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The Sundarbans, located in the Bay of Bengal delta, are the largest remaining mangrove forests in the world. Cleaved apart by a militarized border between India and Bangladesh and crisscrossed by fishing boats, Forest Department patrol boats, tourist cruisers, and decrepit shipping vessels, the Sundarbans are also home to many endangered plant and animal species, including the Bengal tiger and the Irrawaddy River dolphin. As a result, the Sundarbans are a global conservation hotspot and a region emblematic of climate emergency with cyclones, sea-level rise, and the ongoing processes of land accretion and erosion.
Conserving Life argues that current conceptions and practices of conservation and climate adaptation negate the flourishing of both the fragile ecosystem and its five million inhabitants. Based on long-term ethnographic research in the Sundarbans, Megnaa Mehtta's book explores the ordinary lives of communities who live on eroding coastlines alongside the mangrove forests. She offers a new conception of conservation that foregrounds the everyday work of sustaining ecologically grounded forms of life amidst rapid transformations. Ultimately, the book argues that it is not solely the rising seas but distorted politics, a poverty of imagination, and false climate and conservation solutions embedded in histories of colonial and postcolonial extraction that are to blame for the vulnerability of those living in the Sundarbans and the degradation of its biodiversity.
"Conserving Life is daring and original in unsettling the reigning discursive grip of rights-based welfare and economic development. Richly ethnographic and masterfully written, Megnaa Mehtta offers us the lens of 'life-projects' for understanding how marginalized populations in the Sundarbans one of the planet's most uncertain and hard scrabble environments can rethink political imaginations and place-making through hope, love, courage and a range of other emotional and ethical dispositions. At heart, Conserving Life questions the commonsense belief that the lives of climate change-impacted populations can be qualitatively improved by simply moving them out of harm's way. Rather, the alternative to their more likely 'expropriation' through dispossession by India's brutal informal economy lies in bravely exploring how vulnerable landscapes can be remade as viable habitats by remaking life itself through labor, care and by grasping the powers of the non-human and the latter's many enchanted possibilities. Conserving Life is a truly remarkable contribution to a huge field of ongoing concerns and worries in conservation, political ecology and studies on climate change impacts." —Rohan D'Souza, Kyoto University