Story of a sinking land

You couldn’t hope for a more perfect climate change victim than Ajay Patra, the head man of Ghoramara — the island in India’s Sunderban chain that is next in line to be submerged beneath the rising sea.

You couldn’t hope for a more perfect climate change victim than Ajay Patra, the head man of Ghoramara — the island in India’s Sunderban chain that is next in line to be submerged beneath the rising sea. The hungry tide had already claimed all but seven of the 100 hectares his family had once owned, Ajay told me. Each year, he directs his villagers to pile felled trees onto the mud, in the deluded hope of building the island back up. And each monsoon, the sea ripped the crude barriers down, tearing off another chunk of his birthright. He was like a modern-day Canute.

As we sipped tea outside Ajay’s large mud bungalow, I excitedly scribbled down my notes, imagining how all this would go down in the Ecologist magazine or perhaps the Independent. It had already run an article reporting the disappearance of the next-door island of Lohachara, ‘the first inhabited island to be claimed by climate change’. I felt sure they’d love this too. But when I asked Ajay what he made of the fact that all of his troubles were the direct result of heavy industry thousands of miles away, he looked at me like I was mad.

‘It’s not because of global warming, it’s because of natural erosion,’ he said. ‘People settled this island before they should have, the land mass is unstable.’

I smiled inwardly. It was perhaps too much to expect a simple village leader to have a full grasp of the science of global warming.