Abak Hussain

Already, winter seems lost for good. The joy of the season, at least.

Bangladesh might lose its winters by 2100, reports say. But forget so many decades into the future; see, right now, if you can go outside and breathe in deeply without inhaling a fistful dust and whatever other poison. It’s not possible. The air is bad all year round, but in winter it reaches greater heights. And this was supposed to be the festive season! Wedding season and all that! Now it is the season of allergies and respiratory illness.

Of all the legacies of Bangladesh’s grotesquely deformed governance of the years, the one most palpable with every breath is our air pollution. Environmental protection is one department in which we get a big F grade. This was true under the previous regime, and it is true at present. The realist in me has no choice but to concede that it will probably remain true under whatever government comes next. We have always been a public health catastrophe and a textbook example of mistreating the environment. The rivers, which we revere only in theory, are too polluted to even speak of, all urban greenery has been filled up with ugly buildings, and no regulations exist for deafening construction noises. And in spite of nice-sounding words from the government, nothing has yet been done about curbing air pollution. It is not a matter of opinion but an objective fact that Dhaka continues to be the most unliveable big city on the face of this planet.

Photo Source: Kabiur Rahman Riyad

So the joy of winter is gone. The colder months today resemble nothing like the Dhaka winter of my childhood or early youth, when I could take a rickshaw ride down the road, bundled up in a hoodie, not bothering to wear a mask, enjoying the light chill on my face. And now? It’s like living on a hostile foreign planet where the air was not meant to facilitate human habitation. People don’t even bother talking about the AQI anymore, all of this is so exhausting, and old hat. So they turn their eyes away from the immediate emergency at hand, and comment on the distant future.

Climate change too now holds an uneasy place in our discourse. Look, here’s Time Magazine’s cover with the notorious Person of the Year feature. This time it’s a bunch of AI tech bros, because of course it is. There is no way of denying that, love it or hate it, AI has been front and center of every discussion recently and especially in the past year. To a get a little more meta (hah!), not only were the discussions about AI, they were largely by AI, as in much of what our eyes saw while scrolling our phones were AI generated. It is mostly what has come to be known as AI slop, ie cheap, brain-dead content generated by chatGPT and other tools with little or no human effort. The effects of AI on humanity and culture is one whole other endless discussion so let’s pause that for a second and get back to the disappearing winter. Because on a tangible, undeniable, environmental level, we can at least point out once again how disastrous AI is for the environment, and a culprit in accelerated climate change. 

The technology behind AI, which include data centers that use massive amounts of energy, take a serious toll on our natural resources by guzzling water and yes, heating up the planet. AI, the golden child of the current moment, Time Magazine’s Person of the Year, the thing we are supposed to embrace because we are constantly being told that it’s not going away: nothing but an unmitigated disaster for the planet. But apparently we have to accept all of this.

Photo Source: Sabbir Ahamed

So that’s it then? After all that climate activism, simply sit back and watch the likes of Sam Altman and other tech psychopaths ruin the planet to make their own net worth rise? Sit back and watch the already non-existent joy of winter turn into no-winter-at-all?

What’s ironic is that there is probably some writer (imagine the word in gigantic quote marks if you wish) out there at this very moment using AI to generate some godawful content, perhaps an op-ed piece, about how much AI is harming the planet. Or a sub-head and em-dash heavy feature on our disappearing winters.

Good memories are sometimes sad. It’s a bit sad for me, for example, to remember how on a cold morning with a light heart you used to be able to make a cup of tea and walk around outdoors, or look out into the distance from your rooftop, or enjoy a car ride with the window down because the weather was just the perfect level of nippy on the skin. It was cherished all the more because you knew it was brief. But those were more innocent times, when climate seemed like something fixed and eternal. Winter is winter is winter … how can it possibly disappear?

But it probably will, and sooner than we expect. The forces of greed and growth that govern the planet are too strong. During my winters these days, heavy thoughts loom. The heart is no longer light. 

Abak Hussain is Contributing Editor at MW Bangladesh.