View: Lockdown and covid woes, then add cyclonic destruction

At some point the questions give way to explanations that involve the gods, or fate, or happenstance, or coincidence, or chaos. Answers become elusive, and we begin to think instead of the fragility of life; of its chance-bound ephemeral nature.

By Durba Chattaraj

Some places have a deeper acquaintance with cataclysm than others -- the Easter Islands, Ephesus, Pompeii. We know not exactly why.

We might know that an earthquake in 262 AD, after a series of other disasters, destroyed Ephesus in modern Turkey to such an extent that people lost faith in their resplendent patron goddess, Artemis. We might know that a volcanic eruption decimated the then-thriving city of Pompeii in today's Italy, preserving much of the city in a death tableaux of calcified ash. But why that city? Why that moment? Why those people? Why not others?

At some point the questions give way to explanations that involve the gods, or fate, or happenstance, or coincidence, or chaos. Answers become elusive, and we begin to think instead of the fragility of life; of its chance-bound ephemeral nature.

Bengal is such a place, an area that has seen far more than its fair share of catastrophe. A few of these include the Great Famine of 1770, which is estimated to have killed a third of the population; the Bengal Famine of 1943, which gave us about 3 million deaths; Cyclone Aila in 2009 which left over 400 dead, and hundreds of thousands of people homeless. And now, in the middle of a global pandemic, Cyclone Amphan, for which we do not yet have any true estimate of damage. To add devastation to injury, Amphan visited the same regions as Aila, leaving in the Sundarbans in south-eastern West Bengal and southern Bangladesh, a palimpsest of destruction as few places in the world have seen.

These are just some of the greatest hits that Bengal has faced, in an unrelenting parade of smaller ones. Suffering is palpable in memory. A beloved and haunting lullaby in these lands recalls an empty granary, a raid, and a fear of hunger. Yet, after each of these destructions, somehow these lands have resurrected themselves — a phoenix arisen from the waters. And they will do so yet again.

What is striking about Bengal’s particular brand of cataclysms, though, is the strong hand that man has played in many of them. For 1770, as Amartya Sen and others have shown us, we can look to the British. For 1943 — as the case is made in Madhusree Mukherjee’s exacting, cogent Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India During World War II — we should look specifically to Winston Churchill and his war regime.

And for Aila and Amphan, we should look to ourselves.

Much scientific research has linked cyclonic frequency and intensity to rising Sea Surface Temperatures (SST). The rise in SST is itself occasioned by climate change. Climate change, as we know, those of us who believe in it, is caused for the most part by human activity — the cycle of accelerated extraction, production, and consumption that most of us participate in. Global CO2 missions caused by humans have increased by over 400% since 1950. We are already witnessing the effects of these increases, some of us more than others, and some places more than others.

When it comes to contributions towards climate change, not all humans are created equal. For a long time now many scholars have been pointing to the role that consumption plays in in the process. The more we consume, the greater our contribution. As environmental journalist Fred Pearce wrote in the essay, 'Consumption Dwarfs Population as Main Environmental Threat' in Yale Environment 360 in 2009, 'The Princeton Environment Institute, calculates that the world's richest half-billion people — that's about 7 percent of the global population — are responsible for 50 percent of the world's carbon dioxide emissions. Meanwhile the poorest 50 percent are responsible for just 7 percent of emissions.' The more affluent our lifestyles, the more we are responsible.

When it comes to experiences of climate change, yet again, not all humans are created equal. One of the great tragedies of this process is that many of the people who have begun to bear its brunt most sharply are those who have done the least to contribute towards it. This is the case for millions of people who live in the Sundarbans, that gargantuan Gangetic delta that opens its mouth out into the Bay of Bengal.

For people in this area, climate change has been an everyday reality for more than two decades, experienced through increasing loss of land, and increasingly violent cyclonic activity. And this has long been known to us. As early as 2002, Sugata Hazra, professor of oceanography, School of Oceanographic Studies, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, estimated the loss of land in the Sundarbans over a 30-year period to be close to 162.879 sq km, and predicted a sharp growth in the number of 'climate refugees' in the region.

Since then we have watched this estimate play out in heightened form, as entire islands disappear, and hundreds of thousands of homes and livelihoods are destroyed by wind and water.

It can be said then, of climate change, that it has a slightly perverse sense of justice. As it stands now, in the big picture, the more your way of life may have contributed to its burgeoning, the less you are feeling the heat (California forest fires, etc aside). But for the masses of climate refugees being created in coastal areas like the Sundarbans, the more modest and sustainable was your lifestyle, the more suffering you are likely to experience.

And your suffering is to be largely ignored by the country, and by the world. Large swathes of the Sundarbans, and many parts of West Bengal in India, have been too cut off till now as a result of Amphan’s destruction for us to receive reports of the situation there. By the time stories from these areas trickle in, the cyclone will be pushed far off international and national news cycles, in a time of pandemic, economic meltdown, migrant crises, and, at least in India, a plague of locusts.

Until we get word from more courageous journalists on the ground, and while Amphan still rings fresh in our minds, I go back to my fieldnotes, from April 18, 2007, when I interviewed a village leader on the island of Sagardwip about the people who were already being rehabilitated in his panchayat from nearby islands in the Sundarbans, including Ghoramara and Lohachara. These people had witnessed their homes slowly being submerged, till they could sustain even their modest lives no longer, and they were forced to move to the nearest larger island, Sagar.

Those rehabilitated, the village leader said, were 'not seen as outsiders at all, not a drain on resources'. They just needed a way to earn a livelihood, but the problem was, as he identified it, 'Global warming is there and Sagar is also a victim of global warming. Sagar is gradually eroding as well. Then what will happen?'

An eroding island plays host to other eroding islands. And now, after Amphan, the host island itself is in dire straits. A recent report in Down to Earth described Sagar as struggling in the aftermath of Amphan, having received 'virtually no support' from the mainland. The island remains cut off both physically and in terms of communications infrastructure. A drinking water and agricultural crisis across the Sundarbans also looms as salt water gushes into sweet water sources and arable land.

In most of the articles one reads, administrators and people in the region describe both the storm and its fallout as something never-before-seen, plunging an already uncertain place into a zone of destruction and uncertainty that seems unprecedented, unimaginable.

People who live in these areas have long been familiar with river and ocean, with water’s ebbs and flows. With cyclones as well. Life here has long involved risk, as well as courage. But now climate change pushes people's ways of life to the razor's edge. Imagine 4.5 million people walking on a tightrope, determinedly, bravely, but a tightrope that every year frays, loses threads, erodes. And then a cyclone comes.

As consumers, as participants in the system that ratchets up carbon emissions and sea surface temperatures, we have all played a role in this erosion, however infinitesimal at the individual level. As we struggle with uncertainty under lockdown ourselves, let us remember people whose heightened suffering we have contributed to. They face everything that we face with the lockdown and the pandemic. But in addition they were hit with a cataclysmic cyclone.

Let us keep Amphan in mind, and in the news, and not let this part of the world be forgotten. And let us donate, generously, to cyclone-affected areas as they arise from the waters. This isn’t charity. These are reparations.

(The writer teaches writing and anthropology, Ashoka University, Sonepat, Haryana)