Enamul had lately become chief of the International Border Affairs Committee for the powerful All-Assam Students Union (AASU), which for three decades had campaigned to save ethnically distinct Assam from what it called “a silent invasion” of Bangladeshis. India, after a big push from AASU, was quietly constructing a $1.2 billion fence around Bangladesh, and Enamul spent his days driving alongside it and taking boats along it and walking it with binoculars, looking for gaps. “I ask, ‘What are the lacunas?’” he told me. “What are the plans? And what is the real picture?” When he saw infiltrators, he reported them. When he saw problems with fence construction, he reported them. Once, he walked so many days on the border’s sand and loose dirt that his left knee swelled up dramatically. “Like this,” he said, and he cradled an imaginary basketball in his hands. Another time, he heard there was a firefight between Indian and Bangladeshi border posts, so he rushed to the Indian side, borrowed a gun from a dead guard, and began shooting. Often, he bragged, he was in such remote border areas that he had to skip his lunch. He was a patriot. He was like one of the activists from America’s Minuteman Project, only he was fond of yoga.
At more than 2,100 miles, the new border fence—flanked by new roads, illuminated with floodlights, soon to be electrified—would be the longest in the world. It would be so long not because Bangladesh, with its 164 million people, is large—it’s smaller than Iowa—but because Bangladesh is surrounded: The predominantly Muslim country, which in 1947 broke off together with Pakistan from predominantly Hindu India, remains encircled by India on three sides. (Bangladesh’s only other land border, 120 miles fronting Burma, is in the process of getting its own barbed-wire fence, and its south is bounded by the ever expanding Bay of Bengal.) When Bangladeshis sneak west into the Indian state of West Bengal, where the people are ethnically and linguistically indistinguishable, they blend in. When they sneak north across a much shorter section of border with Assam, the locals notice an influx of darker-skinned people who speak a different language. This was one reason that the first and loudest calls to seal the border had come from here.
What Enamul wanted was a perfect fence, something that could keep the Bangladeshis out no matter how unlivable Bangladesh became. He had been a communications student when he first joined AASU, but like many people today he now approached social problems with the mentality of an engineer. The question was not what we could do but what we could build, and India’s razor-wire-and-steel response to migration—much blunter than Europe’s varied responses to its African migrants—seemed to me even more representative of what was beginning to happen in this third stage of climate distortion, as the world faced up to rising seas in addition to melt and drought. Walls. From here on, in one sense or another, this is what those of us who could afford them were engineering against climate change. Those who could not afford them would be stuck on the other side.
India was a poor country, but Bangladesh was poorer. India emitted more carbon than Bangladesh, and perversely this signaled that it had more resources to deal with the effects. The first Bangladeshis had not come to Assam because of global warming, and AASU had not been worried about warming in the 1980s, when it first pushed for the fence. But it was worried now. “Global warming, if it happens, what will happen?” its leader had asked me. “Will there be war? Will Assam become part of Greater Bangladesh? Most of Bangladesh will be underwater, and where will they come?”
As the fence went up, it was the job of India’s paramilitary Border Security Force (BSF) to hold the line. Nearly a thousand people have been shot dead at the border since 2000—about one every four days. In a 2010 report, Trigger Happy, Human Rights Watch detailed a pattern of extrajudicial killings and torture: boys killed while fishing too close to the fence, men shot in the back as they tried to run away, criminals armed with sticks felled by border guards armed with rifles. Indian authorities claimed the border’s lawlessness—ethnic insurgent groups, smuggling of narcotics and rice, and especially the rustling of tens of thousands of cows that lost their holy status upon leaving Hindu India—justified any violence. In one widely publicized incident, a fifteen-year-old Bangladeshi girl named Felani was shot when she tried to cross back from India, where she was living illegally, into Bangladesh, where she was about to be married. Her purple shalwar kameez caught on the barbed wire, and for five hours her dead body hung upside down. “We fire at criminals who violate the border norms,” the BSF’s director general said during an official visit to Bangladesh. “The deaths have occurred in Indian territory and mostly during night, so how can they be innocent? We have made it clear that we have objection to the word ‘killing,’ as it suggests that we are intentionally killing people.”
I tried to get the BSF’s permission to visit the border well before flying to Assam. In Delhi, I called the force’s headquarters again and again until an officer relented, telling me I could expect to get my clearance when I showed up in Guwahati, Assam’s largest city. In sprawling Guwahati, I took a taxi to the local BSF camp, where they told me they could do nothing without Delhi’s okay in writing. In Shillong, in Assam’s neighboring state of Meghalaya, I secured a meeting with a deputy commandant, but when I got there after a three-hour jeep ride, he had been called away to a meeting. I finally took an overnight taxi ride toward Enamul’s hometown of Dhubri, and by dawn, as we passed through villages along the braided Brahmaputra, it already looked like Bangladesh: streets impossibly packed with cars and rickshaws and pedestrians. Dhubri District had one of the highest population densities in India: 1,492 people per square mile, about half that of Bangladesh. As I neared Dhubri city, I saw another BSF camp, and I decided to try to bluff my way in. I dropped the Shillong officer’s name, and a young soldier led me down a long corridor and into a sparsely furnished office, where he made a series of calls while I peered at a document on his desk titled “Unnatural Death.” He finally put down the phone and turned to me. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but the border area is closed to foreigners.” That was the point.
I was in the city scarcely twelve hours before the police showed up at my hotel. “Actually, we are protecting you,” said a man in a leather jacket, and I was led down the street to the station for questioning that became all the more polite once they were certain I was American. On the second floor, in a hall with a languid ceiling fan and teal green walls, an officer gently thumbed through my passport while others stared at an ancient television that was showing the movie Titanic. One wall had a hand-drawn crime map: recent petty thefts, cattle rustling, and banditry by armed dacoits. Bangladesh was ten miles away. The relaxed mood changed only after I was allowed to leave and the next interviewee was ushered in. She was a small woman in a beautiful orange shalwar, towing a young son. “Bangladesh?” the officer asked. She nodded. His smile faded.
• • •
LIKE ALL ELSE related to climate change, sea-level rise is not the same across the globe—not uniform, certainly not equal. An extra inch in the North Sea does not necessarily translate to an extra inch in the South China Sea or Sea of Cortez or Bay of Bengal. Satellite measurements cited in the IPCC’s 2007 report show two parts of two oceans—the western Pacific and the eastern Indian—rising more quickly than any others, while measurements taken along the lengthy Indian coastline show that some areas, including West Bengal, adjacent to Bangladesh, are more quickly losing ground. The variability is attributed to tectonic movements, to changes in the distribution of heat and salt, which lead to changes in water circulation, and to the fact that surface winds can literally move oceans. The Hadley cell and another atmospheric circulation thought to be invigorated by climate change, the Walker cell, are pushing water from the Indian Ocean’s southern reaches north toward the Bangladeshi coast, according to a recent University of Colorado study. And there is another factor causing uneven sea-level rise, the subject of a flurry of recent research, that bodes especially ill for Bangladesh and many other places in the low-lying tropics: The thick ice shee
ts atop Greenland and Antarctica have a strong gravitational pull on surrounding waters, yet that force is diminished the more the ice sheets lose mass. More melt, less Greenland. Less Greenland, less gravitational pull. The perverse result of Greenland spilling at least fifty trillion gallons of water into the sea each year may be “a smaller sea level rise in the far North Atlantic,” explains John Church, the lead author of the sea-level chapter in the IPCC’s 2014 report. “Of course, a smaller rise in one place means a larger rise elsewhere.”
On average, global sea levels are rising at a rate of about three millimeters a year—twice the rate of the middle part of the last century but still mostly manageable, equivalent to adding little more than an inch every ten years. If the expansion remains linear, oceans will be roughly a foot higher in 2100. But few scientists believe it will stay linear. The summer I traveled with Minik around Greenland, the eight-nation Arctic Council began one of the most authoritative surveys yet of the island’s precipitous melt. The researchers found that the flow rate of Greenland’s largest glaciers had increased two- or threefold and that small earthquakes—the rumbles of calving glaciers as icebergs fell into the sea—were several times more frequent than in the early 1990s. Thermal expansion, the fact that when water heats up, it expands, is no longer the biggest contributor to sea-level rise, their report claimed. Instead, it’s melting ice. An average rise of three feet by 2100 is now considered a reasonable forecast; some experts believe six feet is within the range of possibility.
In the Bay of Bengal, the creep of the sea was like the migrants sneaking into India: silent, mostly invisible, just beginning. Even at six or eight millimeters a year—local scientists’ rough estimate—it was having an effect. In the Sundarbans, the world’s largest mangrove forest and the last bastion of wild Bengal tigers, high tides and higher salinity were starting to kill the namesake sundari trees, which lost life, leaves, and color from the top down—“top-dying disease,” the locals called it. In the adjacent delta formed by the Brahmaputra and the two other great rivers of Bangladesh, the Meghna and the Ganges (known here as the Padma), seawater was not inundating the land so much as infecting it: There is a point in an estuary system where an inflowing river becomes subsumed by the sea, where freshwater becomes so intermixed with salt water that it can no longer be considered fresh. This point was moving inland year after year. Salt levels in the waterways of six southern districts have risen by 45 percent since 1948. The amount of damaged cropland increased from less than four million acres in 1973 to more than six million in 1997 to a projected eight million or more acres today. An Indian dam on the Ganges, the Farakka Barrage, completed in 1975 to divert freshwater to Kolkata, was blamed for worsening the problem—less freshwater down, more salt water up—and now more megadams, Chinese as well as Indian, were planned for the Brahmaputra. Bangladesh was being hit from both sides. In a country where small farmers make up half the population, fields and rice paddies that fed thousands, even millions of people were gradually becoming too salty to sustain crops.
Salinity is one of the four horsemen of climate change for southern Bangladesh described by the country’s leading environmentalist, the IPCC author Atiq Rahman. The next is cyclones. While warming’s effect on tropical storms is hotly debated, a general consensus is emerging: Whether or not it increases their frequency, it very likely increases their strength. Cyclones and hurricanes are fueled by ocean temperatures; more heat means more destructive winds. Bangladesh, long in the path of storms, is likely now in the path of larger storms. In late 2007, category 4 Cyclone Sidr—the second-biggest storm since reliable record keeping began in 1877—sliced into the Sundarbans and southwestern delta, destroying 1.5 million homes and killing more than three thousand people. In 2009, smaller Cyclone Aila left at least half a million people homeless. It sent a twenty-foot-high wave crashing over fields and into mangroves: With sea levels higher, there is more water to push around, and storm surges are all the more damaging.
The third horseman is increased flooding. Seasonal flooding is normal in Bangladesh, and in many ways positive. A typical monsoon season sees as much as 30 percent of the country underwater as the Brahmaputra, Padma, Meghna, and dozens of other rivers swell with rain and overtop their banks. Farms flood, families are displaced, and some riverine islands, known as chars, disappear entirely. But new chars are created as the rivers discharge their billion-plus tons of sediment, and a new layer of mineral-rich soil remains when the waters recede. The soil allows Bangladeshi farmers to plant and sow a remarkable three crops a year. Flooding is like the greenhouse effect itself: It makes life possible. Only in excess—a modified monsoon, a higher Bay of Bengal—does it extinguish it. Flat, slow rivers, having less elevation to drop than before, were becoming yet flatter and slower, and seasonal floods were starting to last longer and spread farther. A Dutch-designed, foreign-financed system of dikes and embankments built in the 1960s was worse than useless: Rather than keeping water out of the delta’s cropland, the barriers often trapped water on the wrong side, turning fields into ponds. The Dutch were now hawking updated technologies via their embassy.
The fourth horseman requires little explanation: A sea-level rise of three feet by 2100—or whatever the global average will translate to in Bangladesh—will permanently submerge at least the southern fifth of the country, simple as that. The people who live there, twenty to thirty million of them, will have to go somewhere else.
• • •
THERE WAS A STANDARD tour route for foreign journalists reporting on Bangladesh’s woes: south on the river ferries from Dhaka, its capital, to the saline, overcrowded delta, to the chars, to the Sundarbans, and to the villages flattened by Cyclone Sidr. Almost as soon as I crossed over from India, I found myself following it. My guide for the tour was Atiqul Islam Chowdhury, or Atique, an unflappable, unfailingly polite man in his thirties from the local nonprofit COAST, which focuses on “survival strategies for coastal poor.” Our deal was straightforward: I paid his way for what amounted to a week of site visits and meetings that his organization could not otherwise easily afford, and in return he gave me access to villages and to his sense of quiet indignation.
I’d come across the border on the newly reopened Maitree Express, or Friendship Express, a Kolkata-Dhaka train that had been closed for forty-three years and was now touted as the start of a new entente between India and Bangladesh. Much of the 230-mile rail trip was on elevated tracks above the latter’s rivers and chars, which were visible out the picture windows but blurred by speed and distance, as if part of a different reality. But when Atique and I rode the Parabat, or “Pigeon,” a large, southbound night ferry from Dhaka, such distance was harder to attain. He had booked us an air-conditioned cabin with a small TV and an outlet to charge my cell phone, but the waters of Dhaka’s Buriganga River were only three decks down, the masses only two decks down. There was a blackout in Old Dhaka the night we left, and on the opposite bank was a shipyard where the sparks of welders’ torches periodically brightened the humid sky, like lightning. We got chai and samosas from an attendant, then the ferry’s foghorn blared. As we pulled away from the dock, we could see the faint hulk of the massive city fading away, and for the rest of the night there was only whatever appeared in the beam of the ferry’s spotlight. It swiveled back and forth, operated by rope and pulley. A bearded man stood by, tugging on one side, then the other. The rules of the river were like the rules of the Bangladeshi road: When the spotlight-wallah’s beam caught smaller ships or wooden, gondola-like sampans ahead of us, the ferry began blasting its horn, and they got out of our way before we ran them over.
We arrived in the city of Barisal at dawn, and Atique hailed a rickshaw that would take us to the crowded bus that would take us farther south on a series of crowded, two-lane roads. There were huts and rice paddies and palm trees and people and shrimp farms on both sides of the road, but as in Malta not once was there an empty, uncultivated, perfectly natural space. The shrim
p farms consisted of rectangular ponds hemmed in by dirt walls, and they were a relatively recent addition to the landscape, the result of two trends: Bangladesh’s growing need for export dollars and the delta’s creeping salinity. Shrimp has become the country’s second-largest source of foreign income, after textiles, and each year as many as a hundred million pounds of it now flow out to some of the world’s biggest emitters of carbon: half to Europe, a third to the United States, and most of the rest to Russia and the Middle East. When Bangladeshis gave up farming rice in favor of shrimp, it was sometimes hailed as climate adaptation, but it was lopsided: Shrimp farming requires far fewer workers, and the profits are largely kept by exporters and middlemen. Small farmers did not switch to shrimp themselves so often as they sold or leased their land to the country’s small oligopoly of shrimping families, then migrated to Dhaka or beyond.
Where there were still rice paddies, yields per acre were going down. Seasonal food shortages were already such a way of life that they had a name: the monga. The Bangladesh Rice Research Institute (BRRI) and international partners would soon begin large-scale tests of salt-tolerant rice, hoping to keep up with the rising seas. The BRRI’s first varieties were conventionally bred and distributed for free in southern Bangladesh, though it was also working on genetic modification. Other varieties being developed across the world—including by Monsanto, which had an office in Dhaka despite being dropped from a deal with the country’s Grameen Bank after activists protested in the late 1990s—were genetically modified for expected profit. Bangladesh, where the average person emits 0.3 tons of carbon a year—a seventieth of the average American—could do little more about climate change than try to adapt to it. Elsewhere in the country, NGOs were creating floating gardens: mats of water hyacinth covered with soil, cow manure, and seeds that grew into gourds or okra. They turned a riverboat into a floating school, and they bought other boats to serve as rescue arks during flooding, even training locals as their pilots. It was reminiscent of another program in a similar climate-threatened, rice-growing, shrimp-exporting delta, the Mekong in Vietnam, where the government and international donors began distributing life jackets and teaching children how to swim. But only in Bangladesh were families told to raise ducks, not chickens. Ducks float.
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