On a very hot day in August 2012, at around midday, I got stuck. My feet were sucked deeper in the mud and, trying to lift them up, I fell face down into the muck of the marsh. A few meters away, my friend Deniz, a marine biologist, was knee-deep in water, struggling to make another step.1 Emre, an ornithologist, had donned fisherman-style plastic overalls that went up to his chest, and he kept walking swiftly, holding a GPS device in his outstretched arm, soon disappearing behind a tall thicket of reeds. I wiggled out of my orange plastic boots, which I had bought the day before from a fishing-supply store at Deniz’s insistence. I stood up in the hot breeze. Deniz and I continued walking barefoot in the soft mud. We held our boots and soggy socks in one hand, and we started to run to catch up with Emre.
At that moment, I did not understand the importance of the claim Emre was staking as he geolocated the wetland reeds in the marsh, using his GPS to record the coordinate points of the reeds’ meandering in the marsh. Later, I would learn that the reeds were one of many nonhuman actors in a political drama unfolding in a rapidly changing delta, for the reeds marked a boundary between different water salinities. Encroached upon by fields of water-thirsty cash crops, industrial areas, and new exurbs, the wetland had become an endangered ecological refuge, a place where Turkish scientists, bureaucrats, and activists made nature. The reeds were watered by the same irrigation infrastructure that diverted riverine flows away from the coastal marshes. Conservation legislation and environmental governance had allowed the wetland to continue to exist, though it had displaced fishers and farmers from marshes and swamps—a form of everyday environmental violence that took shape atop the sediments of a longer history of ethnic violence, dispossession, and population resettlement.
The paradoxical fate of the marsh—at once an ecological refuge and a site of violence and conflict—was entangled with other socio-ecological transformations that have come to hold moral significance for contemporary Turkish environmental scientists, fishermen, farmers, bureaucrats, planners, and nongovernmental organization (NGO) workers. While Deniz, Emre, and I walked among the reeds, Turkish environmental NGOs were campaigning to draw attention to the rapid disappearance of wetlands nationwide. These watery biomes were dredged for agricultural and industrial development, polluted with urban and industrial wastewater, and flooded in the basins of dam reservoirs. Small-scale farmers and groups of urban middle-class residents had mobilized on local and national water rights platforms, crafting shared struggles against the expansion of hydropower infrastructure across thousands of rivers throughout Turkey. Civil-society groups had called attention to radioactive waste buried in city fields. Environmental scientists had published reports of waterways and soil polluted with carcinogenic substances.
The surface water of the marsh was brown, yellow, and light gray, and it was scalding hot; as I walked, my toes wiggled in darker, thicker, cooler mud. Each step released an acrid and sulfurous smell, tempered by the lighter scent of salt, tree bark, and pungent grass. I could hear the rustling of reeds, a polyphony of birdcalls, and the splashing and suction of our steps.
“What do you like most about this landscape?” I asked Emre, as he handed me the GPS device to take over the reed mapping.
“Are you asking so that you can write this in your thesis?” he asked, with a smile.
I pleaded guilty as charged. “Why is the mud changing color?” I continued, insistent.
“This is the work of anoxic bacteria,” he said.
Deniz took a handful of mud and let it slip through his fingers. “This is a nourishing soup for biodiversity. For example, the mighty Artemia salina [a brine shrimp] lives here and eats microscopic algae. And then the flamingos eat Artemia. It’s all connected. And it all comes together in the wetland.” Deniz used a Turkish neologism for wetland, sulakalan, meaning “watery place.”
Emre, Deniz, and I stepped on drier land and sat down on the cracked mud, sharing cookies and water. We were in the lower Gediz Delta, in the northern shore of Izmir Bay, on Turkey’s Aegean Sea, walking across what had once been a saltpan. A conservation official had dropped us off on one side of the saltpan hours earlier and would be waiting for us on the other side. Only wetland conservation management and the hunt-control patrols were allowed motorized access to the wetland conservation area. In the early 1980s, the Çamaltı Saltworks had started expanding on the adjacent coastal marshes. Concerned natural scientists, birders, hunters, and environmental activists had organized to stop this infrastructural unmaking of the marshes. This effort had led to the creation of a nature conservation area, which people often called Kuş Cenneti, the Bird Paradise.
The lower Gediz Delta was also one of Turkey’s fourteen wetlands that appeared in the Ramsar Convention list of Wetlands of International Importance, and it held other overlapping national conservation statuses. In 2017, scientists at a Turkish environmental NGO along with university scientists from natural science departments would jointly write a report demonstrating that the delta fit the criteria to become a UNESCO World Heritage Natural Site: to be of “outstanding” value and “to contain the most important and significant natural habitats for in-situ conservation of biological diversity.”2 The same year, environmental advocates in Izmir organized around the call “Don’t touch my flamingo” and filed a civil lawsuit against the Ministry of Transportation to prevent a highway bridge from being constructed on the wetland.3 In 2019, a Turkish NGO orchestrated a social media campaign called “Gediz is our heritage,” collecting signatures in support of the delta’s UNESCO candidacy.4
The Gediz Delta wetland was not only a site of environmental advocacy: its flowing materiality was entangled with other overlapping infrastructural transformations of the delta’s agrarian and industrial landscape. Saltworks infrastructure—pans, dikes, roads, and canals—remained in place but had now become part of the “natural” Gediz wetlands conservation area. The active sections of the saltworks now hosted artificial islands for flamingos. The saltpans had become a popular destination for scientists, nature photographers, and local tourists, who flocked there to observe thousands of flamingos feeding in the Artemia-rich water and thousands of birds from hundreds of species. From the salt marshes rose the sparsely forested hills of Üç Tepeler, once the site of the ancient fortified city of Leucae.5
Fishers on small motorized dinghies cast their nets in the shallow waters of the lagoons and the shores of the Aegean Sea. Upstream in the Gediz Delta, farmers and migrant day laborers worked to reap seasonal harvests of cotton, grains, and vegetables. Adjacent to an industrial leather district and a new university campus built among the cotton fields was one of Turkey’s biggest villa and apartment complexes, where opportunistic real estate speculators enticed members of Izmir’s aspiring (and declining) middle classes who could no longer afford a city apartment. Izmir’s wastewater plant collected the city’s sewage and then pumped treated water into the sea near the industrial area. A eucalyptus orchard, planted on drained coastal marshes, gave way to an experimental forest, a designated picnic area, and then a zoological park. A long bike path connected Izmir’s wealthy neighborhood of Bostanlı to the wetland conservation area’s headquarters, where Emre, the biologist, worked.
This book is about how environments saturated in water—such as this deltaic salt marsh—became wetlands, a transformation that has been at once political, cultural, and material. During my ethnographic fieldwork research, between 2012 and 2018, I followed the making of Turkish wetlands in two deltaic environments. I moved between the Gediz Delta, on the Aegean Sea, and the Kızılırmak Delta, on the Black Sea coast of Turkey. Drawing comparisons between different wetland ecologies is central to how environmental scientists, state officials, and NGOs make Turkish wetlands into objects of knowledge and management.6
One day in October 2013, I followed Emre as he caught a flight from Izmir to Samsun and then drove to the Kızılırmak Delta with his manager and office staff. I sat in a dark conference room as Emre gave a talk to a small audience of scientists, environmental managers, and provincial administrators in the management headquarters of the Kızılırmak Delta wetlands. Behind us, farmers on horseback and on small boats directed their herds of water buffaloes as they swam across a wetland lake, returning to the farms after six months of grazing in the marshes. Flocks of birds assembled into V-shaped formations before setting out on their migratory journey southward.
Emre described the management system that governed the Gediz Wetlands—an institutional form constituted by a partnership of delta municipalities and overseen by Izmir’s provincial government. The National Parks Bureau contracted this organization for implementing its wetland management guidelines on-site. Two years later, an identical administrative structure was implemented in the Kızılırmak Delta. At that later time, I was living in a local village with a family of buffalo and rice farmers. The delta’s farmers, buffaloes, sheep, birds, fish, and other plants and animals had become involved in multiple competing visions of wetland biopolitics. I spent my days with my hosts cooking, attending gatherings, playing with children, tending to water buffaloes, growing vegetables, and fishing in the delta’s lakes. It was apparent that everyday rural livelihoods, including those of nonhuman animals, were affected by, and, in turn made claims on, wetland science and governance.
While in the Gediz Delta, I shadowed NGO and university scientists and lived in a seaside neighborhood in the nearby metropolis of Izmir. While in the Kızılırmak Delta, I lived and worked with rice cultivators, water buffalo herders, cash-crop farmers, and fishermen, all of whom were ambivalent about the new developments in the delta. Delta municipalities invested in ecotourism infrastructure and tore down “illegal” beachside vacation houses; scientists obtained grants for their wetland research and for setting up wetland education activities. However, delta farmers worried about new conservation restrictions on their ability to graze their livestock; to collect reeds, wood, and leeches in the protected area; to fish; and to gain access to the beach.
“Wetland” is a very broad scientific and legal category that emerged out of concerns, coalescing in the mid-twentieth century, around the destructive environmental effects of resource extraction and conversion to farmland—a conversation that involved European and North American scientists, hunters, and birders (and largely excluded wetland-dwelling communities worldwide). The category “wetland” has been a semantic sponge, absorbing changing environmental preoccupations throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: from waterbird habitat to biodiversity, water security, international development, participatory conservation, ecosystem services, and climate change.
Wetlands remain critical environments to think and to live with in the early twenty-first century. Places like the Gediz and Kızılırmak Deltas, and the many other wetland ecologies that have been drained, filled, and otherwise transformed to their disappearance in Turkey and elsewhere, make apparent the uncertain and precarious futures of human and nonhuman livelihoods. Where an ethnography of wetlands reveals the contradictory politics of environmental conservation, it also demonstrates the importance of attending to historically layered transformations of place and environments. The Gediz and Kızılırmak coastal delta wetlands are watery, terrestrial, and amphibious7—their materiality is not static but ever changing and in flow and very much at stake in debates among communities of farmers, fishers, scientists, bureaucrats, and NGO workers. In both places, the wetlands are also at once urban, industrial, rural, wild, and engineered.
Wetland environments are inseparable from the work of infrastructure. You find wetlands at the edge of agricultural fields, industrial ports, sewer overflows, abandoned industrial sites, city parks, and many other places. For environmental scientists, planners, and conservationists, the wetland has itself in the past two decades also become natural infrastructure for supporting the livability of Planet Earth. This book seeks to apprehend environmental infrastructure in its most expansive meaning. Infrastructures are material assemblages of things and people that move through space while remaking it, and also abstract kinds of calculative reason. Anthropologists studying infrastructures have often focused on the things infrastructures do, the social relations and moral subjectivities they produce, and their politics—whether planned or accidental. This approach derives from notions of infrastructure in earlier science and technology studies (STS) as invisible systems of scientific organization embedded in specific social arrangements and knowledge.8
From its late nineteenth-century use in French and English to indicate the material substrate below railway tracks, in the post–World War II era, infrastructure denoted the fixed installations of military deployments, such as airfields, signal communications, and headquarters. With the rise of “development” as a political model and an international form of intervention, the construction of infrastructure, large and small, became central to processes of modernization.9 Infrastructure was simultaneously recast as the material precondition for, and a symbol of, industrialization, economic growth, and political power.10
For my Turkish interlocutors in the wetlands, infrastructures are material constructions, maintained through work, that always produce ecological effects and carry political meaning. During a conversation I had with a rice farmer about a small irrigation canal in the Kızılırmak Delta, the farmer connected the canal to the large-scale dams upstream on the Kızılırmak River; the relentless work of coordinating the flow of water across multiple fields; the high cost of the electricity pump; the flow of drainage waters to the delta’s marshes; and the slow death of the delta’s frogs, fish, and birds from the excess of fertilizers and pesticides that farmers are compelled to use to grow their hybrid rice varieties for the national market. Another friend noted that the number of birds had visibly increased two years after a wetland road was closed to cars. And fishermen in the Gediz Delta talked to me about the relentless traditional work of maintaining a “natural” lagoon, which involved moving stones and reeds to create favorable spawning habitat for their catch. Infrastructure is a useful concept for anthropologists because it is always relational. Infrastructure becomes visible when it breaks down, or in its absence. But even the most invisible infrastructure is visible to those who work to build it and make it work.11
Anthropological and historical accounts of infrastructure have been particularly useful in illuminating processes of political rule, community belonging, and resistance. The movements that infrastructures allow—of energy, capital, media people, and goods—also form the connective tissue of states and symbolize their power.12 Failing urban water infrastructures reveal to their users centralized political systems that are unable to reach citizens, left to fend for themselves against breakdowns,13 or cultivating new practices of care to tame unruly sewage and maintain everyday neighborly relations at the thresholds of their homes.14 While access to water infrastructure may be central to informal settlers’ claims of belonging to a city polity, it can also produce new moral subjects.15 Infrastructures at once materialize processes of belonging, reproduce sectarian communities, and shape subjects as they move through them.16 The materiality of infrastructure can work to support colonial projects of conquest and displacement.17 Contestations over infrastructures, conversely, constitute new political connections and form novel collectivities; the communicative and collaborative networks people create and maintain, or work to disrupt and exclude others, become invisible “social” infrastructures.18
If infrastructure is an assemblage to make certain things move, one can ask what is moving, and what are the materials, technologies, peoples, ontologies, and knowledge that constitute the network? The answer is always shifting, as it depends on a situated perspective. Anthropologists have noticed that things—landfills, for example, discarded bread, or forests—can become infrastructural, as they conjure and facilitate practices and affective responses that generate their own patterns and social order.19 This book builds on these analyses of environmental relations and transformations to call attention to the mutual constitution of ecologies and infrastructures as conduits for moral claims about more-than-human livelihood in uncertain times. Environments are constituted through layered histories of work and human-built infrastructures.20 The concept of environmental infrastructure calls attention to the expert notion, arising in the 1990s from the work of ecosystem economists,21 that ecologies themselves perform the work of human-built systems—a kind of work that can become commensurable in monetary terms.22 Used as a tool for anthropological analysis, the notion of environmental infrastructure can also point to the varied ways in which “built” and “natural” environments are co-constituted and entangled.23
Wetlands illuminate these multifaceted aspects of infrastructure in, of, and as ecology. During my research, I learned to see the Gediz and the Kızılırmak Delta wetlands at once as sites of capitalistic speculation, objects of ecological care, open-air scientific laboratories, and experimental grounds for agro-economic development. They are shaped by the work and visions of university experts, municipal institutions, national ministerial offices, and transnational conservation protocol and inspire contrasting moral claims about translocality, expertise, and temporality. In contemporary Turkey, as in many other places, wetlands are an important site of everyday contestations—for middle- and working-class residents, scientists, bureaucrats, and farmers—over new and foreclosed possibilities for human and nonhuman livelihoods in a time of uncertain politics and in precarious and rapidly changing environments. I emphasize the mutual constitution of ecologies and infrastructures rather than their opposition, both as lived environments and as conduits for moral claims about valuations of human and nonhuman livelihoods in their ecological entanglements. These moral claims are often also violent and, to others, immoral. Moral ecologies reveal the work of power and inequality at play in everyday environmental politics, ethics, and practices.
My biologist friends Emre and Deniz worked with great commitment and care to create more just wetland doğa kültürü, “nature-culture,” as Deniz called it, or biokültür, “bioculture,” as Emre and other friends of his would say. Their work is that of crafting a moral ecology. Moral ecologies are forms of ecological practice and thought in which morality—the concern with what is of value in life24—is at stake. Aspirations of justice and ethical subjectivity are staked on relations between people, plants, animals, fungi, water, and other organisms.25 Moral ecologies are both assessments of justice and motivations for action. They help account for people’s ethical impulses of caring for particular ecological arrangements: care that often results in violent outcomes—depending on the perspective. This analytic is helpful for understanding how, and why, people confront and respond to environmental transformations in various ways. I build on recent anthropological scholarship highlighting the interconnections of ecology and infrastructure,26 as well as on notions of moral economy.27 Moral ecologies, beyond their more common use to describe peasant, indigenous, and activist resistance,28 or deployed interchangeably with the concept of moral economy,29 are particularly useful for the anthropological study of environmental expertise, highlighting practitioners’ ethical and affective commitments to their work. Moral ecologies are crisscrossed with and productive of politics and reveal the complex ways in which practices of ecological care, conservation, and love can at the same time also involve violence, dispossession, and marginalization of unwanted people, organisms, and ecological relations.
International journalistic reporting has largely portrayed environmental mobilizations in contemporary Turkey as a stark leftist and secular opposition to its current ruling party, the Muslim conservative Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP). Indeed, many Turkish environmental activists vocally opposed to quarries, mining, nuclear energy, hydropower, and deforestation have faced an intensification of violent political repression over the last decade. However, the multiple and contrasting moral ecologies at play in Turkish wetlands are not a simple microcosm of the divisive politics of the “New Turkey,” a term first used by AKP leaders and later appropriated by its opponents as a term of critique for the regime.30 In recent years, and particularly after the Arab Spring of 2011, political commentators have frequently debated whether Turkey offers a model of moderate Islamic democracy and balanced neoliberalism. Some journalists have positioned Turkey’s political mobilizations as exceptional; and others, as a template for regional politics. This postulation is not new. Throughout the twentieth century, social scientists have studied Turkey as a material laboratory for theorizing and measuring modernization, whereby Turkey was posited as either exceptional or a model for other political systems.31
Wetland conservation practices in Turkey, however, are not a clear-cut critique of authoritarian rule, nor are wetlands symbolic sites for displaying governmental might and party politics. Rather, in their contestation over how to preserve and manage wetlands, and how to live in them, different social groups wrestle with what it means to be moral ecological subjects at a time of political and climatic uncertainty. Some of my urban friends in Izmir and Istanbul suggested that wetlands showcase the ongoing battle between an aggressive governmental agenda for rapacious development at all costs and demands for ecological justice espoused by ordinary people. I came to disagree with them. I do not take wetlands as simple stand-ins for the polarizing politics of Turkish nature. Instead, I situate wetlands as part of specific provincial and municipal administrative units, bordering villages, towns, and metropolises and shaped by centralized planning, international currents, and local politics.
Where my interlocutors have seen in the wetlands flourishing models for Turkish democracy, resistance, hope, and sustainable futures—and have worked to realize them—I have tried my best to follow them in their visions and partake in their everyday work so that I could better understand and write about it. Whereas the wetland is, for some of my interlocutors, a tangible symbol of the structural failures of Turkey’s environmental policy, I have attended to this perspective while trying to convey the multiplicity of contrasting perspectives on what exactly constitutes failure. Everyday practices of work and politics in the wetland, however, are more directly connected to its ecological flourishing. I heard fishermen puzzle over a newly introduced species of lake fish that is eating their catch, learned to marvel with birders as flamingos performed their seasonal courtship dance, followed photographers looking for the spring blossoming of floating water lilies, harvested small handfuls of Salicornia and wild asparagus for the evening’s dinner with field biologist friends, and rejoiced with farmers at the birth of a new gruffy water buffalo with an endearing personality.
In the past two decades, Turkey has become a productive field site for nuanced anthropological inquiries of the nation-state; religion and secularism; urbanization; kinship and gender; and ethnicity, war, and migration. The remaking of agro-economic landscapes and ecologies has been central to Turkish nation-state building and its discontents; however, ethnographers have largely sidelined Turkish environments as blank slates, existing only in the background of wider political and economic processes. Ottoman and Turkish historians have begun writing on climate histories, forestry politics, genocide environments, disease landscape, water, and animals.32 Recent environmental ethnographies of Turkey have centered on environmental mobilizations, focusing on resistance to the construction of new energy infrastructure, such as nuclear, coal, and hydropower plants.33
Scholars have suggested that Turkish grassroots environmentalism attracts different constituencies around a common political “malcontent” for which the environment serves merely as proxy.34 Alternatively, others have posited that, despite environmental advocates’ proclamation of being “above politics,” environmentalism only reproduces rather than challenges class and political divisions,35 or that it results in a legitimization of state governance.36 A critique of these approaches is that they render lived environments marginal to, and often overdetermined by, other politics.37
Sometimes I observed in my research that wetlands are indeed proxies reflecting other political concerns, and class and political positioning may in fact be reproduced in conflicts over wetland management. However, portraying wetlands as just reflective of other political formations would result in perpetuating a structural marginalization of the environment as a secondary concern, a strategy that is also often used by political elites themselves to suppress people’s claims for environmental justice and moral ecologies. In contrast, this book analyzes how wetlands are made—and the varied crafting of moral ecologies.
Over the course of my field research in the Gediz and Kızılırmak Delta wetlands, between 2012 and 2018, I would learn that people who lived and worked on wetlands—particularly scientists, farmers, fishers, and bureaucrats—understood them as complex lived ecologies shaped by cultural and political forces. They were environments requiring constant work of care, variously directed at maintaining wetland ecologies; cultivating them; rewilding; rendering them productive; studying, transforming, or governing them. Where water should flow, for example, what kind of water, how much, what kind of flow, and what new configurations of more-than-human livelihoods would result from these decisions were very much contested matters.
On that hot summer day in 2012, in the abandoned saltpan, Emre was working on a vegetation map, tracing the expansion of reeds, which he used as an indicator for the moving boundary between fresh and saltier water. The “reed line” had been gradually advancing toward the Aegean Sea, taking over the saltmarsh habitats that thrived in the lower delta. This was an effect of recent wetland management: to counter decades of drought and increased water extraction for agriculture, the wetland management agency, where Emre worked, regularly purchased water from the delta’s irrigation cooperative to, literally, water the wetland to prevent the marshes from drying. However, irrigation also transformed them into freshwater environments, and more toxic agricultural and industrial runoff seeped into the saltmarsh ecology. Wetland materialities like these were always contested and generative of moral assessments of ecology. A senior university biologist supported irrigating the wetlands as a palliative for the increasing violence of summer drought and as a way to counter the effects of agricultural water use. But Emre and others envisioned this intervention as reducing the saline marsh habitat. They fantasized about restoring the ebbs and flows of the lower delta before dikes and irrigation canals had turned it into drier, more static earth, starkly separated from the marshes and the sea.
I encountered many contrasting and conflicting visions of the wetland in both the Gediz and Kızılırmak Deltas. Each wetland imagination also entailed a material transformation of the wetland to produce or support specific ecological relationships, all of which also included people. University scientists envisioned turning wetlands into university laboratories—a transformation that involved denying access to local fishers, herders, and foragers—and also controlling the population of eucalyptus trees, feral horses, buffaloes, invasive fish, and other problematic species. City officials saw the wetland as a potential tourist attraction. Urban planners worked on projects that highlighted the functions of the wetland as a natural and “green” infrastructure, one that would keep Turkish metropolises, towns, and villages livable for future generations. Real estate speculators saw the wetlands as a site to be drained for prime real estate as the city expanded northward. For international scientific teams, the deltas were also a node in the international network of wetland managers and conservationists. In each of these visions, notions of ecological relations were connected in various ways to moral aspirations for human livelihood and politics. Rather than serve as a simple reflection of the social order, the wetland itself muddles, sediments, and transforms the political.
1. Throughout this book, I use pseudonyms and have changed several toponyms and institutional names to protect my interlocutors’ identities. All translations of Turkish dialogues and documents are my own.
2. UNESCO, “The Criteria for Selection.”
3. Derneği, “Flamingo Bölgesine Otoban.”
4. “İzmir’in Gediz Deltası UNESCO Dünya Doğa Mirası Ilan Edilsin!”
5. Ruzicka, Trouble in the West, 97–98.
6. Choy, Ecologies of Comparison.
7. Anthropologists have written on amphibious spaces, in contrast to visions that privilege terraforming and divisions between land and water, as those where social life and infrastructure are organized around water flows. Krause, “Rhythms of Wet and Dry”; Richardson, “Terrestrialization of Amphibious Life.”
8. T. Hughes, “Evolution of Large Technological Systems”; Star, “The Ethnography of Infrastructure.”
9. Adalet, Hotels and Highways.
10. Carse, “Infrastructure.”
11. Björkman, Pipe Politics, Contested Waters.
12. Larkin, Signal and Noise.
13. Schwenkel, “Spectacular Infrastructure.”
14. Farmer, “Willing to Pay.”
15. Anand, Hydraulic City; Von Schnitzler, “Traveling Technologies.”
16. Nucho, Everyday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanon.
17. Meiton, Electrical Palestine.
18. Elyachar, “Phatic Labor”; Simone, “People as Infrastructure.”
19. Kurtiç, “Sedimented Encounters”; Stamatopoulou-Robbins, Waste Siege.
20. Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature; Yeh, “Nature and Nation in China’s Tibet”; Pritchard, Confluence; Ritvo, The Dawn of Green; R. White, The Organic Machine.
21. Costanza, Farber, and Maxwell, “Valuation and Management of Wetland Ecosystems.”
22. Carse, “Nature as Infrastructure”; Morita, “Multispecies Infrastructure.”
23. Bruun Jensen, “Amphibious”; Cons, “Staging Climate Security”; Hetherington, “Keywords of the Anthropocene”; Kim, “Toward an Anthropology of Landmines”; Stoetzer, “Ruderal Ecologies”; Tsing, Mushroom at the End of the World.
24. Millar, Reclaiming the Discarded, 100.
25. In the last two decades, anthropologists have elaborated on notions and practices of economic morality in great detail, inspired by the earlier work of E. P. Thompson and James Scott, which emphasized communal understandings of redistributive economic justice in the face of profiteering and exploitation and taking part in a growing interest on the phenomenology, ontology, and politics of moral and ethical worlds. Mattingly and Throop, “Anthropology of Ethics and Morality”; Scott, Moral Economy of the Peasant; Thompson, “The Moral Economy.” I propose that the moral stakes of ecological relations also be critically examined.
26. Carse, “Nature as Infrastructure”; Stoetzer, “Ruderal Ecologies”; Anand, Gupta, and Appel, The Promise of Infrastructure.
27. Scott, Moral Economy of the Peasant; Muehlebach, The Moral Neoliberal; Thompson, “The Moral Economy.”
28. Baker et al., “Mainstreaming Morality”; Dove and Kammen, “Epistemology of Sustainable Resource Use”; Martinez-Reyes, Moral Ecology of a Forest.
29. Rizvi, “Moral Ecology of Colonial Infrastructure”; Campbell, “Moral Ecologies of Subsistence.”
30. Erensü and Alemdaroğlu, “Dialectics of Reform and Repression.”
<31. Adalet, Hotels and Highways.
32. Dolbee, “Desert at the End of Empire”; Mikhail, Nature and Empire; Özkan, “Remembering Zingal”; S. White, “Rethinking Disease in Ottoman History”; S. White, Climate of Rebellion.
33. Erensü, “Powering Neoliberalization”; Erensü and Karaman, “Work of a Few Trees.”
34. Arsel, Akbulut, and Adaman, “Environmentalism of the Malcontent.”
35. Knudsen, “Protests against Energy Projects.”
36. Evren, “Rise and Decline of an Anti-dam Campaign.”
37. Erensü, “Fragile Energy.”
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