Delta Futures: Time, Territory, and Capture on a Climate Frontier

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 its rivers and ports as engines for industrial growth. This talk, and the book upon which itis based, 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 entanglements they engender - between dredgers and embankments, tigers and tiger prawns, fishermen and forest bandits. 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.

Speaker: Jason Cons, University of Texas, Austin