Anisur Rahman is the mayor of a village that is literally disappearing beneath his feet. He knows how this is happening but not why. His village, Antarpara, used to straddle one of the great rivers of Asia, the Brahmaputra. Like the Ganges, the Brahmaputra originates as snow melt in the Himalayas before pouring down through the low plain that is Bangladesh to the Indian Ocean. Centuries of practice have taught people how to cope with the annual flooding of the Brahmaputra. They even welcome it, despite the foot or more of water it sometimes leaves in their huts, because without it their lands would be less fertile.
But things are different now. "This river comes from India," says the mayor as we look out at the muddy water. "For some reason, the water in India is increasing, so the floods here are bigger. The floods are sweeping away our houses, even the land beneath them. There were 239 families in this village before. Now we are thirty-eight families." Clustered around us are dozens of villagers, mainly women in cheap, bright saris--lime green, sky blue, scarlet--with children clinging to their necks. "I have had to move my house seven times in the last twenty-eight years," says Charna, a mother of two. "I used to live over there," she says, pointing toward the middle of the river, "but floods washed the land away and I had to move here." But there is little room here either. Bangladesh is the most densely populated country in the world; its 150 million people--half the size of the US population--are crammed into an area about as large as Iowa. "We don't even have land for a graveyard," Charna laments. Rest of article at: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070507/hertsgaard
