Tuesday, April 11, 2006

An Inconvenient Truth; Only Convenient Names

A documentary called "An Inconvenient Truth" is being released, spearheaded by Al Gore's vocal fight against global warming and its effects. Rising sea-levels, stronger storms, hotter weather.

While outlining countries that will be most direly affected by sea-level rise, he cites Florida, Shanghai, and "the area around Calcutta."

Well, hello! The area around Calcutta is historically known as Bengal, and is now called Bangladesh! They show an animated map of a region of Eastern India, and it's *all Bangladesh*! Just call it Bangladesh! We're over here, we're over here!

Bangladesh is at the forefront of almost every major environmental disaster. We suffer cyclones, we have annual flooding, we are suffering from desertification, we have extensive deforestation, increasing urbanisation, water-depletion that is soon going to pull us into a huge crisis, naturally-occuring arsenic which is poisoning our existing water supply, what little of it we have, we have energy shortages, river salination, river silting and rivers drying up.

We have serious issues there! In fact, heck! We deserve our own documentary!

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I write essays in my spare time on things that are important to me. The ones that I feel are any good, or make any sense, I put them up here. :)