Delta Futures - by Jason Cons (Paperback)

About the Book

"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 life: 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"--

Book Synopsis

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 life: how they are experienced, understood, and contested by those who live and work in 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.

From the Back Cover

"Jason Cons's ethnography of Bangladesh's Sundarbans is filled with fascinating insights into the multiple and often contradictory entanglements of global warming, crime, politics, development, and projected 'climate solutions.' This important work presents a detailed, ground-level portrait of the region's ongoing transformation, examining the ways in which climate change, economic uncertainty, and historical legacies are shaping its future." Amitav Ghosh, author of Smoke and Ashes: Opium's Hidden Histories

"Both synoptic and ethnographic, Delta Futures illustrates how the Bengal Delta and its inhabitants are being 'captured' by particular actors and imaginations, struggling to navigate the 'siltscape' with ever smaller margins between climate frontier futures. A very powerful book."--Franz Krause, author of Thinking Like a River: An Anthropology of Water and Its Uses along the Kemi River, Northern Finland

"In this creative and original work, Cons makes the reader think more closely about how climate change is remaking a place that could be considered a 'sentinel space' for the planetary crisis, and how people are living through it."--Nayanika Mathur, author of Crooked Cats: Beastly Encounters in the Anthropocene

Review Quotes

"It is an important contribution to the rich literature on an area of transnational interest and will benefit not just social scientists but policymakers and activists alike to be sensitive to the deltaic temporalities of Bengal."

-- "H-Asia"

"Delta Futures is an elegant reminder that the future is never singular, but always plural, contested, and captured in the messy terrains of the present."

-- "Asian Affairs"

"The book's thoughtful conceptual and insightful theoretical offerings are incredibly valuable for anthropologists, geographers, and sociologists engaged in larger considerations of the agrarian question of climate change."

-- "The Journal of Peasant Studies"

"Cons takes us on a journey into the heart of the Bengal delta, where alternate futures of peril and promise gain traction within the 'multidimensional complexity' of cultural repertoires, social histories, and geopolitical contentions shaping everyday lives--the result is a rich narrative account of the region's 'material ecology and politics'

-- "Developing Economies"

About the Author

Jason Cons is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin and author of Sensitive Space: Fragmented Territory at the India-Bangladesh Border.