Bricklayers who worked fourteen hour shifts in the Bengali heat, inhaling the dust from their construction.
Shiploaders who carried two hundred loads of coal and other materials overhead across planks from cargo ships to shores, over and over.
Metalworkers in alleyways who worked without proper protective gear to take apart the scraps of old ships.
In one square mile of Dhaka I saw all of the most difficult, laborious, and underpaid jobs being worked by climate migrants. Obviously, they wound up in this position because of one unfair systemic problem stacked on top of another.
When you see the effects of hyper consumption and a climate crisis firsthand like that, it makes you wish a direct response was a little bit more within reach. But truly, the only sustainable solution was to go upstream. To look at the root causes, and work from there. In the meantime, the best immediate action someone could take was simply deciding to take a posture of listening to their stories and perspectives.