I can see the participant this is sort of expanding as people are joining in.
We will give it a minute or two before we begin. So.
Are you guys able to see the participants? I mean, the list? No. OK.
I can see that, like fifty one have joined so far, but I think they have about a hundred glass on
and 50 who signed up. So we just wait for.
We'll wait for a couple of minutes.
OK, I think you're got to begin now because it's a minute after the start time, sort of
a warm welcome to everyone to the Cyclone Unfun webinar. My name is Manickam
Arthur and I'll be chairing today's discussion. The Spaniard emerges from a research network entitled
Climate Crisis Thinking of the Humanities and Social Sciences that I Can Win, along with my colleague from
the history faculty here in Oxford. Professor Amanda Barr, I'm going to say a few words about our network objectives.
Before moving on to introduce today's incredible panel. So the Climate Crisis Thinking Network
is supported by the Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities Torch, as well as Oxford Martin School.
Officially launched in October last year with several objectives that can be found reflected in today's discussion
as well. So the first was to forge a truly into discrete conversation in Oxford and
hopefully more broadly around the climate crisis, especially one whereby
we can get humanities scholars and social scientists to speak to one another and even
B hope right and think collectively across disciplinary divides. Another
ambition related to the forging of truly into the spring conversations around the Anthropocene and the climate
crisis was a finding new ways to make academic research more potential matters of the day,
or finding ways to communicate and somehow translate a longstanding academic research in more creative
ways. So the battle to the on the Super Cyclone Unfun emerges from this collective thinking
on the climate crisis. I'm absolutely delighted to have these five scholars gathered together
today, as well as only a few have signed up to participate in this conversation.
I'm going to very briefly introduce the panel in the order in which they're speaking. So alphabetically,
as it happens, we're going to begin with Professor Jonny Bhattacharya, who is assistant professor
of history at Drexel University. She's the author of Imbibed and Ecology and the Bengalla Delta.
The Making of Kalkadoon that was published back in Britain was depressed in twenty eighteen. This
book tells the history of dramatic ecological changes in the Bengalla dead from 1760 to 1920,
involving land, water and humans. It traces the stories and the struggles that link them together.
But Johnny is currently working on a new book, tentatively entitled Monsoonal Landscapes, Credit,
Climate and Calamity. After the journey began, Professor Jason Collins,
who is associate professor in anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin.
His first book was Sensitive Space Anxious Darity at the India Bangladesh border. It was published by
the University of Washington Press in 2016. His current research is situated in the Southern Bundes
and the Southwest Delta region of Bangladesh addressing climate change. It addresses
his new book, addresses climate change related development, conservation, industrialisation, piracy and security.
And it explores the ways that imagination's of future climate change are shaping the Delta and the
India Bangladesh border in the present. After Jason, we're going to have Professor Unusually,
Uno's assistant professor in Salvacion studies at the National University of Singapore. She's
the author of Forest of Tigers, People, Politics and Environment and the Sunderbans,
which directly explores the human non-human interface. And it looks at how people live
in these impoverished islands and how did how they interact with the tigers of the region and
how the perceptions of Tigers and Lochiel articulate contradictory understandings of sociality.
I know is also the co-author of the Bengali Diaspora Rethinking Muslim Migration,
and she's currently working on the Indian Anthropocene, the body as well as on cost
after. I know we're going to have Dr. Meqdad Martha, who is a research associate at the University of Sheffield
Miguna, has recently completed a APHC from the Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics.
Just earlier this year, in fact, her doctorate research based on Long-Term Ethnographic Fieldwork in the Sundarbans
Forests of India, interrogated what it means to conserve life for those living
alongside a submerging global conservation hotspot. Magnus, currently working on a
book manuscript that is tentatively titled Conserving Life Political Imaginative from a Forest.
And finally, we're going to have Professor Cash up approach. He was assistant professor in environment at the Department
of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics. Current Book Project, which is based on over two years
of ethnographic and archival research. And Salvacion Europe, examines the political ecology of climate change adaptation
in coastal Bangladesh. She has also published several articles on the anti politics of climate
change on climate justice, as well as the broader contribution of the climate crisis in Bangladesh.
So I'm not going to hand over to the Bjarni, just a few words on the format.
Everyone is going to speak for about 10 minutes approximately, and then we're gonna open up
the binder for Q&A from all of you. So ordered the Bjarni.
Thank you so much, and Annika. And also thank you so much to Dortch for organising this conference,
organising this conversation. And I'm really also very honoured to be here
amongst anthropologists and geographers who are doing very critical work in this
under. But I as a historian of Calcutta and environmental. I am also very
appreciative of Nyoni for including a historian. Thank you so much to talk about the current moment. I think it
is kind of important. So in some ways I would make a few comments
and please, I'm funding a longer historical trajectory. And also think
a little bit about forgetting and remembering and attention that we've paid for to this. I'm fun.
It was fun happened. It made landfall in the
in Bengal, in eastern India. Meanwhile, Bangladesh on 20th me and
the casualties were not as high as it has been in the in the last
few years, though in both India and Bangladesh, government has gotten better about actually relocating
people to shelters. So I. One hundred and twenty eight is the latest count that I checked.
People who've died because of the fun money, many of the deaths
were because of fallen trees, but also land loss and a diving surge.
It's also, though but the damage that has been estimated so far is
about cutting billion U.S. dollars. And this is a damage that covers both Bengal and Bangladesh.
So this is the event we're talking about. But it also happened as
migrants who were coming back to Bengal in at least in the
Indian site following the code red lockdown, like harshly imposed, Gobin logged
on and they were walking back home. So they were walking back to a very uncertain kind
of a future into this decimated landscape. So, so unfun is
has to be seen as something like embedded in this epidemiological event that is
unfolding in South Asia at the moment. The other thing I also want to mention
is it was also an event which some of us who live or work in that area were surprised
at how little it global or even one might even see. National attention it received in India,
at least, and how far Tribune regularly covered it in ways. I don't think we can say that
about the national media in India. So so that's why I really appreciate Manicka
wanting to actually not forget that event. And I really want to thank you because I think
creating board the archive and I'm a historian, I worry about creating icons with creating both the archive
and the historical memory and knowledge at the same time is really, really important. So
let me just to Doc Doc see a it a few things. So climate scientist
Rocsi Matthew Cole, who works in Chennai, he said he called the iPhone a compound event.
That's meteorologically that's what it's called multiple extreme's come together. And I think
for us social scientist, it is also a compound event in the senses. We can never just look
at it as a cyclone because what Unfun did. Like many other cyclones before, is it pulls back
the curtain on the many modes of forgetting we've done, forgetting in our planning, in our design,
in our legal and economic structures within which such cyclones are actually embedded. So
I want to talk a little bit about that in some ways. For one small example, I'll begin with about
Calcutta, because I know most of my panellists will talk about Sunderbans as we all won, but we can't get lost
between 20 to 30 percent off its tree cover because of the landfall. And one of the things
we realised is that sort of bubbled up into our consciousness, not that we didn't know is
we had not been tending auburn trees. So every time we were laying down lines or putting down
footbath, we were cutting, severing their roots. And as a result, the trees became imbalanced. And suddenly now
the road department, the Transport Department is wondering who should they be talking to next time they want to do
road work? And this is what I actually looked at in my book, Empire Ecology is how we forget
and what sort of political economy within which are forgetting is embedded. And I said one comes from
siloing of knowledge and policy knowledge is get created in various different departments.
And I said and I showed how that siloing of knowledge is actually driven by
various kinds of lobbies and stakeholders. That is, once the league the building builders
lobby, if you can think about it, in a much larger framework, which is not a, as I say, build a syndicate and
lobbies are not a 1980s or both neoliberal like neo liberal thing in South Asia, but actually goes
back to the late 18th century, if one might even want to stretch it that far. So there's
that there is that kind of forgetting. There's a forgetting that happens within law where the legal architecture
of property will make certain forms of living with land, water and human in it.
Look at recalcitrant, recalcitrant or sort of eatery's certain kinds of relation that don't
fit into the regimes of property. So this forgetting is also.
We need to pay attention to the political economy of forgetting this. We're getting as deeply linked with our ability
to imagine, imagine alternative futures. Imagine our path forward. Imagine how we move forward,
because what Unfund has revealed is if we cannot go back to business as usual and in the greed
derangement, Mr. Bush has actually spoken about how the failure of imagination in the face
of such compound events, which is a force, a tone that comes out of meteorology. But we need to look
at these events as acts in this manner. So this
is one thing I want to stock about. And then let's I hope as a panel we can
think together what the work of forgetting does in cases like this, what lessons we remember,
what we choose to forget and what lessons we cannot see because we've forgotten certain strands of
thinking and living with land and water. What prevents us also from seeing those kinds of lessons?
And and so I ended my book with trying to imagine what urbanisation
might look like in these climate changed world. What sort of lessons is that? Urbanisation
is going to proceed through concretisation of the city and that's what we are doing in Calcutta.
We're just pouring concrete in the wetlands, which which actually protects
not just Calcutta, but also the also the sun Durban. So one of the things I want to think
a little bit about is also the relation between the top one conversation I have seen emerge,
especially Borst Eila and in Fun is Sunderbans of them. The mangroves need to be protected
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
space. That's not how one historians often look at it when the rural comes. It comes mostly in terms of
migration and not as our ecological unit. So that's been a very good thing
to think about. But we've learnt the absolutely wrong lesson because the next thing we say is we need to
protect the mangroves to protect Calcutta, and we need to change that equation. And we need to seek Alpha
as ecological pressure on the mangroves. Not that mangroves need to be protected to protect Calcutta
because the next thing we see is we need to then depopulate the mangroves in order to
protect Calcutta. But never the other way around. So that's something I want to put on the forefront in thinking
through what makes a problem, a compound problem. And that's a very, very important category. But let's turn
to some other kinds of natural disasters and put this in context. So a couple of things
that are happening. We had the 2005 floods in Mumbai. We had the 2015 floods in Chennai.
And I want to just remind him through what McDonough and Nick Cannon. I'm told,
reminded us after the Chennai floods of the Japanese water crisis. And he said Chennai ran
out of water more than a century ago when the British began centralising water projects in 1876,
according to Jazira. These projects should a new paradigm that say what? Any relation between
human land and water. And I think this this is the paradigm we are seeing also in the case
of how we react to these cyclones, especially by the policy and think tank
policy think tank and government officials and the bureaucrats and the irrigation department, the road department,
transport relief disaster, all of that that's happening. So let me go briefly
back to one other thing that happened in eighteen six seventy six. And that's being covered
by Benjamin King's various excellent book, The Imperial Disaster. This was a cyclone that struck
Bengal bad. It was a pretty devastating cyclone. And what happened
was just like, I'm fine, but in a slightly different temporality,
it was followed. One hundred thousand people almost died in that cyclone. And that was because of
the second. But the cholera that the cholera outbreak that have in the current outbreak haven't precisely
because the impeded development completely bypassed this one. But when it came to infrastructure,
so it really couldn't go to the places that were affected, which were primarily bucket of Gonta, and she'd
gone down that area normally, primarily in the Bangladesh side of this one, that one really couldn't
actually go there in time. And the cholera just spread devastatingly. And
for us, it's trying to really understand. So what he basically says is this is a human, human
historical event and we need to understand what the human loss, but the history of what who
was screamed. And he said if we look at the longer imperial policies that actually
eviscerated the people, these immiseration and the people who were claimed finally
by the cyclone was embedded in the social hierarchies of the political economy. NBC, a similar thing
happening. The people who were at what actually affected by cyclone unfund is are
also people who are affected by a longer history of land lost through
Eila and Embankment Building, who had to leave the Sunderbans to become migrants
in other cities, will now come back to a completely decimated landscape. Whereas fields are
the agrarian fields as alienated, their embankments are broken. So there is a longer history.
So we have to see this as a kind of a human historical event. We Kingsbury's work
helped us understand. And then I want come to one final point of similarity between the 1876
moment and now. It's following the 1876, a cyclone.
The imperial government responded by disbursing aid in the form of loans.
And ah. And basically establishing a security regime.
So the two things that the summer months got at the end was loans,
as well as a police force all over this area. And they came together. Money
and policing always goes together. We know that. And the loans are often the people who got
the loans were the wealthy or landlords who also doubled as moneylenders in the area. So
what happened that people who actually had the ability to produce security and collateral got the
loans which created pockets so far, inequality and wealth accumulation
and the poorer people became overdependent on these moneylenders. Second
time over. And now the Imperial Police was used to actually extract higher amounts of rain,
higher amount of rent from the poor, the poorest of the poorest population in the Sunderbans.
And like as of yesterday, what Rihad is known has been disbursed in the Indian side in
Bengal. But we now have, Forni, people who've gotten the loans and now we are going through
entire bureaucratic machinery has been set in place to now look at who are the deserving of
aid and who is not deserving of it. And that is that entire bureaucracy of corruption within which it is embittered.
And this has a very, very long history. So these are the two similarities,
I think, that comes out, which makes us wonder what are the lessons we learnt in the last
hundred and fifty years? Almost, we can see between 1876 and this present moment.
And what are the lessons we failed to learn or chose not to learn is kind of important. And then I want
to come back to one minor point is when I say if we forget and I know some of
my panellists, fellow balance will speak on this when we forget, we forget precisely because there are very, very
strong lobbies that that aid in the production of this forgetting.
So there have been some anthropologists, sociologists who have been saying there
are other ways of banking, for instance, and there are. And it's
ultimately surprising, as I was reading, about the kind of in banking that's happening in the John Gita, which is
Brahmaputra tributary, where they use bamboo Poles, they call it bundling, they use bamboo footfalls
to do up in banking. What happens is silk gets to collect in it and life grows around
it. Trees take root and crabs and fish and biota can thrive
in it. And that has often been ignored in the face of concrete embankments because
builders like concrete brings in money. Concrete creates economy of circulation.
Builders lobby make money. The art movies make money. The irrigation department people
get to make money and dish. Most of this work actually shows the politics within which these
builders lobbies are located. So we have to understand it's not that we don't know the lessons.
It's the lessons. What kind of solutions make money and don't make
money and greed ultimately decide what happens and how we respond. So with that,
I'll give it over to Jason.
Thanks to a giant and thanks also Manicka and all the folks at Tortue of organised, this is a really exciting
conversation to be part of. I, I have the luxury
of saying something that's going to be a little bit more narrow than what some of my other panellists
are going to talk about, in part because they're doing such a wonderful job of setting the stage. I'm going to skip
over some of that and try and just say some make
three fairly general points about the response to Cyclone Unfond and the way it plays into
our imaginations of various different kinds of both humanitarian and development responses
to climate change, particularly in Bangladesh. Although I think
that some of what I have to say speaks more broadly to development at a more global level.
I my research is focussed on various different projects of making the future
in the Bengal Delta and specifically in the Bangladesh side of it. And so the observations
that I'm going to make today are drawing largely on an area that I've been doing work in for quite some
time now in Southern Shop. And
I'm going to try and make these points in a general way, but I will reference some of what's going on
in that area and specifically in an island which has become sort of a notorious island in discussions
of climate change in Bangladesh called Guevarra. So
the basic point that I want to make is that disaster and disaster response are one form,
one kind of project of making the future. And so it's instructive to think
about Psychon unfond and the ways that people have responded to it in trying to sort
out what those projects mean and how those work. So the area that I work in was badly affected
by cyclone unfun embankments broke throughout the region, leading to fairly widespread
flooding and damage of not just homes, but also crops and fields. The damage
was especially bad in southern shut, Kara, especially in Gobert's, which is a space
which has been in perpetual need of and waiting for the government to rebuild some of its critically
weakened embankments, essentially since Cyclone Eila in 2009.
So the points that I'd like to make about this events are threefold.
And the first is maybe to amplify something that Johnny said, which is to give
some credit to some of the work that's been done in terms of creating
more sound disaster preparedness in the region. I think it's really critical to acknowledge,
especially as scholars who are often the position of critiquing development,
that there is in some ways Cyclone I'm fine can be read as a tremendous success
of both the early warning and the cyclone shelter system. There is
a comparatively shockingly, shockingly low rate of mortality coming out of cyclone on fun.
And I think that's something that we all need to acknowledge and think about and think about in some sense, what
miraculous structures, cyclone shelters, especially multis, use cyclone shelters are
now to be clear. That's not to say that there are not major issues that need to be confronted
around the cyclone shelter system, especially questions around the spread of
covered 19, especially with the timing of unfun, essentially at
the height of the of the pandemic crisis. There are still large gaps
where it takes a very long time for people to get to cyclone shelters. There are ongoing reports that cyclone
shelters have become sites of domestic violence or violence against women. And there continues to be a crush
around lack of space for livestock, which also need protecting main events of floods. However,
I think that there is a really meaningful transformation. So comparing,
say, cyclone comparing cyclone unfond to the super cyclone that hit Bangladesh
in 1991, also super cyclone, which left over 140000 dead. There have been really tremendous
steps forward here. The second question,
the second point I'd like to raise is that if the actual preparedness
around cyclone shelters is good, I think that we could say that maybe the response has not been so wonderful and in fact,
has been extraordinarily problematic. It's been slow. It's left many, many
people in the lurch. People were left without access to food or water throughout the EED holiday and for
weeks following. Indeed, in the regions that I work, many people are still without
access to reliable clean water. Their houses are still damaged. Embankments have yet to be repaired.
And I think what's instructive to think about here is to reflect back on the response
to Cyclone Eila in 2009 and to see what that kind of slow response
did. So to think with Guevarra as a case in point, the islands.
This is an island which is essentially situated quite close to the India Bangladesh border and affected. Right across
the right, across the river from the sugar bonds. That was an island that became quite
well-known in the wake of Cyclone Eila, in part because there was a critical
failure to repair the embankments there in a meaningful way for years to come. And
what that failure to repair the embankments not did was not only did it cause ongoing
damage to agricultural land and people's livelihoods on that island, but it also allowed for a new
kind of imagination of what Guevarra, in fact, is and represents and both caution. I have written
about this in various ways. Gbara effectively became this island, which was imagined as a place
where climate change had already happened and subsequently became a space that was good,
that was good to think with for development professionals were interested in putting it together experimental projects
designed to increase climate adaptation and climate resilience.
Now there are a range of effects of those kind of projects, but very few of them were actually transformative
to the lives of the people who are living on those islands. Instead, what they did is sort of they they
transformed Guevarra into sort of this new place to sort of future anteria of what climate change
may look like in other places around the world. And as as
I've argued elsewhere, effectively, this is really that in many ways sort of looked over
the head of a lot of the actual much more grounded projects that people inside of Guevarra were trying to get up
and running to deal with ecological change as they encountered it on a daily basis. So
effectively, these kind of slow responses have to speak
with Johnnys language of the political economy of forgetting tend to have an effective
erasing the memory that what's actually happening is the result of a particularly bad
response to a disaster and instead recasting these spaces as zones of climate
change that can be treated in different sorts of ways than zones of humanitarian relief. So they
move from spaces of acute vulnerability to climatic events like cyclones to spaces
that seem to be zones of disaster foretold, where this sort of doomed nature of the land
and the people that live there open up various kinds of possibilities for experimental intervention with
little serious concern for the actual dynamics of vulnerability that people face on
a daily basis. And I worry that that that often is effectively
going to be a sort of the next wave and recasting this region and that in that particular way.
So the third and related point that I want to make is to think
a little bit about the actual responses by people who lived in that region to cyclone on fun
as possibly a more hopeful way to think about the conditions of life in Christ
in the context of climate crisis. So first, one of the things that emerged
in this region is that the actual risk, the actual effective response in terms of providing much needed
aid, in terms of access to food, water, shelter and so on and so forth, actually emerged within communities
in this region, particularly local collectives. Some of them led
by groups of women who had organised themselves around this new emerging softshell crab business
in the region, sprang into action to provide some much needed and immediate relief for the most severely
affected members of the community. So that kind of response, of course, is not that surprising.
But it's worth noting, nonetheless, that the most immediate and effective responses too often emerge
not from development or humanitarian organisations, but from the communities that were most affected by it,
and especially people who are already organising within that community to think collectively about how to address
the transforming environment. Second, the impact of
unfond within Guevarra motivated a resurgence of a protest that's been popping up there for now
several, several years, where people gather on the islands to canning embankments
in the wake of storms. This happened after Cyclone Bubel. That happened after funny and start
protesting, calling not for relief, but for the government to repair the island's weakened embankments.
So now I want to qualify that a little bit and say it's worth noting that that protest itself is
political and is part of the dynamics of a local chairman
who is a member of not the ruling party, trying to sort of press the Awami
League for for a response. And also, of course, raises some questions about
the extent to which embankments are effective infrastructures to keep people safe in the first place.
Questions that I know some of my colleagues will be responding to. But nonetheless, these protests, I think, offer
an occasion to reflect on how we might think about anticipatory responses to climate
change in a slightly different way. So people protesting in Gabeira are asking for
a more proactive infrastructure that might provide protection from storms like I'm fine in the first
place, as opposed to the kind of weak response that they're getting in terms
of relief now. Now, whether or not such infrastructures are possible, and I think that that's very much an
open question. The protests in Guevarra and community based responses
to providing relief highlight kind of a classic problem in development, not just in Bangladesh but elsewhere.
I mean, that is that people who are most directly affected by things like climate change and who have
also. And who also have some the Sprouter responses to the vulnerabilities that climate change produces
are rarely at the centre of conversations about addressing their own futures. So
I think I'm fun on the one hand offers a fairly grim portent of what climate change could
look like in the delta and what the climate crisis could look like in the delta. But it also offers, I think, some hope
and brings us to the point of needing to say the often repeated but little heated thing
about climate change and development, which is if I think we are to think seriously about
life lived amongst this climate crisis in places like the Bengal Delta on both sides of the border
as something more than just a window onto future catastrophe, we've got to continue to support and prove things that
already work like cyclone shelters. And we also have to continue to advocate for more democratic,
consultative and community engaged responses to climate preparedness. And
that both of these, I think, are fundamental to imagining a more just and perhaps effective
way forward in addressing the unfolding crisis. Thanks
very much.
And want to get to you next. Thank you so much for inviting
me. And thank you, George, and thank all of you.
More than 100 participants listening. So what I thought I'd do is actually
look back on my kind of relationship with cyclones
in the region. So I think I'm going to talk
just about the various cyclones that I have witnessed and
migration. I think I'm just going to focus on on this. So
in 1998, I was in class seven and we had gone to the junior one
for a nature study camp with our school. And that was
our. Just a couple of weeks before the big cyclone,
off nineteen eighty eight from Durban, which killed more than 8000 people.
And it was after that cyclone that my father and
his friends show one lullabye Energy was an architect,
built the first cyclone shelter of the Schruder, which is in a place called Charcoaled today.
So it was, you know, this this this idea that they were there to sink.
There wasn't a single cyclone shelter in the entire region before 88.
So I think it got built by by 19 and by 90.
So a couple of years to raise money and then to build this huge big cyclone shelter. Anyway, so
what do you want to say is that, you know, two eight thousand people killed are
the next big cyclone happens. When I was in the shelter, I had just arrived.
That was in 99. And initially, the stronger
one, we're going to be hit. The government had sent three boats
to Shagger Island to do something about the cyclone that took to help people out. Nothing else
had been organised. Nothing. That cyclone hit or that about 10000
people. But I think that from 2000 onwards,
because there are many more schools that are built in concrete and brick.
People have been now going into, you know, schools that have become sort of
cyclone cyclone shelters. And in Bangladesh, there are perhaps a few more cyclone shelters stand
than investing. But investing goes to schools taken over that that
has been repurposed as cyclone shelters when when cyclones come.
So. I love killed
less than 500 people. However, eight thousand people disappeared,
and I think this is a friend from the Shandor one who was telling me
a thousand people disappeared. We don't know where they are. We can assume 10, 11 years
after the cyclone that they are probably dead. So it's not as if
so whether they're dead, whether they migrated out. And this is what I really did last
year. I was doing some fieldwork to mark my 20 years in the Schumer one. So I was there
for a long time in August and September. And what I noticed
was that there weren't new homes.
So basically 20 years ago, the number of huts I had surveyed
in this little village were more or less the same. And this
is strange for a place where, you know, people have had kids and now
it's in the same place in the outskirts of Kabul that, for example, you have you have twice
as many Hudson and people now. So where where did those people go? So
people said, you know, most of the islanders say we tried to send our kids away. We tried to
to to get them to leave the place because there isn't really a future
here. And even what was interesting to see was that even those who had done
well were trying to buy lots of land in the outskirts of Tibet
to send their children there. So do those who have done well try to buy a plot of
land and then had, you know, install the sort of small shop for them.
And those who did not have land and whose father were actually fishermen were
construction labourers in Tamil Nadu, in trucks and in Punjab,
Kerala. The underline that the places where people are migrating out.
And so this is this is this is what happened with Eila and with
I'm fine. Actually, the opposite has been happening. So even though the Libyan
whose house I lived is twenty one years back, her
two of her sons had returned because of the fact them losing their
jobs. OK. There's nothing for them to do apart from. They have a little bit of land. So
it'll it'll be know them for, for maybe a few months. But after that
they will have to return and and work again outside this region. So I
think that people in this region, on the one hand, are very aware of the fact that
there isn't much to be done. But on the other hand, I also think
that there is a complete mismanagement and there could be a lot more cottage
industries that could be, for example, you know, beekeeping.
So people from Bari will come and put their beehives all along the
the the river in front of the forest in people's homes. And I've been
here for the last 20 years. Why don't you guys start doing the same. And buy your own
house and then organise yourselves around, you know, selling the honey. But
but nobody has really talked of sending them to Bari to get
a course on how to become proper.
You know, honey collectors and how to perhaps do this job.
Similarly, there are very few alternatives. And,
you know, sort of cottage industries where people could be organised. They're very, very few of
these. There are some congeals. But what is surprising to me is that what has also
happened in the last few years, two things that have really caught my attention,
that you have a mushrooming of hotels all along the
forested islands. And these hotels are never, ever owned by
people from the front. So they're owned by people from Calcutta. So those then employ
people from the area to manage the place. And the other thing that has
happened is that apart from apart from these little
hotels, again, you know, the government here could be
having a system where it would be local people who could be a lot
more organised into, you know, owning these places, or at least
the taxation could be higher. These hotels could also be
a lot more eco friendly than they are now. And so
so so this is really what is happening. The other thing that is happening is
that a lot of people who are from originally from the
schruder Boeing have started to lend geos and are no longer living there. So
they live in Ann Arbour and more like four in Borya. And so I've
been meeting quite a few of them and they say, no, you know, originally Evander's from there,
but now we we want to do something for the shingled, which but they are not living there. And I think
if you are not living there, you get you forget what the priorities are.
And again, this is something very, very interesting, you know. So is it linked to a certain
idea of what a place is and your own standing?
So, for example, if you are educated, you are not going to live in gobbled up or shut in yet,
but you are going to try and go a little higher up. And when I wasn't here.
For example, when I found out was that entire tracts of the borough were full
of Muslims who had migrated from West Bengal in the 60s. So
it was very interesting to see that these were people that had, you know, been kicked
out and had been given the worst kind of land.
So so this is it's the same. So basically, your geography,
in a way, is what tells the world who you.
So even within the island, as I as I wrote in my book, you know, when when usually
you are around, you live on the periphery of the island. You are a
Fisher Fisher and, ah, somebody who depends on the
forest. Whereas when you are inside, you own lunch and you are
a lot less susceptible to have your land
submerged by the river water. So what
what the government has been doing, actually, the new government has been doing quite a lot in
this one when they have the honour guard and they receive 1000 rupees
every month for just being the farmers. And if they do
go and perform, they get two thousand rupees per month. So at least there is something
so that, you know, one government has also started a scheme where
widowed women get a thousand rupees per month, where the elderly get a thousand rupees per month.
And I think that, you know, that people are not dying of hunger. You
can see it in people's bodies. Twenty years ago, bodies were a lot thinner than
they are now. You can see that you don't have the kind of malnutrition that you had, know
all those years ago and 20 years ago. People talked a lot about starvation
and how it had been so difficult for them to eat. Whereas this
is no more, the rhetoric to people today speak a lot more about safety, about
the fact that they fear the river breaking up and then losing their houses. They
also fear a lot of the local politics and how basically
to get anything done, you need to have contacts, you need to know people. And it doesn't always work
to to their benefit, which is why they prefer just leaving and trying at
least to make money outside the region. I haven't
looked at have I have I extended my SO.
So this is so I really feel just like Jason was saying, you know,
there is a failure of imagination in relation to this region because
on the one hand, nobody wants to do anything. You know, recently people have been talking
about the fact that constructing concrete or brick embankments
really does not help because. But what
I also wanted to highlight is that what these people are going through today and
is basically because these rivers are the silt is increasing.
And so therefore, they they need to they need to change their courses. And this is
because of the Frucci Dam. This is because of all the dams that India has built
around Bangladesh. These are because of the dams. China has built
along the Brahmaputra just, you know, on on its very. And so basically
you have a lot of silting and a lot of that. The way the river
was flowing is not what is happening anymore. So, so,
so this river is going to increasingly break embankments and try
to find ways of slowing down because the silt is making it,
you know, just just rice. So so this is this is what has been happening
really from a geographical point of view. And this is going to increase. And
I've been talking to a lot of people I know in the shoulder one and.
You know, they were saying that really this is what is happening.
One of them was telling me how his bond was dying. And I said, is it because of the
saltwater that has just come in? Because I know his house is inside. He's one of the richer
people. And he said, no. And I said, you know, you live next to the school.
And last time I visited, I saw all the school kids throw plastic packets
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
covered in these plastic packets. So I said, you know, maybe you should just dredge out and pull out all these
plastic packets and you're just we often would start breathing again. So these
are all the problems that some parents are facing. It is not just one thing. It is also,
you know, the kind of food people are buying for for the richer
ones, how they dispose of plastic. You can the forest is full of tourists
on Styrofoam plates. If you go visit in winter, for example. So it's
it's it's a much bigger problem. But again, I would I would say that there is a
a crisis in imagining a better future for
this place. Thanks.
Thank you, I know. Thank you, Nancy Gerfaut bringing us together
today. And actually, I've been following Vinita Damodaran and Richard Grove, who just passed
away recently. Their work. And even though the bingo there does such a small
part of the world, they actually argue that the Indian Peninsula is crucial for
understanding just environment and climate at the planetary
scale. So it's sort of important to understand what's happening in India in terms of climate,
not just for India, but for for the rest of the world. And also, I've spent the past
five years drawing on each of my co panellists walk. It really is an honour to
be here talking alongside them. So one of the things that I suppose we know
about scholarship in terms of cyclones is that they
are not exactly natural disasters. And I think they've Dani touched on this a little bit. And I just want
to firstly begin by saying that both historically and often
are actually disasters by design, which means they're disasters because of particular
forms of development and particular forms of war, leaving places underdeveloped.
So they're sort of all too human as disasters. And so scholarship has shown that
these are shaped by inequalities, inequalities in society, which is both cost
atrocities that were taking place in the Indian subcontinent and how we build. So what
materials we build with how we damaged dredge rivers, how we sort of changed
the courses of rivers. And we kind of continue to disregard particular forms of knowledge,
both scholarship and archival, but also of the people living there. So I
think just to repeat that, what they've done is said in the beginning that there's a narrow narrative
of the Sunderbans being saved for callcott or for Bythewood biodiversity.
But I think there needs to be at the centre of these conversations that the importance
of saving the Sunderbans for itself. So not there are people who live there that are animals
who live there. And it's not just a site for climate adaptation elsewhere. And it should not be conceived
of that because there are people's life projects that have to be put at the centre of what it means to conserve.
So that's what my work has been focussing on. And that's what I would like to talk
about. That can be reconceive conservation from what it means for people
who live in the Sunderbans or what is it that they might want to conserve for their own lives and who
chooses what to conserve and why. And so I guess it's
already been mentioned. But just very briefly, the Sunderbans is disentanglement not just of saltwater,
freshwater, monsoon, water, land and and forest, but also
of Hindus, Muslims and other devices who live there. So there's religious influences from Sufi Islam
as well as version of Islam, share of Islam. There's entanglements of birds, fish, crabs, mud,
skipper. So there is a sort of interconnectedness that a planetary level and that interconnectedness is very
much with people who live there alongside non humans.
So do I think the role of the humanities and the social sciences in understanding climate
crisis is crucial because it does put people back into the picture
in a way. I think it's not very easy. What it means to put people's life
projects back at the centre. So I think in trying to interrogate what it might mean
to live better or notions of of living better, it's quite complicated.
And so I think I'm going to unpack what that means. I'm going to do that with two points.
And they're sort of very banal points. But I guess from the ones it's quite complicated
how each of them play out. When we think about implementing how we might rebuild
lives or reconstruct lives Borst to cyclone. So if we try and think about what
are people's hopes and aspirations of people who live there, they're not homogeneous.
And so, as from everything we've heard so far and what Unruh said, what
kinds of houses they want, where do they want to live, where do they want, whether they want to live
and leave the Sunderbans or actually in the cases of some, they might not want to be rehabbed,
lifted out of the Sunderbans, even though it's a very precarious landscape environmentally.
And so these are different sort of choices that different people in this in their bones based on
generations. So that's young and old. Whether you are landed or not landed,
all of those kind of choices of what one wants is not homogenous. And that's very different. And we need to
understand what people might want for themselves. And I think the second thing about
what people might want in terms of just diversity, not just based on religion and cost,
is that in rebuilding life. And I think I know you and others have touched on this, is that local politics
really matters. And so party politics matters, political sort of patronage.
And this is not just. Relation to, I suppose, neighbours being, you know, Frank,
of friends and showing mutuality in times of disasters, but there's also a lot of envy, there's a lot of infighting.
People do poison each other's bonds and do those kinds of local politics
need to be taken into consideration? And I think the last point in terms of putting
people's life projects at the centre is taking into consideration how they relate
to this landscape. So how do they think of these storms and disasters? And,
you know, one of the things that is woven into the sort of everyday
fabric of life in the Indian subcontinent, but definitely also the bingo data is religion.
So there are Hindus, Muslims and devices in this region. There are several gods, goddesses,
deities that are worshipped. We might call in some senses, it's an animistic society
where people worship from Margon Gods or the goddess of the Ganges, to William Beebe,
who is the sort of Islamic forest deity to mom on a show, who is the snake goddess
or Lord Vishwakarma, who's the Lord of Iron. And they're sort of another kind of Hindu Banten.
And there's dotted with mosques and temples. So most books on
Brazilian's or climate change adaptation, disaster and risk will say,
let's put participation at the centre, let's put people at the centre of these approaches. But what
they can completely disregard sometimes is how people actually live. And what might
they conceive often make sense of these disasters in their own sort of my theologies,
in their own memories and through stories. So I think to scholarship in the
humanities might contribute to these conversations with economists,
climate scientists, environmental economists, basically, because this is sort
of trying to think about how people in the Sunderbans are
thinking about these disasters and the monsoons and just everyday life. So it's not
just organisations necessarily like the World Bank that
don't necessarily put the way that people relate to the landscape, but even development
work and kind of so-called secular activism. So whether it's the rights
activists in India or people who are thinking about rights to livelihoods
really completely disregard the way in which then the ones people relate to the landscape themselves.
And so I think we really do need to, as people who are in the social sciences, think about
mythology stories as being a part of adaptation and resilience as well.
And I think one example to elucidate just the ways in which these local politics
and people's politics are so complicated is. And I'll do that to the embankments.
And maybe Garcia will speak a little more about this. So at the time that I was in
the field, Dr. Armitage, Merkabah there's this book on him back when
politics came out. And as I was reading his book and it was sort of the nitty gritty details
of, you know, land compensation and party politics and just how
these embankments are built in and how what it takes to to build in the Sunderbans
with, you know, peoples, you know, all the sort of disaggregating different people's
relationships to where they live on the island and who gets compensation or not. And simultaneously
to reading his book, where I was based, these modern kind
of Dutch style [INAUDIBLE] were coming along and these were concrete embankments
that were much bigger and they were supposed to withstand the cyclone better.
And in some ways, as they've Dani's work also assures these
sort of so-called modern embankments, which came after Cyclone Eyeline 2009.
They've all cracked right now after cyclone unfund. And as Jason said, they've cracked in parts of Bangladesh. They've cracked
in many parts of this in their bones in West Bengal. And so they completely
disregard not only history and what we know in terms of sort of this
landscape not being a fixed landscape. It's a moving delta. So they've misread the local ecology,
but they've also kind of mr they'd older histories of how
the desire for said in translation was linked to taxation, to tools,
to creating states. And these were moving communities. There was much more nomadism
than is allowed for both because of the sort of border we have between Bangladesh and India, but also of creating
fixity in a landscape which is which is shifting. So my proposition,
I suppose, for the future in terms of going ahead after rebuilding
from cyclone arm fine is to forward. And so as cyclones and densities
are increasing. One is that reground reconstruction work. Of course,
in the current context, in the specific. Cities of the Bingguo Delta. But I think alongside
that, we also really need to learn from interesting examples elsewhere. And there are
just so much more imaginative kaat happening in different parts of the world. So China, for example,
is thinking about sponge cities where the idea is to be able to absorb floods
instead of create walls against floods. And landscape architects like Andrado Mathurin
delivered a corner have prompted us to think about flood plains. And so not just sort
of fixed boundaries and separations between land and water. So I suppose one proposition
about really taking into consideration the local gritty integrities undermine due to
differences in the bingel Delta is not necessarily just
thinking about the bingo they're dying. I think this is something is really fascinating in this banner
to maybe get into is that even within the bingo world out there, so many differences. So I think
in the Bangladesh side, it's there, you know, lots of diversity. It's a different scenario
within the West Bengal side. There's deep differences based on, you know,
monsoon backdowns, differences based on accretion and erosion and sanitation. There
are certain islands which are more low-Lying than others. So I think what
I'm proposing is that actually the future could look like with very decentralised,
very localised plan. So it needn't be that there's one plan for the entire bingo data,
but actually within the landscape and the ecology, it could have very specific
interventions based on the specificities even within the West Bengal side or
the Bangladesh side. And so it could be a really sort of radical decentralisation of how one rebuilds
from where we are right now. And so even within this area,
the idea of extremely decentralised approaches would then have to take into consideration
the kind of local politics that is to do with, you know, panchayat
level, BDO level, state capacities, patronage, politics. Who is getting them mean
post unfun people who are getting compensation for damage. And as I mentioned
it all, it's all based on, who knows, political party members who, as you know, does the DMC
party who doesn't. So I think it cannot be at
at at a remove at all because those those they nitty gritty
details, Enza, end up mattering in in how one rebuilds.
So just a day, I suppose. And my comments, I think, again,
the there's so much work around the differences. And again, and I'm thinking
about here cameleer the ones work on flooding and she sort of breaks
down the ways in which not all floods are bad. There is some flooding which has existed
and has existed forever and has very good flooding and there's other floods that are bad. So I think just sort
of disaggregating the nitty gritty of what's going on. But
again, beneath that more drone and Richard Grove has been working for
a very long time on long environmental histories. And I think the Centre
for World Environment has been documenting and archiving our historical database
of climate history. And it's really an incredible database. And it's incredible
work to think about the archives of climate and of monsoon.
But I think one of the things that might be interesting alongside that kind of an
archive is also an archive of some of what
has been said in this panel, that everybody's sort of beginning from their journey of just memory, of recalling
what it means for people who live in this in their bones to face
a stock Dido's storm or to face a cyclone. And these
are just kind of documenting things like those sort of very mundane fears
of children when they encounter cyclones and what it means for them to what
it means to protect their livestock when a storm is coming. Or do
I think just that a mutuality between neighbours, but also in and envy between
neighbours? So I think what I'm saying is that there really is the need for a database
not just of longer climate histories, but also of oral histories, of people living with
precarity and an end and not a new form of climate, bigger data or
people as a new set of in their lifetime, people in this in their bones. This is the sort of fourth
or fifth time they're rebuilding their home. So this is not the first calamity at all that they
have seen on. And I think this is why and I sort of end here. But
this is why people like the rest of you on this panel and sort of especially
Unau with your two decades of engagement in the Sunderbans, is sort of invaluable to. Be able
to kind of have that long, good reflection on a region and its memory. So
thank you.
Well, yeah, I guess I'll just start by thanking the nine ECA and all of
these brilliant friends. It's really exciting to be in conversation with all of you. And
to follow all of these really important
reflections. A lot of what I have to say
follows, I think, in important ways on each of each of their
comments that we've heard so far. But also
something that I want to talk about and kind of centre is that in addition to
interrogating these in many ways violent,
imagine areas of climate change future for this coastal
region, I think that it's important also to pay attention to the fact
that there are progressive imagined areas of redistribution in
the region that we absolutely should not ignore and that
are important, in my opinion, to imagining what
an alternative kind of adaptation could look like. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to talk
about. I'm going to talk about the political economy of
climate change adaptation in coastal Bangladesh specifically.
And I'm going to situate that in relation to how.
How on time played out in one particular community recently. So,
I mean, we're thinking about cyclones and climate change. It's clearly
important to understand that these kind of extreme weather events
are being made more frequent and more extreme
because of climate change. And so I'm fine. Is in some ways
sort of a harbinger of the future. Right. We're going to see more of this. And it's going to make
communities more precarious. But also, what's really important to centre is
that strategies for adapting to climate change, these specifically strategies
for response, have also made communities in the coastal region more vulnerable.
And so that's what I want to talk about, is how
development agencies are responding to climate change, how communities have responded to climate change. And then
what that means for this vulnerability. And
I think that what's really important in understanding this is.
It and especially I mean, I think that Deb John is sort of starting us off by talking about
this sort of intentional work of forgetting. It's really valuable.
I think that's something that's really important to remember, is that people
in this region have had have developed over centuries
really robust strategies for living within this fluid
landscape. Right. And so for those of you who aren't familiar with the Delta,
as you know, my co-pilot sort of alluded to the
Bengal Delta is the youngest and most active river delta in the
entire world. And so it's constantly shifting and that means that the rivers are shifting and also that the landscape
itself is shifting. And the communities that have lived here
since it was settled, which started in the precolonial period.
They have developed strategies for living with this. And starting
in the colonial colonial period, new development interventions have attempted to
fix the landscape in ways that have been at odds with these sort of local strategies
for living in this of landscape. And so some of the ways that they've
done that, for example, there are indigenous
rice varieties that people have cultivated that are
naturally adaptable to salt because the land floods with salt regularly,
like we've seen, like we sign off on some of these rice strands also grow rapidly
with floodwaters, which means that, you know, when the land floods,
it doesn't matter that a rice paddy gets flooded because the rice can just shoot wrap
with the floodwaters. These, you know, traits
for living with the floods have been sort of selected out as
new hybrid varieties have been introduced. And ironically,
now there are sort of scientific efforts to develop climate adapted rice
strains which mimic exactly these traits that indigenous
rice varieties had already sort of had embedded in them and
sort of contra. This sort of scientific practise, some communities on both sides of the border
have said, you know, we're just going to try to resuscitate these varieties that we already
could use, which we can grow from season to season your year like.
And then another another strategy that has historically been really important
for living in this fluid landscape is
a management of embankments that are not cement. Right. So
I'm not going to get into a lot of the specifics of the differences on either side of the
landscape. But Bangladeshis in a really different position from where the shoulder bonds is right now
in India, because is this massive system of concrete embankments
was built in starting the 1960s in Bangladesh. And so
the negative effects that are friends have been
talking about of these concrete embankments in India. Those negative effects started
to be seen in Bangladesh in the 1960s. And today we see that
sort of 50 years on a really sort of extreme form of of what happens when
you build these kind of embankments, which isn't just the kinds of vulnerabilities that we've heard about,
but it's also that the landscape has the toe
because the landscape is so dynamic. As I said earlier, when you
build concrete embankments like this, it cuts off the estuary. And that means
that the land can no longer continue to be built up. And the result of that
is that the land is literally sinking. So sometimes that's called sea level rise, but it's different
from the drivers of sea level rise because of climate change, because literally the land
is falling down because of embankments that have been built. And that has
just a tremendous amount of negative effects before these embankments were built.
At least on the Bangladesh side and presumably also in the sugar bonds,
local communities had a system that they call Ozio Musher Bodh, which is like eight month
embankments. And that means that they have embankments
that are not concrete. They're made of mud. But
during the monsoon, they let them sort of dissipate and the land is
built back up with the silt. And that means that they sort of can't they
they can protect the land while they're growing rice. But they also can counteract this problem
with subsidence. And the upstream offshore bodh system was intense when the
Polders were built in in Bangladesh. So it's been a lot more difficult
for local communities to sort of redevelop new strategies for managing these embankments
themselves. When you build the concrete embankments, only people who have the technology to build the concrete
can manage that embankments. OK. So now I going to tell you about this community that I that
I mentioned before. So
Poller 22 is so sorry. As I mentioned, this system of embankments, it was built across the
across the coastal zone. And now all of these islands that are surrounded by these concrete embankments
are called by their names within this system. So there's like pulled or one pulled or two pulled or
three and pull there. Twenty two is one very unique
island in the coastal zone of Bangladesh because whereas
in the last 40 years or so.
In particular through structural adjustment programmes, many of these islands have transitioned away
from traditional rice agriculture toward shrimp aquaculture. Holder 20 to has always
resisted the this transition to shrimp aquaculture.
Shrimp aquaculture is ecologically
devastating for the region. It also requires much less
labour than rice farming requires, which means that we see these massive migrations
out of the coastal zone because it doesn't sustain the kind of agrarian political economy
that agriculture sustains. And so
in Polder, twenty two, they had a they've always had a social movement that has resisted this
transition and that means that they have continued to farm rice in a landscape
that was surrounded by other islands where they have
transitioned to shrimp. And the thing about the shrimp is that it.
It requires sailing water and it it's necessary to bring that sailing
water into the into the islands to be contained. Which weakens the embankments.
And so in order to support ongoing
grain production there, 22, in addition to mobilising
against often quite violent encroachment by land grabbers
for shrimp, the people in Polders wanted to have organised for
decades to continue farming rice and also to protect
the embankments around the islands themselves. So there are cement
and holders. Then on the outside of that, they've built an additional ring of what
they call the very bad. And that is essentially embankments that are built
up by hand, much like this sort of historical ocean much or bad system. And
those embankments have protected the islands. And they
were allowed to do that because of. Because they had advocated
in the 1970s and 80s to the government to essentially allow landless people
to have access to the land in between the the rings
of embankments and to farm that collectively themselves. And this is
this is in part due to this
unique and I think really important provision in the Bangladeshi constitution,
which allows for the distribution of common lands to lands people. It hasn't always
been implemented effectively. But it is
it is there as a piece of leverage for social movements like the one that I'm talking about.
And so these Lambis people farmed this land collectively and they maintained
this system of embankments themselves. And so after cyclones
SIDOR and Iola in 2007 and 2009, when all of the rest of the islands
around Polder 22 were devastated by the embankments being broken
and causing this massive flooding, the embankments
in Polder, twenty two were fine. And
people say that during those cyclones, the rice laid down for
a couple of weeks and then it came back up and they did not experience
the same flooding. And they were incredibly resilient to the impacts
that that we saw. And all these other polders and in fact, people from
all over the region came to pull their twenty two to seek refuge at this time, even though
they're trying to, unlike other islands in the area, does not have a second shelter
a few years ago, like 2015.
This massive Dutch climate change adaptation
programme started developing plans for several polders in the region
that were aimed at creating new markets
for cash crops in this coastal region. And they
targeted Polder 22 as one of their sort of primary sites
for new adaptation interventions. And as part of this sort
of development of new cash crops, this Dutch programme, which is called blue gold.
They took control of the land between the colder
and the very bad. And they said
that the groups that we're going to manage this land would be essentially
a mixed class groups. They said, well, what that meant is that a lot of the people who
are included in these sort of newly constituted collectives
were. People who did not reside and pulled out twenty two, so they were sort of
absentee landlords, and that meant that not
only the system of farming this land collectively broke down, but also the system
of maintaining the embankments itself broke down
and months before unfun. These local
social movement groups that had been working this land for four decades
said the embankments are breaking down. Please, you need to fix them. And
they did not. So during unfun
embankments deteriorated. Of course they broke. And
the entire island was flooded. And they lost all of their winter crops.
Watermelon is like a very lucrative winter crops. It's
sailing tolerant. And it was devastating. It was devastating the way that
it hadn't been hit, that it had been resilience
to these previous cyclones. And so in the aftermath of that,
people said, we need the government to rebuild this embankment. It had deteriorated to an extent
that it was not possible for people to rebuild
it by hand. The way that there are accustomed to this means
the government says that they will rebuild the embankments and
the blue gold. This climate change adaptation programme somewhat fortuitously ended
in June 2020. And so now there is a hope that that these
groups will be able to regain control of the land and be able to maintain
it themselves. The boat, I think, is important about
this particular story about Polder 22 is that
it illustrates both the sort of failure of these
climate. Imagine areas that we are. You know, that my my
co panellists have drawn out in really important ways. But it also illustrates the
potential of these alternative kinds of imagined
areas of continue to grow and production chairman and sort
of collective management of the landscape that I think are absolutely
critical to imagining more resilient future in the face of climate change and future cyclones.
So, yeah, that's why I have to say I'm so looking forward to questions and discussion.
Great. Thank you so much to all of you. There were like five incredible talks.
And it was it was really fantastic to see you all converse with each other without actually having that conversation,
but also to see some of the divergences and thought what I'm going to do is I'm not going to sort of
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
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.
So you can either write in the Q&A box on the side or if you'd like to speak, if you could raise
your hand, then I'll you know, I can just randomly pick some people to
speak. I can see from a list of attendees that there are many people who actually work on climate
change and Anthropocene actually even on cyclones would be wonderful if and if you'd like to
sort of add your thoughts to do this. So just pretty quickly, I think what I found really interesting
was how almost all of you actually did touch on
different cyclones. So, you know, of course we would. I'm fine. But it was we there was a sort of comparative approach to
cyclones where the smaller big waste in the Chinese case going back more than one hundred years back, etc.
and sort of it was really interesting for me as someone who doesn't know that much about cyclones, to see
this little comparative approach you had. I think there was a lot of emphasis on the question of forgetting
and remembering, as well as on the idea of imagination. So whether these are progressive,
imaginative in the way that, gosh, I just explained or in the failure of imagination that Amatol Cautious
talked about, but also some of you also touched upon that. I really enjoyed the way,
you know, during these things like resilience or preparedness or, you know,
climate change adaptation techniques. The temporality is does a lot of that that we see in sort of the developing
world as well as in the media. But I really loved the way you all nuanced what this might mean.
Like what might it mean to think about climate disasters or climate preparedness very
much in the particular specific context in which all of you have the sort of long term academic
experience. I also really appreciated the way in which
you got in local politics. So whether we're talking about the WAMI league of you're talking about
national level politics in India or you're just talking about the BDO level politics of that sort of micro
local level. I thought that was really important to actually have this nitty gritty daily politics
in there. Also state forms. And I was sort of thinking of the difference between India and Bangladesh. I
think McNutt did a really interesting job in terms of thinking about some of these differences here of state forms.
I also thought that the way in which the question of migration came up in inside the talks and
the sense of place on you say, is that what does place signify? What does it sort of
argue for was really important in this context. Just thinking methodologically, there
was this question of scale again. And I think you are moving between different scales in moving from talking
about a particular island or a particular pond or a particular individual to thinking about global
macro politics and on the climate crisis. And I think your opening comment
on looking to the work of Richard Gove and we need to be more drawn in thinking about global environmental histories
is really well taken. I also thought that even within those of you
were anthropologists, psychologists, geographers, there will be interesting ways in which
you present your arguments. So whether it is to see
an unjust case, the case of that one particular point and that conversation with a mate with the neighbour,
as well as your own long term ethnographic experience of working in the summer months and your own history,
or you're drawing upon seeing the Johnny ski's a longer archives or other forms of
writing on it was fascinating. How do we centre a particular wasis whose voices
are being heard the most, which are not how to be sort of, you know, if a certain voices in this?
There was also a really interesting look at infrastructures around this. So, of
course, there's thinking and methods and, you know, imaginative and politics of the climate crisis. But I
also found quite a strong in all your talks, talk about things
like a cyclone shelter, like embankments, in particular bonds
or the bureaucracy of corruption or sort of way in which the state enters into it or doesn't enter into it.
Quite fascinating. So I think this was like a superbly dense,
you know, wonderfully rich conversation. I'd really love to be your doctor each other, actually, without necessarily
thinking about in the first place. Before this session started, we were kind of worried that everyone's going to
either say exactly the same thing or they'll say exactly the opposite of one another. And I think
what's been fascinating is to see how very much you are in conversation with each other methodologically, intellectually,
even in terms of the region, but also how you accommodate with your very unique perspectives. And it's sort
of invaluable to have you all together in the same sort of space talking about it. So thank you again so
very much for this. I don't have any particular questions, but I'm gonna sort of take. So
what do people want to sort of raise their hands? I can you can you can speak it out or I can just
I can just sort of pick it up so I can see there's one hand. Yeah, I'm going to
just. Yeah. Nicole onon. Could you please please go ahead. Yeah.
Thanks, everyone, for this wonderful session and been learning a lot through it.
And like Manicka, there's a lot of conversation, I think, across the different panellists. And I wanted
to ask about embankments, both in terms of how they were raised
and the Chinese point and kind of forgetting that allows for the proliferation of embankments.
Who's crumbling is now making communities very vulnerable. But what's
enough with the terrain upon which residents live and depend on the sun
burns is now an infrastructure landscape. And so I was wondering if Magnacca
or any of the other panellists could see a little bit more about the imaginary off embankments.
For people living in the Sunderbans, how they desired or how they addressed by residents there.
Thank you. I wanted to state that.
I said, you wanna go first? Sure. So,
yeah, thank you and Acuil for that question. I think that it's a really important
and fraught one and one that I have to admit
I don't have an excellent answer to, largely
because I think that's imaginary is about what to do.
What to do about this failure of this embankment system at this point
are really lacking. And it's it's, I think, an
important cautionary lesson for the Indian side of the border because of,
you know, sort of where we're at now. In Bangladesh. But
so, you know, there seems so this Polders system is based essentially
on the Dutch model of like cutting off the estuary. And that's and
and the Dutch have been sort of in banking their
coastline, allowing it to sink and then pumping water out since
the Middle Ages. And so that's why the Netherlands is this, you know, infamously a land below
sea level. That's essentially what has happened to Bangladesh. But there is not
there are not the resources to maintain the embankments and to do this sort
of pumping out of the water that the Dutch have been doing for centuries.
So in the in the 80s, there were a couple instances
where farmers in this landscape
were seeing what the Polders were doing to actually I'll say first that
while that the polder system was being built in the initial plans of these Dutch
engineers, they were saying, we're seeing people protesting
the building of these embankments, going to keep building
them. And so it's not that. It's like 40 years later, people started
to understands the problems, like the farmers, their imagined
the problems with these polders immediately as they were just starting to build. But in the
80s, it was getting really bad. There was a lot of water logging.
And in some communities, one one community in particular.
This massive group of farmers came together and they've cut down
the embankment to let water in to flood their land because they
knew that it would bring silt and to sort of rebuild the land
and prevent these problems that they were seeing. And it was this
this sort of build a cottier movement to cut the embankment
was led actually by the local Communist Party.
And there were armed guards who came to the police that came
in to fire on them. And one like sort of legendary
white engineer was working for a Dutch firm, told me that she showed up and stopped
them from firing on these farmers, which could have been an even worse story
than it ended up being. So this so this, like new strategy of
cutting the embankments to build the land back up came to be known as Title River
Management and titled River Management. Is
this sort of like. Legendary folk technology.
But a lot of people talk about in in Bangladesh, these sort of
hydrology water engineering circles. And it seems
to have so. So a few times development agencies have decided, oh, we're going to we're gonna try
this Title River management thing. We're going to see if it can work in other places to fix these problems
with the Polders. But it's whenever they've done that, they haven't attended
to the sort of social relations that made that a really distinct
kind of intervention. And those strategies have failed. And
in any other kinds of situations, where are new
opportunities have been made available to experiment with engineering technologies
to to rethink the problems
with these embankments. There has not been space made for thinking about
local expertise grounded in the in the quite specific conditions
of Bangladesh's delta ecology.
And so, you know, for a few years ago, the World Bank commissioned this massive nine nine
two dollar project to rethink the pull their system. And
the terms of reference for this project specifically said we will not take
proposals for this project from any domestic firms. And so
I think I think that while there are, you know, as I said, some imagined areas of
how. These investments might be resisted.
There has not been investments in new
ways of thinking about engineering alternatives, given that
now the landscape has sunk and embankments have
put these communities in. And that's really sort of dire situation.
And I quickly signing the word, oh, sorry, just very quickly, I,
I just wanted to say it in response. Nichols'
question is that I think the imaginary has changed and I don't think it's one imagined or even
within a particular Sunderbans island. So I remember when these sort of modern
embankments were being built first. It was very different from people who lived on the river's edge and who lived
in the sort of centre of the island. But the other thing is that that imaginary was at the time, very
much of this is progress. This is modernity. The bigger the wall, the more concrete
the wall, the safer will be. Now, they've all cracked in the past month, actually,
after unfun people, friends in the Sunderbans are very much saying
this is no good because the entire river bed has come down. There's mudslides. So I think
the imaginary has also shifted within this from the bands for people who live alongside these embankments.
And I just I remember very clearly that even not as a sort of non designer
engineer expert architecturally, I mean, to build these embankments, you had to basically
uproot all of the mangrove trees on the river's edge. And that was just,
you know, it doesn't take rocket science to know that these mangrove roots are holding the soil together. So it was
clearly quite destructive in just making the riverbed much weaker.
And people pointed that out at the time. Even so, I think in some ways
the imaginary has changed. And I guess to the drawing on some of the Gianni's all the work. It
is also ordered imaginary has changed, which is that these are places that the
accretion of soil, the erosion and accretion of soil and the cetacean patterns are where
if so, if soil is being sort of lost somewhere, it is being regained elsewhere.
So it needn't be an imaginary of just creating land formation in one
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
to the kind of all the ways in which perhaps there was movement in this shifting
delta, which now we need, you know, fixed taxation and property. So we need also
sort of embankments and that in that imaginary.
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
I met all these people in the archive in 1856 who were writing back. These are engineers
sent to like, say, a good point about engineers. After all, my dad is one. But there
was, I think, took I'll go dancing. We actually are working with reverse and reverse
engineering. But what I meet here are Knoller's and their dreams and spill channels.
And there was a beautiful letter, one Ingenico, William Sage wrote and said, Indian Rivers
cannot you cannot imagine margins on Indian River or a Bengali river.
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
completely erased. And there was a knowledge sedimented in that. And the other thing to talk about,
the good flooding and the bad bad flooding some of you have been raising. One of the things pharmacy
is during a war, Scheid, Yumi Jolla, Junto, which means during monsoon,
my rice fields are teeming with life by life. They mean fish.
And that is many things. There are many ways of understanding what this is. It is not a critique. And
this is what when we pay attention to language, we see the sedimentation
of knowledge that is also getting forgotten. So anyways. Stick.
Thank you, guys. I'm going to take two more questions when we get Yvonne and then McCallan Dola.
And then if it could just be quite quick and our response, because I see it already over time. But
cameleer, would you like to go next, please?
Can you hear me? Yes, we can hear you. Thank you so much. These were amazing reflections.
There's so much to say. What I'm wondering is your thoughts about
the embankments for West Bengal. Because my own research is in southwest coastal
Bangladesh, close to across the end Jason's work. And I found
that most the embankment broke where there was much tiger prawn Baghdad cultivation,
where there are many pipes and illegal cuts in the embankments and our back office and
others there. Paper also show that it pulled the 32 it was where they were most tiger prawn cuts
that the embankment broke. And actually that then because of the long time for repair
during this time, the silt managed to raise the land levels
again. So my main question then is
what kind of solution can provide protection from sideline dry season tides
and cyclones to help agriculture in this area? Because in the south west
coastal zone of Bangladesh, agriculture is possible. If the embankment is intact and this
Louis Gates are closed for what is the situation in the West Bengal Sundarbans
Forest Islands? And is there any way of also dealing with siltation
similar to Tidal River management being done in West Bengal? Thank you.
We'd would like to take that.
Jenny may have.
Yeah. Thank you. Camillia. And I'm looking forward to your book, Chameleon's written an amazing
book on on the whole embankment
in Bangladesh. So I'm looking forward to that.
You know, unfortunately, I don't know enough. I know.
I was just talking to somebody today from the island of 20 who told me
that in in a tree four years ago, a lot of
the mangrove forest to us was chopped down in a place called, I don't know, above
in Forest Guard. And that that had been the worst affected place
in that in that region. And the mangrove had been chopped down to
make to to make fisheries. So,
you know, what you what you observe in in in Bangladesh could
could be the same. But Bangladesh has had fisheries a lot earlier than West Bengal.
And the fisheries in West Bengal have been,
you know, there are two types, but one of them has been more towards the interior. When you travel
from Calcutta to a to towards speciality,
you see fisheries on both sides. And this is basically
land that is in sight and that isn't affected as much.
But the first person to start the fisheries in West Bengal was Jonathan WashU,
Jyoti Watson's son, and Jody West, who was the chief minister of West Bengal.
For. For how many years? Thirty four years. The left front government.
And he was for most of it. So anyway, his son was the one who started the big fisheries
around the canning area. As to whether embankments
are more prone to breaking when there are fisheries. I am not
sure I know that people convert their land to fisheries. A lot of the time when the embankment
has already broken and and the land has been submerged with saline
water, brackish water, at that point, people then transform
that that that plot of land into a fishery. Of course, that creates a lot of
problem with those who have land more inside the fort inside the the
island because they don't want the saltwater to sort of have
an adverse effect on their own land. So so that's how it goes. But
so I know that usually it's when you've lost your land that you converted into a fishery. To what
extent is it that those. I don't know. So maybe not. And
Jenny could perhaps answer that. And thanks, cameleer. Looking forward to your book.
I just really want to briefly say that I think my only as I said and when
instead of the comments, which is that I think a Milan conversation with you also and both of us agree on this,
is that the bingo that I saw diverse, that actually it really does matter. Based
on the very specific D of what that experience in the Bangladesh side is
and how in the Indian side. I mean, there are several factors here. It's not
just in terms of the siltation, but also the monsoons and also
livelihoods like the bar. The cultivation in the West Bengal side is from on Zwack, as
you know, it's quite different from the way the Jews are. Jason and Garcia describe it.
And you describe it in your own walks. I think my only sort of response to that is that it's so
deeply diverse. So I don't think there's any one homogenous thing that's happening on the Indian
side that is, you know, the same in every context.
But you are deep down, you do you want to come in and. I think we'll pass it up for questions,
I think. Yeah. I don't have anything new to add to what you guys said. Yeah. The active don't just
do you don't do the drugs. Nuclear strike. I. So in somebody that is good.
There is there is so much debate. So it's very funny. When they first sort see
the idea that the Delta moves are the river's move became being written about in
the Royal Geographical Society and Bengali Geographical Society around the late 19th
century, the fact we didn't have an ocean off the child's life, who actually
is the father of geology and talks about evolution and talks about this active Delta Delta, I
love what it felt like. Ecology is is Leviton in 1833. That's when it becomes
popular knowledge. But still thinking through Catastrophist SSM and unitary Unitarian forms
of thinking that there was other kinds of local knowledge. Because, you know, there is one word for Yarosh. Adoption
is one word in English. And as al-Hadi got those work has shown and see Jugg boards
work has shown that a seven ways of seeing pangbourne in Bangla, which basically indexes
that you cannot translate these two words. So there is. And then there's another interesting
thing is that there was a for a long time through the 19th century, people thought this
is a dying delta. They wouldn't say active or so there. What? Well, we have
now much under the thumb mature your Delta active delta. But the idea was Calcutta
wasn't a dying delta in the north. The voice started dying. And it's very interesting, I think I know you were
talking about the death of a book called The Death of a Born. I've heard it's very interesting how we think
in terms of death of water and something to think. But that was later revised as an
active Delta water dynamic delta. But one thing we have to understand is what we've really realised
in the post-Katrina moment from the more research that's gone into this kind of delta species
is Delta formation has been moving and always moving.
The movement didn't happen before. And I think and there is a lot of research in sea
like silt bed rising and like that what we call a flood. And you've probably worked
on it a lot, silt beds rising and land formation. So when we lose land, new land is being formed
somewhere. And we see that for New Orleans. And I suffer niya like that. Delta is actually expanding
as New Orleans is sinking. You'll see the same thing happening in the Sunderman side. So
I think it's it's only obligated debates. When I remember one of my review was basically
said, I cannot all this at Delta, I have to call this an estuary. We did what was also an interesting
way to think. And then finally, I want to see one more point. There is a legend that talks
about oceanic formation of our Delta and other river information. And the idea is when the ocean
charts this new land or Gilkey laughs what was often called this Sunderman area was formed.
Some oceanographers are also claiming this oceanic formation, which we often forget. It's not
just the combined river system forming land, but there is also oceanic formation
of land happening and this very new. It's only in the last 10 years this kind of oceanographic geology
fault. Well, that's coming. So there's a lot of debates about exactly
the point question you are pointing to Camelia. It is everyone
happy to just take a last question. I know everyone must be exhausted, be well over time now, but I think a gallon.
Would you be happy to ask your question?
Yes, hello, can you hear me? Yes. OK. I was having some connexion. So
my question really just emerged out of this discussion of embankments. But it's a little bit
broader. And I'm just struck by the contrast between some of the local political struggles
that Jason mentioned in Bangladesh, in which I've also seen around embankments by I work in
the West Bank or some their guns. And on the one hand and then the well-founded critiques
of concrete embankments that many of the panellists have offered. And so with this multiplicity
of different voices and actors in the region, I'm thinking about the role of social scientists and humanities scholars
and weighing in on these public debates, and particularly at moments of crisis, how
scholars are often approached for for solutions. But then I'm also reminded
of this kind of distinction that Tanyalee draws between critics and programmers. And I'd be interested
to hear how the panellists think of these roles and whether they need to be distinct and given
the fraught histories of research, informed development work in both West Bengal and Bangladesh.
How can scholars today work to avoid these kind of pitfalls?
Thank you so much, Colin. I'm just because there's the last question maybe to take, would everybody in the band
like to just sort of respond to this wider question of the climate crisis? And that could be me.
And, you know, how do we respond to some big floods of the kind of work that we do?
Would that be OK? Are any other thoughts you might have on just matter? I think it's a good question
for Jason, actually. So maybe he can respond specifically to her and try to wrap up.
That's right. Should we begin with you? Would you be happy to respond? And then also just off any
way to thoughts you might have? Sure. I mean, it's a tricky question. I think,
you know, that it presumes that there is sort of a single task for social science to
accomplish here, which, you know, I'm guessing none of us really think is true.
My own take on this is that I
I think what's important is not to pretend expertise beyond
sort of what what I can offer, what I know here, but rather
to see my own job as sort of trying to foreground some of the complexity of the various different
kinds of narratives and imaginations that are emerging, which, of course, doesn't mean I don't have my own opinions. But
in terms of sort of a kind of a more normative relationship to the sorts of things that are unfolding, I think
my answer to that has always been to try and think with
organisations that don't necessarily fall into a neat distinction between the critic and programmer and
to engage more actively with community groups
and collectives and organisations that are supporting different kinds of initiatives of development
of caution. I have worked with an organisation called Nedra Quarry in Bangladesh. I'm quite
a bit. And I think that they're an excellent organisation to sort of hold up in this fight and that they're
primarily focussed on addressing questions of empowerment and
enabling people to actualise the rights they already have, as opposed to
as opposed to being a resource providing organisation. So I think
I think that the role of social scientists in relation to the climate crisis is to listen to that kind of multiplicity
of voices and to think with more progressive organisations that are working
more directly with people and dealing with some of the kinds of complexity that Magna's pointed us towards
thinking critically about and doing our best to make sure that those voices are
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
to the question.
We'd like to go next. I know. Would you like to follow on in terms of
just the broader question that Saddam was asking? It's a complicated question.
You know, killing I, I it's interesting because you're
right to point out that many local people, politicians believe
that concrete embankments are the solution. And in some places, they've worked and
made life a lot easier. Because usually they surface roads and people can travel around
along that. And actually in Bangladesh also, I was surprised to see how sturdy
the embankments were and how many of them were there. I'm back to the west Bengali ones, which were mostly
mud ones, which were dissolving in in in the monsoon time,
tried to walk on an embankment today in the rain. It's just a nightmare.
And it's so so I can understand that it makes sense to have a proper brick
and concrete embankment along which you can drive your your motorbike and
your cycle and walk without slipping and breaking your leg. So
on the one hand, yes. But on the other hand, it all depends on where you built it.
And again, you know, sort of to what extent are engineers really
trained to think of where go for the. I'm sure this can be sort
of I don't know, but perhaps understood. Where will the river break
next? Usually when you talk to people in a village, they kind of know where the river
is going to break and where the river is depositing silt. So it's not as
if these islands are just breaking up. They are also on certain
places. They are also getting you and landslides added to them. So they are also growing
in some places. And this is why it is these islands really like I mean, Tabaco writes about I
are shifting. They move. So to what extent would it not be possible to have
some brick and concrete embankments in places where we know that
it's it's remained stable in the last few years? We don't think it's going to break there.
And we can build something there. And to what extent? You know, so basically
remaining open about this. But a lot of the time, it has to do with who the local politician has,
what his contacts are with Calcutta. Whether he wants to be re-elected and is going
to do something about this or whether, you know, he doesn't really care.
Previously as Armytage move, I wrote about in his book, you had the
a lot of the Oddy buses where the ones under the British, for example, and even to this day are the ones
to cheque the the mud embankments because they cheque to see
if the embankment has been eaten up by Crap's and if it's full of faults. Right.
And whether it meets it needs to be repaired. But everything is linked in West Bengal
to so much politics and too so much. You know, recently I was I was looking at this
all these I really feel that demographers that are there
all around now with smartphones, I have this lovely young friend who sent me
a list of things he made on how the engineers scan
this, the embankment. The local people told them it was too low. And then you see
how when the river comes, it just it just overflows the whole thing. And basically
the whole thing is it's lost. And I said, why didn't you guys tell them
this? I know. But they didn't listen. And they ran away before before high tide. So there was no
way. And who's going to repair this? Who's going to talk to, you know, who was going to
take the responsibility for this? And again, I think it's for me, in the end,
it boils down to cost, cost and cost and kind of related rips off
of negotiation where really it matters where you
live and what you know and what cost background you come from.
Unfortunately, thanks. I can go next
hour. Thank you so much, Chameleon. I'm looking forward to also not complicated and I'm also looking
forward to excellent work. So then I look, we can say something like I also find this
distinction between the critique and the programme are actually unhelpful to think
with. And I think what both unlearnt Jason's been pointing to is the far
to understand that imagine and respond. We need to have a critical kind of our understanding of
the situation as a very complex situation. It's fast, it's politics. And something that came up
during the discussion might be useful. Way to think is what we realised is when people
when people are leaving this window. And I think and we were talking about that and people are moving out of it.
The question is, what's creating? What's forcing them to move out? Is it always the rising seas
and which will require a concrete amendment or is it the local politics? And unless we have a
critical approach to that, if it is local politics, if it's the impossibility of being
able to achieve social mobility in in this one day, one without having political
context precisely where you are located within the class hierarchy, then maybe the problem is not a problem
of simply embankment, then build back better. But it's a different problem. So one of the things
that you know, that I am reading a lot about the planned retreat and managed retreat, that everything then seems to love
at the moment. And I'm asking. We have all the vulnerable population, but we've never asked what is the vulnerability.
So to really end on one last point I want to talk about is this what flag is?
You know, when we talk in terms of climate emergency, we always have a knee jerk solution.
We because emergency requires quick fixes. And that's why I think and if
we request programers and not critics, in some ways, one might even say imagination
to even imagine a solution would be would be to think in terms of a
critic. You think with critique, I think, and come up with solutions, with critique. And I don't think that as
one can be done without the other. Thank you so much, everybody.
Thank you. Camilla and Caitlin, for your questions. And yes,
it's a really great question to think about our role as social scientists. And I think
in this moment, not just with unfund, but in this kind of of
several kinds of crises. I think I've definitely thought about
what are the different things one can do in terms of using and thank you in any cover bringing
us together in terms of don't think about our insights as
long term ethnographers in debates elsewhere. And
I've been, you know, in touch with and working with, of course, friends in the Sunderbans, but also, as
our said now everybody's on Facebook. They have their smartphones. They have WhatsApp. They didn't use
to. I did when I was in the field, even though recently. And so it's really exciting, actually, because maybe
we can all translate the work that we're doing into one line that can be more dialogues and,
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
of my officials, union friends and my rights activist friends. And there are all kinds of problems
with this kind of Lochlyn. It doesn't look good kind of on people who become big men in the Sunderbans
and represent the entire Sunderbans. But it's the same kinds of problems as sort of bolie
academics as we kind of present a part of the world. And so I think
one of the things I've sort of tried to do when I'm fine happened is reach out to the rest
of you and several people on this panel and and say, let's write something together
in the public domain. And so, you know, Dave Darney and I actually just today have written
something in the Telegraph in Callcott. And I think that to me is trying to think about sparking
debate beyond academia in, you know, wider sorts and are trying to I've just got
under Twitter and I know I'm terrible at it, but you're trying to tag different government ministries who are doing
work in reconstruction and say, here are sites. Just think again. And I think
people do have imagination. And I think if we can try and get them to think, maybe they're also
just exhausted with their work and need other people to help them think
and sort of deal with these crises. So I guess, yeah, a combination of people in the Sunderbans
having smartphones and being on Facebook do thinking with all of the
activist networks. Despite all of their problems to writing and public forums
and talking in words and languages that can be, you know,
accessible to not just a small tribe of anthropologists, but beyond is one
way of responding and social scientists.
India has put up the link to the Telegraph article about the journey and McNatt published just today
on Embankments. So it's impeccable timing from them, a very, very relevant
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.
Sure, yeah. Just really briefly, because I think that I agree with everything.
Others have said, I guess I'll respond
more to nine Eco's general question about the role of scholars
in understanding the climate crisis than this question about Craxi programmers, which
others have responded to really brilliantly. I you know, I get this
question a lot, especially from Puchi students who want to study climate crisis.
And my and I think what's really brilliant about
what nine Nikah has done for us here and in bringing all of us together and thinking
about this is that I always say, if you are starting by
trying to understand the climate crisis, instead of trying to understand the particular
place in which you want to write about it, then you've gone about it wrong. Because
climate change, the experience of climate change is always mediated by existing
histories and power dynamics. And so if you haven't centred those
histories and power dynamics in understanding that experience, then you have missed
everything that is shaping how climate change is going to be experienced. And so
for me, you know, just as as Jason described this social movement that we work with,
starting with understanding those movement members
and their struggles and their histories with those struggles
in the region was really critical for me and understanding what it means to experience
climate change and coastal Bangladesh. And I think that anyone who
wants to understand climate change as a social scientist and
especially as a blogger, should also take that approach where
you think first about what is happening in this region, what are the political economies that I need to understand
in order to figure out what's happening here, and that
if you do that, you will find that there
are people in the community where you work likely who are neither critics nor programmers
whose own visions you have an opportunity to sort of,
you know, give voice to 3D work. So that's how I
approach that in my own work. Drastic. Thank you so much to
all of you to unload the BJARNI to make nine digits into Cacio. Thank you so much for your incredible
talks. Thank you so much to all of the participants were being you know, we had 100 people in Janik.
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
and thank you for just being here. I knew this was going to be an interesting discussion, but honestly, this was
just one of the most fantastic discussions I've had yet on not just I'm fine, but the time crisis. And also
actually going back to the last question on how we as academics can respond
to this particular moment in time. So thank you so much for that. And I hope we can
all sort of meet again and some of the capacity somewhere in the world soon.
Thank you. Thanks, everyone.
Thanks, everyone. Especially now safe. Thanks, everyone.