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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.
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.
"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
210 pp.6 x 9Illus: 29 color illustrations, 1 map
9780520414181$34.95|£30.00Paper
Mar 2025