The years of yellow phone booths. I bought a coin and reported two people who took sand illegally from our neighbourhood. The police came and made them pour the sand. This is my first movement about nature. I was so excited. I was 7. I couldnot accepted any destruction to nature. I would intervene if tree was cut down, I was bored if the sea was polluted.
At 1990’s tons of septic tanks, inudustrial waste, household waste and more, which were left uncontrolled to Samsun Port and the sea.The colour of water was red brown. The bottom of the sea is like a waste of battery storage. There are car tires, hospital wastes (waste glass serums), iron scaps whatever you are looking for. Samsun’s shelf is like a garbage dump. As if that’s not enough, the marked barrels with skull and crossbone thrown from foreign cargo ships are on the beach of Municipal Houses.
Human begins to perceive its environment firstly. In the years when I started to notice the natural events around me at an early age, we witnessed the compensations paid to the farmers from Samsun Nitrogen Industry. Those, who grow vegetales in Tekkeköy are leaving the farming one by one. I watch the smoke, coming out of the nitrogen and copper factories. Samsun is under carbon. Coal is burning everywhere. We are in the mid 1990’s, ecology is starting to succumb to the economy.
The 1986 Chernobyl disaster created a severe trauma at all over the Black Sea Region. I rememnber the hazelnuts that were given out for free at school. Europe doesnot buy hazelnuts because there is a suspicious of radiation. Students are fighting with nuts. There are hazelnuts grains like pebbles everywhere in the schoolyard. On TV’s there are debates about Chernobyl. Radiation is the word we heard the most in those years. 20 years later, the Black Sea Region is like a hospital. Patients’ relatives accompany their patients in the hospital gardens for days. Long, tiring and hopeless treatment processes. At least one person in each family dies of cancer.
Uncontrolled environment in the 1990’s we are witnessing how the sea has ben polluted for years helplessly. We couldnot do anything. We could only keep statistics of this business verbally. It wasnot offical either. While witnessing how the streams, rivers, lakes, and sea are polluted, suddenly with a sudden deterioration in all of these, the abundance that water gives to humanity ceases. No one wanted to admit that these inevitable ending is coming.
Firstly water was polluted. How does? Of course because of the pesticides that have been used for a long time industrial wastes, domestic wastes, pesticides, which are released into the waters uncontrollably. Everything became clearer in my mind when I read Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring”. This groundbreaking work in America in 1962 was the locomative of my environmental movement. I read breathlessly until the end of the book, how the preparations, especially DDT and likes, are killers. Industrial products that have been cultivated in Samsun for years came to my mind. Tabacco, paddy and nuts humans and all living things were all heavily sprayed. The painful truth was also reflected in the language of the society. In our neigborhood, when our Ümmühan Auntie got angry with children on the street, she would shout “eat aldırın” (aldırın yiyesiceler) and we laughed. How do we know aldırın is a kind of a poison? But there was a fact that it was used intensively in Samsun (some of pesticides; DDT, BHC, Lindon, Toksafen, Dieldirin, Aldirin and phosphate).
In the 1940’s, a war was waged on the land and nature in the USA. Almost all of the US county’s territory was exposed to heavy pesticides. Us pragmatism has infected us too. The situation was no different with us. It is called the “Agricultural front for the war with the land” in the anthem of the Village Institues. All-out war on the land had spread in waves with USA all over the world. Us-origin drugs had to be used for reproduction. People were made to believe in this massacre. The lands of Turkey, which was a part of the “Fertile Crescent” in 1950’s were under the siege of the prepats. Especially large plantations in deltas.
After 1950’s we encountered a heavy pollution. Nowadays our villager, who is made to believe that nothing can grow without pesticides, is relentlessly applying every pesticide, to the ecosystem. It is said that “ no potatoes or tomatoes without pesticides. You can go on to say…”
The production booms all over the world and brings population growth with it in 1950’s. Of course, Turkey would get its own share from that. Production increase, migration from the village to the city accelerated. More energy requirements had increased the number of dams and yhe use of coal. Even nuclear power plant projecs. In the 1990’s there was the synthetic revolutaion and the concentrate revolution. We were faced with a rapid concreting. Emissions, carbon emissions, fosil fuels problem has always been for energy. Governments had come to compete with each other. Countries boasted about how many cars they produced, how many televisions and refrigerators they sold, how many houses were sold annually. In fact, it was the footsteps of extinction. Industrial production was inscenely out of control and humanity didnot even realize it. The Anthropocene was living now. The explosions in energy production with the discovery of oil and the result and the point we have come to are known. Nowadays everyone is trying to aviod cancer through organic natural nutrition. A human being in search of pesticide- free products and she looks after the apples that she did not buy from the market because they were wormy.
I will mention about Samsun location, which is how been damaged. As everybody knows, firstly water is polluted. Then weather. Two magnificiant rivers of Turkey, Kızılırmak and Yeşilırmak. The deltas are formed by these two streams with their enormous wetlands and lakes were openly exposed to chemical pollution. Firstly sensitive species began to dissappear. Crayfish, snails and other aquatic life slowly started to die. Every drug that was thrown pased from the soil to the water. Finally it met with streams and underground waters and the sea. Floratic and faunatic extinction accelerated. In the mountains, the elm dissapeared first. Then the mushroom species disappeared one by one. Hazelnut farming has found an uncontrolled application area in the mountain villages on the plain of the Black Sea coast. Forests are slowly being illegally cut down for more hazelnuts instead of beech (hornbeam) forests; hazelnut orchards took place in many places. Too much fertilizer and pesticides were thrown into the hazelnut. Bees are starting to disappear. Butterflies disappeared. Birds are almost silent in spring in the Black Sea. In the future, I always had the following thought in my mind about hazelnut. “What if a disase came to hazelnut one day, would the green Black Sea turn into a desert ?”
I witnesed the most serios talk about climate change in 1997. I was only 17 years old and there was a program on a private channel tv, NTV, about global warming and climate change. Many concepts that I heard for the first time, from melting glaciers to carbon emisions were discussed here. Polar bears were the most obvious symbol. The polar bears and thier cubs were looking helplessly at the cameras on a piece of glacier. At the end of the programme I almost blacked out. After this programme , even though I tried to explain to everyone what I know about global warming., it didnot mean anything to people. Because in those years, water in pet bottles had just begun to be sold in Samsun. There was clean water everywhere. Even in the fountains between the neighborhoods. My relatives now understand beter what I mean in those days after 25 years later.
Diseappering species from my field research; sturgeon.
When I read Freud’s death instinct (impulse) and life instinct during my university years, I witnesed why human strives to self destruct. On the one hand humankind trying to keep it alive, was trying to destroy the world very quickly without keeping it alive. I started to examine the destructions by human hands. The Aral Lake was a disaster. It was also one of the most painful scene to have been systematically destroyed by human hands. Aswan Dam, Ruhr Valley Dust Bowl were like that. Geographies were polluted for oil, destruction of the Middle East wildlife, Caspian Sea ecosystem, Venezuela and many more… I could now understand the extinct species beter. All off them is because of human.
By the 2000’s, ecological stress had reached its peak. Some were talking about ecological doomsday scenarios and few countries in Europe were trying to implement doomsday warehouse projects. In this field, futuristic ideas and eschatological scenerios were now talked about. How could a livable world be possible after a major climate disaster? Unfortunately, when I watched the “The Day Afer Tomorrow”, a movie about climate change and it was made in 2004, I liked vey much; humankind had passed the red line already.
The point we have come to is full of many oddities. Bill Gates, one of the richest people in the world, wrote a bokk: “How to Prevent Climate Disaster?” The most obvious thought in the book was that the world could no longer carry eight billion people. There are very serious statistics from health and education to clean energy and today’s 860 million people without electricity. The old planet was now a ship about to sink. How should passengers be evacuated from this ship or thtown at sea? Thinking that large cattle have a share in carbon emissions, Bill Gates argued that the number of animals in the world should be reduced, and even the use of artifical meat produced in a cell-based laboratory environment. No matter how much we reduced carbon emissions afer this time, the inevitable end was that the climate would change in a way we didnot want. So was it the poor people of the poor countries who destroyed the world in carbon emissions, or the rich countries who ruined the world with all kinds of pollutanta with their consumption frenzy? Nowadays multinational companies contemptuously support recycling products. These companies try to look cute as if they are so-called environmentalists with the products they offer to the market.
Since the first IPCC repor in 1988, annual carbon emissions from fosil fuel use, have increased by 60 percent. The fact that the carbondioxide level in the atmosphere reached the highest level of the last 800000 years in April 2014, is in front of us with all its clarity. UNEP (1972), Montreal (1987), Rio (1992), Kyoto (1997), Copenhagen (2009) ,UN Paris Climate Summit (2015) and international meetings purposes, unfortunately, couldnot be achieved.
Diseappering species from my field research; Abant trout.
It is very sad that adequate steps arenot taken about climate change in my country also. Clean energy efforts, controlling the fosil fuel industry is an urgent priority for a sustainable life. We should be more careful while constructing HES (Hydrological Power Plant) on streams which are the capillars of nature, and we should stop making HES of any size, large or small, for every stream we find. We should act sensitively on projecs that have the idea of warming our country even more and pass it through the filter of nature for a sustainable common life. In the last year and a half at the Covid19 pandemic, humanity must withdraw itsef. In the measures to be taken, the country administration and the public should be a whole and action should be taken. It is very pleasing that we as a country taking part in Polar Studies Institue Natural Polar Science Programme (2018-2022) . In addition, the planting trees of the country’s lands and the zero waste Project are among the good exmples implemented.
Finally we are face to a humanity who burns and destroys from the Holocene to Antropocene Age. Sustainability indicates that the difficult struggle of people trying to maintain their lives with agriculture will make the dream of a sustainable world even more difficult. In the near future, we will see carbon taxes or a more severe utopian scenario. It is also limited water consumption and water wars. This close prediction is actually a painful truth that everyone knows but ignores. At the end of the movie, from scanerios about remaining a hunter gatherer species to Stone Age Scenarios, humanity will work hard for drinkable water and clean air to breathe. I thin the name of this age is battery age or fitler age. In order to prevent furter carbon emissions, we will need batteries to store all kinds of clean energy and filters for a cleaner air and water. As in the American Indian Proverb; humanity had gone at a dizzy speed, but our souls were just that far behind. We were the last generation to watch Captain Cousteou on the Blue Planet, but we were also the ones who hastened this extinction and wrote the apocalyptic scenarios.