Solidarity amid strife in Turkey

It wasn’t long after the blasts tore through the crowd that the urgent cries began going out on Twitter and Facebook: “O-, O+ and A- blood needed at Numune, Hacettepe and İbni Sina hospitals!”

Next came the photographs of papers tacked to walls: lists of the names of the injured, shared online to get the word out to their family and friends.

As night fell after Turkey’s deadliest-ever terrorist attack, a dual suicide bombing targeting a peace rally organised by trade unions in the capital city of Ankara, the calls for help continued...

The killing of 103 people in the Ankara bombings of 10 October sent many in Turkey, myself included, into deep mourning. One of the few things bringing some comfort was seeing the solidarity and resilience of people coming together to protest the deaths and help those wounded in the attack and the families of those who perished.

This is a difficult moment, however, for Turkey's grassroots, which while revitalized in some ways by the Gezi Park protests of 2013 and subsequent civic organizing, is also under an increasing amount of pressure from the country's government and security forces. I wrote about some of these tensions for Equal Times, a Brussels-based news site that also published the story in Spanish and French.

Read the rest of my article, "The Renewal and Repression of Turkey's Civil Society Grassroots," on Equal Times.

Environmental battles along Turkey's Black Sea coast

Turkey's little-visited Black Sea coast has become a hotbed of resistance to dams and other environmentally damaging hydropower projects, part of an ambitious national development and privatization agenda that includes the building of coal plants, nuclear plants, and nearly 2,000 new dams, as well as many new mining and other industrial operations.

The Black Sea region’s lush forests and small mountain villages provide a striking backdrop for the fierce battle being waged there, a fight pitting farmers, fishermen, and beekeepers against the powerful government and corporate interests seemingly intent on bulldozing the landscape and damming its life-giving waterways in the name of “progress” and profit.

“We were born hearing the voice of this river and we will die with it” is a commonly expressed sentiment among Black Sea villagers, whose honey harvests, hazelnut crops, and vegetable gardens all depend upon the region’s rivers. Though the threat of dams looms the largest, gold mining and other extractive industries also put people’s health, homes, and livelihoods at risk.

Local activists who have rallied against such threats often end up facing new ones: lawsuits filed against them by hydropower companies, many with close ties to Turkey's ruling political party; intimidation and even violence from police and other security forces seeking to break up protests; vilification as traitors, communists, or even terrorists by government authorities; and pressure from local officials and religious leaders not to speak out against such projects, and to take below-market buyouts for homes in the path of construction.

With a grant from Mongabay's Special Reporting Initiatives, I traveled this spring across the eastern Black Sea, from the port city of Trabzon to the mountain towns of Artvin, Murgul, and Yusufeli, taking in the gorgeous – but in many cases already blighted – scenery and talking to local residents and activists about the threats they and their homes face.

Read my first two articles from this reporting trip on the Mongabay website:

• New solidarity in struggle to protect Turkey's 'life spaces'

• Turkish government bears down on rural resistance to mining and hydro projects

A little link love

Reporting on environmental issues in Turkey can be a lonely pursuit (and can sometimes feel like a lost cause), so it's always gratifying to have my work for TreeHugger.com cited by people I respect.

Writing about the resignation-under-pressure of a longtime Turkish columnist who had "railed against the Prime Minister and other government officials for their plan to build a series of controversial dams in a scenic part of northeastern Turkey," journalist Yigal Schleifer linked to one of my TreeHugger posts as context for the story:

On a related note, Jennifer Hattam of the TreeHugger blog has a great post up about just what is happening with the dam project that [columnist Oktay] Ekşi wrote about and why people are getting so fired up about the government's actions on the issue.

More recently, acclaimed Turkish environmentalist Çağan Şekercioğlu linked to my reports on his latest research in his own write-up for National Geographic NewsWatch.