My ancestral home is situated in the island of Kutubdia in Bangladesh. During visits, when I awake early in the morning, I have very vivid memories of a bamboo bush on the east side. This bush used to block the bright sunshine in the early morning, which I remember fondly. But now, it is not there. We lost the bamboo bush and almost all of our vegetation due to unpredictable and oftentimes violent weather. Now, nobody lives in the home of my childhood. My brother moved his family to the nearest town of Coxsbazar and I am living in our very crowded capital city Dhaka. When I ask my children to visit my home, they are reluctant, as they fear the turbulent sea and cyclonic weather that has brought about all of this change.
I remember bicycling all around the islands in the Bay of Bengal in the 1970s with my friends. We were raising funds to publish a magazine on the island in the huge and lovely fisherman village named Kudiartek. Recently, I saw the island from the window of an airplane. The whole of the village and its surroundings are under water. During my lifetime, it was a 65-square kilometer island, but now it is less than 25-square kilometers. It is the Kutubdia, what people refer to as one of the disappearing islands in Bangladesh.
Scientists forecast that Bangladesh will lose one-third of its land in the next 50 years, and that this could cause 30 million forced migrants. In an already densely crowded country, this would be a disaster of unknown proportions.
For my work I used to visit the district town of Coxsbazar. There are a large number of ex- Kutudian people living there now, as they had no choice but to migrate from their sinking island homes. After a 1991 cyclone, a large population from that Kudiartek village of Kutudbia had to migrate and were living in sandbars outside the Coxsbazar airport. There are around 40,000 thousand of them, and the name of the place is now "Kutubdia Para" (in bangla para means village). In fact, it is an urban slum. Now they are under threat of eviction, so naturally they feel as though they are in constant movement as they have no home. Some of their leaders used to see me and ask advice on what they should do now and about where they should go next. I avoid them as I have no solution. It is truly a tragedy without easy answers.
What I know is that I view them as climate refugees. Perhaps we are not considered refugees under the international legal definition, but we have had to migrate because of climate induced problems. And these climate problems are especially tragic for us because we are not responsible for the warming seas, the rising tide, or for anthropogenic climate change. We are not heavy emitters and yet we are forced to deal with global warming problems first. And now that the Kutubdia Para is threatened with eviction, they will again be without a home.
I rarely believe what is written in the bible. (Some of it actually makes sense)
Unless CO2 actually makes more water than that which was on earth originally- how are we all going to drown?
CO2 at the height of the Sangamon was 27% less than what it is now; the Sangamon being a time when the seashore was 112 miles inland from where I sit now. We know there is a lag time between emission and effect. We are committed to at least 120-150 miles of inland sea migration all the way from Texas to Massachusetts. Wash DC will have to relocate to the original capitol in Philadelphia at some point.
The horse is out of the barn. We live in very interesting times.
I'm a climate refugee tonight too: it got cold again here in the Ozarks.
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Any more, we get very little information and lots of pretty pictures painted for us of how these are natural occurrences along with the accompanying denials that these sort of changes in global climate, water levels and land mass is a normal occurrence that warrants no concern.
Thank for your concise and to the point accounting of what it's like to experience the very real and frightening current situation on Mother Earth.
To the author, I am sorry for your loss.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/06/20/fortress_india
When and if she goes, it won't be a little rumbling, a little shaking and then press resume on life as usual.
I imagine the number of believers that the world actually could end will rise exponentially.
This disaster in waiting is a consequence of that overpopulation not global warming. Bangladesh has a history of corruption and a related culture of aid dependency.
And regardless of the massive overpopulation, any country that can expect to lose up to 30% of its land area is going to face massive hardships. Yes, that IS a consequence of global warming. The extent of which in Bangladesh is only exacerbated by the enormous number of people who will be afflicted.
If you're implying this is a matter of Bangladeshis only bringing these problems upon themselves and that they have no grounds to complain, then this article isn't about that. This is about trying to curb global warming.
The population of Bangladesh has increased by one hundred million since 1951.
This is the cause of the occupation of marginal land. And it is going to get much worse long before sea levels rise two feet.
There's a famous 'green' author named William McDonough who wrote Cradle to Cradle and he has this phrase, a slogan if you will, to describe how products should be made. The phrase he uses is 'Waste Equals Food' and with that phrase he's saying that a correct manufacturing paradigm would be to make it so that all waste is food for something else. So all waste according to him all products and manufacturing processes should essentially be either 100% re-usable, 100% recyclable or 100% compostable. He makes an incredibly good argument and he's proven that it works many times.
But the Pro-Pollution for Profit lobby has a different paradigm, which is 'Waste Equals Profit'. Think of all of the profit made from waste, and you'll start to get the real reason why there are a lot of people here that are actually _for_ waste. The irony is that they almost always call themselves 'conservatives'. LOL!!
There are acceptable (and desirable) loss projections already estimated.
A general stepping off point for finding out more is here:
http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2012/s3419273.htm