The relationship between everyday lives and the climate changed present is layered, complex, and deeply embedded in social context. In the Sundarban region of India and Bangladesh, the entangled web of development, anthropogenic climate change, and so-called climate change adaptation projects (such as concrete embankments, the hardening of coastlines, and brackish aquaculture) have interrupted natural adaptation processes and caused environmental degradation that negatively impacts those who live there. Scholars have called for better frameworks to link between everyday struggles and macro-level processes of climate change and development. Building on a long-term ethnographic engagement and existing theories of everyday adaptations to climate change, I utilize salinity intrusion as a case study showcasing the complicated interlinkages of climate change and development on daily life. I argue that there are three interlinked processes of increases and accumulations of salt: naturally occurring, exacerbated by capitalism and development, and exacerbated by climate change. Residents describe the consequences of salinity intrusion as they materialize in their bodies, evidence of the external imposition on their lives. I argue that although climate change is the cause of environmental transformation, it interacts with local conditions in diffuse ways that social science needs to pay attention to. Looking at the causes and consequences of salinity intrusion in tandem allows us to see past hegemonic thought and makes way for understanding climate adaptation outside of the constraints of neoliberal development paradigms.

Climate science to date demonstrates that natural and human systems must urgently adapt. Adaptation refers to changes in societies and ecological systems as they respond to both actual and anticipated impacts of the changing climate. While adaptation is not limited to the level of planning and policy, existing adaptation practice privileges institutional action. We argue that the definition of adaptation should be broadened to include the small, incremental changes made in our daily lives to accommodate the shifting ecologies in which we live. Drawing on critical adaptation research and our own ethnographic fieldwork in the Global South, we define everyday adaptation as the shifted ways a person works, eats, lives and thinks in response to climate realities, rather than the hardening of coastlines or the relocation of vulnerable structures. We integrate and build on existing scholarship on adaptation and the everyday to theorize the logics of everyday, hyperlocal adaptation. This hyperlocal scale is a critical component of any definition of adaptation and a useful lens for studying the way much of the global population adapts and will continue to adapt their lives to climate change. We offer two theoretical components of adaptation revealed by the everyday - adaptation labor and value adaptation – as lenses to see changes in everyday action. Through considering hyperlocal action, we then identify and explore four logics of everyday adaptation actions: lifestyle stability, socio-ecological reactivity, livelihood flexibility, and community capacity. Everyday adaptations are limited by individuals’ capacity to adapt and thereby determine the longevity, livability, and quality of life of places on the frontlines of climate change. We argue for understanding the aggregate effects of everyday adaptation in order to better align the actions of those living with climate change in their everyday lives and the large-scale adaptation projects aiming to protect them.

Hungry Tides in Gabura

The Bangladeshi village of Gabura is a prime example of social disruption caused by climate change. Before Cyclone Aila, Gabura was a beautiful place. Now, faced with rising sea levels, villagers must fetch fresh water from three kilometers away and find work off the island.

Hungry Tides, Salty Lives.

Reflections from my second fieldwork visit in the Sundarbans. A deep dive into how salinity intrusion affects the every day lives of people in the Sundarbans. This article was a follow up to the article I had written the previous year for the Dhaka tribune.

The Human Planet

Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin’s The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene bridges the gap between the concept of the Anthropocene and geology, to interrogate what the Anthropocene is and when it actually began. I reviewed the book for the journal Environment and Society.

A Crisis of the Imagination: What is In Store for Our Planetary Future?

The book Climate Leviathan: A Political Theory of our Planetary Future by Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright helps us sort out how to imagine the world in light of the climate catastrophe. I summed up my understanding of their book for the journal Communication and the Public.