How to Make a Wetland: Water and Moral Ecology in Turkey by Caterina Scaramelli is the outcome of painstaking ethnographic fieldwork from 2012 to 2018 in two Ramsar sites: the Gediz Delta on the Aegean coast and the Kızılırmak Delta on the Black Sea. As the title phrases concisely, the book seeks to understand how marshes, swamps, and alike – “environments saturated with water” – are made into wetlands in Turkey, a process that it argues to be “at once political, cultural, and material” (p. 5). Focusing on the day-to-day affairs of environmental expertise in the deltas, it gives a detailed account of the subtle politics emerging from contrasting perspectives on how the conservation must be performed. The focus on contrasting expert visions is accompanied by two significant themes essential for the book’s undertaking on the wetland’s socio-political making. One is the infrastructural arrangements that necessarily intervene in the wetland ecologies to protect them amidst industrial and agricultural economies putting pressure on water through pollution or depletion. The second is the deltas’ connections with local communities harnessing the ecosystem for their livelihoods through fisheries, grazing, or agriculture, and who have their own opinions on conservation as they are affected by the conservation. Scaramelli also nests this inquiry within the social and environmental history of Turkey and provides a succinct yet essential account of the main trends in migration, agricultural expansion, and demographic transformation from the nineteenth century onwards, showing the “simultaneous transformation of … swamps and marshes into agricultural fields and into wetlands” (p. 135). In the deltas, on the other hand, Scaramelli incessantly shadows scientists from the university, a non-governmental organization (NGO), or state agencies as they run their errands; she even partakes occasionally in their work, such as contributing to the writing of a proposal, and dwells with the local communities.

The wetland conservation areas stage ongoing, subtle politics, which stem from contrasting expert views on the human and non-human lives in the conservation areas, as well as local perceptions and petitions. These conflicting understandings of caring and protecting, in turn, elicit different valuations of the conservation ecologies and nature. In portraying these conflicts, How to Make a Wetland seeks a vantage point beyond the antagonism of “an aggressive governmental agenda for rapacious development at all costs and demands for ecological justice espoused by ordinary people” (p. 11). While it unquestionably recognizes the primary role of long-standing development policies in the loss of habitats and ecologies, in its view, wetlands are not merely reflective of “polarizing politics of Turkish nature.” With its attention to more diffuse forms of politics, one that is played out through normative and moral evaluations of nature, How to Make a Wetland is a distinct contribution to the already burgeoning literature on the political ecology of Turkey.

The first chapter elaborates on a historical trajectory that permeates the book. It provides a “regional environmental history” and expands on the effects of migration and demographic transformation, agricultural expansion, and the public health concerns regarding malaria in the transformation of Turkey’s lands since the nineteenth century. This short account moves on to the formation of ideas on conservation by ornithologists, for whom the marshes in the Ottoman Empire were cherished places. However, this ethos became more articulate and more sonorous following World War II, when the conditions afforded an international network as well as scientific and policy work for wetland conservation. In the late 1960s, Turkish officials also aligned with them by hosting “Technical Meeting on Wetland Conservation.” Conversely, this period was also the zenith of wetland drainage in Turkey; half of Turkey’s wetlands were drained between 1950 and 1990 (p. 31). Two presentations from the meeting by a Turkish scientist and a bureaucrat illustrate the contrast. One reprimands reckless agricultural expansion and emphasizes the necessity of preserving wetlands for their national, which is also ecological, value, whereas the other expresses a “profitable” program towards more drainage (p. 27). Thus, destruction and preservation of the wetlands were interlaced, if not commensurate, processes.

The second and third chapters, “Sediments” and “Moral Ecologies of Infrastructure,” respectively, organize Scaramelli’s fieldwork encounters in the Gediz Delta. Through these encounters, Scaramelli highlights the fundamental role of two notions integral to her understanding of the day-to-day conservation work. The first is the inseparability of built and natural environments, infrastructures, and ecologies. The second is the “moral ecologies” that mark the normative claims that different actors make in their relation to the conservation area, thus revealing “competing ideas of wetland habitats and livelihood” (p. 53). Moral ecology is also a revision to the concept of moral economy, which marks a collective and local resistance against market economy intrusions. Building on but also differentiating it from moral economy, Scaramelli deploys moral ecology “to highlight mutual obligations, affective relations, and valuations among humans as well as plants, animals, and other organisms” (p. 90).

Although occasionally lost among the empirical findings, this framework guides Scaramelli’s descriptions of the continuous remaking of the conservation work in the Gediz Delta. An infrastructure project involving irrigation of the wetland to save the wetland habitat or implementation of artificial flamingo nesting islands reveals the conflicting moral ecologies of scientists working for the wetland management. These conflicts not only rehearse a clash of ideas on how the wetland conservation should be, but they also involve the remaking of environmental infrastructures and materiality of the wetland. Beyond varying conceptions of conservation or intricacies of ecologies and infrastructures, the wetland is also not insulated from the urban and agrarian life surrounding it. The construction of nesting platforms for flamingoes and media attraction turns the area into a leisure site for the middle classes (p. 54). The protection area also enforces locals who exact their livelihoods from the delta to adapt, determining their fortunes in fisheries or agriculture. Some of Scaramelli’s local informants complain about the work of Mehmet Sıkı, a university scientist whose activism contributed much to the formation of the conservation area, for it curtailed both agriculture and the possible urban sprawl towards the wetland area (pp. 86–7). Thus, diverse moral evaluations of ecologies are weaved together with the making of environmental infrastructures; protection and uses of ecologies, for livelihood or spectatorial purposes, also produce diverse positions for those with stakes in them.

The remaining two chapters sustain Scaramelli’s analysis of the environmental expertise in the Kızılırmak Delta in Samsun. The change in the setting and the actors has tangible consequences; most significantly, the Kızılırmak Delta hosts a considerable regional economy through rice cultivation, and water buffalo grazing is also present. Nevertheless, the themes explored are still driven by the intersections of historical settlement patterns on demographic and agricultural change, local livelihoods, and economic life in conflict with the state-led interventions to the environment for preservation, and the varied approaches to the conservation work evident in different scientific and managerial perspectives. Chapter 4 problematizes care for the delta, and despite the diverse profile of the delta’s stakeholders, the participation of local communities is stymied and overruled by the expert gaze from above. Scaramelli depicts a student–professor–villager meeting about which İbrahim, a rice cultivator in the delta, comments that the professors do not regard the real challenges of the agriculturalists. Chapter 5 dwells on the wetland animals, unpacking the symbolic and material conflicts around their presence in the delta. Overall, the details from the Kızılırmak Delta supplement the findings from Gediz, without striving to propose a legible framework of comparison between the two.

Scaramelli’s book contains rich and intriguing details about the wetland ecologies in its scope, which occasionally translates into a challenging read. Nevertheless, these details also question the boundaries between built and natural environments in the deltas and support the author’s claim that “wetlands remain critical environments to think and to live with in the early twenty-first century” (p. 7). For this reason, the ways Scaramelli’s interlocutors know nature are manifold and, in many instances, quite tacit and hands-on. The book opens with a anecdote when Scaramelli tagged along with Emre, an NGO volunteer and ornithologist, and Deniz, a marine biologist, who were counting the reeds in the delta to map the boundary between salty and fresh water in the delta. In Samsun, a professor of agriculture encourages his students to step into the marshes with bare feet to learn “to be water buffaloes – to feel the wetland” (p. 107). Such details feed into the fieldwork’s commitment to depicting the affective work and care that are interlaced with the scientific claims and administrative structures overseeing decisions on the wetland conservations in Turkey.

On the other hand, though, the book’s theoretical ambitions also reveal its shortcomings. The book’s exciting and distinct approach to valuations of nature by reading through moral claims is also one of its main flaws. Scaramelli comes to disagree with the dominant paradigm of state-led development and local struggle in Turkish environmental politics, yet it is questionable if moral ecologies offer a satisfactory alternative to it. Its spin on moral economy remains too vague and its assumptions on the valuation of nature, without a robust dialogue with the existing research on the topic, such as the “languages of valuation” discussed at length by Joan Martinez Alier with strong assertions on global inequalities, or many sociological works on values and valuation, remain untested.

Moral ecology expresses “ideas, aspirations, meanings, and evaluations of right and wrong that concern relations between organisms, humans included” (p. 166) while rejecting ascribed binaries of urban and rural, built and natural, or capitalist processes and resistance, arguing that ethical subjectivities can also entrench capitalist economic transformations. I agree with this approach, yet I also think it fails to account for two possible objections. First, reading normative claims through subjective ethical evaluations fails to reflect on their relations with institutional and legal arrangements or socio-economic changes. Second, it overlooks the chance that dominant paradigms could script moral evaluations, affording subjectivities and boundaries and therefore informing valuations of nature.

Nevertheless, this qualification does not devalue the merits of Scaramelli’s perspective. Its evident search for innovation builds on meticulous work bridging archival research and historical trends with fieldwork in two sites in which these histories reify, all described vividly by the author. With its nuanced, ethnographic attention to environmental management and moral evaluations of nature, How to Make a Wetland indeed makes a novel contribution to research on the environment in social sciences.