Bangladesh Environment Network marches for climate justice in New York in September 2014.
Growing up in Uttar Pradesh, India, Gulrez Shah Azhar read Western poets like John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley and wondered what on earth could be so poetic about a warm summer’s day. From where he sat, in a country where almost half of working people toil outside in agricultural jobs, summer was a hellish inferno of high heat and power cuts.
“In India, 300 million people do not have a power connection at home. That’s, for context, the entire population of the U.S.,” says Azhar, a medical doctor and former professor at the Indian Institute of Public Health. So as climate change drives temperatures approaching 120 degrees Fahrenheit, he adds, many Indians can’t even plug in a fan at home to cool off.
“What we’re seeing is an increase in mortality—deaths—during heat wave events,” Azhar tells The Progressive. “Unfortunately, the people who have contributed the least to this kind of warming are the ones who are suffering the most from it.”
He’s right: Across South Asia, climate conditions are bad and getting worse. In poor and developing countries including India and Pakistan, events like the 2015 heat wave that killed more than 3,600 people across both countries could become a regular occurrence, according to a shocking new study by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. A series of terrible floods across South Asia last summer killed more than 1,200 people. Elephants had to be used to rescue flood-stranded people in Nepal. Police in India told people to abandon their cars in high waters. And fully one-third of Bangladesh—a nation of 165 million people—was inundated.
Now a growing number of South Asian scholars and activists living in the United States are pushing their new country to take responsibility for unfolding climate crises. Groups such as EcoSikh in Maryland, Bangladesh Environment Network in the New York area, and Brown and Green: South Asian Americans for Climate Justice in the San Francisco Bay area are leading the way.
In Azhar’s case, he is now getting his Ph.D. at Pardee RAND Graduate School to build interdisciplinary knowledge about deadly heat waves—and how to survive them.
“Climate change is a justice issue,” says Nazrul Islam, founder of Bangladesh Environment Network and an economics professor at St. John’s University in New York City. “It’s the poorest countries, and the poor people of these poor countries, who are the least culpable and suffering the most.”
A recent World Bank report determined that more than 800 million people across South Asia live in areas where rising temperatures and changing rain patterns are threatening crops and sinking living standards.
“Many of us who live in the U.S. and have roots in places like India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal—you wonder what you can do to make things better,” says Barnali Ghosh, coordinator of Brown and Green.
“What we’re interested in is a global justice climate framework,” she adds. “We live in a country that is historically one of the largest contributors to climate change so, since the Industrial Revolution, we’ve had certain countries benefit from emissions whereas other countries have not benefited. But because of the situation related to poverty and the global distribution of wealth, we are seeing that the countries that are paying the price for industrialization are actually in the Global South, and especially South Asia.”
The urgency around climate change is pushing some newer immigrants to civic involvement for the first time.
At Brown and Green, a loose network that includes teachers and engineers, members have not only marched and rallied but also joined local activists across the bay in Richmond, California, in fighting to reduce pollution from the large Chevron refinery there.
“We see often that the so-called villains of the large scale, often oil companies, are operating both at the local level and at the global level,” Ghosh says. “We need to fight them at all of those levels.”
The urgency around climate change is pushing some newer immigrants to civic involvement for the first time.
“We need to become involved in the political process of this country. We need to elect leaders who do not question science,” says Rajwant Singh, founder and president of EcoSikh, which has grown into a worldwide organization. “That is something we need to do as part of this nation and as South Asians, because whatever is being done in this country is ultimately impacting our friends, our relatives, our families in all parts of the planet, especially the South Asian region.”
As with all organizing, the push for change begins from the ground up.
“For all of India, and especially northern India, things are getting quite unpredictable. The natural weather pattern has changed quite a bit,” Singh says. “Our mission is trifold. One is to really create awareness about the teachings of the Sikh religious thought process on nature and preservation, and how nature should be seen as a gift from the Creator.”
Second is education, he says, including programs in schools and religious institutions, both in the United States and worldwide. And third is hands-on projects, whether it’s planting trees to help restore the watershed near Baltimore, Maryland, or combating deforestation in Punjab, India.
In India, “we’ve been pushing farmers who are under severe financial distress to switch to organic farming, which is really good for the land, good for the environment, good for health, and also good for the farmers—and it is also profitable,” Singh says.
One project involved pushing the most sacred temple of the Sikh faith, the Golden Temple in Amritsar, India, to go organic. Nearly 100,000 people eat at the temple daily, Singh says, and “that food now is being grown organically.”
Moreover, “we need to realize that we, the people of the United States and other developed countries, are contributing significantly in warming the planet. So it is our moral responsibility to really do the maximum to mitigate the effects of carbon emissions,” he says.
At Bangladesh Environment Network, or BEN, this is a struggle that spans decades. BEN was founded in 1998, though at that time it wasn’t focused on climate change but rather on stemming local pollution, says BEN’s global coordinator, Saleh Tanveer, a mathematics professor at Ohio State University.
Tanveer, along with founder Nazrul Islam and other expatriate scholars, were concerned about the environmental degradation in their home country. So through BEN they partnered with a local group they also founded called BAPA, for Bangladesh Poribesh Andolon, or Bangladesh Environment Movement, to bring change.
Both by cajoling the government and launching street demonstrations, BEN and local activists racked up a string of early successes. In 2002, Bangladesh was the first country in the world to ban thin plastic bags. It also agreed to encourage auto-rickshaws to convert to natural gas instead of gasoline, and it banned a type of two-stroke engine with poor fuel efficiency in the capital, Dhaka.
But between 2006 and 2010, it became increasingly clear that climate change was a key issue threatening coastal areas of Bangladesh, a crowded delta nation. “It’s not within the scope of Bangladesh to solve this problem,” Tanveer says. “We realized that we actually needed partners in Western countries to create pressure.”
Flooding is an age-old problem in Bangladesh, but it is much worse now that rain-fueled floods don’t drain to the sea as quickly because the sea levels are themselves also rising, he says.
BEN joined up with organizations such as 350.org, co-founded by author Bill McKibben, at the massive 2014 People’s Climate March in New York, and with Friends of the Earth to protest a planned coal-fired power plant in Bangladesh near the world’s largest mangrove forest. Though the coal project is still moving forward, and victories in the global sphere have been elusive, BEN remains determined to continue building grassroots power.
As for 350.org, this year its Rise for Climate event in September featured more than 900 actions in ninety-five countries.
“We need to start seeing the climate crisis as a massive human rights issue,” says Thanu Yakupitiyage, the U.S. communications manager for 350.org who, as it happens, is a Sri Lankan national. “It’s not just about polar bears and ice caps. This is actually about people, communities, livelihoods.”
In her view, casting climate change as a justice issue makes clear the links to other social-justice issues—including the current migration crisis, which includes people leaving their homelands because of crop failures and other environmental woes. “We’re at a really crucial time in which we need to be connecting the dots,” she says. “We really need to be pushing for mass movements for justice, because all of these issues are interconnected.”
“It is our moral responsibility to really do the maximum to mitigate the effects of carbon emissions.”
Yet, at the local level, many mainstream environmental groups could do more to recruit and partner with a more diverse array of voices, says Aparna Rajagopal-Durbin, a founding partner of the Avarna Group, a consultancy that advises environmental groups on inclusion.
“If we’re trying to solve the most pressing environmental issues, that diversity in the movement is really important because everyone has different connections with different ideas,” she says.
For Rajagopal-Durbin, a native-born American of Indian descent, her activism isn’t fueled by stories from an ancestral homeland, but rather by her life right here as a woman of color in the United States.
“As a person doing consulting work in the environmental, conservation, and outdoor space, I saw that there was a dearth of people of color who would show up at the various events,” she says.
She also co-founded an affinity network for individuals from underrepresented groups called People of the Global Majority in the Outdoors, Nature, and Environment (PGM ONE). The network allows minority activists to inspire and support each other as well as share their challenges and successes so they will stay in the movement longer, she says. The PGM ONE summit this year in Oakland, California, drew 300 people.
At BEN’s recent twentieth anniversary conference in New York, global coordinator Tanveer says the younger, American-born-and-raised generation in attendance “wanted to know what they could do.” He knew exactly what to tell them.
“Get connected to the U.S. environmental organizations,” Tanveer said. “If you want to help Bangladesh in this way, one way to do that is to be involved in the climate change movement.”
Sidebar:
Keeping It Sustainable
As thousands of South Asia’s poorest people die from ever-worsening climate-linked disasters, a looming question is how countries such as India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh will seek to develop their own economies now that the atmosphere cannot withstand more emissions.
Developing countries are in a bind. They need to improve economic conditions for their people, but the development model presented by the West is still carbon-heavy.
“We have to work on the technologies that will help countries develop without having to emit so much carbon. Unless we do that, countries like, say, India and China, or Nigeria or any of the big countries, will not be willing partners in combating global climate change,” says Balu Vellanki, a member of Brown and Green: South Asian Americans for Climate Justice.
At the Bangladesh Environment Network, global coordinator Saleh Tanveer says Western countries in partnership with international organizations could do more to promote renewable energy in the developing world. “We certainly need a more urgent effort,” he says.
“We have to think about justice not just meaning that other countries should have the right to emit more,” says Barnali Ghosh, coordinator of Brown and Green. “Not just: Oh, everybody now gets a car, but also: How do we support communities in their adaptation and mitigation efforts and also make sure these resources are reaching the most vulnerable people?”