On May 31st, Metin Lokumcu, a 54-year-old retired teacher, collapsed and died after being tear-gassed and allegedly kicked by police during a protest in northeast Turkey. He was demonstrating against the government-backed construction of dams and hydroelectric plants in the pristine mountain valleys of the Black Sea coast.
”]The crowd had gathered in the town of Hopa to oppose a visit by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan ahead of Turkey’s June 12th general election. Though they represented a disparate array of causes, the issue of the dams was a key grievance. “Water is a right — it cannot be sold”, one banner read.
Environmental activists claim that Lokumcu’s death and the protests in Hopa show that Turkey’s green movement — often ignored, derided, and vilified by the government — is becoming louder and angrier.
“What happened in Hopa is certainly going to change the scale of activism against hydroelectric plants and dams in Turkey,” said Guven Eken, chairman of the Turkish NGO, the Nature Association.
Turkish ecologists have had a lot to worry about in recent months. Top of the list is the government’s plan to pass a new nature law that could threaten up to 80% of protected land to clear the way for 2,000 new hydro plants.
Though experts say the technology exists to build eco-friendly plants, the government has put few restraints on the private developers carrying out the projects.
Some worry that Erdogan’s planned third bridge over the Bosphorus, as well as his recently unveiled project for a canal joining the Black Sea and Marmara Sea could decimate forest outside Istanbul, jeopardizing the city’s main fresh water source.
Energy Minister Taner Yildiz appeared to sum up the government’s attitude towards environmental fears when he said that staying single posed a greater health risk than nuclear energy.
The problem, activists say, is that while countless Turks are seduced by the government’s vision of bold, relentless development, few worry about the environmental consequences.
“It’s much too early for that,” said Cengiz Aktar, a political scientist at Istanbul’s Bahcesehir University, told SETimes. “Turks are still discovering the consumer society, they are eager to buy more of everything. It’s very difficult to raise consciousness about environmental damage.”
In few places is the devastation of Turkey’s environment clearer than in the town of Dilovasi, an hour outside Istanbul.
More than 150 factories are haphazardly jumbled among a population of 45,000, including dirty, heavy industries such as scrap metal resmelting and paint and petrochemical manufacturing. Because of air pollution, the town’s cancer death rate is nearly triple the national average.
In 2006, a parliamentary commission recommended that Dilovasi be declared a “sanitary disaster zone”. But authorities have done little since then to clean up the town’s polluting industries.
But even here, where residents blame the government for not cutting the deadly pollution, many are still won over by the record of breakneck economic development credited to the AKP.
“In spite of what’s going on here, I can make no insult against them,” said 66-year-old retired metalworker Tahsin Karadag. “They have brought Turkey to where it is today.”
Eken fears that when Turks wake up to the environmental cost of economic progress, it could be too late.
“Right now, it’s only the people directly affected by the loss of environmental assets who care, and most people are not directly affected yet,” he said. “Eventually people will understand. The government’s policy is to convert natural assets into cash — this is not a sustainable way of growing our economy.”
This content was commissioned for SETimes.com.