“Who is the state? I am the people, who is the state? The state exists thanks to us, the people. The roads between these highlands will not be connected. We most certainly do not want it. The governor calls us marauders. We have been living here since birth. Who is the governor, who is the district governor? I am the people!”1
This elderly rural woman’s outrage in July 2015 on the rain-soaked, lush green highlands of the Eastern Black Sea coast of Turkey summarizes the uncanny transformation of local environments, state-capital relations and the landscapes of authoritarian neoliberalism, hydropower politics, environmental opposition, and mass tourism investments disguised as development in a nutshell. Undertaken by a construction-energy conglomerate which moved up the ranks of ‘usual suspects’ in the past decade due to its very close ties with the Erdoğan government, the so-called Green Road project aiming at building a 2,600 km highway through the pristine highland provinces of the region was the target of Havva Ana’s rage.2 The main rationale behind this project was to provide infrastructure for highland tourism, thereby transforming a region once best known for its state-supported tea and tobacco production into a mass tourism hotspot (Alaeddinoğlu and Şeremet, 2016). The rural transformation and dispossession in the region, in part driven by IMF-imposed liberalization of the agriculture and energy sectors after 2001, yielded a strong grassroots environmentalist movement, particularly against small hydropower projects (Sayan, 2017). The deterioration of rural livelihoods and consequent outmigration were quickly entrenched into the fabric of these highlands, which carry memories of religious conversions, multiple ethno-linguistic identities and state-building (Simonian, 2007), while also demonstrating the strong tradition of left-wing politics and resistance to state power in Turkey (Biryol, 2012).
Among many others, the story of Havva Ana and the Green Road urges us to explore the transformation of socio-natures from a variety of multi-scalar and trans-disciplinary perspectives. Turkey is one of the missing pieces of the global environmental humanities puzzle. Likewise, environmental humanities is the missing piece in the field of Turkish studies. With its attention to “thick inter-weavings of human cultures, histories, values, imaginaries and ways of life with a dynamic more-than-human-world” (van Dooren, 2018: 418), environmental humanities promises to fill a significant gap in the field of Turkish studies. This is what makes this book timely, well positioned and valuable: introducing Turkey, a country on the edge, into environmental humanities scholarship, while bringing environmental humanities to the attention of scholars of Turkey dealing with the social, historical, economic and cultural dimensions of environmental change along the society-nature continuum. Turkey is a burgeoning field of study for environmental humanities/social sciences not only due to its ambiguous geopolitical positioning, but also because of its troubled relationship with development and modernization (Adaman and Arsel, 2005; Adalet, 2018).
This book is the product of a scholarly collaboration extending into environmental humanities by benefiting mainly (but not exclusively) from the strengths of trans-disciplinary approaches in particular from environmental history and political ecology. Therefore, our broader attention to the socio-natures of a country on the edge is no coincidence. Following Swyngedouw (1999), we refer to socio-nature as a historical-geographical process that is at once malleable, transformable and transgressive (446–447). Describing ‘social nature’ from a critical standpoint, Castree (2001) suggests that nature is intrinsically social across different scales in different ways, and one needs to focus on revealing the perpetuation of power and inequality to avoid abstracting nature from its inextricable social qualities. In this continuum, the environment often refers to a nonsocial and nonhuman nature, although the history of environment as an idea has taken different turns in the past century (Warde et al., 2018). Our conceptualization of socio-natures here follows the material and discursive co-production of nature and society in Turkey through historically situated processes. This includes attention to the state-society relations “sedimented in relation to past histories and geographies and also recast in relation to recent development and environmental changes” (Harris, 2012: 35). We therefore start from “the actually existing socionatural conditions,” which are “always the result of intricate transformations of preexisting configurations that are themselves inherently natural and social” (Swyngedouw, 1999: 445, our emphasis). Thus, our attention to the production of uneven landscapes, socio-ecological hierarchies and resistance to them provides fresh contributions to the environmental social sciences and humanities literature on Turkey. Consequently, throughout this book the individual chapters trace the transformation of socio-natures in the Republic of Turkey through “multiple narratives that relate material practices, representational visions and symbolic expressions” (Swyngedouw, 2015: 21).
While the environmental histories of the Ottoman Empire have finally received well-deserved attention (İnal and Köse, 2019), critically informed historical-geographical research has only recently begun to explore the interplay between the environment and the country’s tumultuous political, economic and historical trajectory during the Republican period. Despite the recent proliferation of studies of the political economy of environmental change, rural dispossession and urban transformation in particular, an elaborate exploration on the environmental meaning makings and contested historical trajectories of environmental change in Turkey still require attention. Prominent contributions to this literature succinctly depict perspectives mostly from political science, ecological economics, political sociology and urban studies in critically reflecting on and contributing to the debates related to the politics and economics of the Erdoğan regime (Aksu et al., 2016; Özbay et al., 2016; Adaman et al., 2017; Göçek, 2018). In particular, the Gezi Park protests of 2013 sparked a renewed scholarly interest in the long-brewing environmental conflicts in the country (Özkaynak et al., 2015; Aksu and Korkut, 2017).
Contributions from human geography and critical environmental politics have been instrumental in exposing the socio-ecological impact of Recep Tayyip Erdog˘an’s strong commitment to socio-environmentally destructive mega-projects, transportation and infrastructural investments, such as the third bridge over the Bosporus, a gigantic airport in the middle of Istanbul’s last standing northern forests, and a Suez-type canal to connect the Marmara Sea to the Black Sea. Add Turkey’s construction and imported energy-driven economic growth obsession, and we have a clearer picture. Yet, we believe that this is not enough. A more complete treatment of Turkey’s troubled environments on the edge calls for employing the toolbox of environmental humanities and exploring the main political, cultural and historical factors related to socio-environmental problems (including, but not limited to climate change, see Turhan, 2017). This helps us not only to better ground some of the historical and contemporary debates on the actually existing socio-natures in Turkey, but also to understand the multiplicity of framings and narratives around human-nonhuman interactions in the country in a time of authoritarian populism. Moreover, we believe that Turkey’s unique position of living on the edge both geographically (between Europe and Middle East) and politically (between democracy and totalitarianism) is an interesting case to explore from an environmental humanities perspective. This is what this book tries to achieve.
As with many similar projects, the initial seeds of this book were sown during an academic workshop held at TürkeiEuropaZentrum (TEZ) of the University of Hamburg in October 2017, which also served as the inaugural meeting of the Network for the Study of Environmental History of Turkey (NEHT, www.envhistturkey.com). The project was later expanded in scope by inviting carefully solicited chapters from an emerging cohort of early career researchers in the field. Hailing from disciplines as diverse as history, sociology, urban studies, anthropology, architecture, political ecology, geography and film studies, these early career researchers transgressed the boundaries of their own disciplines by situating their contributions to this book within the overarching framework of the environmental humanities. Expanding on the existing works on the roots and directions of environmental change and analyzing variegated relationships between the state and society, between power and nature, between environmental change and economic change, between the core and the periphery, and between the urban and the rural, this book offers a holistically novel perspective on the landscapes, state-capital axis and environmental movements in Turkey. One shortcoming of this collection is its lack of further attention to ecocritical approaches to the Turkish literary tradition. However, on this we happily refer the attentive reader to a recent addition to ecocritical literature that successfully covers this lacuna (Gürses and Ertuna Howison, 2019). Consequently, the chapters here, we hope, will be of interest not only to students of Turkey from a variety of social science and humanities disciplines, but also contribute to the larger debates on environmental change in the context of the global authoritarian populist turn. On this latter point, we also believe that the contributions in this book are fitting with the growing scholarly interest in social, cultural, economic and political struggles over the environment (for recent studies on environmental governance under authoritarian populism, see McCarthy, 2019; Brain and Pál, 2019). After all, as C.S. Lewis reminds us in The Abolition of Man (1943: 55), “What we call man’s power over nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with nature as its instrument.” Merging a critical diagnosis and a normative prognosis for a country on the edge, this book is our collective tribute to Havva Ana’s plea.
Overview of the book
The book is organized into three sections that, respectively, cover transforming landscapes, transforming state-capital relations and transforming environmental movements. The first section focuses on the production of transforming landscapes on the edge.
In Chapter 2, Binboğa traces the changing meanings of nature informing the aspirations for agricultural development and industrialization between 1930 and 1960. In an attempt to demonstrate how expert knowledge contributed to the making of an experimental nature, her chapter focuses on scientific soil survey reports produced by the sugar technologist, Cornelis van Dillewijn, the soil specialists, Willem van Liere and Harvey Oakes, and the agronomist, Leo Placide Hebert, all of took up roles in Turkey’s modernization drive. This chapter helps us to reconsider entwined conceptions of land as experimental nature that is continuously produced and re-produced.
In Chapter 3, Stahl takes us through a journey to a techno-political frontier: the Keban Dam project. Proving to be one of the largest civil engineering projects in the world in the 1960s–1970s, the making of the Keban Dam not only relied on the idea of eastern Anatolia as a frontier region, but also taking the dam itself as a frontier to be crossed in making the imagining and engineering of a young nation possible. The chapter focuses on the ideas, influences and changes brought to light by multiple actors in this period. Using both historical and literary sources, this chapter successfully narrates the enfolding of the historical frontier into a broader techno-political framing of southeastern Anatolia.
In Chapter 4, Acara moves across the country to provide a detailed account of the former imperial frontier in Turkey’s European province, Thrace. By exploring the meanings and representations of unruly places in this region where socio-natures have been interwoven with nation-building practices since the demise of the Ottoman Empire, this chapter employs a discourse analysis of the micro-histories of the Alpullu Sugar Factory and the Ergene River. Through a well-crafted mix of human and more-than-human histories, this chapter provides a lively account of the social and discursive constructions of Turkish territory and territoriality in the period from 1920 to 1940.
The second section of the book focuses on the transforming state and capital relations on the edge.
In Chapter 5, Zeybek focuses on the uncanny assemblages of humans and nonhumans in re-ordering the spatial arrangements of animal husbandry and industrial meat production against a backdrop of ethnic strife in the Kurdish provinces of southeastern Turkey. Contributing to the literature on the capitalization of agriculture and the securitization of rural livelihoods, this chapter focuses on the notion of animal population control as key for controlling human populations from the state’s vantage point. The chapter advances the notion that capital accumulation by and large depends on disciplining, monitoring and supervising human and nonhuman bodies, enabled by new constellations of relations between trees, soil, people, animals and water.
In Chapter 6, Kurtiç provides a detailed reading of the history of dams in Turkey over sediments and the relations between forest landscapes, the state’s interest in taming natures through technical intervention and natural resource rehabilitation projects in the Çoruh River Valley of northeastern Turkey. Using historical and ethnographic methods, this chapter narrates a “sedimented history” of nation-state making, developmentalism and rising authoritarianism through its attention to the state’s moves to know, measure and control rivers. In doing so, it chronicles the blending of rural transformation and depopulation, the rise of socio-environmental movements and the state’s green rhetoric about the water-forest nexus.
In Chapter 7, Tuçaltan takes us through the socio-spatial, material and economic entanglements between the poverty, waste and urban growth in the country’s capitol, Ankara, between the 1930s and 1990s. Focusing on the production of informal waste regimes, and the materialities, actors, diverse representations and power relations therein, her chapter shows how waste moves between being matter out of place and a source of value creation. By doing so, Tuçaltan’s contribution provides a detailed account of socio-historical struggles waged over waste in tandem with macro-economic, political and institutional transformations in Turkey.
The last section in the book f...
