Scaramelli, C. (2021). How to make a wetland. Water and moral ecology in Turkey. Stanford University Press. ISBN 9781503613850 (hardcover)/ ISBN 9781503615403 (paperback)/ISBN 9781503615410 (ebook). From USD28.
(URL: https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=32174&bottom_ref=subject )
Selin Le Visage
Lecturer, Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis; selin.le-visage@univ-paris8.fr
To cite this review: Le Visage, S. (2024). Review of “How to make a wetland. Water and moral ecology in Turkey”, Stanford University Press 2021, by Caterina Scaramelli, Water Alternatives, https://www.water-alternatives.org/index.php/boh/item/375-scaramelli
Research on wetlands in the Mediterranean often highlights the impact of agricultural development on former marshes, or the marginalisation of local rural populations due to conservation policies in deltas that have become 'wetlands'. Thanks to an ethnography carried out in the Gediz and Kızılırmak deltas in Turkey, this book shows how the ever-changing materiality of wetlands is perceived by and constantly debated among communities of farmers, fishermen, scientists, state employees and NGO representatives.
The author, Caterina Scaramelli, uses the framework of moral ecology to highlight ‘people’s ethical impulse of caring for particular ecological arrangements’ (p.10). However, she does not limit moral ecology to resistance of smallholders to capitalist economies. Nor is her aim to study an open conflict between the Turkish government and environmental activists. Instead, her research takes seriously the diversity of actors with their respective logics of action and attachments (including 'practitioners' ethical and affective commitments to their work'). In this book, we obviously find examples of injustice in access to land and water, but we also find love. And that, to my mind, is the whole point of this research: to show with subtle insight how it is possible to take care of students, irrigators, infrastructure, professional careers, animal or plant species, while at the same time generating, through these practices of care, violence, dispossession and the marginalisation of certain people, animals or ecological relationships in favour of others deemed more legitimate. Everyday practices are marked by power relationships, exercised more or less consciously, but with real effects on the materiality of wetlands and the daily lives of the people who live and/or work there.
The first chapter traces the history of the construction of Turkish wetlands. In a quite classic way, it looks back at the will to transform marshes and swamps described as unhealthy into productive land, with the establishment of a sedentary agricultural civilisation, from the end of the Ottoman Empire, and with the violent history that we know with regard to the Greek and Armenian minorities. Above all, this chapter also traces the way in which scientists constructed an 'ethos of wetland conservation' from the beginning of the 20th century, finely connecting Turkish networks with those in Europe and North America. The other four chapters deal with the two case studies. In my opinion, the two chapters on the Gediz delta are interesting in that they unravel the moral ecology of scientists and NGO representatives, while the following two on the Kızılırmak delta provide more detail on the shaping of agrarian wetlands. This can be explained by the different conditions under which the ethnography was conducted - more 'urban' in Izmir in the first case, while the researcher lived with farmers in the second.
First, rather than copying the classic social science narrative according to which environmental concerns in Turkey are merely an import of modern international standards, more or less well transposed locally, or just a pretext for wider partisan political conflicts, the chapters on the Gediz delta provide an ethnography of Turkish scientific life. This enables us to understand how bureaucrats, scientists and NGO representatives have actively debated, implemented and given meaning to wetland protection policies, thanks to the specific role played by ornithologists since the beginning of the 20th century.
Second, the chapters on Kızılırmak offer a clearer insight - which I felt was perhaps lacking in the previous chapters - into the everyday moral ecologies of farmers and their practices for accessing (or challenging restrictions on access to) land and water. These chapters also show how conservationists have both romanticised peasantry and excluded certain forms of agrarian life in their vision of the wetland. The participation of farmers in the construction of management plans is not really an issue for them, and large-scale questionnaire surveys used in social sciences are often limited to technocratic exercises. An ethnographic scene shows how farmers can be invited to testify in front of students and then very quickly silenced by well-meaning academics as soon as their own words risk being questioned (p.124-125). Finally, one of the book's strengths is that it does not fall into the trap of a simplistic reading of good or bad agriculture, but instead presents a heterogeneous relationship with wetlands.
Another specific feature of this research is the important place given to animals (horses and flamingos in the Gediz delta, buffalos, purple swamphens and little egrets in the Kizilirmak delta). As different visions of the environment come into competition, the enrolment of these non-humans reminds us of the case of trout in dam removal projects (Druschke et al., 2017).
One very personal regret while reading this book concerns the way it deals with infrastructure, even though it is supposed to be central to the anthropological analysis here. This research finely demonstrates the ‘mutual constitution of ecologies and infrastructures, rather than their opposition’ (p.89). The conflicts that sometimes break out around infrastructure are very well described (the sabotage of the canal in Kizilirmak in the middle of the night is a striking scene in the book), as are the ways in which the actors 'feel' the never-fixed materiality of flows. Infrastructure is therefore omnipresent in the book... but without any real description of the materiality of the engineering networks around which debates are formed and knowledge is discussed or called into question. A simple example of the way in which irrigation and drainage canals are spatially organised would no doubt have helped readers to better project themselves into the local context in order to understand what materialities were being debated and what debates were being avoided (changing access to surface and groundwater, current plans to modernise large-scale irrigation systems to replace open canals with pressure systems and their impact on downstream water circulation into wetlands, etc.). Another regret is that the personal and professional trajectories of the "delta bureaucrats" (p.137) are not given much attention, compared with the more detailed presentations of other actors intervening in the wetlands.
These last remarks in no way lessen the interest of the book. Having conducted my research on water and agriculture in Izmir, including the downstream part of the Gediz catchment area, it was a real pleasure to read the beautiful and accurate descriptions of the region. Each chapter opens with scenes that illustrate the relationship between the various protagonists and their environment. This makes this book as easy and enjoyable to read as it is stimulating. I would recommend it to my students, as it provides an excellent example of what a boundary object is, to environmental social scientists in Turkey and to political ecologists working on water or conservation beyond this national context. The framing proposed in terms of moral ecology is fully in line with political ecology - a link that is only briefly explained in the conclusion, although it seems fairly obvious throughout the book.
Reference
Druschke, C. G., Lundberg, E., & Drapier, L. (2017). Centring fish agency in coastal dam removal and river restoration. Water alternatives, 10(3): 724-743
