The following text (accompanied by photos and videos) is excerpted from “The Weight of a Falling Sky” in the Winter 2015 issue of Ms. In that article, acclaimed author Barbara Kingsolver investigates the impact of climate change on women globally—and the creative ways that women are lifting up their communities. To read more, become a member of the Ms. community and get the issue delivered to your doorstep or inbox!
Bangladesh is losing the most to the rising seas of a hotter world. Of its approximately 150 million people, some 5 million live on sandbars and islands called chars in the country’s rivers, simply because they have nowhere else to go.
Runa Khan, founder of the Bangladeshi nonprofit Friendship:
When I was here three months ago, the land was at least 100 meters there. There were crops and fields and cultivation. All that is under the water now. Every few years, five years, 10 years, there used to be a massive flood event. Now you can get floods coming in twice a year. The rains come, and everything that they’ve invested is washed off.
Every time they shift, they lose everything. Ninety percent of their goods, they lose. The lands they lose. So they become poorer and poorer. When you are living on the fringe, every single raindrop, every single penny that you bring in makes a difference in your life.
In central Kenya’s Kwabenzi village, many women and girls get up before first light to start their daily walk to the water they carry back to their villages. It may be eight, 10 or even more hours before they return home, hungry and exhausted, to begin the rest of their day’s work. The consequences of their climate growing drier are unthinkable.
When every labor-intensive ounce of water goes for drinking and cooking, bathing is a luxury beyond imagining. Women use cow urine for washing utensils, and clean their children’s faces with saliva. Infant mortality is high in conditions like these.
If women are disproportionately carrying the weight of what seems to be a falling sky, they are also bringing outsized energy to creative solutions. The Bangladeshi nonprofit called Friendship began with Runa Khan and a vision that many called outlandish. She found the means to convert a retired French oil barge into a floating hospital and sail it up the rivers of her home country, bringing health care to the nomadic inhabitants of the delta islands.
Women with few other choices are first to adapt to climate change, and many are not waiting for outside help but forging their own local initiatives to mitigate its effects.
Lourdes Lucila Saavedra Pilco, a Peruvian farmer who is part of a CARE initiative to help farmers learn new livestock production methods in a changing climate:
I was the first woman [from my village] to go to Lima to do business with my livestock. … [People said], ‘You’re a woman. You’re not going to be able to.’ I loaded my cattle in the truck and I went to Lima. Women can work. We can do business. Starting with me, many women have also become leaders.
Esther Gataya, a Kenyan schoolteacher and tree planter with TIST:
All [women] need is a little empowerment and they’ll do great things.
All photos and videos courtesy of Ripple Effect Images.
