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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.
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.
Price: $34.95
Pages: 210
Publisher: University of California Press
Imprint: University of California Press
Publication Date:
04 March 2025
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9780520414181
Format: Paperback
BISACs:
“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’
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.