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Toxic Residues in Fluid Commons: More-Than-Economic Dispossession and Shipbreaking in Coastal Bangladesh
Camelia Dewan, PhD
2023, Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology
February 02, 2025
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Abstract
This article examines processes of 'more-than-economic dispossession' arising from pollution in the interconnected forests, tides, canals, rivers and humid airsthe fluid commonsof the shipbreaking region Sitakunda. It ethnographically explores how minority Zele fishermen and shipbreaking workers are experiencing three interrelated forms of 'more-than-economic' dispossession. First, extra-economic means of accumulating profits by dismantling ships in cheaper countries enables dispossession by pollution in coastal ecologies. Second, more-than-economic points to the structures of political power inequalities making marginalised Bangladeshis exposed to toxics in ways that cannot be economically compensated. Lastly, morethan-economic draws on 'more-than-human' ethnographies: affective experiences of sensing, tasting, hearing and smelling pollution reveal how toxic residues biophysically damage the health of both human and more-than-human, resulting in the loss of ability to 'sustain life'. It thus joins the growing body of anthropological scholarship that expands on pollution as 'matter out of place' by taking its materiality seriously.
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Ethnos
Journal of Anthropology

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/retn20

Toxic Residues in Fluid Commons: More-Than-
Economic Dispossession and Shipbreaking in
Coastal Bangladesh

Camelia Dewan

To cite this article: Camelia Dewan (11 Jul 2023): Toxic Residues in Fluid Commons: More-
Than-Economic Dispossession and Shipbreaking in Coastal Bangladesh, Ethnos, DOI:
10.1080/00141844.2023.2208309

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2023.2208309

UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis
Group

Published online: 11 Jul 2023.

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ETHNOS

Toxic Residues in Fluid Commons: More-Than-Economic
Dispossession and Shipbreaking in Coastal Bangladesh
Camelia Dewan
University of Oslo, Norway

ABSTRACT
This article examines processes of ‘more-than-economic dispossession’ arising from
pollution in the interconnected forests, tides, canals, rivers and humid airs – the
ﬂuid commons – of the shipbreaking region Sitakunda. It ethnographically explores
how minority Zele ﬁshermen and shipbreaking workers are experiencing three
interrelated forms of ‘more-than-economic’ dispossession. First, extra-economic
means of accumulating proﬁts by dismantling ships in cheaper countries enables
dispossession by pollution in coastal ecologies. Second, more-than-economic points
to the structures of political power inequalities making marginalised Bangladeshis
exposed to toxics in ways that cannot be economically compensated. Lastly, more-
than-economic draws on ‘more-than-human’ ethnographies: aﬀective experiences
of sensing, tasting, hearing and smelling pollution reveal how toxic residues
biophysically damage the health of both human and more-than-human, resulting in
the loss of ability to ‘sustain life’. It thus joins the growing body of anthropological
scholarship that expands on pollution as ‘matter out of place’ by taking its
materiality seriously.

ARTICLE HISTORY Received 29 December 2021; Accepted 25 April 2023

KEYWORDS Toxicity; accumulation by dispossession; Bangladesh; environmental justice; development

Introduction
Shipbreaking, the breaking up of ships into steel plates, is one of the most dangerous
occupations in the world. For more than two decades, NGOs have used images of bare-
footed labourers wading through the muddy beaches of the Global South to put
pressure on maritime corporations and the governments of ship-owning nations to
improve precarious labour conditions (A Greenpeace-FIDH-YPSA Collaboration
2005; National Geographic 2014; Vidal 2017; NGO Shipbreaking Platform 2017).

CONTACT Camelia Dewan
[email protected]
© 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.
org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work
is properly cited. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository
by the author(s) or with their consent.

2 C. DEWAN

These vessels range from container and cargo ships to fuel tankers, whereas Banglade-
shi shipbreakers specialise in dismantling large oil tankers – the most toxic of ships
(Abdullah et al. 2013). Thus, in addition to lethal maiming accidents, shipbreaking
workers are also exposed to signiﬁcant toxic hazards when ships are taken apart:
from asbestos and radioactive wastes to heavy metals and crude oil that contain per-
sistent organic pollutants (POPs) like polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and dioxins
(Hossain, Sharifuzzaman & Rahman Chowdhury 2016).
Shipbreaking in southeast coastal Bangladesh is done on intertidal beaches. Tides
carry hazardous materials far away from the conﬁnes of land-based shipbreaking
yards. Crude oil [kalo tel, black oil] with its POPs and PCBs travel with the tides to
nearby mangroves, canals, rivers and agricultural soils while carcinogenic smoke
arising from shipbreaking and steel processing industries intermingle with air pol-
lution from the heavily traﬃcked Dhaka-Chittagong highway to blend with these
waters through heavy rains. These entangled ecologies of interconnected forests,
tides, canals, rivers and humid airs constitute a coastal ‘ﬂuid commons’. This article
explores how dispossession here is more than one of the loss of access to common
lands – but related to the more-than-economic forms of loss by people living in,
and oﬀ of, a wetlands ecology materially transformed by pollution (Figures 1–4).
One of my main local ﬁeld assistants was ‘Rahim’, a young shipbreaking worker
living close to the yards who took me to see the dwellings of shipbreaking workers
and their families, to abandoned yards with their oiled and dirty beaches and the vil-
lages of Hindu Zele ﬁshermen caste located in-between Sitakunda’s shipbreaking
yards.1 Nikhil Kaka, a 60-year-old Zele elder lived in a cramped village located near
a black and pinkish canal that polluted domestic ponds. It comprised homesteads of
cracked mud and sheds made out of cement bags and sticks, with powders and
ﬁbres scattered along the village, some of which were asbestos and glass wool.

Figure 1. Shows the coastline of Sitakunda, and the oil spillage surrounding yards. Photo credit: Google Maps,
February 2020.

ETHNOS 3

Figure 2. Abandoned yard, Sitakunda district. Photo credit: Author, February 2020.

Nikhil kaka explained that these substances cause fever and cough. In addition, crude
oils and other pollutants in the water harmed the ﬁsh they continue to depend on for
their living as Zele are not hired in any industries.

Figure 3. Image of a signboard marking a plot of land to be developed into a shipbreaking yard. Photo credit:
Author, February 2020.

4 C. DEWAN

Figure 4. Unidentiﬁed substances in the canal of a Zele village

Sitakunda is an agrarian area seeing ongoing processes of accumulation and dispos-
session as it is being made into a state-designated special economic zone, following fam-
iliar patterns of state-led development-induced dispossession in South Asia (Fairbairn
et al. 2014; Levien 2012) that fails to provide meaningful employment for all sections of
the rural population despite promises of ‘economic growth’ (Levien 2013). The Zele are
landless and are not being dispossessed by the land they live on. Rather, they are being
dispossessed from ‘the possibilities to sustain life’ (Ojeda 2021: 86) as shipbreaking
activities through beaching and pollution negatively aﬀect their social reproduction,
that is, ‘the social and ecological structures, relations and institutions that sustain life
at the individual, communitarian, local and planetary level’ (Ojeda 2021: 87).
This article argues that the circulation of toxic residues materially transforms the
ﬂuid commons that sustain life and provide means of social reproduction. Disposses-
sion here is not limited to the denial of access and use rights to land. As Nikhil kaka
points out, their lives are impacted by pollution that travel far from the boundaries of
land-based industrial facilities. While moving waters evade the ﬁxity of property and
the regulations that apply to land (Strang 2011), toxic residues are also transgressive
and disobey boundaries (Boudia et al. 2018, 167) as they ‘leak, ooze and persist’
(Packer 2021). Unlike the reversible salinisation of arable lands from shrimp
farming that diminish rural people’s capacity to socially reproduce through ‘in situ dis-
placement’ (Feldman and Geisler 2012: 974), persistent organic pollutants from indus-
tries are ‘forever chemicals’ that bioaccumulate in the environment, food and bodies.

ETHNOS 5

The concept of ‘more-than-economic’ dispossession draws attention to how pol-
lution aﬀect more-than-human co-habitation, and causes the loss of health for both
human and more-than-human (ﬁsh, waters), over time and across generations. This
focus on the materiality of polluted waters expands on the usage of more-than-econ-
omic dispossession in the introduction to this special issue on ‘ﬂuid dispossessions’,
where it is described as the disruption of existing aﬀective, symbolic or spiritual
relations with water (Dewan and Nustad, this issue). I use ‘more-than-economic’ to
denote three diﬀerent interlinked things (1) extra-economic means of accumulation
result in pollution; (2) How capitalist social relations permits uneven toxic exposure;
(3) how pollution disrupts human and more-than-human health. It thus joins the
growing body of ethnographies that take the material properties of pollution seriously
(Fisher et al. 2021; Dietrich 2021), departing from Douglas’s (1966) classic suggestion
that pollution constitute socially-constructed ideas of ‘matter out of place’.
The article explores three aspects of more-than-economic dispossession. First,
‘more-than-economic’ dispossession includes the extra-economic means of shifting
dismantling to cheaper locations that allow for proﬁt accumulation by contamination
(Demaria 2016). The 2009 ‘Hong Kong Convention for Safe and Environmentally
Sound Ship Recycling’ (HKC) results in ship owners transferring liability for handling
hazardous wastes to poorer countries in ways that increase rates of enclosure for pol-
luting shipbreaking. Second, more-than-economic dispossession emphasises the
importance of capitalist social relations in perpetuating structures of political power
inequalities shaping uneven toxic exposure. Lastly, more-than-economic dispossession
draws attention to the ‘more-than-human’, where aﬀective experiences of sensing,
tasting, hearing and smelling pollution reveal how toxic residues damage the health
of both human and more-than-human, resulting in the loss of ability to ‘sustain life’.

More-Than-Economic Dispossession in Fluid Commons
In Dispossession and the Environment, Paige West asks whether anthropologists draw
theory out of our evidence, or read our evidence through European social theory and
Western philosophy (West 2016). Admittedly, centring this paper on a standardised
set of analytic lenses such as Marxist accumulation and dispossession risks falling
into the latter. I am, however, attempting to use my empirical ﬁndings to reconstruct
processes of accumulation and dispossession through locally articulated capitalisms
(Fairbairn et al. 2014). By focusing on ‘ﬂuid commons’ and ‘more-than-economic’ dis-
possession as an aﬀective critique, this article attempts to draw theory out of ethnogra-
phy and make sense of my interlocutors seeing, smelling, tasting, hearing and sensing
diﬀerent forms of loss, change and embodied experiences of industrial pollution and its
material transformation of the ﬂuid commons they live on, and from.
In deltaic ecologies, waters are inseparable from airs or soils, these are entangled
ecologies, ﬂuid commons where natural resources are not clearly delineated or
deﬁned. The use of ‘ﬂuid’ draws from a growing critical scholarship that points out
the colonial construction of artiﬁcial boundaries of solid (land) and liquid (ﬂowing
waters) in South Asia (Mukherjee & Ghosh 2020) where waters and silt are entwined

6 C. DEWAN

and ever-shifting (D’Souza 2006; Lahiri-Dutt & Samanta 2013; Bhattacharyya 2018; da
Cunha 2018; Mukhopadhyay 2017; Dewan 2021).
The inseparability of land and water comes to the fore with the polluted transform-
ations of ﬂuid commons. Ethnographies of ‘living with’ chemicals highlight the genera-
tive possibilities of toxicity: from how aﬀective experiences of injurious chemicals may
be feared or desired (Chen 2012), ‘chemosociality’ from collective exposures to chemi-
cals (Shapiro & Kirksey 2017; Kirksey 2020) to ‘chemical kinship’ (Balayannis &
Garnett 2020). We may all live in a permanently polluted world where ‘the pollution
of the water has joined the molecular fabric of our bodies’ (Murphy 2013: 495), but
dumping toxic vessels on the Global South illustrates how people are not equally
exposed or protected. While focusing on ‘damage’ may pathologise already dispos-
sessed communities, making them ‘less than fully human’ (Murphy 2017) and stigma-
tise ‘polluted bodies’ (Theriault & Kang 2021), the use of more-than-economic
dispossession is an attempt to emphasise that political structures enable uneven
toxic exposure, necessitating acting in a permanently polluted world (Liboiron,
Tironi & Calvillo 2018).

Extra-Economic Cost-Shifting and Toxic Liability
Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation refers to processes where ‘peasants enjoyed
the right to exploit the common land, which gave pasture to their cattle, and furnished
them with timber, ﬁre-wood, turf etc’, and where enclosure entails expulsing the pea-
santry from the land using extra-economic force (Marx 1976, 1:877). Harvey’s (2005)
concept of Accumulation by Dispossession (ABD) further extends Marx’s primitive
accumulation by incorporating global capitalist ﬁnancial processes since 1973 where
over-accumulated capital ﬁnds new outlets and appropriated nature is converted
into ﬁnancial investment and speculation. Levien further suggests that ADB includes
the use of extra-economic coercion to expropriate means of production, subsistence or
common social wealth (Levien 2012: 940). Viewing pollution as a form of extra-econ-
omic coercion, ‘accumulation by contamination’ can be seen as chemical warfare
(Picard and Beigi 2022) with the ‘incentive to contaminate’ (Ofrias 2017: 436–437).
One aspect of more-than economic draws on ecological economic ideas of ‘extra-
economic means’ as cost-shifting – the socialisation of costs that may endanger the
means of subsistence of humans (Demaria 2017: 83–84; 164–165). Demaria argues
that there are systematic tendencies of cost-shifting environmental damages to the
Global South through a system of [proﬁt] ‘accumulation by contamination’ main-
tained by those in power – ship owners, ship breakers and authorities’ (Demaria
2016: 300). Furthermore, the implementation of the Hong Kong Convention for
Safe and Environmentally Sound Ship Recycling – despite promises of environmen-
tally safe practices – continues an evasion of liability from pollution. Notably, the
HKC is much less stringent with its environmental regulations than the 2018 EU
Ship Recycling Rules. The global maritime industry, the shipping economy that prior-
itises the proﬁts of ship owners and large multinational shipping conglomerates, exter-
nalise the costs of toxic waste disposal outside their own borders (Demaria 2010: 2).

ETHNOS 7

Shipbreaking in Bangladesh thus reproduces a racial capitalist system that devalues
non-white bodies so that they are more exposed to harmful chemical agents than white
bodies (See Pulido 2016). This can be interpreted as an example of modern imperial-
ism (Packer 2021) where the Global North knowingly pollutes ‘the Global South as its
receptable of waste for unrestricted capitalist accumulation’ (Stein & Luna 2021: 100).
This inequality of who lives with what toxins is also seen in the environmental racism
against black communities in the US (Pulido 2016; Murphy 2013; Davies 2018) and as
settler colonial violence in North America (Hoover 2017; Liboiron 2021; Gross 2021;
Voyles 2015; Murphy 2017). More-than-economic dispossession through the extra-
economic means of cost-shifting as ‘accumulation by contamination’ thus illustrates
how global inequalities underpin the unequal distribution of toxic exposure (Liboiron,
Tironi & Calvillo 2018).

Capitalist Social Relations
The agrarian coastal district of Sitakunda has in the past decade been designated a
special economic zone by the state, seeing a rapid transformation into a peri-urban
industrial zone with increased class divides. This is captured by the speeding trucks
loaded with shipping containers carrying goods from ships and local factories on
the Dhaka–Chattogram highway that runs alongside the shipbreaking facilities. The
route is paved with various factories and shops selling items recycled from ships
and illustrates the importance of ship recycling in providing consumer goods to Ban-
gladeshi middle classes (Gregson et al. 2010) – indeed, the processing ‘waste’ from
ships into economic goods creates ‘industrial symbiosis’ (Gregson et al. 2012). This
highway symbolises how Bangladesh’s shipbreaking industry is intimately tied to
both the global and national economies.
Wealthy national conglomerates have capitalist relations, the ability to mobilise
capital and land (Li 2014), to beneﬁt from lucrative shipbreaking, while Sitakunda
landowners able to sell their plots to businesses accumulate the funds to set up
shops selling recycled goods from the ships – or move elsewhere. These capitalist
relations are not only material and based on land and capital (Li 2014), but social in
the sense that these actors have the social (often kinship) networks to beneﬁt from
development (Dewan 2020). Shipbreaking yard owners are able to solicit the
support from a variety of actors from large sections of society through a near-consen-
sus over the idea that capitalist growth generates local jobs, similar to that of Tata in
West Bengal (Nielsen 2010).
Zele, however, do not gain employment as they lack both capitalist and social
relations to partake in unnayan [development] that is essentially toxic, nor do they
have allies to ﬁght their dispossession (Dewan 2020). This illustrates Rosa Luxemburg’s
point that capitalist processes set up social and political barrier between workers who
are made to feel like their industries and interests are diﬀerent from those of people
living in rural places (Luxemburg 1951: 369–371). As this article will come to
discuss, shipbreaking workers themselves are unwilling to see the industries end, no

8 C. DEWAN

matter the health complications that may arise for themselves and their families living
in this formerly agrarian, rapidly industrialising special economic zone.

Aﬀect and More-Than-Human Health
The third aspect of ‘more-than-economic’ draws on environmental anthropology’s
work on ‘more-than-human’ ethnographies that go beyond particular species to
underscore how industrial pollution results in a loss of ecological relations and
health. More-than-economic dispossession helps to bring forth how these ﬂuid
commons in this coastal region – its interconnected forests, tides, canals, rivers
and humid airs – are not only ‘means of subsistence’ and resources for social repro-
duction. When they become polluted, they are materially transformed in ways that
result in the loss of a thriving ecology with rich biodiversity that provides suste-
nance, including the ‘ﬁsh and rice that make a Bengali’ (old Bengali proverb).
Such a focus on pollution and health builds on and expands anthropological
work on ‘embodied ecologies’ where humans are inseparable from their surround-
ing environments (Ford 2019) through the porosity of our bodies that intermingle
with food and our chemically-laden surroundings (Solomon 2016; Agard-Jones
2014, 2013).
Nature’s materiality tends to be undertheorised in processes of [primitive] accumu-
lation, but it is the materiality of nature becoming contaminated that creates livelihood
dispossession (Perreault 2013: 1055). This article expands on this attention to the
materiality of polluted waters on human livelihoods by taking into account the
more-than-human eﬀects of the ecological ruptures caused by industrial contami-
nation. Following Ojeda, social reproduction is about sustaining life – and what is
life without health? Here, health is not only limited to humans but also extends to
the more-than-human. More-than-economic dispossession pays attention to the
aﬀective experiences of pollution and its impact on more-than-human life. Fish and
rice make a Bengali, but what if that ﬁsh is poisonous?
The link between polluted ﬁsh and health is a global concern as harmful chemi-
cals bioaccumulate along the food chain (Mansﬁeld 2012). Carcinogenic POPs con-
taminate ﬁsh and result in the loss of health of those living in polluted waters
(Camargo 2021; Camacho 2017; Hoover 2017: 15). Eating toxic ﬁsh does not
only aﬀect the individual but has environmental epigenetic eﬀects (Guthman &
Mansﬁeld 2013; Hoover 2017: 261), resulting in a shift from ‘you are what you
eat’ to ‘you are what your mother, or your grandmother, ate’ (Lamoreaux 2016).
In Bangladesh, the lack of evidence of establishing causality between pollution, ill
health and reduced ﬁsh populations result in a lack of liability – highlighting
how pollution is tied to equity, politics and environmental justice (Gross 2021;
Liboiron 2021). Focusing on the lived experiences of pollution of rural people in
an industrialising zone is an attempt to make visible local stories of contamination
from the Global South, a ‘guerrilla narrative’ that politicises bodies made ill of
exposure (Iengo & Armiero 2017).

ETHNOS 9

Toxic Liability: From the Basel Convention to the Hong Kong
Convention
A ship is both a good and ﬁxed capital where shipbreaking, by removing ships from the
maritime market, helps to reproduce global capital on an expanding scale (Sibilia 2018).
Ship recycling is thus essential in keeping maritime capitalism aﬂoat. In 2015, China –
the most popular destination for ‘ethical’ and ‘responsible’ ship recycling for actors like
the Danish shipping line Maersk – tightened its environmental regulations and stopped
dismantling non-Chinese ships due to concerns over environmental pollution. Global
shipping companies concerned with corporate social responsibility, therefore, had to
ﬁnd other sites for recycling their ships in ways that would be viewed as ethical. This
accelerated the demand for ‘green yards’ that comply with the 2009 Hong Kong Inter-
national Convention for the Safe and Environmentally Sound Recycling of Ships (HKC)
(Dan Watch 2016). Ship recycling under the HKC requires technical expertise, infra-
structure and downstream waste management and is thus an improvement from ship-
breaking directly on intertidal beaches of the Global South.
‘John’ is a maritime researcher based in the Global North. During our meeting, he
was sceptical against the ‘green recycling’ agenda in Bangladesh. He pointed out that
prior to the HKC, exporting toxic ships to third countries fell under the 1989 Basel
Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes:
The Basel Convention states that if you generate toxic waste you are liable and in charge of
disposing it – or you must justify that you do not have the capacity to do so. With the
Hong Kong Convention, in contrast, the shipowners have no such burden. They only decide
what yard [shipbreaking facility] to sell it [the ship containing hazardous materials] to. The
HKC was tailormade to protect ship owners. India reacted to this and it is now having to
assume the burden of disposing of hazardous waste.

Under the HKC, countries receiving polluting ships must create and pay for waste man-
agement infrastructure to properly dispose of hazardous waste Bangladesh’s aim to ratify
the 2009 HKC thus entails accepting a considerable transfer of liability of waste manage-
ment. Bangladeshi ship recycling facilities must now bear the costs to ‘pre-clean’ ships
from the ship owner. This means that Bangladesh must be able to handle hazardous
and toxic waste that now, under the HKC, can be legitimately dumped into the Global
South. Polluting waters, soils and airs are no longer the legal problems of foreign ship-
owners. Not only is this an example of cost-shifting as an extra-economic means to
accumulate proﬁts by saved expenses on safe disposal (Demaria 2016), it shows also
how this becomes a legal way of avoiding any liability from such contamination.
Demaria’s study of Indian shipbreaking yards in the 2010s is a scathing critique of
dismantling ships in the Global South. Since then, India ratiﬁed the Hong Kong Con-
vention in 2019 and most of its ship recycling facilities are now compliant with the
HKC. Unlike Bangladeshi shipbreaking yards, Indian ship recycling facilities in
Alang have access to high-temperature incinerators, a wastewater treatment plant
that can separate and purify oily waters, and state-of-the-art asbestos removal technol-
ogies – all managed by a private company and much of the waste infrastructure was
funded by Japanese actors. In order to compete with India’s HKC yards, the

10 C. DEWAN

Government of Bangladesh decided in 2018 that it would ratify the HKC by 2023 and
upgrade its existing shipbreaking yards into high-tech, ship recycling facilities and
establish infrastructure for hazardous industrial waste. Bangladesh’s work to incenti-
vise yard owners to make their facilities ‘green’ (i.e. HKC-compliant) was further sup-
ported by donors like Norwegian Norad and the International Maritime Organization.
Several of the most well-known shipbreaking yards in Sitakunda are owned by
wealthy Bangladeshi businessmen part of family-based industrial conglomerates.
They were spending millions of US dollars to hire foreign consultants to redesign
their shipbreaking yards into state-of-the-art ship recycling facilities abiding by inter-
national labour and environmental standards. They repeatedly told me they wished
that they could receive state-subsidised loans for this reform work. Yet there is a
limit to how much work the individual yards can do. During my ﬁeldwork in 2020,
the Government of Bangladesh had yet to establish a Treatment, Storage and Disposal
Facility (TSDF) with a high-temperature incinerator to handle hazardous waste. By
2022 there is still no TSDF. One consultant pointed out: ‘the yard itself becomes a
landﬁll as it is storing these materials from the ships on its own premises while
waiting for the Government of Bangladesh to construct a TSDF’. Another argued
that without a TSDF it is odd that any Bangladeshi yard is certiﬁed as ‘HKC-compliant’.
In a similar vein, stated compliance with environmental regulations was often per-
ceived to be a ‘theatre’ [natok] rather than actually addressing existing concerns
regarding toxic risks. Whenever I met shipbreaking workers – independently or in
the company of NGO staﬀ – they laughed about the ‘inspections’ carried out by gov-
ernment authorities [after emphasising how they want ship recycling to continue in
Bangladesh]. They suggested that this was a performance to tick oﬀ boxes in a checklist
more than it was to ensure the safety of workers and the environment. For example,
most of the oily-water separators that shipbreaking yards are supposed to have do
not actually work. One of them stated:
The most common ship type to arrive to Bangladesh are oil tankers because they are made out
of high-quality steel. However, it is impossible to remove all the traces of oil from the drums of
these tankers. The oil is washed away with the high tide – rather than puriﬁed in an oily-water
separator.2
Shipbreaking workers were mostly concerned with kalo tel (black oil, crude oil) as
well as asbestos, glass wool and the smoke from cutting toxic paint-laden steel with a
hand-held gas torch. When I asked them what a solution could be to truly make ship-
breaking ‘green’ and less polluting, they replied that they wish that ships should be
cleaned from poisonous substances before entering Bangladesh. Arguably, the stan-
dards of the Basel Convention banning the transboundary movement of hazardous
waste would be preferable for Bangladeshi shipbreaking workers over the HKC that
transfers this liability on the receiving nation lacking proper enforcement of environ-
mental regulations. Under both conventions, more-than-economic cost-shifting
enables proﬁt accumulation by contamination (Demaria 2017) in ways that reinforce
racial capitalism (Pulido 2016) and waste colonialism (Liboiron 2018). With the HKC,
however, a toxic liability occurs where this dumping is now green-washed and made
more legitimate and acceptable.

ETHNOS 11

Capitalist Social Relations: Enclosing Khas Mangroves and
Embankments
The ongoing eﬀorts to make shipbreaking into ‘sustainable ship recycling’ has ironically
resulted in a larger area of coastal belt becoming enclosed and polluted – interspersed
with active and inactive shipbreaking yards. Active shipbreaking yards are hidden from
outside view through concrete walls watched by armed guards in uniforms policing
entry – barring local ﬁshing and non-ﬁshing communities from enjoying the view of
the ocean. In contrast, abandoned and inactive yards have become derelict ruins and
are easily accessed. Many of these abandoned facilities are littered with waste, rusting
machinery as well as abandoned and half-broken ships with their broken parts
peeking through the water’s edge with black oily waters visibly marking the surface.
The farther north one walks, one comes to an eroding embankment. Here, company
names are listed on signboards placed on green plots of land devoid of any shipbreak-
ing infrastructure. The inactive yards and the signboards of yards to be established
illustrate a wider process of enclosing coastal land for shipbreaking since the 1990s.
My rural interlocutors suggested that shipbreaking took oﬀ due to the 1991 Bangla-
desh cyclone when hundreds of families vacated sea-facing lands. In addition, inter-
national factors such as the global push to ﬁnd a new dismantling market as Taiwan
stopped recycling ships in the late 1980s (Demaria 2010) and favourable bank loans
awarded to those establishing shipbreaking yards (Sibilia 2019) may also have contribu-
ted. By 2020, more than 200 shipbreaking yards have been formally registered with the
authorities, yet in practice only between 50 and 70 yards are considered ‘active’. This illus-
trates the low barrier to entry in shipbreaking which was completely unregulated until
2011 when the High Court of Bangladesh closed all shipbreaking yards, set up environ-
mental and labour standards and transferred the responsibility of overseeing shipbreak-
ing from the Ministry of Environment to the Ministry of Industry (Abdullah et al. 2013).
Stakeholders involved in the HKC process suggested that signboards with the company
names on them are a symptom of unserious actors pretending to start shipbreaking oper-
ations in order to obtain aﬀordable loans. They expressed a belief that the pressure to
invest millions of U.S. dollars to upgrade existing yards to comply with the HKC would
weed out unserious actors and result in fewer and higher standard ship recycling facilities.
Still, ever since ship recycling became recognised as an industry and subject to regulations
and controls, the area where ships are broken apart has actually doubled. A researcher at a
local university shared that the area was only three kilometres long in 1988. By 2005 this
area had expanded to 7 kilometres, 11 kilometres by 2009, 15 kilometres by 2014 and to
approximately 22 kilometres by 2020. The push to create ‘green yards’ thus coincides with
global maritime capitalist demands to replace China as a recycling site.
To understand how shipbreaking expansion happened on the ground, one must also
understand the ways in which state-owned embankments, state-planted forests and
private arable land came to become enclosed and converted into shipbreaking yards.
Unlike the Sundarbans mangroves of southwest Bangladesh and West Bengal with
the iconic Bengal tiger, the mangrove trees in Sitakunda were planted from 1968 to
2011 by the Bangladesh Forest Department as part of state aﬀorestation eﬀorts to

12 C. DEWAN

stop coastal erosion (Mamun et al. 2021). The ‘common lands’, khas jomi, that is, public
and state-owned land, enclosed in this context comprised of a mix of khas mangrove
forests [keowra bon, lat. Sonneratia apetala], and a khas ﬂood-protection embankment.
People are entitled to access rights on all khas lands, sea-facing embankments on khas
jomi provide unlimited coastal access to the sea, with landless or poor peasant house-
holds able to occupy (squat) on such lands (Adnan 2013, 2016).
Mostafa is a Bengali Muslim man in his 30s who grew up in Sitakunda with his large
extended kinship network of families that once lived close to the coast. He recalled how
they, the villagers, were complicit in cutting down the mangroves:
I was part of cutting down trees many years ago as a child. I got 1000 taka to just bind and hold
down a forest guard in ropes. I didn’t understand then what this meant. We cut down the
forests and they are now gone.

Mostafa also added that businessmen buy up much of the agricultural land from
brokers who know the community and when land might be up for sale. These
brokers pressure locals into selling their land, often by sending intermediary agents
that the seller might like and trust to convince them.3
The Zele, a migrant group of Hindu ﬁshermen caste squatters arriving in Sitakunda
from Sandeep in the 1970s, never owned land here. Runa Kaki, a Hindu Zele woman in
her late 50s admitted that Zele was also complicit in helping shipbreaking yard owners
cut down the mangrove trees ‘in order to cut [kata, dismantle] ships’. She also
described how shipbreaking negatively aﬀects the Zele who are fully dependent on
coastal waters and access to the ocean. Their expensive ﬁshing nets are torn apart
by incoming vessels and the black oil that leaks out from shipbreaking negatively
aﬀects their ability to sustain their livelihoods.
The removal of the mangroves and the poor state of the ﬂood-protection embank-
ment allows saline tidal water to breach into their village and their homestead ponds.
The high tide brings in not only ﬁsh but also polluted water that contaminates local
homestead ponds with black oil as well as the Zele’s expensive (paid for via loans)
ﬁshing nets so that the ﬁsh they catch end up smelling like oil. ‘We cannot sell it
[the ﬁsh], we cannot eat it’, Runa Kaki stated as a matter of fact.
Now we are without trees. We have to buy ﬁrewood for cooking that costs 250 taka for 40 kg.
Zele do not cultivate food. We keep some goats, ducks, chicken but they die suddenly after
drinking water the contaminated with black oil from the ships.

The Zele are not employed by the factories or shipbreaking yards and desperately
want shipbreaking to end in contrast to shipbreaking workers who are adamant that
ships continue to come to Bangladesh. The Zele not only lack the ability to mobilise
capital and land (Li 2014), to beneﬁt from lucrative shipbreaking but also the social
relations and kinship networks to be able to partake in Sitakunda’s transformation
as an industrialising economic zone. Without allies, the Zele is an example of the
barrier between those living in rural places and the workers employed in capitalist
industries (Luxemburg 1951: 369–371).

ETHNOS 13

Aﬀect and the Loss of More-Than-Human Health
While sitting with Nikhil kaka in a Zele village, we could see the nearby shipbreaking
yard emitting a thick black smoke – a common sight, he explained. When asked about
the environmental changes he had witnessed, Nikhil kaka replied that the trees are
dying while the number of birds has decreased in the area:
with no trees, where will all the birds go? There’s no ﬁsh we can easily catch, and no land for
cows to graze on. Here we now only have crows and cats. It feels good to wake up to the sound
of birds, but we only hear industrial noises instead. Without birds, human illnesses increase.

This sensory evocation illustrates how a healthy ecology for more-than-humans is
essential for healthy humans.
The loss of ﬁsh and cultivated foods as a result of polluted ﬂuid commons is a case in
point. Zele ﬁshermen in diﬀerent villages were concerned over the reduction of ﬁsh in
coastal waters. Neel Kaka describes the black oil leaking from the shipbreaking process
as toxic, so much so that many small ﬁsh and ﬁngerlings die from ‘eating black oil’. The
asbestos and glass wool that have for a long time been dumped into the waters have also
contributed to the death of ﬁsh spawn according to the Zele elders I spoke with. Prasad
Kaka stated that before the yards, there were bata mach, gora mach, boil mach. Lakwa
mach, almost two metres long, is one that he has not seen for over a decade. Chitta-
gong’s popular laitta mach [lat. harpadon nehereus] is included among the ﬁsh that
are less abundant compared to the past, along with very large ﬁshes like hriska mach,
kaj puti, para chan and lajua mach ‘ﬁlled with taste’. ‘There is less chandana hilsha,
koral mach, bhetki, none of them are found here, Sagarer mach (ocean ﬁsh) still have
lots of taste’, Prasad Kaka said. The Bengali proverb Maach-e Bhaat-e Bangali (Fish
and rice make a Bengali) captures the importance of these ﬁsh for Bengali identity
and how material changes to ﬁsh bodies are experienced as the loss of taste.
Similar to the Zele, Muslim families who have resided in Sitakunda for decades also
mourned the loss of taste in food, particularly locally grown tomato, pumpkins, seem
(ﬂat beans) and lao (gourd). Mostafa’s aunt recounted how there were cows, rice ﬁelds,
jhum (shifting) cultivation, vegetables that tasted wonderfully, fresh coriander, fresh
onions as recent as 2005: ‘we used to have everything here, dates and date juice.
Now this is an industrial zone’. The fruit trees (jackfruit, guava, pineapple, betel nut,
pomegranate, safeda, kalo jam and jamrul) are covered with a red metallic dust
from heavy air pollution and do not bear fruit. Residents can no longer eat locally
available foods they must buy everything.
If it is unhealthy or not, poisonous or not, we have to eat regardless. This food we buy from the
market tastes less than it used to. There’s less nutrition in this food. But what can we do? We
have to eat it.

This reﬂection of how the taste, the material quality of the ﬁsh and diﬀerent culti-
vated foods was diﬀerent highlights toxic sensorium (Stein & Luna 2021), how one can
taste toxicity (Senanayake 2019) or that chemicals may reduce the taste in foods
(Dewan 2021). Similar to my interlocutors in southwest coastal Bangladesh living in
saline tiger-prawn cultivating villages, this mourning of locally cultivated foods and

14 C. DEWAN

how they tasted, is an eﬀective critique of environmental change (Dewan 2021: 16;
Sultana 2015) that reﬂects the ‘ghosts’ of lost species in the Anthropocene (Gan
et al. 2017). The loss of locally available foods as well as the loss of more-than-
human biodiversity with its aﬀective and sensory eﬀects constitutes more-than-econ-
omic dispossession – this comes to the fore with the changed quantity and quality of
ﬁsh so integral to deltaic Bengali identity.
The loss of taste and the changing quality of food are enmeshed with pollution,
where air pollution settles on trees, soils and in people’s lungs. Throughout my
ﬁeldwork, locals complained over industrial air pollution, breathing diﬃculties and
that the number of illnesses is increasing. Another interlocutor pointed out: ‘there is
always a much longer line to the pharmacy than to the general store nowadays’.
Externally-funded studies have found carcinogenic air pollution in the areas sur-
rounding shipbreaking yards (Nøst et al. 2015) as well as asbestos among shipbreaking
workers (Courtice et al. 2011; Muralidhar, Ahasan & Khan 2017). According to
workers, civil society activists, medical professionals and consultants working inside
the yards that I spoke to, a majority of shipbreaking workers take painkillers regularly
in order to work so as to not lose income. People in Sitakunda, including shipbreaking
families, felt that they should pre-emptively leave, ﬁnding it hard to breathe and even
live in this area.
Prasad Kaka pointed out:
Zele in their 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s are dying, lots of people have died. They cough up blood from
their lungs. Smoke from shipbreaking and smoke from factories combine to make us sick. But
what can we do? We cannot say anything to them [the owners]. What can we say? They would
just ask us ‘should we close our industries for you’?

The dismissal over concerns over life and health with a remark about closing industries
illustrates the political prioritisation of economic growth through industries, where
ship recycling provides much of the nation’s steel demands. Ships are toxic and are
coated with chemicals intended to prevent rust and algae blooms. When the steel is
taken apart by handheld gas torches, these chemicals react and turn into toxic
smoke. Yet while the HKC is focused on improving worker safety with personal pro-
tective equipment, the updated ship recycling facilities will continue to be open-air
outdoor facilities. Furthermore, actors involved in reforming Bangladesh’s ship recy-
cling industry argue that shipbreaking yards are not the main culprits to this environ-
mental pollution and illnesses among local workers and ﬁshermen. They are able to do
so as there is no systematic data collected on health impacts on the local communities
and workers.
The lack of evidence of the causes of pollution and ﬁsh reduction also means that
there is a lack of liability for who is responsible for ﬁxing these problems. This is
further accentuated by the very ﬂuidity of this coastal commons that exacerbates the
issue of the existence of several competing sources of pollution (ship breaking yards,
garment factories, oil reﬁneries, steel processing plants) and other factors reducing
ﬁsh populations beyond pollution (loss of breeding grounds, overﬁshing). Such
‘toxic layering’, or the ‘accumulation of multiple and potentially interacting industrial

ETHNOS 15

toxins’ (Goldstein & Hall 2015: 640) makes it diﬃcult to establish a causal relationship
between toxic exposures and illness as most ethnographies of living with polluted
environments can contest.
The ruling elites, in business and politics, have designated Sitakunda into a special
economic zone where business concerns in Chattogram outweigh environmental and
health concerns. A man maimed in an accident at a shipbreaking yard said:
The yards are becoming richer and richer, while poor people are becoming poorer and poorer.
There is development, but there is corruption inside all of them. It is on the backs of workers
that this economic development is even happening.

The distance between those polluting (nationally and internationally) and those having
to live with pollution is thus a matter of class. The Bangladeshi elites owning ship-
breaking yards live in shielded areas, with air-conditioned private vehicles and air-con-
ditioned oﬃces creating a distance between pollution and exposure. These actors are
not foreign or from the Global North: their capitalist relations are inextricable from
their social relations, kinship network and family ties that help them wield inﬂuence
to shape development in Bangladesh. Thus, ‘green ship recycling’ may expand ‘econ-
omic development’, but are these environmental eﬀorts serious without proper waste
management, limited environmental monitoring and no discussion on rectifying exist-
ing pollution that is persistent and linger?

Conclusion
More-than-economic ‘accumulation by contamination’ has resulted in Bangladesh
being a cheap destination for dismantling toxic ships, ﬁlled with hazardous materials.
Land-based industries’ polluting activities do not stay within enclosed boundaries,
toxic residues of hazardous materials, asbestos, crude oil, PCBs and other carcinogens
and persistent organic pollutants seep into waters and air, travelling to distant soils and
transform the qualities of surrounding humid air, ground- and surface waters and soils
– Sitakunda’s ﬂuid commons. The pollution from ships is thus not only one where
toxic residues leak, ooze and persist but where the act of burning paint-coated steel
creates toxic fumes that travel via air and settles in people’s lungs, whether they
work for these industries or not. These toxic residues transform and rupture ecological
relations in an interconnected ﬂuid commons, aﬀecting not only human health but
that of other species, plants and entangled ecologies of water, sediments and soils. Mar-
ginalised poor communities like the religious minority Zele ﬁshermen lack the capital-
ist social relations to beneﬁt from economic growth or even to resist uneven toxic
exposure.
Their aﬀective and sensory experiences of loss of more-than-human species such as
ﬁsh shows the importance of more-than-economic dispossession to understand the
emic and eﬀective understandings of dispossession as the loss of an ability to sustain
life. Industrial pollution materially transforms the quantity and quality of ﬁsh so inte-
gral to deltaic Bengali identity. Unlike the reversibility of salinisation by shrimp farms
in southwest coastal Bangladesh, the loss of healthy commons in the coastal

16 C. DEWAN

Chattogram division with ‘only cats and crows’ and ‘no birds, only industrial noises’
cannot be undone with tenure reform due to their more-than-human temporalities
of the lingering eﬀects of hazardous materials such as crude oil, and its carcinogenic
persistent organic pollutants.
This, in turn, illustrates how enforcement of environmental and labour laws is weak
and underfunded. There is no regular data collection on asbestos, dioxins and PCBs in
these tidal sediments, or eﬀorts to trace these toxic residues – indeed it is this lack of
environmental precautions that enable proﬁt accumulation by contamination through
extra-economic cost-shifting. Maritime actors and donors involved in making ship
recycling ‘green’ are set on fulﬁlling the minimum requirements of the HKC but Ban-
gladeshi regulatory authorities need further strengthening and support. Even if yards
may become HKC-compliant, lacking downstream management of hazardous
materials risk to continue a tradition of inspections as ‘theatre’ and contribute to wor-
sening already existing, and signiﬁcant, environmental degradation and health-hazar-
dous pollution. This attention to the more-than-economic forms of dispossession
caused by industrial pollution exposes the context-speciﬁc structures of power that
permit particular bodies to be more exposed to toxic substances that leak, ooze and
persist far beyond tenured enclosures, transforming ﬂuid commons irreversibly and
for generations.
To conclude, the reduction of safeguards against transnational dumping of hazar-
dous materials through the shift from the 1989 Basel Convention to the 2009 Hong
Kong Convention for Safe and Environmentally Sound Ship Recycling beneﬁt ship
owners and Bangladeshi [elite] ship recycling actors. Ethnographic attention to the
lived experiences of more-than-economic dispossession among the most marginalised
communities in a rural and increasingly industrialising region reveals how underlying
global – and domestic – power structures enable uneven toxic exposure both due to,
but also beyond that of, colonial environmental racism.

Notes
1. All names and rural places are pseudonyms to ensure the anonymity of my interlocutors. This
article draws on multi-sited ethnographic ﬁeldwork I conducted from December 2019 to
March 2020. I interviewed a variety of local NGO workers, trade union and labour rights acti-
vists, academics, ship recycling yard owners and government oﬃcials in Dhaka and Chatto-
gram city; male shipbreaking workers and their families as well as landless Hindu ﬁshermen
of the Zele caste, and interviews with international consultants and researchers. I was repeat-
edly warned before and during ﬁeldwork that ‘shipbreaking is a very dangerous industry: be
careful’. Workers could lose their jobs if speaking up, organisations risking blacklisting. To
conceal the identities of those who helped me I therefore made use of ﬁeld assistants from
diﬀerent organisations and local communities. I am a ﬂuent Bangla speaker and conducted
all my interviews myself.
2. Government oﬃcials, on the other hand, stated that no oil is wasted, that each drop of oil is
recycled – sold to industries like brick kilns[2] and burned again. This re-processed oil is
then used to paint wooden ﬁsher boats.
3. While beyond the scope of the current paper, existing studies on Bangladesh point to corrup-
tion and violence in the distribution of khas lands (Feldman and Geisler 2012: 977). Elites have

ETHNOS 17

been shown to be successful in manipulating laws, courts, etc. in securing private property
through the control and manipulation of land titles, registries and maps on the expanding
fringe of Dhaka and other urban areas (Feldman and Geisler 2012: 982).

Acknowledgements
Thanks to all the Bangladeshis in Dhaka, Chattogram and Sitakunda who helped me conduct my
ﬁeldwork, by sharing their valuable time, experience, networks and insights with me – from govern-
ment oﬃcials, academics and NGO staﬀ, to shipbreaking workers and ﬁshermen communities. I could
not have done this research without them. Thanks to Knut Nustad, Thomas Hylland Eriksen and the
anonymous reviewers for constructive feedback on earlier drafts. A special thanks to Heather Swanson
for helping me think through ‘more-than-economic’ and dispossession by pollution, and to Elisabeth
Schober for critical suggestions on theories of dispossession and accumulation.

Ethics Declaration
The research has received ethical approval from the Norwegian Centre for Research
Data (NSD) and the Ministry of Industries, Government of Bangladesh. Oral informed
consent has been obtained by research participants and all personal data has been
anonymised to ensure conﬁdentiality of interlocutors.

Disclosure Statement
No potential conﬂict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Funding
This research was funded by the Norwegian Research Council [grant number 275204/F10]; Norges
Forskningsråd for the project Disassembling the Lifecycle of Container Ships: Ethnographic Explora-
tions of Maritime Working Worlds.

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Feldman, Shelley & Charles Geisler. 2012. Land Expropriation and Displacement in Bangladesh. The
Journal of Peasant Studies, 39(3–4):971–993.

ETHNOS 19

Fisher, Josh, Mary Mostafanezhad, Alex Nading & Sarah Marie Wiebe. 2021. Introduction: Pollution
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20 C. DEWAN

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ETHNOS 21

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Voyles, Traci Brynne. 2015. Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
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Camelia Dewan, PhD
Uppsala University, Faculty Member
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Can the poor resist capital? Conflicts over 'accumulation by contamination' at the ship-breaking yard of Alang (India) - Book Chapter
Federico Demaria
How struggles for environmental justice contribute to the environmental sustainability of the economy. Capital looks at waste management as a new emergent global market, where a rentier position can be acquired and profits realized. Indeed, capitalists consider waste management as one among several economic spaces to be occupied for the expansion of the scale and scope of capital accumulation (Harvey, 2003). However, the commodification, the marketization and the privatization of wastes increase ecological distribution conflicts, i.e. the struggles around the redistribution of benefits and costs generated by an increase of the societal metabolism (the energy and material flows) of industrialized societies (Martinez-Alier, 2002). Shipbreaking in the developing world is not just an externality but a successful case of cost shifting, or else, capital accumulation by contamination. This is the process by which the capital system endangers, through cost-shifting, the means of existence (and subsistence) of human beings to in order to find new possibilities for capital valorization (e.g. alteration of biogeochemical cycles). An appropriation of de-facto property rights takes place resulting in the shifting of costs and risks, i.e. exploiting the sinks over their sustainable assimilative capacity (e.g. climate change). The consequences most likely fall upon the most vulnerable social groups (e.g. small scale farmers or fishers in the South), but the society as a whole can be affected. The shipping industry constitutes a key element in the infrastructure of the world's social metabolism. Ocean-going ships are owned and used for their trade by developed countries but are often demolished, together with their toxic materials, in developing countries. Ship breaking is the process of dismantling an obsolete vessel's structure for scrapping or disposal. The Alang–Sosiya yard (India), one of the world largest shipbreaking yards, is studied here with particular attention to toxic waste management. Ship owners and ship breakers obtain large profits dumping the environmental costs on workers, local farmers and fishers. This unequal distribution of benefits and burdens, due to an international and national uneven distribution of power, has led to an ecological distribution conflict. The controversy at the Indian Supreme Court in 2006 over the dismantling of the ocean liner ‘Blue Lady,’ shows how the different languages of valuation expressed by different social groups clashed and how a language that expresses sustainability as monetary benefit at the national scale, dominated. Book: Nature, Economy and Society: Understanding the Linkages. Springer, 2015. http://www.springer.com/us/book/9788132224037#aboutAuthors
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Remote sensing of fish-processing in the Sundarbans Reserve Forest, Bangladesh: an insight into the modern slavery-environment nexus in the coastal fringe
Kevin Bales
Maritime Studies
Land-based fish-processing activities in coastal fringe areas and their social-ecological impacts have often been overlooked by marine scientists and antislavery groups. Using remote sensing methods, the location and impacts of fish-processing activities were assessed within a case study of Bangladesh’s Sundarbans mangrove forests. Ten fish-processing camps were identified, with some occurring in locations where human activity is banned. Environmental degradation included the removal of mangroves, erosion, and the destruction of protected areas. Previous studies have identified cases of labour exploitation and modern slavery occurring within the Sundarbans, and remote sensing was used to triangulate these claims by providing spatial and temporal analysis to increase the understanding of the operational trends at these locations. These findings were linked to the cyclical relationship between modern slavery and environmental degradation, whereby environmental damage is both a driver ...
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Ecocidal Displacements in Bangladesh: A Climate-Affected Hot-Zone
Umme Sayeda
Act for Displaced , 2021
The author illustrates the background scenario of some of Bangladesh’s highly funded developmental projects. The scenario is full of sorrows of extreme poverty, lack of right even to live, and displacement. This is all how natural, and human-made disasters are formulating an influential but neglected identity, “ecological refugeehood.”
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The People’s Forest: Environmental Activism Surrounding the Sundarbans in Bangladesh (2018)
Helal Mohammed Khan
The Jahangirnagar Review, 2018
Since 2010, the governments of Bangladesh and India have been progressing with a coal-fired power plant at Rampal (Bangladesh) in the vicinity of the Sundarbans, world’s largest mangrove forest. The project saw widespread popular protests in Bangladesh and elsewhere, with scholarly reports also adding to the activism. Political leaders from the ruling party along with a number of state officials in Bangladesh also campaigned in support of the project, disregarding the project’s apparent lack of prospect in energy production and susceptibility to cause significant harm to the Sundarbans. In this essay we engage with these various representations of the Sundarbans-Rampal affairs and show how newer interest identities emerge from them, and, consequently, how state-people relation changes. Analyzing the popular activism-populism paradox, we argue that Rampal helps in picturing the oft-common global nexus that has power-hungry governments on the one side and increasingly wary and seemingly defenseless citizens on the other.
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Water Pollution and Environmental Injustices in Bangladesh
sarker faroque
International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, 2021
Water is an essential element for human life but is being wasted and made unsafe due to anthropogenic activities and pollution. In Bangladesh, both surface water and groundwater are being polluted due to the rapid growth of urbanisation and industrialisation, and most importantly, arsenic contamination and industrial waste are affecting the potability of this natural resource. Bangladesh is a highly polluted country that faces a scarcity of clean water, despite having an abundance of water sources. This article presents a range of examples of existing environmental pollution in Bangladesh before focusing on water pollution and its causes and consequences. In addition, this article discusses how inefficient water management and poor law enforcement have failed to ensure environmental justice for the citizens of Bangladesh. Finally, this article concludes with observations about some ways forward to ensure water justice, enable access to clean water for all and achieve sustainable dev...
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Politics of Pollution: Eco-Imperialistic Reading of Amitav Ghosh’s River of Smoke
Dr.K. Maheshini
Ishal Paithrkam, 2025
Every living and non-living thing is a part of the natural world. The human condition, literature, and environment are all inextricably connected. The world is currently facing danger due to the recent peak of ecological issues brought on by industrialization and its accelerated growth. Amitav Ghosh is a well-known writer who attempts to use his works to convey his opinions about the environment and educate readers about ecological circumstances and their detrimental effects. In his works, Ghosh illustrates how human brutality to the natural world has made an impact on living things. He is one of the successfully acknowledged writers of the environment. Not only are his books an important collection of writing that addresses social and historical issues, but they also show how the writer has approached ecological issues from an ecocritical perspective. His book concerns the idea that the survival of humans on earth will be threatened by the fast deterioration of biological variety. The primary goal of this paper is to investigate the extent to which the chosen book is illuminated by an ecocritical viewpoint in terms of ecological imperialism. He clearly evaluates the political circumstances behind the devastation of the ecosystem and brings out the plight of the native people who suffer under the umbrella of imperialism. With the motive of extending territories, the colonisers never thought of improving the colonised. Colonisers intended only to use the resources for the welfare of their own nation and they turned blind eye towards the colonised countries by exploiting the manpower.
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Fluid lives: subjectivities, gender and water in rural Bangladesh
Farhana Sultana
Gender Place and Culture, 2009
This article seeks to contribute to the emerging debates in gender–water and gender–nature literatures by looking at the ways that gendered subjectivities are simultaneously (re)produced by societal, spatial and natural/ecological factors, as well as materialities of the body and of heterogeneous waterscapes. Drawing from fieldwork conducted in Bangladesh on arsenic contamination of drinking water, the article looks at the ways that gender relations are influenced by not just direct resource use/control/access and the implications of different types of waters, but also by the ideological constructs of masculinity/femininity, which can work in iterative ways to influence how people relate to different kinds of water. Conflicts and struggles over water inflect gendered identities and sense of self, where both men and women participate in reproducing and challenging prevailing norms and practices. As a result, multiple social and ecological factors interact in complex and interlinked ways to complicate gender–water relations, whereby socio-spatial subjectivities are re/produced in water management and end up reinforcing existing inequities. The article demonstrates that gender–water relations are not just intersected by social axes, as generally argued by feminist scholars, but also by ecological change and spatial relations vis-à-vis water, where simultaneously socialized, ecologized, spatialized and embodied subjectivities are produced and negotiated in everyday practices.
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"Web of Life Beyond Species Boundaries: A Multispecies Anthropology of Marine Pollution, Adaptation, and Transformation in Fisherman-Fish-Sea Relationships
Mulyadin Permana
This research examines the complex relationships between fishermen, fish, and marine ecosystems in Jakarta Bay within the context of severe environmental pollution. Using a multispecies ethnographic approach, this study reveals how industrial waste pollution has fundamentally altered the web of life in the region. Key findings show that fishermen have developed various adaptation strategies, including shifting from traditional fishing to using lift nets and green mussel cultivation. However, these adaptations have limitations when facing severe pollution. The research also uncovers the complexity of power relations in coastal environmental management, where large industrial interests often dominate environmental policies. This study contributes to a richer understanding of how human and non-human communities respond, adapt, and transform in the face of environmental degradation, while highlighting the importance of a holistic approach in coastal environmental management.
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Marginalization of Sundarbans' Marichjhapi: Ecocriticism Approaches in Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide and Deep Halder's Blood Island
Camellia Biswas
Literature, 2022
The article identifies the Sundarbans landscape as a ‘marginal scape’ in the context of the Marichjhapi Massacre of 1979. It applies the conservationist vs. environmental (in)justice approach of ecocriticism to Amitava Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide and Deep Halder’s Blood Island: An Oral History of Marichjhapi Massacre. It relates the idea of environmental discrimination and injustice based on caste to the misallocation of the ‘Commons’. For the Marichjhapi Dalit Refugees, the Sundarbans landscape and its ecological attributes become an essential medium in reconstructing their layered identity after migrating from Bangladesh to Sundarbans, which becomes marginalized. The paper argues that the management of environmental resources/landscapes has always been in the hands of the rich, entwined with Brahminical hegemony, who try to impose political geography over ecological systems to suppress the dispossessed. It concludes by comprehending that any justice-based approach (here, social and environmental) still favours non-human beings and ends up causing a multi-layered crisis for marginalized human populations.
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Coastal and Marine Pollution in Bangladesh: Pathways, Hotspots and Adaptation Strategies
Naveen Kalra
European Journal of Environment and Earth Sciences
Marine and coastal pollution is a global issue for human health and biodiversity. We have investigated pollution sources, flow patterns, hotspots, challenges, and adaptation policies in Bangladesh. Industries, ship breaking yards, sewage, tourism, and transboundary depositions are the main sources of pollutions. The Ganges, Padma, Jamuna, Brahmaputra and Meghna carry wastes to the Bay of Bengal. Pollution hotspots are Dhaka, Gazipur, Narshingdi, Narayanganj, Chittagong, Khulna, Mongla port and Sylhet city. Textile and dyeing industries discharge 12.7–13.5 million m3 waste waters annually and pollute 20% of fresh water. Ship breaking yards dump about 22.5 tons polychlorinated biphenyls in a year. More than 50% of the marine oil pollution comes from urban activities. Plastic wastes at 3000 t day-1 and tourism are also contributing to the coastal pollution. Effluent releasing standards are not maintained, and thus higher concentrations of heavy metals are found with marine fishes. Use ...
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(PDF) Toxic Residues in Fluid Commons: More-Than-Economic Dispossession and Shipbreaking in Coastal Bangladesh