Thanks, Matt. I just causally ran across the article in the Times one morning, and it instantly hit a chord with me, reminding me of a book I read many years ago,
The Songs of Salanda by H. Arlo Nimmo, about
"the Bajau, a small group of nomadic boat-dwellers who plied the waters off the southernmost Philippine islands in small single-family houseboats...by the 1970's the Bajau way of life had largely disappeared, an indirect casualty of the Marcos regime's war against the Muslims of Sulu. Nimmo's testimony about his experience of the archipelago is thus an ethnographic treasure." The book is written as fiction, a series of stories, so it was really compelling reading, empathetic in a way that perhaps a dry anthropological report might not have been. It filled me with such melancholy for that which is human and passes away. In that case the agent was political, not environmental, but ignoring all polemic, the emotion of loss was the same as that I felt when I read of the plight of these "lake people".
Nemo