How to Make a Wetland presents a lively ethnographic study of two deltas in Turkey, Gediz and Kızılırmak, both characterized by thick layers of sedimented political histories and current recognition as key conservation areas at local and international levels. Caterina Scaramelli examines the lived ecologies of the wetlands as morally charged, multifaceted entities, attending to the diverse scientific, political, and economic claims made by the wide range of agents involved. These claims, Scaramelli argues, are assessments of “what is of value in life,” interweaving care, conservation, and politics, while also producing dispossession and displacement (p. 10). Scaramelli characterizes these converging and contrasting ecological ideas and practices as moral ecologies through a detailed analysis of the historical and contemporary relations between people, nonhuman animals, plants, and other organisms in these wetlands. Grounded in six years of ethnographic fieldwork between 2012 and 2018, as well as in-depth archival and online research, the book offers a refreshing framework for studying conservation, infrastructures, and ecologies in relation to longer environmental histories and imagined ecological futures.
Built on an analytical framework and methodological approach that creatively accounts for the multifaceted materiality, elusive and sedimented temporalities, and contested ecologies of wetlands, How To Make a Wetland questions the taken-for-granted descriptions and definitions of wetlands as “natural” entities. The book analyzes wetlands as environmental infrastructures that are put to work in alignment with human systems and interests, all the while not losing sight of the more-than-human and unplanned elements that both cater to and at times challenge such work. The book documents the ways the wetlands work as “semantic sponges,” replicating the spongelike materiality ascribed to them in the descriptions of birders and hunters from the 1920s and 30s in the United States, emphasizing their capacity to absorb, hold, and work as a ground for the flourishing of agricultural goods (p. 35). Scaramelli presents an historical analysis of the emergence of the category of wetland, examining the shifts in its definition, perception, and management internationally and in Turkey, as well as the roles of wetlands as scientific open-air laboratories, economic assets, and objects of environmental organization. She also examines the bureaucratic, scientific, and cultural tools and technologies that rework the meanings wetlands hold today, as they both replicate and diverge from earlier narratives.
The book explores sediments in both material and figurative ways, attending to multiple layers of history and examining both social and engineered changes that have unfolded in the Gediz delta. These sediments reflect the “elision of cosmopolitan histories,” as evidenced by the historical displacement of human populations, the renaming of geographical elements such as rivers, and the engineered redirection of rivers to prevent the expansion of sediment into ports valued for their potential to enable mobility (p. 71). Sediment as an analytical tool is helpful for investigating these layers of history as they are reevoked in the present. In both deltas examined in the book, ongoing contestations regarding the form and function of the wetland and the populations seen as its rightful inhabitants document the recurrent implications of these “sticky sediments” (p. 24). The more contemporary layers of those sediments are explored in further detail throughout the rest of the book. For instance, the notion of “the infrastructural remakings” of the Gediz delta juxtaposes the moral ecological imaginaries of different stakeholders, including fishermen, university professors, urban residents, and bureaucrats (p. 104). Similarly, the various valuations of the Kızılırmak delta highlight the tensions that arise from differing regimes of care for the delta as a site of production, use, and conservation. In this book, the implications and manifestations of moral ecologies are underlined, with ethnographic vignettes illustrating different valuation regimes narrated by people involved in the making of these deltas. Moral ecologies are presented and discussed in a way that refuses to imply a dichotomy between moral claims and corporate logic or the capitalist market. The author is attuned to various forms of environmental subjectivities, some of which are conjured as part of modernist, capitalist environmental projects.
Scaramelli critically moves away from and challenges some of the key dichotomies that characterize discussions on ecology, conservation, and infrastructures. Her monograph diverges from environmental studies that situate ecological concerns strictly within the sphere of antiauthoritarian political movements in Turkey. Making a wetland, in this analysis, is a complex and multilayered process that includes nonhuman inhabitants, farmers, ornithologists, and urban residents, as well as bureaucrats, state institutions, and environmental activists. The book highlights how political and ecological claims made by these social actors are as shifting as the boundaries of the wetlands. These claims cannot be neatly boxed into modernist narratives that see ecological concerns as another frontier of state failure in Turkey or political ecological claims that posit a stark contrast between the imperatives of the neoliberal state and “nature” as a value concept. In a related manner, the author also refuses to oppose wetland conservation to modernist politics of drainage, instead documenting the ways in which these have historically become linked projects.
How to Make a Wetland also can be read as an engaging account of a multispecies ecological history in Turkey. Given the intricate relationship between wetland conservation efforts and ornithology described in the book, birds are key protagonists in this ethnography. Birds’ stories figure in all chapters, serving as catalysts for wetland preservation organizing, as charismatic symbols for environmental activists, and as contested symbols or icons of nativity. The book introduces one of the most intriguing bird stories, bringing the reader back to the evocative painting of swamphens featured on its cover and giving the book a circular narrative structure. The symbols and speculations surrounding the purple swamphen illustrate how the past and present of the deltas’ lived ecologies are contested, continually reshaping who has the right to inhabit and belong to these environments. Alongside stories of birds, the book elaborates on the histories of mosquitoes and malarial ecologies, feral horses as agricultural residues, water buffaloes as proxies for the care of the wetland and as biopolitical subjects, and many other nonhuman species, including jackals, wild boars, and leeches, as well as reeds, glassworts, and eucalyptus trees. The multiplicity of these connected stories makes the book a valuable read for audiences interested in more-than-human histories.
The stories of lived ecologies explored in the book document how wetlands are connective in an infrastructural and more-than-human way. They testify to the intricacies of collective survival, particularly in the face of environmental precarity that only grows in scope as climate change becomes increasingly more pressing. The ending of How to Make a Wetland gestures toward the possibilities for that survival, emphasizing the powerful tools political ecology offers amid a worsening political climate, civil wars, and catastrophes of extractive capitalism. With its focus on moral ecologies, care, and everyday politics with a multispecies lens, this ethnographically rich and politically urgent book is a fascinating and timely read for anyone interested in environmental anthropology, the politics of water, infrastructure, and materiality.
