story about Polder 22 is that

853
01:16:43,010 --> 01:16:48,440
it illustrates both the sort of failure of these

854
01:16:48,440 --> 01:16:53,570
climate. Imagine areas that we are. You know, that my my

855
01:16:53,570 --> 01:16:58,580
co panellists have drawn out in really important ways. But it also illustrates the

856
01:16:58,580 --> 01:17:03,580
potential of these alternative kinds of imagined

857
01:17:03,580 --> 01:17:08,720
areas of continue to grow and production chairman and sort

858
01:17:08,720 --> 01:17:14,030
of collective management of the landscape that I think are absolutely

859
01:17:14,030 --> 01:17:20,930
critical to imagining more resilient future in the face of climate change and future cyclones.

860
01:17:20,930 --> 01:17:28,370
So, yeah, that's why I have to say I'm so looking forward to questions and discussion.

861
01:17:28,370 --> 01:17:34,200
Great. Thank you so much to all of you. There were like five incredible talks.

862
01:17:34,200 --> 01:17:39,450
And it was it was really fantastic to see you all converse with each other without actually having that conversation,

863
01:17:39,450 --> 01:17:44,580
but also to see some of the divergences and thought what I'm going to do is I'm not going to sort of

864
01:17:44,580 --> 01:17:49,710
try to sum up what all of you said. I'm going to just open up some of the teams that I could see across the five

865
01:17:49,710 --> 01:17:55,740
talks. And then what we're going to do is we gonna open it up for I think we can take about fifteen minutes of Q&A.

866
01:17:55,740 --> 01:18:00,930
So you can either write in the Q&A box on the side or if you'd like to speak, if you could raise

867
01:18:00,930 --> 01:18:06,030
your hand, then I'll you know, I can just randomly pick some people to

868
01:18:06,030 --> 01:18:11,190
speak. I can see from a list of attendees that there are many people who actually work on climate

869
01:18:11,190 --> 01:18:16,200
change and Anthropocene actually even on cyclones would be wonderful if and if you'd like to

870
01:18:16,200 --> 01:18:21,570
sort of add your thoughts to do this. So just pretty quickly, I think what I found really interesting

871
01:18:21,570 --> 01:18:26,640
was how almost all of you actually did touch on

872
01:18:26,640 --> 01:18:31,770
different cyclones. So, you know, of course we would. I'm fine. But it was we there was a sort of comparative approach to

873
01:18:31,770 --> 01:18:37,500
cyclones where the smaller big waste in the Chinese case going back more than one hundred years back, etc.

874
01:18:37,500 --> 01:18:42,690
and sort of it was really interesting for me as someone who doesn't know that much about cyclones, to see

875
01:18:42,690 --> 01:18:47,790
this little comparative approach you had. I think there was a lot of emphasis on the question of forgetting

876
01:18:47,790 --> 01:18:53,010
and remembering, as well as on the idea of imagination. So whether these are progressive,

877
01:18:53,010 --> 01:18:58,170
imaginative in the way that, gosh, I just explained or in the failure of imagination that Amatol Cautious

878
01:18:58,170 --> 01:19:03,610
talked about, but also some of you also touched upon that. I really enjoyed the way,

879
01:19:03,610 --> 01:19:08,940
you know, during these things like resilience or preparedness or, you know,

880
01:19:08,940 --> 01:19:13,980
climate change adaptation techniques. The temporality is does a lot of that that we see in sort of the developing

881
01:19:13,980 --> 01:19:19,110
world as well as in the media. But I really loved the way you all nuanced what this might mean.

882
01:19:19,110 --> 01:19:24,180
Like what might it mean to think about climate disasters or climate preparedness very

883
01:19:24,180 --> 01:19:29,190
much in the particular specific context in which all of you have the sort of long term academic

884
01:19:29,190 --> 01:19:34,470
experience. I also really appreciated the way in which

885
01:19:34,470 --> 01:19:39,570
you got in local politics. So whether we're talking about the WAMI league of you're talking about

886
01:19:39,570 --> 01:19:44,780
national level politics in India or you're just talking about the BDO level politics of that sort of micro

887
01:19:44,780 --> 01:19:50,460
local level. I thought that was really important to actually have this nitty gritty daily politics

888
01:19:50,460 --> 01:19:55,500
in there. Also state forms. And I was sort of thinking of the difference between India and Bangladesh. I

889
01:19:55,500 --> 01:20:01,950
think McNutt did a really interesting job in terms of thinking about some of these differences here of state forms.

890
01:20:01,950 --> 01:20:07,060
I also thought that the way in which the question of migration came up in inside the talks and

891
01:20:07,060 --> 01:20:12,420
the sense of place on you say, is that what does place signify? What does it sort of

892
01:20:12,420 --> 01:20:17,430
argue for was really important in this context. Just thinking methodologically, there

893
01:20:17,430 --> 01:20:22,500
was this question of scale again. And I think you are moving between different scales in moving from talking

894
01:20:22,500 --> 01:20:27,990
about a particular island or a particular pond or a particular individual to thinking about global

895
01:20:27,990 --> 01:20:33,210
macro politics and on the climate crisis. And I think your opening comment

896
01:20:33,210 --> 01:20:38,380
on looking to the work of Richard Gove and we need to be more drawn in thinking about global environmental histories

897
01:20:38,380 --> 01:20:43,810
is really well taken. I also thought that even within those of you

898
01:20:43,810 --> 01:20:49,260
were anthropologists, psychologists, geographers, there will be interesting ways in which

899
01:20:49,260 --> 01:20:54,370
you present your arguments. So whether it is to see

900
01:20:54,370 --> 01:20:59,550
an unjust case, the case of that one particular point and that conversation with a mate with the neighbour,

901
01:20:59,550 --> 01:21:05,100
as well as your own long term ethnographic experience of working in the summer months and your own history,

902
01:21:05,100 --> 01:21:10,260
or you're drawing upon seeing the Johnny ski's a longer archives or other forms of

903
01:21:10,260 --> 01:21:15,420
writing on it was fascinating. How do we centre a particular wasis whose voices

904
01:21:15,420 --> 01:21:20,880
are being heard the most, which are not how to be sort of, you know, if a certain voices in this?

905
01:21:20,880 --> 01:21:25,920
There was also a really interesting look at infrastructures around this. So, of

906
01:21:25,920 --> 01:21:31,020
course, there's thinking and methods and, you know, imaginative and politics of the climate crisis. But I

907
01:21:31,020 --> 01:21:36,030
also found quite a strong in all your talks, talk about things

908
01:21:36,030 --> 01:21:41,250
like a cyclone shelter, like embankments, in particular bonds

909
01:21:41,250 --> 01:21:46,620
or the bureaucracy of corruption or sort of way in which the state enters into it or doesn't enter into it.

910
01:21:46,620 --> 01:21:51,670
Quite fascinating. So I think this was like a superbly dense,

911
01:21:51,670 --> 01:21:57,150
you know, wonderfully rich conversation. I'd really love to be your doctor each other, actually, without necessarily

912
01:21:57,150 --> 01:22:02,160
thinking about in the first place. Before this session started, we were kind of worried that everyone's going to

913
01:22:02,160 --> 01:22:07,230
either say exactly the same thing or they'll say exactly the opposite of one another. And I think

914
01:22:07,230 --> 01:22:12,960
what's been fascinating is to see how very much you are in conversation with each other methodologically, intellectually,

915
01:22:12,960 --> 01:22:17,970
even in terms of the region, but also how you accommodate with your very unique perspectives. And it's sort

916
01:22:17,970 --> 01:22:23,130
of invaluable to have you all together in the same sort of space talking about it. So thank you again so

917
01:22:23,130 --> 01:22:28,320
very much for this. I don't have any particular questions, but I'm gonna sort of take. So

918
01:22:28,320 --> 01:22:34,850
what do people want to sort of raise their hands? I can you can you can speak it out or I can just

919
01:22:34,850 --> 01:22:39,860
I can just sort of pick it up so I can see there's one hand. Yeah, I'm going to

920
01:22:39,860 --> 01:22:45,170
just. Yeah. Nicole onon. Could you please please go ahead. Yeah.

921
01:22:45,170 --> 01:22:51,230
Thanks, everyone, for this wonderful session and been learning a lot through it.

922
01:22:51,230 --> 01:22:56,450
And like Manicka, there's a lot of conversation, I think, across the different panellists. And I wanted

923
01:22:56,450 --> 01:23:01,710
to ask about embankments, both in terms of how they were raised

924
01:23:01,710 --> 01:23:08,960
and the Chinese point and kind of forgetting that allows for the proliferation of embankments.

925
01:23:08,960 --> 01:23:14,080
Who's crumbling is now making communities very vulnerable. But what's

926
01:23:14,080 --> 01:23:19,280
enough with the terrain upon which residents live and depend on the sun

927
01:23:19,280 --> 01:23:24,600
burns is now an infrastructure landscape. And so I was wondering if Magnacca

928
01:23:24,600 --> 01:23:30,390
or any of the other panellists could see a little bit more about the imaginary off embankments.

929
01:23:30,390 --> 01:23:36,250
For people living in the Sunderbans, how they desired or how they addressed by residents there.

930
01:23:36,250 --> 01:23:44,730
Thank you. I wanted to state that.

931
01:23:44,730 --> 01:23:49,950
I said, you wanna go first? Sure. So,

932
01:23:49,950 --> 01:23:55,380
yeah, thank you and Acuil for that question. I think that it's a really important

933
01:23:55,380 --> 01:24:00,600
and fraught one and one that I have to admit

934
01:24:00,600 --> 01:24:06,030
I don't have an excellent answer to, largely

935
01:24:06,030 --> 01:24:13,940
because I think that's imaginary is about what to do.

936
01:24:13,940 --> 01:24:19,430
What to do about this failure of this embankment system at this point

937
01:24:19,430 --> 01:24:24,440
are really lacking. And it's it's, I think, an

938
01:24:24,440 --> 01:24:29,520
important cautionary lesson for the Indian side of the border because of,

939
01:24:29,520 --> 01:24:34,520
you know, sort of where we're at now. In Bangladesh. But

940
01:24:34,520 --> 01:24:39,710
so, you know, there seems so this Polders system is based essentially

941
01:24:39,710 --> 01:24:44,900
on the Dutch model of like cutting off the estuary. And that's and

942
01:24:44,900 --> 01:24:50,210
and the Dutch have been sort of in banking their

943
01:24:50,210 --> 01:24:55,250
coastline, allowing it to sink and then pumping water out since

944
01:24:55,250 --> 01:25:00,410
the Middle Ages. And so that's why the Netherlands is this, you know, infamously a land below

945
01:25:00,410 --> 01:25:06,020
sea level. That's essentially what has happened to Bangladesh. But there is not

946
01:25:06,020 --> 01:25:11,120
there are not the resources to maintain the embankments and to do this sort

947
01:25:11,120 --> 01:25:17,600
of pumping out of the water that the Dutch have been doing for centuries.

948
01:25:17,600 --> 01:25:23,900
So in the in the 80s, there were a couple instances

949
01:25:23,900 --> 01:25:29,630
where farmers in this landscape

950
01:25:29,630 --> 01:25:34,770
were seeing what the Polders were doing to actually I'll say first that

951
01:25:34,770 --> 01:25:40,670
while that the polder system was being built in the initial plans of these Dutch

952
01:25:40,670 --> 01:25:46,520
engineers, they were saying, we're seeing people protesting

953
01:25:46,520 --> 01:25:51,780
the building of these embankments, going to keep building

954
01:25:51,780 --> 01:25:57,080
them. And so it's not that. It's like 40 years later, people started

955
01:25:57,080 --> 01:26:02,660
to understands the problems, like the farmers, their imagined

956
01:26:02,660 --> 01:26:07,730
the problems with these polders immediately as they were just starting to build. But in the

957
01:26:07,730 --> 01:26:12,830
80s, it was getting really bad. There was a lot of water logging.

958
01:26:12,830 --> 01:26:19,660
And in some communities, one one community in particular.

959
01:26:19,660 --> 01:26:24,890
This massive group of farmers came together and they've cut down

960
01:26:24,890 --> 01:26:29,960
the embankment to let water in to flood their land because they

961
01:26:29,960 --> 01:26:35,150
knew that it would bring silt and to sort of rebuild the land

962
01:26:35,150 --> 01:26:40,460
and prevent these problems that they were seeing. And it was this

963
01:26:40,460 --> 01:26:45,500
this sort of build a cottier movement to cut the embankment

964
01:26:45,500 --> 01:26:51,110
was led actually by the local Communist Party.

965
01:26:51,110 --> 01:26:57,290
And there were armed guards who came to the police that came

966
01:26:57,290 --> 01:27:03,260
in to fire on them. And one like sort of legendary

967
01:27:03,260 --> 01:27:08,630
white engineer was working for a Dutch firm, told me that she showed up and stopped

968
01:27:08,630 --> 01:27:13,630
them from firing on these farmers, which could have been an even worse story

969
01:27:13,630 --> 01:27:20,450
than it ended up being. So this so this, like new strategy of

970
01:27:20,450 --> 01:27:25,490
cutting the embankments to build the land back up came to be known as Title River

971
01:27:25,490 --> 01:27:30,530
Management and titled River Management. Is

972
01:27:30,530 --> 01:27:35,880
this sort of like. Legendary folk technology.

973
01:27:35,880 --> 01:27:41,130
But a lot of people talk about in in Bangladesh, these sort of

974
01:27:41,130 --> 01:27:46,170
hydrology water engineering circles. And it seems

975
01:27:46,170 --> 01:27:51,240
to have so. So a few times development agencies have decided, oh, we're going to we're gonna try

976
01:27:51,240 --> 01:27:56,310
this Title River management thing. We're going to see if it can work in other places to fix these problems

977
01:27:56,310 --> 01:28:01,800
with the Polders. But it's whenever they've done that, they haven't attended

978
01:28:01,800 --> 01:28:07,320
to the sort of social relations that made that a really distinct

979
01:28:07,320 --> 01:28:12,350
kind of intervention. And those strategies have failed. And

980
01:28:12,350 --> 01:28:17,850
in any other kinds of situations, where are new

981
01:28:17,850 --> 01:28:23,510
opportunities have been made available to experiment with engineering technologies

982
01:28:23,510 --> 01:28:28,770
to to rethink the problems

983
01:28:28,770 --> 01:28:34,170
with these embankments. There has not been space made for thinking about

984
01:28:34,170 --> 01:28:39,240
local expertise grounded in the in the quite specific conditions

985
01:28:39,240 --> 01:28:44,520
of Bangladesh's delta ecology.

986
01:28:44,520 --> 01:28:49,690
And so, you know, for a few years ago, the World Bank commissioned this massive nine nine

987
01:28:49,690 --> 01:28:54,780
two dollar project to rethink the pull their system. And

988
01:28:54,780 --> 01:29:00,510
the terms of reference for this project specifically said we will not take

989
01:29:00,510 --> 01:29:07,080
proposals for this project from any domestic firms. And so

990
01:29:07,080 --> 01:29:12,150
I think I think that while there are, you know, as I said, some imagined areas of

991
01:29:12,150 --> 01:29:17,250
how. These investments might be resisted.

992
01:29:17,250 --> 01:29:22,530
There has not been investments in new

993
01:29:22,530 --> 01:29:28,680
ways of thinking about engineering alternatives, given that

994
01:29:28,680 --> 01:29:34,440
now the landscape has sunk and embankments have

995
01:29:34,440 --> 01:29:39,880
put these communities in. And that's really sort of dire situation.

996
01:29:39,880 --> 01:29:44,970
And I quickly signing the word, oh, sorry, just very quickly, I,

997
01:29:44,970 --> 01:29:50,820
I just wanted to say it in response. Nichols'

998
01:29:50,820 --> 01:29:55,860
question is that I think the imaginary has changed and I don't think it's one imagined or even

999
01:29:55,860 --> 01:30:01,200
within a particular Sunderbans island. So I remember when these sort of modern

1000
01:30:01,200 --> 01:30:06,270
embankments were being built first. It was very different from people who lived on the river's edge and who lived

1001
01:30:06,270 --> 01:30:11,280
in the sort of centre of the island. But the other thing is that that imaginary was at the time, very

1002
01:30:11,280 --> 01:30:16,560
much of this is progress. This is modernity. The bigger the wall, the more concrete

1003
01:30:16,560 --> 01:30:21,810
the wall, the safer will be. Now, they've all cracked in the past month, actually,

1004
01:30:21,810 --> 01:30:26,820
after unfun people, friends in the Sunderbans are very much saying

1005
01:30:26,820 --> 01:30:31,860
this is no good because the entire river bed has come down. There's mudslides. So I think

1006
01:30:31,860 --> 01:30:37,720
the imaginary has also shifted within this from the bands for people who live alongside these embankments.

1007
01:30:37,720 --> 01:30:42,990
And I just I remember very clearly that even not as a sort of non designer

1008
01:30:42,990 --> 01:30:48,750
engineer expert architecturally, I mean, to build these embankments, you had to basically

1009
01:30:48,750 --> 01:30:53,750
uproot all of the mangrove trees on the river's edge. And that was just,

1010
01:30:53,750 --> 01:30:59,160
you know, it doesn't take rocket science to know that these mangrove roots are holding the soil together. So it was

1011
01:30:59,160 --> 01:31:04,680
clearly quite destructive in just making the riverbed much weaker.

1012
01:31:04,680 --> 01:31:09,690
And people pointed that out at the time. Even so, I think in some ways

1013
01:31:09,690 --> 01:31:14,880
the imaginary has changed. And I guess to the drawing on some of the Gianni's all the work. It

1014
01:31:14,880 --> 01:31:20,040
is also ordered imaginary has changed, which is that these are places that the

1015
01:31:20,040 --> 01:31:25,350
accretion of soil, the erosion and accretion of soil and the cetacean patterns are where

1016
01:31:25,350 --> 01:31:30,660
if so, if soil is being sort of lost somewhere, it is being regained elsewhere.

1017
01:31:30,660 --> 01:31:35,670
So it needn't be an imaginary of just creating land formation in one

1018
01:31:35,670 --> 01:31:41,220
place. And I mean, maybe they've done you come in on this and to say that, you know, how we can rethink property in relation

1019
01:31:41,220 --> 01:31:46,290
to the kind of all the ways in which perhaps there was movement in this shifting

1020
01:31:46,290 --> 01:31:51,510
delta, which now we need, you know, fixed taxation and property. So we need also

1021
01:31:51,510 --> 01:31:57,830
sort of embankments and that in that imaginary.

1022
01:31:57,830 --> 01:32:03,140
I know there are lots of questions, I won't take time, but, you know, it was very interesting listening to all of you because

1023
01:32:03,140 --> 01:32:08,380
I met all these people in the archive in 1856 who were writing back. These are engineers

1024
01:32:08,380 --> 01:32:13,400
sent to like, say, a good point about engineers. After all, my dad is one. But there

1025
01:32:13,400 --> 01:32:18,410
was, I think, took I'll go dancing. We actually are working with reverse and reverse

1026
01:32:18,410 --> 01:32:23,630
engineering. But what I meet here are Knoller's and their dreams and spill channels.

1027
01:32:23,630 --> 01:32:28,730
And there was a beautiful letter, one Ingenico, William Sage wrote and said, Indian Rivers

1028
01:32:28,730 --> 01:32:33,950
cannot you cannot imagine margins on Indian River or a Bengali river.

1029
01:32:33,950 --> 01:32:38,960
So we really need to rethink engineering. But of course, these are. And this is what I'm saying. These are the voices that got

1030
01:32:38,960 --> 01:32:44,510
completely erased. And there was a knowledge sedimented in that. And the other thing to talk about,

1031
01:32:44,510 --> 01:32:50,030
the good flooding and the bad bad flooding some of you have been raising. One of the things pharmacy

1032
01:32:50,030 --> 01:32:55,160
is during a war, Scheid, Yumi Jolla, Junto, which means during monsoon,

1033
01:32:55,160 --> 01:33:00,260
my rice fields are teeming with life by life. They mean fish.

1034
01:33:00,260 --> 01:33:05,300
And that is many things. There are many ways of understanding what this is. It is not a critique. And

1035
01:33:05,300 --> 01:33:10,610
this is what when we pay attention to language, we see the sedimentation

1036
01:33:10,610 --> 01:33:15,910
of knowledge that is also getting forgotten. So anyways. Stick.

1037
01:33:15,910 --> 01:33:21,040
Thank you, guys. I'm going to take two more questions when we get Yvonne and then McCallan Dola.

1038
01:33:21,040 --> 01:33:26,320
And then if it could just be quite quick and our response, because I see it already over time. But

1039
01:33:26,320 --> 01:33:32,700
cameleer, would you like to go next, please?

1040
01:33:32,700 --> 01:33:39,810
Can you hear me? Yes, we can hear you. Thank you so much. These were amazing reflections.

1041
01:33:39,810 --> 01:33:45,030
There's so much to say. What I'm wondering is your thoughts about

1042
01:33:45,030 --> 01:33:50,130
the embankments for West Bengal. Because my own research is in southwest coastal

1043
01:33:50,130 --> 01:33:55,200
Bangladesh, close to across the end Jason's work. And I found

1044
01:33:55,200 --> 01:34:01,320
that most the embankment broke where there was much tiger prawn Baghdad cultivation,

1045
01:34:01,320 --> 01:34:06,710
where there are many pipes and illegal cuts in the embankments and our back office and

1046
01:34:06,710 --> 01:34:12,060
others there. Paper also show that it pulled the 32 it was where they were most tiger prawn cuts

1047
01:34:12,060 --> 01:34:17,400
that the embankment broke. And actually that then because of the long time for repair

1048
01:34:17,400 --> 01:34:22,500
during this time, the silt managed to raise the land levels

1049
01:34:22,500 --> 01:34:27,570
again. So my main question then is

1050
01:34:27,570 --> 01:34:34,260
what kind of solution can provide protection from sideline dry season tides

1051
01:34:34,260 --> 01:34:39,630
and cyclones to help agriculture in this area? Because in the south west

1052
01:34:39,630 --> 01:34:44,810
coastal zone of Bangladesh, agriculture is possible. If the embankment is intact and this

1053
01:34:44,810 --> 01:34:50,220
Louis Gates are closed for what is the situation in the West Bengal Sundarbans

1054
01:34:50,220 --> 01:34:55,500
Forest Islands? And is there any way of also dealing with siltation

1055
01:34:55,500 --> 01:35:03,680
similar to Tidal River management being done in West Bengal? Thank you.

1056
01:35:03,680 --> 01:35:11,790
We'd would like to take that.

1057
01:35:11,790 --> 01:35:18,640
Jenny may have.

1058
01:35:18,640 --> 01:35:25,080
Yeah. Thank you. Camillia. And I'm looking forward to your book, Chameleon's written an amazing

1059
01:35:25,080 --> 01:35:30,090
book on on the whole embankment

1060
01:35:30,090 --> 01:35:35,310
in Bangladesh. So I'm looking forward to that.

1061
01:35:35,310 --> 01:35:40,500
You know, unfortunately, I don't know enough. I know.

1062
01:35:40,500 --> 01:35:45,510
I was just talking to somebody today from the island of 20 who told me

1063
01:35:45,510 --> 01:35:50,580
that in in a tree four years ago, a lot of

1064
01:35:50,580 --> 01:35:55,800
the mangrove forest to us was chopped down in a place called, I don't know, above

1065
01:35:55,800 --> 01:36:00,960
in Forest Guard. And that that had been the worst affected place

1066
01:36:00,960 --> 01:36:06,210
in that in that region. And the mangrove had been chopped down to

1067
01:36:06,210 --> 01:36:12,690
make to to make fisheries. So,

1068
01:36:12,690 --> 01:36:18,070
you know, what you what you observe in in in Bangladesh could

1069
01:36:18,070 --> 01:36:23,660
could be the same. But Bangladesh has had fisheries a lot earlier than West Bengal.

1070
01:36:23,660 --> 01:36:29,590
And the fisheries in West Bengal have been,

1071
01:36:29,590 --> 01:36:34,790
you know, there are two types, but one of them has been more towards the interior. When you travel

1072
01:36:34,790 --> 01:36:39,950
from Calcutta to a to towards speciality,

1073
01:36:39,950 --> 01:36:45,290
you see fisheries on both sides. And this is basically

1074
01:36:45,290 --> 01:36:50,480
land that is in sight and that isn't affected as much.

1075
01:36:50,480 --> 01:36:56,050
But the first person to start the fisheries in West Bengal was Jonathan WashU,

1076
01:36:56,050 --> 01:37:01,460
Jyoti Watson's son, and Jody West, who was the chief minister of West Bengal.

1077
01:37:01,460 --> 01:37:06,710
For. For how many years? Thirty four years. The left front government.

1078
01:37:06,710 --> 01:37:11,750
And he was for most of it. So anyway, his son was the one who started the big fisheries

1079
01:37:11,750 --> 01:37:16,760
around the canning area. As to whether embankments

1080
01:37:16,760 --> 01:37:22,010
are more prone to breaking when there are fisheries. I am not

1081
01:37:22,010 --> 01:37:27,290
sure I know that people convert their land to fisheries. A lot of the time when the embankment

1082
01:37:27,290 --> 01:37:32,390
has already broken and and the land has been submerged with saline

1083
01:37:32,390 --> 01:37:37,530
water, brackish water, at that point, people then transform

1084
01:37:37,530 --> 01:37:43,340
that that that plot of land into a fishery. Of course, that creates a lot of

1085
01:37:43,340 --> 01:37:48,350
problem with those who have land more inside the fort inside the the

1086
01:37:48,350 --> 01:37:53,510
island because they don't want the saltwater to sort of have

1087
01:37:53,510 --> 01:37:58,750
an adverse effect on their own land. So so that's how it goes. But

1088
01:37:58,750 --> 01:38:03,950
so I know that usually it's when you've lost your land that you converted into a fishery. To what

1089
01:38:03,950 --> 01:38:08,960
extent is it that those. I don't know. So maybe not. And

1090
01:38:08,960 --> 01:38:17,450
Jenny could perhaps answer that. And thanks, cameleer. Looking forward to your book.

1091
01:38:17,450 --> 01:38:22,750
I just really want to briefly say that I think my only as I said and when

1092
01:38:22,750 --> 01:38:28,700
instead of the comments, which is that I think a Milan conversation with you also and both of us agree on this,

1093
01:38:28,700 --> 01:38:33,740
is that the bingo that I saw diverse, that actually it really does matter. Based

1094
01:38:33,740 --> 01:38:38,840
on the very specific D of what that experience in the Bangladesh side is

1095
01:38:38,840 --> 01:38:43,910
and how in the Indian side. I mean, there are several factors here. It's not

1096
01:38:43,910 --> 01:38:49,200
just in terms of the siltation, but also the monsoons and also

1097
01:38:49,200 --> 01:38:54,290
livelihoods like the bar. The cultivation in the West Bengal side is from on Zwack, as

1098
01:38:54,290 --> 01:38:59,390
you know, it's quite different from the way the Jews are. Jason and Garcia describe it.

1099
01:38:59,390 --> 01:39:04,670
And you describe it in your own walks. I think my only sort of response to that is that it's so

1100
01:39:04,670 --> 01:39:09,890
deeply diverse. So I don't think there's any one homogenous thing that's happening on the Indian

1101
01:39:09,890 --> 01:39:15,350
side that is, you know, the same in every context.

1102
01:39:15,350 --> 01:39:20,840
But you are deep down, you do you want to come in and. I think we'll pass it up for questions,

1103
01:39:20,840 --> 01:39:26,000
I think. Yeah. I don't have anything new to add to what you guys said. Yeah. The active don't just

1104
01:39:26,000 --> 01:39:31,550
do you don't do the drugs. Nuclear strike. I. So in somebody that is good.

1105
01:39:31,550 --> 01:39:36,710
There is there is so much debate. So it's very funny. When they first sort see

1106
01:39:36,710 --> 01:39:41,780
the idea that the Delta moves are the river's move became being written about in

1107
01:39:41,780 --> 01:39:47,090
the Royal Geographical Society and Bengali Geographical Society around the late 19th

1108
01:39:47,090 --> 01:39:52,430
century, the fact we didn't have an ocean off the child's life, who actually

1109
01:39:52,430 --> 01:39:57,530
is the father of geology and talks about evolution and talks about this active Delta Delta, I

1110
01:39:57,530 --> 01:40:02,540
love what it felt like. Ecology is is Leviton in 1833. That's when it becomes

1111
01:40:02,540 --> 01:40:07,700
popular knowledge. But still thinking through Catastrophist SSM and unitary Unitarian forms

1112
01:40:07,700 --> 01:40:13,040
of thinking that there was other kinds of local knowledge. Because, you know, there is one word for Yarosh. Adoption

1113
01:40:13,040 --> 01:40:18,110
is one word in English. And as al-Hadi got those work has shown and see Jugg boards

1114
01:40:18,110 --> 01:40:23,390
work has shown that a seven ways of seeing pangbourne in Bangla, which basically indexes

1115
01:40:23,390 --> 01:40:28,460
that you cannot translate these two words. So there is. And then there's another interesting

1116
01:40:28,460 --> 01:40:33,680
thing is that there was a for a long time through the 19th century, people thought this

1117
01:40:33,680 --> 01:40:38,690
is a dying delta. They wouldn't say active or so there. What? Well, we have

1118
01:40:38,690 --> 01:40:44,030
now much under the thumb mature your Delta active delta. But the idea was Calcutta

1119
01:40:44,030 --> 01:40:49,070
wasn't a dying delta in the north. The voice started dying. And it's very interesting, I think I know you were

1120
01:40:49,070 --> 01:40:54,230
talking about the death of a book called The Death of a Born. I've heard it's very interesting how we think

1121
01:40:54,230 --> 01:40:59,300
in terms of death of water and something to think. But that was later revised as an

1122
01:40:59,300 --> 01:41:04,370
active Delta water dynamic delta. But one thing we have to understand is what we've really realised

1123
01:41:04,370 --> 01:41:09,470
in the post-Katrina moment from the more research that's gone into this kind of delta species

1124
01:41:09,470 --> 01:41:15,020
is Delta formation has been moving and always moving.

1125
01:41:15,020 --> 01:41:20,270
The movement didn't happen before. And I think and there is a lot of research in sea

1126
01:41:20,270 --> 01:41:25,430
like silt bed rising and like that what we call a flood. And you've probably worked

1127
01:41:25,430 --> 01:41:30,700
on it a lot, silt beds rising and land formation. So when we lose land, new land is being formed

1128
01:41:30,700 --> 01:41:36,050
somewhere. And we see that for New Orleans. And I suffer niya like that. Delta is actually expanding

1129
01:41:36,050 --> 01:41:41,210
as New Orleans is sinking. You'll see the same thing happening in the Sunderman side. So

1130
01:41:41,210 --> 01:41:46,370
I think it's it's only obligated debates. When I remember one of my review was basically

1131
01:41:46,370 --> 01:41:51,530
said, I cannot all this at Delta, I have to call this an estuary. We did what was also an interesting

1132
01:41:51,530 --> 01:41:56,690
way to think. And then finally, I want to see one more point. There is a legend that talks

1133
01:41:56,690 --> 01:42:02,000
about oceanic formation of our Delta and other river information. And the idea is when the ocean

1134
01:42:02,000 --> 01:42:08,000
charts this new land or Gilkey laughs what was often called this Sunderman area was formed.

1135
01:42:08,000 --> 01:42:13,160
Some oceanographers are also claiming this oceanic formation, which we often forget. It's not

1136
01:42:13,160 --> 01:42:18,350
just the combined river system forming land, but there is also oceanic formation

1137
01:42:18,350 --> 01:42:23,860
of land happening and this very new. It's only in the last 10 years this kind of oceanographic geology

1138
01:42:23,860 --> 01:42:29,150
fault. Well, that's coming. So there's a lot of debates about exactly

1139
01:42:29,150 --> 01:42:34,370
the point question you are pointing to Camelia. It is everyone

1140
01:42:34,370 --> 01:42:40,250
happy to just take a last question. I know everyone must be exhausted, be well over time now, but I think a gallon.

1141
01:42:40,250 --> 01:42:46,310
Would you be happy to ask your question?

1142
01:42:46,310 --> 01:42:53,150
Yes, hello, can you hear me? Yes. OK. I was having some connexion. So

1143
01:42:53,150 --> 01:42:59,150
my question really just emerged out of this discussion of embankments. But it's a little bit

1144
01:42:59,150 --> 01:43:04,400
broader. And I'm just struck by the contrast between some of the local political struggles

1145
01:43:04,400 --> 01:43:09,410
that Jason mentioned in Bangladesh, in which I've also seen around embankments by I work in

1146
01:43:09,410 --> 01:43:14,540
the West Bank or some their guns. And on the one hand and then the well-founded critiques

1147
01:43:14,540 --> 01:43:20,120
of concrete embankments that many of the panellists have offered. And so with this multiplicity

1148
01:43:20,120 --> 01:43:25,550
of different voices and actors in the region, I'm thinking about the role of social scientists and humanities scholars

1149
01:43:25,550 --> 01:43:30,620
and weighing in on these public debates, and particularly at moments of crisis, how

1150
01:43:30,620 --> 01:43:35,990
scholars are often approached for for solutions. But then I'm also reminded

1151
01:43:35,990 --> 01:43:41,450
of this kind of distinction that Tanyalee draws between critics and programmers. And I'd be interested

1152
01:43:41,450 --> 01:43:46,760
to hear how the panellists think of these roles and whether they need to be distinct and given

1153
01:43:46,760 --> 01:43:53,090
the fraught histories of research, informed development work in both West Bengal and Bangladesh.

1154
01:43:53,090 --> 01:43:58,240
How can scholars today work to avoid these kind of pitfalls?

1155
01:43:58,240 --> 01:44:03,330
Thank you so much, Colin. I'm just because there's the last question maybe to take, would everybody in the band

1156
01:44:03,330 --> 01:44:08,450
like to just sort of respond to this wider question of the climate crisis? And that could be me.

1157
01:44:08,450 --> 01:44:13,620
And, you know, how do we respond to some big floods of the kind of work that we do?

1158
01:44:13,620 --> 01:44:18,680
Would that be OK? Are any other thoughts you might have on just matter? I think it's a good question

1159
01:44:18,680 --> 01:44:24,200
for Jason, actually. So maybe he can respond specifically to her and try to wrap up.

1160
01:44:24,200 --> 01:44:29,300
That's right. Should we begin with you? Would you be happy to respond? And then also just off any

1161
01:44:29,300 --> 01:44:35,210
way to thoughts you might have? Sure. I mean, it's a tricky question. I think,

1162
01:44:35,210 --> 01:44:40,550
you know, that it presumes that there is sort of a single task for social science to

1163
01:44:40,550 --> 01:44:47,630
accomplish here, which, you know, I'm guessing none of us really think is true.

1164
01:44:47,630 --> 01:44:53,020
My own take on this is that I

1165
01:44:53,020 --> 01:44:58,880
I think what's important is not to pretend expertise beyond

1166
01:44:58,880 --> 01:45:04,420
sort of what what I can offer, what I know here, but rather

1167
01:45:04,420 --> 01:45:09,590
to see my own job as sort of trying to foreground some of the complexity of the various different

1168
01:45:09,590 --> 01:45:15,770
kinds of narratives and imaginations that are emerging, which, of course, doesn't mean I don't have my own opinions. But

1169
01:45:15,770 --> 01:45:21,380
in terms of sort of a kind of a more normative relationship to the sorts of things that are unfolding, I think

1170
01:45:21,380 --> 01:45:26,810
my answer to that has always been to try and think with

1171
01:45:26,810 --> 01:45:31,850
organisations that don't necessarily fall into a neat distinction between the critic and programmer and

1172
01:45:31,850 --> 01:45:37,000
to engage more actively with community groups

1173
01:45:37,000 --> 01:45:42,810
and collectives and organisations that are supporting different kinds of initiatives of development

1174
01:45:42,810 --> 01:45:47,930
of caution. I have worked with an organisation called Nedra Quarry in Bangladesh. I'm quite

1175
01:45:47,930 --> 01:45:53,180
a bit. And I think that they're an excellent organisation to sort of hold up in this fight and that they're

1176
01:45:53,180 --> 01:45:58,280
primarily focussed on addressing questions of empowerment and

1177
01:45:58,280 --> 01:46:04,520
enabling people to actualise the rights they already have, as opposed to

1178
01:46:04,520 --> 01:46:10,160
as opposed to being a resource providing organisation. So I think

1179
01:46:10,160 --> 01:46:16,100
I think that the role of social scientists in relation to the climate crisis is to listen to that kind of multiplicity

1180
01:46:16,100 --> 01:46:21,170
of voices and to think with more progressive organisations that are working

1181
01:46:21,170 --> 01:46:26,510
more directly with people and dealing with some of the kinds of complexity that Magna's pointed us towards

1182
01:46:26,510 --> 01:46:32,360
thinking critically about and doing our best to make sure that those voices are

1183
01:46:32,360 --> 01:46:37,790
also part of the conversation in whatever ways that we can. That that's my approach. I'm not sure that's a satisfying answer

1184
01:46:37,790 --> 01:46:45,720
to the question.

1185
01:46:45,720 --> 01:46:50,790
We'd like to go next. I know. Would you like to follow on in terms of

1186
01:46:50,790 --> 01:46:57,390
just the broader question that Saddam was asking? It's a complicated question.

1187
01:46:57,390 --> 01:47:02,640
You know, killing I, I it's interesting because you're

1188
01:47:02,640 --> 01:47:07,680
right to point out that many local people, politicians believe

1189
01:47:07,680 --> 01:47:12,750
that concrete embankments are the solution. And in some places, they've worked and

1190
01:47:12,750 --> 01:47:18,060
made life a lot easier. Because usually they surface roads and people can travel around

1191
01:47:18,060 --> 01:47:23,490
along that. And actually in Bangladesh also, I was surprised to see how sturdy

1192
01:47:23,490 --> 01:47:28,800
the embankments were and how many of them were there. I'm back to the west Bengali ones, which were mostly

1193
01:47:28,800 --> 01:47:33,890
mud ones, which were dissolving in in in the monsoon time,

1194
01:47:33,890 --> 01:47:39,270
tried to walk on an embankment today in the rain. It's just a nightmare.

1195
01:47:39,270 --> 01:47:44,310
And it's so so I can understand that it makes sense to have a proper brick

1196
01:47:44,310 --> 01:47:49,320
and concrete embankment along which you can drive your your motorbike and

1197
01:47:49,320 --> 01:47:55,170
your cycle and walk without slipping and breaking your leg. So

1198
01:47:55,170 --> 01:48:00,480
on the one hand, yes. But on the other hand, it all depends on where you built it.

1199
01:48:00,480 --> 01:48:05,700
And again, you know, sort of to what extent are engineers really

1200
01:48:05,700 --> 01:48:10,770
trained to think of where go for the. I'm sure this can be sort

1201
01:48:10,770 --> 01:48:15,810
of I don't know, but perhaps understood. Where will the river break

1202
01:48:15,810 --> 01:48:21,000
next? Usually when you talk to people in a village, they kind of know where the river

1203
01:48:21,000 --> 01:48:26,010
is going to break and where the river is depositing silt. So it's not as

1204
01:48:26,010 --> 01:48:31,260
if these islands are just breaking up. They are also on certain

1205
01:48:31,260 --> 01:48:36,660
places. They are also getting you and landslides added to them. So they are also growing

1206
01:48:36,660 --> 01:48:42,600
in some places. And this is why it is these islands really like I mean, Tabaco writes about I

1207
01:48:42,600 --> 01:48:47,670
are shifting. They move. So to what extent would it not be possible to have

1208
01:48:47,670 --> 01:48:53,040
some brick and concrete embankments in places where we know that

1209
01:48:53,040 --> 01:48:58,620
it's it's remained stable in the last few years? We don't think it's going to break there.

1210
01:48:58,620 --> 01:49:03,900
And we can build something there. And to what extent? You know, so basically

1211
01:49:03,900 --> 01:49:09,270
remaining open about this. But a lot of the time, it has to do with who the local politician has,

1212
01:49:09,270 --> 01:49:14,310
what his contacts are with Calcutta. Whether he wants to be re-elected and is going

1213
01:49:14,310 --> 01:49:20,610
to do something about this or whether, you know, he doesn't really care.

1214
01:49:20,610 --> 01:49:25,770
Previously as Armytage move, I wrote about in his book, you had the

1215
01:49:25,770 --> 01:49:31,080
a lot of the Oddy buses where the ones under the British, for example, and even to this day are the ones

1216
01:49:31,080 --> 01:49:36,540
to cheque the the mud embankments because they cheque to see

1217
01:49:36,540 --> 01:49:41,640
if the embankment has been eaten up by Crap's and if it's full of faults. Right.

1218
01:49:41,640 --> 01:49:46,810
And whether it meets it needs to be repaired. But everything is linked in West Bengal

1219
01:49:46,810 --> 01:49:53,130
to so much politics and too so much. You know, recently I was I was looking at this

1220
01:49:53,130 --> 01:49:58,510
all these I really feel that demographers that are there

1221
01:49:58,510 --> 01:50:03,690
all around now with smartphones, I have this lovely young friend who sent me

1222
01:50:03,690 --> 01:50:09,150
a list of things he made on how the engineers scan

1223
01:50:09,150 --> 01:50:14,430
this, the embankment. The local people told them it was too low. And then you see

1224
01:50:14,430 --> 01:50:20,130
how when the river comes, it just it just overflows the whole thing. And basically

1225
01:50:20,130 --> 01:50:25,180
the whole thing is it's lost. And I said, why didn't you guys tell them

1226
01:50:25,180 --> 01:50:30,250
this? I know. But they didn't listen. And they ran away before before high tide. So there was no

1227
01:50:30,250 --> 01:50:35,310
way. And who's going to repair this? Who's going to talk to, you know, who was going to

1228
01:50:35,310 --> 01:50:40,350
take the responsibility for this? And again, I think it's for me, in the end,

1229
01:50:40,350 --> 01:50:45,990
it boils down to cost, cost and cost and kind of related rips off

1230
01:50:45,990 --> 01:50:51,120
of negotiation where really it matters where you

1231
01:50:51,120 --> 01:50:56,460
live and what you know and what cost background you come from.

1232
01:50:56,460 --> 01:51:01,820
Unfortunately, thanks. I can go next

1233
01:51:01,820 --> 01:51:07,050
hour. Thank you so much, Chameleon. I'm looking forward to also not complicated and I'm also looking

1234
01:51:07,050 --> 01:51:12,510
forward to excellent work. So then I look, we can say something like I also find this

1235
01:51:12,510 --> 01:51:17,730
distinction between the critique and the programme are actually unhelpful to think

1236
01:51:17,730 --> 01:51:22,770
with. And I think what both unlearnt Jason's been pointing to is the far

1237
01:51:22,770 --> 01:51:27,810
to understand that imagine and respond. We need to have a critical kind of our understanding of

1238
01:51:27,810 --> 01:51:32,910
the situation as a very complex situation. It's fast, it's politics. And something that came up

1239
01:51:32,910 --> 01:51:38,160
during the discussion might be useful. Way to think is what we realised is when people

1240
01:51:38,160 --> 01:51:43,770
when people are leaving this window. And I think and we were talking about that and people are moving out of it.

1241
01:51:43,770 --> 01:51:49,050
The question is, what's creating? What's forcing them to move out? Is it always the rising seas

1242
01:51:49,050 --> 01:51:54,060
and which will require a concrete amendment or is it the local politics? And unless we have a

1243
01:51:54,060 --> 01:51:59,220
critical approach to that, if it is local politics, if it's the impossibility of being

1244
01:51:59,220 --> 01:52:04,620
able to achieve social mobility in in this one day, one without having political

1245
01:52:04,620 --> 01:52:09,990
context precisely where you are located within the class hierarchy, then maybe the problem is not a problem

1246
01:52:09,990 --> 01:52:15,120
of simply embankment, then build back better. But it's a different problem. So one of the things

1247
01:52:15,120 --> 01:52:20,730
that you know, that I am reading a lot about the planned retreat and managed retreat, that everything then seems to love

1248
01:52:20,730 --> 01:52:26,850
at the moment. And I'm asking. We have all the vulnerable population, but we've never asked what is the vulnerability.

1249
01:52:26,850 --> 01:52:31,880
So to really end on one last point I want to talk about is this what flag is?

1250
01:52:31,880 --> 01:52:37,240
You know, when we talk in terms of climate emergency, we always have a knee jerk solution.

1251
01:52:37,240 --> 01:52:42,310
We because emergency requires quick fixes. And that's why I think and if

1252
01:52:42,310 --> 01:52:47,490
we request programers and not critics, in some ways, one might even say imagination

1253
01:52:47,490 --> 01:52:53,430
to even imagine a solution would be would be to think in terms of a

1254
01:52:53,430 --> 01:52:58,980
critic. You think with critique, I think, and come up with solutions, with critique. And I don't think that as

1255
01:52:58,980 --> 01:53:06,340
one can be done without the other. Thank you so much, everybody.

1256
01:53:06,340 --> 01:53:11,590
Thank you. Camilla and Caitlin, for your questions. And yes,

1257
01:53:11,590 --> 01:53:16,960
it's a really great question to think about our role as social scientists. And I think

1258
01:53:16,960 --> 01:53:22,960
in this moment, not just with unfund, but in this kind of of

1259
01:53:22,960 --> 01:53:28,000
several kinds of crises. I think I've definitely thought about

1260
01:53:28,000 --> 01:53:33,130
what are the different things one can do in terms of using and thank you in any cover bringing

1261
01:53:33,130 --> 01:53:38,430
us together in terms of don't think about our insights as

1262
01:53:38,430 --> 01:53:43,450
long term ethnographers in debates elsewhere. And

1263
01:53:43,450 --> 01:53:48,540
I've been, you know, in touch with and working with, of course, friends in the Sunderbans, but also, as

1264
01:53:48,540 --> 01:53:53,760
our said now everybody's on Facebook. They have their smartphones. They have WhatsApp. They didn't use

1265
01:53:53,760 --> 01:53:58,870
to. I did when I was in the field, even though recently. And so it's really exciting, actually, because maybe

1266
01:53:58,870 --> 01:54:04,030
we can all translate the work that we're doing into one line that can be more dialogues and,

1267
01:54:04,030 --> 01:54:09,100
you know, between kind of things that we're writing, things that we're seeing. So I've sort of been in touch with a lot

1268
01:54:09,100 --> 01:54:14,140
of my officials, union friends and my rights activist friends. And there are all kinds of problems

1269
01:54:14,140 --> 01:54:19,630
with this kind of Lochlyn. It doesn't look good kind of on people who become big men in the Sunderbans

1270
01:54:19,630 --> 01:54:24,700
and represent the entire Sunderbans. But it's the same kinds of problems as sort of bolie

1271
01:54:24,700 --> 01:54:29,740
academics as we kind of present a part of the world. And so I think

1272
01:54:29,740 --> 01:54:34,990
one of the things I've sort of tried to do when I'm fine happened is reach out to the rest

1273
01:54:34,990 --> 01:54:40,600
of you and several people on this panel and and say, let's write something together

1274
01:54:40,600 --> 01:54:45,610
in the public domain. And so, you know, Dave Darney and I actually just today have written

1275
01:54:45,610 --> 01:54:51,010
something in the Telegraph in Callcott. And I think that to me is trying to think about sparking

1276
01:54:51,010 --> 01:54:56,080
debate beyond academia in, you know, wider sorts and are trying to I've just got

1277
01:54:56,080 --> 01:55:01,390
under Twitter and I know I'm terrible at it, but you're trying to tag different government ministries who are doing

1278
01:55:01,390 --> 01:55:06,430
work in reconstruction and say, here are sites. Just think again. And I think

1279
01:55:06,430 --> 01:55:11,620
people do have imagination. And I think if we can try and get them to think, maybe they're also

1280
01:55:11,620 --> 01:55:16,840
just exhausted with their work and need other people to help them think

1281
01:55:16,840 --> 01:55:22,270
and sort of deal with these crises. So I guess, yeah, a combination of people in the Sunderbans

1282
01:55:22,270 --> 01:55:27,280
having smartphones and being on Facebook do thinking with all of the

1283
01:55:27,280 --> 01:55:32,620
activist networks. Despite all of their problems to writing and public forums

1284
01:55:32,620 --> 01:55:37,810
and talking in words and languages that can be, you know,

1285
01:55:37,810 --> 01:55:43,060
accessible to not just a small tribe of anthropologists, but beyond is one

1286
01:55:43,060 --> 01:55:48,280
way of responding and social scientists.

1287
01:55:48,280 --> 01:55:53,330
India has put up the link to the Telegraph article about the journey and McNatt published just today

1288
01:55:53,330 --> 01:55:58,550
on Embankments. So it's impeccable timing from them, a very, very relevant

1289
01:55:58,550 --> 01:56:03,950
to it. Gosh, what would you like to have the last word? And then I'm afraid. I think we're going to have to end.

1290
01:56:03,950 --> 01:56:09,400
Sure, yeah. Just really briefly, because I think that I agree with everything.

1291
01:56:09,400 --> 01:56:15,250
Others have said, I guess I'll respond

1292
01:56:15,250 --> 01:56:20,410
more to nine Eco's general question about the role of scholars

1293
01:56:20,410 --> 01:56:26,530
in understanding the climate crisis than this question about Craxi programmers, which

1294
01:56:26,530 --> 01:56:31,660
others have responded to really brilliantly. I you know, I get this

1295
01:56:31,660 --> 01:56:36,730
question a lot, especially from Puchi students who want to study climate crisis.

1296
01:56:36,730 --> 01:56:41,890
And my and I think what's really brilliant about

1297
01:56:41,890 --> 01:56:46,990
what nine Nikah has done for us here and in bringing all of us together and thinking

1298
01:56:46,990 --> 01:56:52,000
about this is that I always say, if you are starting by

1299
01:56:52,000 --> 01:56:58,090
trying to understand the climate crisis, instead of trying to understand the particular

1300
01:56:58,090 --> 01:57:03,550
place in which you want to write about it, then you've gone about it wrong. Because

1301
01:57:03,550 --> 01:57:09,010
climate change, the experience of climate change is always mediated by existing

1302
01:57:09,010 --> 01:57:14,200
histories and power dynamics. And so if you haven't centred those

1303
01:57:14,200 --> 01:57:21,910
histories and power dynamics in understanding that experience, then you have missed

1304
01:57:21,910 --> 01:57:28,060
everything that is shaping how climate change is going to be experienced. And so

1305
01:57:28,060 --> 01:57:34,000
for me, you know, just as as Jason described this social movement that we work with,

1306
01:57:34,000 --> 01:57:39,160
starting with understanding those movement members

1307
01:57:39,160 --> 01:57:44,380
and their struggles and their histories with those struggles

1308
01:57:44,380 --> 01:57:49,690
in the region was really critical for me and understanding what it means to experience

1309
01:57:49,690 --> 01:57:55,810
climate change and coastal Bangladesh. And I think that anyone who

1310
01:57:55,810 --> 01:58:01,150
wants to understand climate change as a social scientist and

1311
01:58:01,150 --> 01:58:07,480
especially as a blogger, should also take that approach where

1312
01:58:07,480 --> 01:58:13,600
you think first about what is happening in this region, what are the political economies that I need to understand

1313
01:58:13,600 --> 01:58:19,570
in order to figure out what's happening here, and that

1314
01:58:19,570 --> 01:58:24,670
if you do that, you will find that there

1315
01:58:24,670 --> 01:58:30,340
are people in the community where you work likely who are neither critics nor programmers

1316
01:58:30,340 --> 01:58:37,200
whose own visions you have an opportunity to sort of,

1317
01:58:37,200 --> 01:58:42,220
you know, give voice to 3D work. So that's how I

1318
01:58:42,220 --> 01:58:47,320
approach that in my own work. Drastic. Thank you so much to

1319
01:58:47,320 --> 01:58:52,390
all of you to unload the BJARNI to make nine digits into Cacio. Thank you so much for your incredible

1320
01:58:52,390 --> 01:58:57,400
talks. Thank you so much to all of the participants were being you know, we had 100 people in Janik.

1321
01:58:57,400 --> 01:59:03,410
Again, as I said, so many of you actually work on bass Monday shows. It was wonderful to have you. Thank you for your questions

1322
01:59:03,410 --> 01:59:08,410
and thank you for just being here. I knew this was going to be an interesting discussion, but honestly, this was

1323
01:59:08,410 --> 01:59:13,840
just one of the most fantastic discussions I've had yet on not just I'm fine, but the time crisis. And also

1324
01:59:13,840 --> 01:59:18,850
actually going back to the last question on how we as academics can respond

1325
01:59:18,850 --> 01:59:23,890
to this particular moment in time. So thank you so much for that. And I hope we can

1326
01:59:23,890 --> 01:59:28,990
all sort of meet again and some of the capacity somewhere in the world soon.

1327
01:59:28,990 --> 01:59:34,440
Thank you. Thanks, everyone.

1328
01:59:34,440 --> 01:59:40,597
Thanks, everyone. Especially now safe. Thanks, everyone.