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Delta Futures: Time, Territory, and Capture on a Climate Frontier
A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.
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 the delta's rivers and ports as engines for industrial growth. Jason Cons explores how these competing futures are being brought to how they are experienced, understood, and contested by those who live and work the delta, and the often surprising entanglements they engender—between dredgers and embankments, tigers and tiger prawns, fishermen and forest bandits, and more. 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.
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 the delta's rivers and ports as engines for industrial growth. Jason Cons explores how these competing futures are being brought to how they are experienced, understood, and contested by those who live and work the delta, and the often surprising entanglements they engender—between dredgers and embankments, tigers and tiger prawns, fishermen and forest bandits, and more. 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.
- GenresBangladeshAnthropology
210 pages, Paperback
Published March 4, 2025
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June 15, 2025
For someone who just started a degree in environmental science, and found a weird obsession with forestry and the Sundarbans, this book is the perfect starter in getting more intimate with the history and geopolitics of the delta region.
I thank my friend Jake for introducing me to this work. Only time will tell what the future of the Delta holds, but this book certainly does a great job in laying out the present dynamics of this gossamer climate frontier.
I thank my friend Jake for introducing me to this work. Only time will tell what the future of the Delta holds, but this book certainly does a great job in laying out the present dynamics of this gossamer climate frontier.
Displaying 1 of 1 review