When Home Begins to Taste Like Salt: Mangroves, women and the changing meaning of home in coastal Bangladesh

There is a particular kind of loss that does not announce itself.

It does not make the news. It comes the way salt comes, slowly, invisibly, carried by water that looks like ordinary water until the day you realize nothing grows in it anymore. Until the day you reach for something that used to be there and find only the absence of it.

This is the story of Bangladesh's coastal mangrove forests. And it is, at the same time, the story of the women who lived inside them.

What the Mangroves Held

To understand what is being lost, you have to first understand what was there.

The mangrove forests of Bangladesh's southwest coast, stretching across Satkhira, Khulna, and Bagerhat, and anchored by the vast breathing mass of the Sundarbans, are among the most ecologically generous ecosystems on earth. They do not merely exist at the edge of the sea. They hold a shifting line between land and ocean, fresh and salt, survival and catastrophe.

Their roots filter water. Their canopy breaks cyclone winds before they reach the villages behind them. Among the tangled roots and tidal mud, fish breed, plants flourish, and coastal communities have drawn resources and livelihoods for generations.

Dense forest once covered 94.2% of the Sundarbans in 1973. By 2024, that share had fallen to 91.5% (Change Initiative, 2024). The numbers may sound modest. The consequences are not.

Here, the story of salt and mangroves is inseparable, though not simple. Mangroves occupy the shifting boundary between river and sea, shaped by freshwater flows, tides and salinity. As freshwater flows decline and saline water reaches further inland, the mangrove's own health deteriorates alongside the communities around it. The forest feels that change too. Some mangrove species tolerate salt better than others, while communities around the forest experience it through their water, food, livelihoods and

health. 

What the Salt Does

In Gabura Union, in Shyamnagar Upazila of Satkhira District, a 2024 study surveyed 443 women about their experience of salinity intrusion (Rahman et al., 2025). More than half (55.31%) reported skin problems associated with salinity. 59.35% of them were not aware of any health risks associated with water salinity, and 58.72% reported being unaware of any method to purify saline water(Rahman et al., 2025). These are not numbers from a distant or hypothetical future. They are from a survey conducted two years ago, in a specific union, among specific women, living a specific kind of daily harm.

For women, the effects can become deeply personal. Studies from coastal Bangladesh have raised concerns about skin problems, pregnancy-related hypertension and menstrual health. In Koyra, women using reusable menstrual cloths reported washing them in saline water when freshwater was scarce (Sinha et al., 2024). The salt does not stay at the shoreline. It follows women into the most private corners of their lives.

The Grief That Has No Funeral

Here is what the research does not fully capture, and what no policy document yet accounts for.

For the women of Bangladesh's southwestern coast, the mangrove was never only an ecosystem. It is tied to everyday life: water, food, livelihoods, knowledge, and routines shaped by the tides. A woman who spent her life collecting shellfish at the forest's edge at low tide, who knew which roots held medicine, who learned from her mother where to wade and where the current changed, that woman did not merely use the mangrove. She belonged to it. And it, in a way only long proximity creates, belonged to her. 

Researchers have a word for what happens when a landscape changes so completely that the people who lived inside it no longer recognize it as home: Solastalgia.  Coined by environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht, it describes the distress caused by environmental change while a person remains in the place they call home (Albrecht, 2005). It is not quite the grief of leaving a place. It is the unsettling experience of watching the familiar become unfamiliar. 

It is being homesick while still at home.

For coastal women whose daily lives were woven into the mangrove's rhythms, its tides, its sounds, its harvests, its protections, its loss is not only economic. It is disorienting in a way that goes deeper than livelihood. Rising salinity, changing livelihoods and ecological degradation do not only alter what people can grow, collect or earn. They can also disturb a sense of place, continuity and belonging. 

Research on solastalgia and place attachment suggests that environmental degradation can bring grief, anxiety, disorientation and a weakened sense of belonging among people deeply attached to a changing landscape. For coastal women whose daily responsibilities are closely tied to water, food, health and household livelihoods, this offers another way of understanding a burden that conventional climate indicators rarely capture. 

This is the wound that no salinity measurement captures. It does not appear in forest cover percentages or health clinic records. It lives in the interior of women who are still there, still standing at the edge of a forest that is no longer quite what it was, carrying a loss that has no clear name and no designated moment of mourning.

The mangrove does not always disappear at once. It changes slowly. And perhaps some forms of grief do too.

What We Are Not Measuring

Bangladesh speaks of climate resilience constantly. It appears in international pledges, in adaptation frameworks, in the language of every major environmental conference. The country has genuine reason to speak of it — it has survived more than most.

But resilience, as it is currently measured, is mostly ecological and economic. Hectares of mangrove replanted. Kilometres of embankment reinforced. Households with access to water. These matter. They are not enough.

What is not being measured is what a changing mangrove landscape, rising salinity and repeated environmental disruption are doing to the interior lives of the women who live with them most closely. The chronic grief of a landscape lost. The daily health damage of water that should be fresh. The slow erosion of a knowledge system of tides, roots, medicines, rhythms that took generations to build and that thins alongside the forest that held it.

The story of the mangrove cannot be separated from the lives around it. Forest loss, water insecurity, health, livelihood and belonging overlap in ways our usual measures of climate resilience rarely show.

Protecting mangroves is therefore not only about protecting a forest. It is also about protecting the possibility of remaining at home without watching home slowly become unrecognizable. 

The Same Hands That Grieve Are Planting

In Sinharatoli village in Shyamnagar, Satkhira, women began building what residents describe as a mangrove wall in 2013. It now grows along the same vulnerable edge where storm surges from Cyclone Sidr in 2007 and Cyclone Aila in 2009 had pushed into the community, damaging homes, farms and livelihoods (IPS News, 2025). 

They planted because they understood, with the knowledge of people who had lived inside that ecosystem for generations, that the forest was the defence and that if the defence was to come back, they would have to grow it themselves. Women in this and other communities near the Sundarbans continue to plant and care for mangroves, while some have also turned mangrove nurseries into a source of income (IPS News, 2025). 

Perhaps this is one possible answer to solastalgia: not the erasure of grief, but the recovery of some agency over a landscape that is changing. Not resolution. Not a return to what was. But the refusal to only watch. 

A mangrove sapling takes years to become a forest. The women who planted in 2013 are older now. The damage done in the years the forest thinned to their health, to their farmland, to the water they drink has not been undone. Resilience, in coastal Bangladesh, is not a return to what was. It is continuing to function inside a loss that has not finished.

They are planting anyway.