This spring break, Prof. Susan Crawford, John A. Reilly Clinical Professor of Law, set out to Bangladesh on a Mittal Institute-supported research experience.
About the motivations behind her trip, Prof. Crawford explains, “I used to write about internet access in America. Over the winter of 2012 I went to visit South Korea, because people there were living in the future: they had cheap, essentially unlimited, essentially ubiquitous access everywhere, including in rural villages. I interviewed people, especially young people, and learned about life there–without visiting in person, I would not really have understood a thing.
Now that I am writing about climate adaptation in America, it was essential that I visit Bangladesh. They, too, are living in a future that hasn’t quite reached everyone in the US yet. Extreme heat, salty water, destructive sea level rise and storms are all facts of life in Bangladesh. My intention was to meet and interview as many people as I could, and thanks to the Mittal Institute I had an extraordinarily fruitful visit. The Institute subsidized my airfare for the visit, and made introductions to wonderful friends of the Institute. It was a transformative trip for me.”
Prof. Susan Crawford.
Read on for a brief snippet about her experience. The full account can be found on her Substack.
Visiting the Future: The family of man in a time of extremes
By Susan Crawford
“I visited Bangladesh this past week to interview a host of people in Dhaka and make a couple of field trips to the south. The country is ahead of the US on the climate curve, and being there felt like visiting the future: the effects of extreme heat events, flooding, increasingly salty water and soils, and extraordinary storms are compounding existing difficulties for many Bangladeshis. The country, in one of the most densely populated and lowest-elevation regions on the planet, was among the first to recognize the need to adapt to the climate changes that are already baked into our world.
At the same time, the cascading, accelerating impacts of what’s ahead will be extremely difficult for Bangladesh to manage, just as they will be for the US. It’s going to be important to consider our interrelated destinies along a host of axes. What’s happening in Bangladesh will happen here.
This past Thursday, I visited Gabtola. It’s a village in Bangladesh’s coastal region that is being decimated by sea level rise. I met adaptable, plucky people who are doing their best to hang on. Gabtola is a small place whose story has enormous implications for global coastal cities: Half of the village has already left town.
It was Md. Shahidul Alam Sheikh, pictured with reddish beard, who told me that half the village has already left, moving to find jobs anywhere they can—in Dhaka, in towns in India, in other villages in Bangladesh. He had been a solidly middle-class successful farmer, quite well off, for the twelve years after he bought land in Gabtola. But he has lost everything to the floods.”