The Natural Evil of the Anthropocene: A Critical Analysis of Climate-Change Adaptation Strategies in Bangladesh Coastal Farmlands

As of this year, official submissions have been made to both the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) and the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) that the Anthropocene be officially approved as the term for the current geologic time. Recognition that humans have a major suite of impacts on the natural environment has a much-longer history than the word “Anthropocene.” Acceptance of the Anthropocene as the neologism for the current geological epoch centers, as its name would suggest, the Anthropos— the human species in its totality. In this way, Anthropocene discourse, writes Jason Moore, “conceals a dirty secret of modern history” by excluding a great many humans from Humanity. (Moore, 2016) The generally regarded legitimacy of the term not only reinforces a dangerous anthropocentricism but also acts as a political evasion that dilutes the conjunctural dynamics through which political economy actively shape the climate crisis.

Two words saturate Anthropocene literature: mitigation and adaptation. (Parenti, 2011) On the one hand, mitigation speaks to the drastic necessity to reduce CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions while moving toward supposedly cleaner energy sources. Adaptation, on the other hand, refers to the planning and implementing of technologies and political solutions necessary to live with the effects of climate change. While mitigation efforts, as meager as they are, seem to be pointed in somewhat the right direction, adaptation to the effects of climate change are increasingly dispossessive and authoritarian. New configurations of power are evolving to meet the presumed adaptive demands defined by Anthropocene discourse, and these assemblages form, what Kasia Paprocki calls, “adaptation regimes.” (Paprocki, 2021) The agents who build, shape, and participate in these adaptive regimes frame their various interventions in terms of a region’s vulnerability to climate change based on Anthropocene logics while simultaneously practicing historical patterns of accumulation based on colonial development models. The explicit justification is simple: the more vulnerable a locality is to the Anthropocene landscape, the more critical it is for development organizations to implement adaptive interventions.

In February of this year, the International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD) and Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology revealed a study that ranked Bangladesh not only as a “frontline country in the global climate change crisis,” but as “the 8th most vulnerable [country] to climate change.” Through Anthropocene discourse, Bangladesh is seen as uniquely vulnerable to climate change, and therefore is a key site to experiment upon with lucrative developmental models. Adaptative regimes, composed of academics, scientists, and NGOs, seek to describe the crisis while shaping the adaptive responses. This knowledge production, however, is shaped by ongoing histories of extraction that are masked by contemporary Anthropocene discourse. For this reason, Bangladesh is a key site for understanding the theodical dimensions of climate adaptation and the theodicy of the Anthropocene more broadly.

For the purposes of this brief proposal, the lucrative transition from rice paddies to shrimp aquacultures in southwestern Bangladesh coastal farmlands will be the illustrative focus for understanding the logics of these adaptive strategies as a whole. Tiger shrimp (Penaeus monodon) is commercially known as “white gold” in Bangladesh due to its export value. (Islam, 2009) The shrimp industry is the second largest export sector in Bangladesh, valued at US$304 million with its greatest demand coming from the European Union and the United States. (Ahmed and Diana, 2015) For generations prior to the 1980s, families in the region farmed rice, but rising seas and storm surges began to push saltwater over the banks of tidal rivers causing seawater to poison their fields. Salinity intrusion adversely affected agriculture in the southern coastal districts. With massive infusions of foreign aid, these farmers began “the transition from paddy to pond” by flooding 680,000 acres with brackish water in order to provide hospitable growing environments for shrimp (Miller, 2022) Development agencies aggressively pushed the proliferation of brackish aquaculture as a means to lift coastal communities out of poverty. Recent findings, however, show little impact on alleviating poverty, and the major portion of profits going to wealthy landowners. (Johnson et al., 2016) In this sense, aquaculture development projects that were underwritten by foreign institutions and described as adaptive climate measures exacerbated Bangladesh’s vulnerability to the climate crisis. (Thomas, 2020) Simultaneously, Anthropocene narratives are deployed in order to depoliticize and obscure the beneficiaries of these economic developments.

In this way, development models put forward by NGOs like USAID (a major supporter of the expansion of shrimp aquaculture in Bangladesh) reaffirms narrow, antipolitical explanations to the climate crisis, which instills neoliberal economic and political rationalities into adaptive strategies. (Dempsey and Suarez, 2016) These Anthropocene framings make use of argumentative structures that are essentially secularized theodicies. That is to say, much like the Christian conception of the Fall, Anthropocene discourse blames humanity in-general for the climate crisis rather than the extractive demands of global capital flows. Many of the development agencies that make up the various adaptive regimes openly acknowledge that their interventions “would be the same regardless of climate imperatives.” (Paprocki, 2021) Therefore, Anthropocene discourse is a reification of neoliberal and colonial “plausibility structures.” (Berger, 1967) These historical trends become hidden within the seemingly unstoppable forces at play in the Anthropocene. To the likely dismay of earlier proponents, the concept of the Anthropocene functions apologetically as a theodicy for extractive practices.

The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 prompted Voltaire, along with other Enlightenment thinkers, to describe the event as a “natural evil.” Such language was intended to critique Leibnizian theodicies. Rousseau responded to Voltaire by saying that natural evil ignored the construction and organization of the city, with its close human confinement, led to much of the death. In a similar fashion, Anthropocene discourse naturalizes “humanity in-general” into a Voltairean “natural evil” thereby shifting the responsibility of the biospheric crisis away from the beyond-human assemblages of capital accumulation that claim to solve the very problems they have created. Without clearly identifying the deep logics that caused today’s biospheric crisis, we will reinscribe those causes in the adaptive solutions we implement in our communities.