International Herald Tribune Losing Bangladesh, by degrees Tahmima Anam Sunday, March 4, 2007
DHAKA, Bangladesh: Imagine, if you will, a country marooned between a snowy mountain range and a churning sea. The country is small, a thumbprint on a vast continent. It holds the youngest and largest delta in the world. This means the landscape is fickle, the rivers often shifting and swallowing giant swaths of land. It is cleaved by two of the world's mightiest rivers, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra. They perform vanishing acts and conjuring tricks. One day your house is dry and the chilis are airing in the courtyard. The next it has disappeared altogether. You do not want to rebuild so close to the river, but you do: There is no space; the country is full. For whatever else it strains to hold, it is the crush of humanity that makes Bangladesh what it is: a calamitous country, a country so full of people that every slight shift in circumstance has dire consequences. The weather does not have to be extreme. It has only to be intemperate, and the country does the rest. How does such a small place hold so much? You worry that it will burst. But your worry is misplaced. You should worry that it will sink. For as the sea level rises, its waters will flow upward like fingers into a glove, turning the sweet river water into salt. The salt will destroy the crops and kill the fish and raze the forests. At the same time, the Himalayan peaks will melt, and they, too, will flow into the country. The rising sea and the melting mountains will meet on this tiny patch of the world, and the people who strain at its seams will drown with it, or be blown away to distant shores, casualties and refugees by the millions. Here in the capital, winter is a festive season. The cool weather allows women to wear their heaviest saris and wrap thick twists of gold around their necks. There is little rain, the ground is solid — good for high heels. Buildings across the city are draped with strings of lights. You can buy hot, crunchy jilapis by the roadside; the markets are full of winter vegetables. One day this winter, I landed at Dhaka airport just before dawn. The fog that had delayed my flight clung to the ground and looked like snow; as it lifted, a milky haze took its place. On the way home I saw groups of men huddled over coal fires by the side of the road. They wore puffy jackets and acrylic sweaters, castoffs from the sweatshops that dot the highways between the airport and the city. When they blew on their hands, I saw clouds whistling out of their mouths. Their heads were wrapped in shawls and towels and mosquito nets. The sun did not make an appearance until noon that day, and even then it was only a heatless, watery orb. In the evening I went to the other side of town, where my uncles live by the long, pencil-shaped Dhanmondi Lake. I watched from the window as the lake appeared to go still, as though deciding whether it was cold enough to freeze over, and there were tiny dots of fish moving toward the shore, not swimming but belly up, drowned. According to the United Nations, the temperatures this winter in some parts of Bangladesh were the coldest in 38 years. The last time it was this cold, Bangladesh was called East Pakistan. Looked at another way, however, the mean temperature was only 2 degrees below the average for January. Yet in a country so precariously balanced, 2 degrees meant the difference between life and death. In the districts of Rajshahi, Nilphamari, Srimangal and Gaibandha, people died of the cold because they had no protection against the weather, no walls between them and the elements — not a long sleeve or a sock. Only 2 degrees, but instead of enjoying their jilapis and weddings and cauliflower, 134 people died. A mere 2-degree rise in the global climate will cause large tracts of the delta to disappear, and 2 degrees after that, the rivers will be wider than the plains, and 2 degrees after that, the water will have swallowed Bangladesh. Two degrees either way for this country is not 2 degrees: it is catastrophe itself, borne on the waves of our warming world. -- Jim Devine / "The truth is more important than the facts." -- Frank Lloyd Wright
