by Sunil Amrith
If borders at sea are forbidding, those on land are even more so. Throughout Asia one of the ways in which communities have coped with extreme weather has been to move—often temporarily, and not necessarily over long distances. For regions that are threatened by climate change and water-related risks, borders create barriers to mobility. “Climate refugees” are much discussed in current legal and political debates. But the Red Cross rightly stresses that the “populist term ‘climate refugees’ is profoundly misleading”: environmental drivers of migration act “in conjunction with economic, social and political factors, and [are] linked to existing vulnerabilities,” and it is “conceptually difficult to establish a precise category of environmental or climate migrant.”73 It would be a mistake to separate a discussion of “climate migration” from a broader consideration of regional patterns of mobility.
There is an odd historical resonance to some of the pronouncements about climate and migration. In the nineteenth century, too, many observers saw the movement of people across the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea as driven by climate—not by climate change but by climate’s natural volatility.74 The use of liquid metaphors to describe migration remains pervasive: a language of “floods” and “tides” and “waves” and “flows.” Many of the region’s migrants today come from places and from communities that have been mobile in the past. This is hardly a surprise. Some of the places most threatened by environmental catastrophe are also places—the coasts and the great river deltas—that have the longest histories of migration. But other affected regions lack the accumulated family connections, knowledge, experience, and access to credit to allow them to move. Forced immobility can be as dangerous, as traumatic, as forced migration. Controls on mobility have intensified since the middle of the twentieth century, and they are likely to harden: hysteria in India about “illegal migration” from Bangladesh, for instance, has led to the securitization and fortification of the border, though many people risk their lives to cross it out of desperation. The slow effects of climate change are as likely to leave people stranded, unable to move, as they are to spark a rush of “climate refugees.”75
A recent study by the World Bank makes clear that although cross-border migration receives more attention, vastly more people migrate within their own countries than migrate internationally. The overwhelming majority of people who are displaced by climate change over the next three decades will move internally—an estimated 40 million people in South Asia alone, and 143 million people globally.76 In the depersonalized language common to climate policy documents, the World Bank concludes that “several hotspots of climate in- and out-migration are in transboundary areas” of South Asia, and that these “must be explored for their opportunities and managed for their challenges.”77 But what does this really mean? It means the options facing people whose lives are threatened by drought or deluge will be constrained by borders as well as by poverty, gender, caste, or a lack of opportunity. It means that the closest refuge, if it should lie across a border, may not be a refuge at all. It means that many routes that make social, cultural, or ecological sense to people—routes embedded in family histories, routes across regions that have not always been divided by borders—will be blocked. It means that those who are compelled to cross closed frontiers in search of security will face unprecedented risks.
GIVEN THE WEIGHT OF BORDERS, ARE THERE PROSPECTS OF CLOSER regional cooperation to confront the problems of water and the threat of climate change? If so, these prospects are modest in scope and ambition. Existing regional institutions—the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the newer and smaller Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multisectoral Technical Cooperation (BIMSTEC)—are focused overwhelmingly on the development of infrastructure and the promotion of trade. Though environmental protection is not absent from their concerns, it is not a high priority. When policy documents refer to climate, it is often as a metaphor, as in the often expressed hope of creating a “climate friendly to investment.”78 And when new infrastructure projects threaten ecological and social harm—as do so many of the port projects that proliferate along the Bay of Bengal’s coasts—they have almost always proceeded regardless, except where they have met with significant public protest. Nevertheless the second half of the twentieth century did create agreements and institutions to manage water across borders, and these need to be strengthened wherever possible. Though flawed, the Indus Treaty signed in 1960 between India and Pakistan, with the World Bank’s mediation, has largely worked. The two hostile neighbors have for the most part worked cooperatively to manage that shared river, though there have been periodic surges of tension between them. The Mekong River Commission, created in the 1950s by the UN, has outlasted the Cold War. Though the commission has often failed to prevent reckless development along the river, the growing involvement of China in its discussions suggests that states are taking more seriously the shared threats they face.
But the most promising initiatives to address shared risks may lie in the realms of science and civil society. From the start, climate science in Asia has been a cosmopolitan enterprise. In the late nineteenth century, observatories and scientists across imperial borders exchanged data and theory and reports. This is not to say that climate science stands apart from politics. It never has. In the nineteenth century, the development of meteorology was deeply entwined with imperial interests. But climate science provided a way of visualizing Asia beyond borders, as a vast and connected climatic space, bound together in every dimension—the oceans, the air, and the land. Meteorologists saw that the same storms menaced the Philippines as India. Growing knowledge of climatic connections inspired attempts to share warnings if not coordinate responses. In an era of nation-states, that level of cross-border cooperation among scientists has continued—and it is more vital than ever. Even as an organization like BIMSTEC is hampered by political tensions among its member states, it has made small but tangible gains in coordinating the sharing of early warnings to bolster disaster preparedness.79 As meteorologists’ ability to forecast storms has advanced with improvements in satellite technology as well as better models, that information is now more readily accessible to a wide public—mobile phones are ubiquitous across South Asia; even the smallest fishing vessels are now equipped with GPS technology.
Some of the most promising recent efforts to increase cooperation across borders to tackle Asia’s water problems have focused on the sharing of information. As we have seen, data concerning the hydraulics of the Himalayan rivers are a closely guarded secret. The Third Pole, a nongovernmental organization based in London and New Delhi, dedicated to understanding and communicating the cross-border water issues faced by Asian states—with a focus on the Himalayan rivers—has compiled as much information as is available on river flow and on climatic trends. Using open source data, it has created a new mapping platform that allows for the sharing of data on river flow and hydropower, glaciers, and groundwater. This is now readily available to journalists, activists, and scholars. These maps of the Himalayan region transcend borders, emphasizing shared ecological challenges. The ability to visualize the risks holds the promise of stimulating a more coordinated response; it might even inspire new solidarities that come from a sense of shared vulnerability. These efforts to pool information have begun to mobilize public participation by so-called citizen scientists. Season Watch, an Indian organization, encourages its members, including schoolchildren, to submit detailed daily observations of climate, thereby linking very local experiences of changing seasonal cycles with changes on a regional and global scale.80 This effort extends to the preservation of local archives. The World Meteorological Organization has urged the importance of “data rescue”—the recovery of records and logs of rainfall and temperature, often handwritten, preserved in local repositories and threatened by physical deterioration. These are potentially invaluable to climatologists looking for long-term patterns of change. Those very archives, as we have seen throughout this book, are full
of evidence of the ways in which, in earlier times, not only storms and currents but scientific information crossed borders.
From the 1980s onward, there has been close cooperation among environmental activists across Asia. They have pooled information, campaigned together, and recognized that environmental degradation—including but not limited to climate change—is a menace they all face. Historian Prasenjit Duara sees reasons for hope in the organizations of what he calls “network Asia”—the web of NGOs, some of them religiously motivated and others resolutely secular, coming together to confront problems of water and climate. The environmental movement has at times been genuinely transregional, yet in both India and China, it has become clear in recent years that environmental organizations are vulnerable to crackdowns by the state. There is also an imaginative barrier to cross. As we have seen, the power of environmental activism very often comes from the ability to evoke a sense of emotional attachment to particular landscapes. Narratives about the past have been fundamental to the rise of environmentalism in India and elsewhere in Asia, but the pasts they have appealed to are profoundly local ones; their narratives juxtapose an earlier age of ecological innocence with the depredations of colonialism and modernity. An appeal to nationalism has been, and remains, one powerful way that environmentalists can mobilize public support. But this can make it more difficult to work across borders.81
At a time of environmental crisis, local histories and national responses are insufficient on their own. It is now easy to see on a map, or in an alarming graphic, the scale of water-related risks that Asia faces. It is clear that those risks pay no heed to borders. The promise of a new sort of environmental history, a more connected and expansive history of Asia’s unruly waters, is to fill that space with cultural and political meaning—to show that the landscape of Asia’s mountain rivers and its monsoons have also constituted a space of migration, a zone of trade, a path of pilgrimage.
Throughout history, water has both connected and divided Asia. The rivers and oceans have been thoroughfares of trade as well as zones of imperial domination. In the nineteenth century, when European empires dominated the world, Asia’s hydrology underpinned many of the commodities that fueled global industrial capitalism. The storms that have always menaced coastal regions always crossed frontiers, but states have responded to them in different ways. As connections across Asia frayed in the mid-twentieth-century decades of nationalism and war, water, too, came under ever-tighter territorial control. One reason why almost all of Asia’s new nation-states tried so boldly to harness water was to gain self-sufficiency in a postcolonial era in which their autonomy was nevertheless called into question by the machinations of the superpowers in the Cold War. They were spurred to do so by memories of water’s lack—bitter memories of famine and suffering within living memory. They were spurred, especially in India, by a fear of the monsoon climate and the power it had over human life. “For us in India scarcity is only a missed monsoon away,” Prime Minister Indira Gandhi said—and this sense of a battle against enormous natural forces inspired in her, as in so many others, a tug between despair and optimism that science and technology held the key to liberation.82 Over time that insistence on self-sufficiency combined with a sense of perpetual crisis led to a narrowing of vision and a willful blindness to the consequences of repeated attempts to conquer nature. Today, the inability of states to think beyond their borders imperils lives and denudes the political imagination.
If there is one consistent lesson in Unruly Waters, it is that water management never has been, and can never be, a purely technical or a scientific question; neither can it be addressed on a purely national scale. Ideas about the distribution and management of water are deeply inflected with cultural values, with notions of justice, with ideas and fears about nature and climate—including very old fears about the monsoon, which grows more capricious. The battle continues to understand the monsoons and mountain rivers that shape Asia.
EPILOGUE
HISTORY AND MEMORY AT THE WATER’S EDGE
“THERE IS THE SCIENTIFIC AND IDEOLOGICAL LANGUAGE FOR WHAT IS happening to the weather,” writes novelist Zadie Smith, “but there are hardly any intimate words,” no words that capture the sense of loss that climate change brings with it. “The weather has changed, is changing,” Smith writes, “and with it so many seemingly small things… are being lost.”1 Faced with the forbidding scale of climate change, many responses are profoundly local. Indian farmers, deeply attuned to the tenor of the skies, are changing when they plant their seeds.2 But changes in the weather also bring a sense of disorientation—a loss of one’s bearings. Everywhere I traveled over the eight years I have been working on this book, I heard stories about the weather—stories of how it is not what it used to be. In many cases, these stories were prompted by a particular landscape that was familiar once, and is now unrecognizable. “Look there,” I was told by a longtime resident of Thanjavur on a trip through Tamil Nadu in 2012, “when I was young, the river ran full, now it is completely dry.”
There are many other kinds of loss that climate change threatens us with. A changing monsoon affects every form of life that depends on it. From the Gurukula botanical sanctuary in Wayanad, northern Kerala, Suprabha Seshan and her colleagues cultivate endangered plants native to the ecosystem of the Western Ghats, the western Indian mountain range that receives some of the most intensive rainfall during the summer monsoon. “We refer to these plants as refugees,” she writes; many have been rescued from areas where forests have already been cut down. “The weather features regularly in our speech,” she writes. The gardeners’ work depends on an intuitive knowledge of the weather. But these patterns are changing. Seshan observes that “ever since I have been here, about 24 years now, I have heard people talking about how the monsoon has gone awry, that it is no longer what it used to be. We also know this from scientific data, but crucially for us, we know this from the behaviour of the plants and animals in our sanctuary.” Here, meteorological research and local perceptions match. Everyone is sure that the southwest monsoon has weakened—and has become more unpredictable. Local species are “confused,” Seshan writes, by the weather’s signals. Temperatures are too high for some mountain species to thrive, and rising temperatures bring new diseases. “I worry,” Seshan concludes, “that the monsoon, with its moods and savage powers, might altogether cease.”3
ALONG THE COAST OF SOUTHEASTERN INDIA, TOO, ARE MANY SIGNS of irreversible change. In a small village near Pondicherry, earlier this decade, I met Mr. Rathnam, a fisherman in his fifties whose family have been fishers in the area for generations. On both sides of the narrow strip of beach on which we sat were granite sea walls. “If not for these walls,” he said, “the sea would have taken this settlement long ago.” The beach has been eaten away over the past twenty years, most noticeably by the construction of a large new port in Pondicherry, a few minutes down the coast. The Pondicherry port marked the beginning of an explosion in port construction in India, with dozens of ports currently planned for India’s eastern and western seaboards. They eye the newly flourishing commercial opportunities of the Indian Ocean’s littoral, which is vibrant again after falling into decline for the second half of the twentieth century. The ports cause enormous upheaval to the coastline. “Where these boats are now,” Mr. Rathnam said, pointing to the beach, “those were all houses. Look, you can see the remains of the floors of houses.” I saw little fragments jutting out from the soil, a small archive of coastal environmental history.
The remains of a house: an archive on the landscape of coastal erosion. CREDIT: Sunil Amrith
He is convinced that the sea is changing in ways beyond what is visible to the eye, beyond the visibly changing shape and extent of the beach. The weather is “unpredictable,” he said; “the seasons seem to mean nothing now.” He was convinced the monsoons are shifting, and in his narrative the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 was the moment when “everything changed.” The tsunami was a geological phenom
enon, caused by an undersea earthquake, but to Mr. Rathnam it seemed a portent of fundamental change. He paused his story. “I don’t understand the sea anymore,” he said, suddenly: the sea that he has known, intimately and instinctively, for a lifetime. I asked him what does the future holds. “Nothing,” he said; “there will be no fish left to catch.”
A narrowing stretch of beach near Pondicherry, eroded by the construction of a new port. CREDIT: Sunil Amrith