Syed Badrul Ahsan

Climate change has certainly been wreaking havoc all across the planet. Seas are drying up, vegetation has been going missing, rainfall has been scarce in regions where it has been natural while it has poured in countries in the midst of deserts. That is all understood and acknowledged.

It is a global problem which has built up over the decades and which might, just might, be resolved in many more decades to come. Human life, let us face it, has been instrumental in destroying much of what is necessary for life.

We do not need to look around for instances of how much damage we have done to the planet. There are examples aplenty here in our own Bangladesh to illustrate the perils we have put life to. Of course, you can argue that all this heatwave we have been going through is but a consequence of climate change.

Baishakh is not Baishakh anymore; and that traditional kalbaishakhi which is part of life has been conspicuous by its absence. There are no rains; the leaves on the trees do not stir because there are no breezes and winds. No ripples play in the ponds.

All of this is a fact of life, whatever is left of the quality of life, we are confronted with in these present times. But now let the mind in you focus on this city, the nation’s capital, we inhabit. Let your eyes, blinded by the heat though they might be, survey the landscape around you. You will hardly see any greenery, any trees.

Those of us who recall the 1960s and 1970s will be wracked by nostalgia, for those were times when Dhaka was nature’s paradise. It abounded with trees, with gardens, with flowers in every part of it. It was soothing walking through the town, with a gentle breeze adding to the poetic instincts playing in you.

That is all in the past. Wherever you go in this city, be it a lane or street or road, there are hardly any trees you will come across. Where have they disappeared? You know the answer. Urbanisation has taken a toll, so much so that even the water bodies - lakes and ponds - which once dotted the landscape are now a memory or receding into memory.

Those lakes and ponds have dried up; and we could never imagine that a time would come when their absence would be felt so acutely. Where children used to play in the water, there now have risen monstrosities of urban squalor.

And the trees, the gardens? Dwell back on the days when homes characterised this city, unlike the flats which have buried the beauty of Dhaka under their gruesome weight. Those homes had gardens, with fruit trees encircling the gardens. The homes are long gone, along with the charm they symbolised.

Today it is apartment complexes and condominiums which stand where those homes were. The trees were brutally cut down ages ago. As for gardens, they now come back to us as in the unreality of dreams. We have killed all aesthetics in our drive for modernity, for development. Did we say ‘development’?

Development is when cities are made and remade in order for people to breathe a little easier. Along the streets are trees which are improvements on the past. When you speak of development, you do not mean pavements to be occupied by shops or vendors.

Development refers to residential areas uncluttered by business establishments, with no food shops or restaurants or boutiques operating on the ground floors of apartment complexes. Development is when lakes and streams and ponds and fountains offer sanctuary for citizens, indeed give them opportunities to savour the beauty of the city.

Development is not a whittling down of a city into a sprawling urban slum. It is the availability of water sources all over town for citizens to quench their thirst. In a city where you can peer into your neighbours’ flats from your own, when you can hear their family conversations and they can hear yours, you know how development has undermined your privacy.

Closeness is what you envision in human relationships, not in buildings being in suffocatingly close proximity to one another. Development is not when the authorities take charge of empty government land and draw up plans to build business structures on it; it is when parks and playgrounds for children are built there.

Stretch the thought a little. Development is not an obliteration of villages and hamlets through having them mutate into so-called model towns; it is drawing up plans to expand the cycle of progress in the rural regions, in preserving the sanctity of the fields from which sprout our rice and our jute and all our vegetables.

In development, in this post-modern phase of life on Earth, the village does not get crushed under the steamroller of urbanisation. Indeed, the village serves as the metaphor for life, for in this land the village has been our hold on life. It is that image of pristine existence we need to underscore in our concepts of urban development.

The heatwave goes on. We can do nothing about it. It is all part of existence in these parlous times. All of this will pass. But the damage we have inflicted on nature in our country will for ages to come keep us imprisoned in its grip. Yet there must be the means by which the future - planting trees, reclaiming lakes, et cetera - can be made somewhat better for Bangladesh’s children yet unborn.

The task is urgent: we cannot afford to lose time. Nature in its essence, in its beauty, must be reclaimed - not just in the nation’s capital but all across the country.
And, of course, appropriate laws to accompany the job require to be in place, together with the means of their effective implementation.
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Syed Badrul Ahsan writes on politics,
diplomacy and history