Delta Futures : Time, Territory, and Capture on a Climate Frontier

Abstract

Delta Futures explores the competing visions of the future that are crowding into the Bengal Delta’s imperiled present and vying for control of its ecologically vulnerable terrain. In Bangladesh’s southwest, development programs that imagine the delta as a security threat unfold on the same ground as initiatives that frame the delta as a conservation zone and as projects that see its rivers and ports as engines for industrial growth. Jason Cons explores how these competing futures are being brought to life: how they are experienced, understood, and contested by those who live and work in the delta, and the entanglements they engender—between dredgers and embankments, tigers and tiger prawns, fishermen and forest bandits. These future visions produce the delta as a “climate frontier,” a zone where opportunity, expropriation, and risk in the present are increasingly framed in relation to disparate visions of the delta’s climate-affected future. “Jason Cons’s ethnography is filled with insights into the multiple and often contradictory entanglements of global warming, crime, politics, development, and projected ‘climate solutions.’ This important work presents a ground-level portrait of the region’s ongoing transformation, examining the ways in which climate change, economic uncertainty, and historical legacies are shaping its future.” — AMITAV GHOSH, author of Smoke and Ashes “Delta Futures illustrates how the Bengal Delta and its inhabitants are being ‘captured’ by particular actors and imaginations, struggling to navigate the ‘siltscape’ with ever smaller margins between climate frontier futures. A very powerful book.” — FRANZ KRAUSE, author of Thinking Like a River “In this creative and original work, Cons makes us think more closely about how climate change is remaking a place that could be considered a ‘sentinel space’ for the planetary crisis, and how people are living through it.” — NAYANIKA MATHUR, author of Crooked Cats