Geoanthropology and the variations of (land) loss: Counter currents of anthropogenic erosion in the Bengal Delta

Abstract

An island named Ghoramara in the Bay of Bengal has lost 84 percent of its landmass over the last 100 years. Climate change-induced sea-level rise, however, does not explain the reason behind the extent of land lost from Ghoramara Island to the sea. What then, if not the rising waters, explains this erosion? This essay dwells on other causations. I draw on Kathryn Yusoff and Nigel Clark’s (2017) notion of the “geosocial”—that is, an invitation for the social to meet the geologic—as a means to understand this loss. I acknowledge the surprises of the earth’s strata and what cannot be controlled: shifts in the tectonic plates, the Bengal Delta’s eastward tilt that changed the course of the river, tides, and the forcefulness of sediments that make and unmake islands. At the same time, I reveal how the earth’s surface is being transformed through what Sheila Jasanoff (2015) calls “sociotechnical imaginaries.” Dams and barrages change the course of the rivers, trap sediments, and lead to downstream erosion; ports and shipping vessels that require dredging break new land formations; heavy and tall concrete embankments weigh the muddied coastlines down and often collapse with large chunks of land. Each of these mega-infrastructures (and many more) are responsible for the loss of land and act as impediments to the flourishing of humans and nonhumans on these watery lands. In a time of totalizing climate change narratives, in what is indeed an ongoing climate emergency, this essay hopes to move away from large abstractions toward regional ecological variations. Understanding the scars imposed on land and water by dams, ports, embankments and commercial shipping corridors provides the grounds upon which actors, interventions, infrastructures, and policies at regional, national, and deltaic levels can be held accountable for their direct attribution to erosion of land, lives, and life-worlds. Ultimately, pinpointing geosocial variations of land (and other) losses is one step towards reparative climate justice.