Treating Nature as an obstacle rather than something to live with has become a peculiar habit in Bangladesh. Rivers are stripped of sand, stones are extracted indiscriminately, forests disappear and hills continue to be cut despite decades of warnings about where this leads. Each of them leaves lasting damage. Hill cutting, however, carries a consequence that arrives with the punctuality of the calendar. Every monsoon, slopes weakened by years of excavation give way after heavy rain, burying homes and taking lives that might otherwise have been spared.
Hill cutting has become so common that scarcely a year passes without fresh reports from one part of the country or another. Chattogram has long remained the epicentre, but the problem extends to Cox's Bazar, Khagrachhari, Rangamati, Bandarban, Moulvibazar, Sylhet, Tangail, Mymensingh and several other districts. Despite repeated drives by the authorities, court directives and media reports, hills continue to disappear for housing projects, brickfields and the lucrative trade in earth. In Khagrachhari alone, close to fifty hills of varying size were levelled within a single year, eight of them in just three months. Similar reports surface so regularly that they barely draw attention unless a hillside collapses or lives are lost. One of the latest tragedies occurred early this month within a Rohingya camp in Cox's Bazar where a landslide swept through a madrasa, killing several female students as they sat reciting the Quran. True, the incessant rain over the previous few days was the immediate trigger, but the process that led to the collapse had begun much earlier.
There is no mystery about why hill cutting persists. It is profitable. The earth excavated from hills is in steady demand for land development and whatnot. However, the cutting does not happen in a single operation. One section is cut today, another a few months later and yet another the following year. The process continues until a hill that had stood for generations exists only in memory. When a hill is cut and stripped of its trees whether by excavators or by workers with shovels and other tools, its ability to hold itself together is fundamentally altered. Those who profit from this trade rarely bear the environmental cost because they do not live anywhere near the slopes they hollow out. That burden falls on nearby communities, public authorities and future generations.
Hills are not the expendable mounds of earth that those who profit from cutting them would have people believe. They hold the soil together, regulate the flow of rainwater, sustain forests and provide habitats for countless species. Their importance has long been recognised, not only by environmental science but also in culture and faith. In the Quran, mountains are described as pegs, symbolising their role in giving the earth stability. That makes it all the more difficult to fathom why so many who profess to follow Islam continue to destroy the very hills whose importance their faith acknowledges. The same understanding is found among many tribal communities in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. They have long observed traditions that limit where cultivation and construction can take place while some hills are regarded as sacred as well. Yet when they oppose resorts, plantations and other commercial projects, their resistance is often recast as an ethnic conflict rather than a legitimate defence of their land and way of life. Even though they are simply trying to protect the land they know better than anyone else.
Even in this day and age, many people misunderstand what environmental protection actually means, treating it as something standing in opposition to economic growth. Preserving a hill, in their view, somehow prevents progress, though the progress in question is invariably their own. The truth runs in the opposite direction. Nature is not scenery to be admired from a distance. It is in many ways infrastructure and often better infrastructure than anything built to replace it. A hill that regulates water flow performs a task that would otherwise demand costly engineering and it performs that task for free, year after year as long as it stays intact. Around the world, governments spend billions building artificial systems to perform tasks that healthy ecosystems provide free of charge.
Look at what gets spent every monsoon season. Houses and roads damaged by landslides need rebuilding. Displaced families need compensation and rescue operations need funding almost every time heavy rainfall strikes. Much of this cost is treated as the price of natural disasters when in reality it stems from damage that could have been prevented. Destroying natural defences only to replace them later with expensive engineering projects makes little economic sense. Even then, no engineering project can match the range of services that an intact hill provides. The sad reality is that disaster management gets funded and noticed. But disaster prevention which can be achieved simply by leaving Nature alone does not.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of illegal hill cutting is that it rarely takes place in secrecy. Entire hills do not disappear overnight. Excavators operate for weeks, sometimes months, while hundreds of truckloads of earth move along public roads in full view of local communities. Such large-scale excavation requires machinery, labour, transport and buyers. It is impossible for it to go unnoticed. Local people are often afraid to speak out because those behind these operations are politically influential or enjoy the patronage of those who are. The fact that the activity continues despite repeated complaints suggests that environmental crimes persist not because they cannot be detected, but because they are not stopped. Whether that failure arises from indifference, political influence, corruption or institutional weakness matters less than the outcome.
What a society tolerates, year after year, says more about its priorities than anything it claims to value. A hill that took thousands of years to form can be destroyed in a matter of weeks. So long as the profits from hill cutting continue to outweigh the penalties, the same avoidable disasters will return with every monsoon and the same expressions of regret.
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