What is the climate crisis? Perhaps it is best understood through several images: Victims of floods helplessly looking on as their homes drown, NGO photo ops filled with rural residents smiling for the camera, perfectly suited politicians in pristine European cities discussing the detrimental effects of river erosion taking place thousands of miles away.
Climate change often appears synonymous with pollution to the public.
At an Environment Day event that I attended, while addressing the issue of waste management, one of the speakers mentioned how it had failed miserably, blaming Bangladeshi culture for the failure. Bangladeshis apparently are unable to grasp the concept of garbage separation.
But what use is garbage separation if, in the end, all of it gets mixed together in the same three-wheeled van? To what extent can we shift blame to individuals who don’t even exercise sufficient control over basic needs such as food and shelter and, perhaps more importantly, education. How can we expect them to care enough and carry out the proper disposal of our polythene bags and biscuit wrappers?
Profits and losses
Individuals still do express guilt and distaste towards food waste, but the doctrine of the industry, production, and distribution allows disposal from the equation of losses and profits, from rationality.
Individuals still do express guilt and distaste towards food waste, but the doctrine of the food industry allows for the acceptance of exponential food waste, as part of a system that only takes into account profits and losses.
This is reflected in practices within the animal agriculture industry (besides the cruelty shown to the animals themselves) which continue to impose dire consequences on the environment. Increased income, for instance, from shrimp exports do little to hide the horrific reality of shrimp farmers, whose depleted health, land, ecology is nothing short of life sentences that are far removed from the average urban dweller.
There’s more: The epitome of our misplaced pride, RMG, and its exports which promise a better life, at the very reasonable price of a dead river or two, as microplastics and heavy metals infuse themselves into the waters which have sustained the lives of the people in this land for centuries.
And research continues to produce staggering statistics which capture the biological, psychological, and ecological harm that permeates the Sundarbans. But to what extent have we become comfortable with accepting these ecological and economic injustices for the sake of some idealized urban utopia or digitized Bangladesh?
Partition, pollution, proliferation
The era we reside in now is one of unprecedented levels of human activity, and with it, of course, has come unprecedented levels of impact on the Earth’s environment. This is often referred to as the anthropocene epoch in the geologic age, characterized as it is by human economic activities that dominate and trump the natural world. This, in effect, creates a separation between man and nature, reducing the latter to a subject of consumption as opposed to a part of our interconnected existence.
However, the question remains: Is simply knowing enough? How often do these quasi-environmentalist discussions and conferences take place, events which adorn themselves with polyethylene-wrapped chicken sandwiches, single-use plastic bottled beverages, and PVC banners?
This manufactured segregation between man and nature results in a sort of dissonance, between what we theoretically believe in and how we live. Does this disembodiment (a relatively new phenomenon), in which one’s body is disconnected from ecology, create a harmful disbalance of its own?
And even if one is fortunate enough to have the privilege of choice, the blatant discrimination, pollution, and its continuous proliferation are difficult to escape (staring into the outside world through a car window presents us with dusty, dirty, and perhaps disillusioning images).
While recycling and individual action is a popular go-to in the development discourse, its endorsement does not succeed in escaping the violent tendencies that are leading to the climate disaster and allowing the oppression of the vulnerable to foster.
And in reality, to come back to the issue of waste management, isn’t most of the recycling done by the “tokais” (the trash collectors), picking up plastic bottles that we discard recklessly on to the clogged gutters of our city?
In the discourse of environmentalism and “recycling” and caring about our planet, why do we not include or acknowledge these countless, often unhoused people? Their contributions are vital but rarely ever highlighted by the immaculately formatted reports published by the likes of the World Bank and other NGOs, focusing instead on the economy and development, and using them to measure the potentials of so-called “third world” or “least developed” countries?
So much of this environmentalism is seen through the eyes of the West, often from neoliberal, development-sector oriented discourse, disregarding local, indigenous practices that exist and circularly sustain waste and livelihoods, practices which predate the overpowering urbanization and globalization that governs so much of our urban activities, from what we eat to how we work.
Looking to these decaying practices is not to revere or manufacture an idealized past but to acknowledge the traditions which allowed our ancestors to subsist without harm, to the environment and to themselves.
Unfortunately, these practices are hardly ever visited or carried out, no longer having a place or voice in the world of today.
A desired outcome
A common expression echoed in the discourse of environmentalism are slogans such has “gaach laagan, poribesh bachan” [Plant trees, save the environment]. But who are we saving nature from? The discursive practices of those who claim authority on the subject prefers to place individual blame, recommending each of us to recycle or take shorter showers, for example.
We shower certain child activists and their crayon drawings with love on social media, but treat the tokais who request the last few sips of our Coke with dismissal and disdain. We must acknowledge that severe structural struggles such as the climate crisis are not isolated problems, but, in fact, a predictable, normal, desired outcome, a forced discontinuity of collective continuance.
We need to look past the ideological tunnel vision that an overdependence on economic “growth” brings, and through interconnectedness and solidarity with those who have often been alienated and ignored.
Ohama Raaz is a visual artist. She is also the Founder of Antobihin, an organization that offers plastic-free products.