Author's note: I am grateful to Benjamin Siegel, Chris Walley, Stefan Helmreich, Tessa Farmer, Jessica Barnes, members of the Middle East Environmental Worlds working group, and the anonymous peer reviewers for their help in refining my arguments. Earlier drafts were presented at the 2016 Rethinking Middle East Environment workshop, the 2016 Conservation workshop at the Center for Humanistic Inquiry, Amherst College, and the 2017 Ecological History in Asia conference at the Yale Council on East Asian Studies. I thank all of the workshop participants for their generous comments. Research was made possible thanks to grants from the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and the National Science Foundation (1429914).

¹ On the making of natural resources, see Richardson, Tanja and Weszkalnys, Gina, “Introduction: Resource Materialities,” Anthropological Quarterly 87 (2014): 5–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Robbins, Paul, Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction (West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012)Google Scholar.

² Elsewhere, I have written on scientific sense making as embodied, and have connected such care practices to the notion of “livable natures” to point to the mutual constitutions of notions and practices of place, livelihood, and ecology. See Scaramelli, Caterina “Making Sense of Water Quality: Multispecies Encounters on the Mystic River,” Worldviews 17 (2013): 150–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Scaramelli, Swamps into Wetlands: Making Livable Nature in Turkey (PhD diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2016).

³ Ethnographic research was conducted in Turkish; all translations in this article are mine.

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²⁹ These histories came up frequently in interviews I conducted with residents of delta villages between 2012 and 2015. See also Yılmaz, Bafra Ovası.

³⁰ “Bataklıkların Kurutulmasi ve Bunlardan Elde Edilecek Topraklar Hakkinda Kanun,” Resmi Gazete 23.I:7413 (1950): 409–12.

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³² On the Kızılırmak wetlands as valuable ecological as well as cultural sites, see Özgen, Can and Taş, Beyhan, “Ramsar Alanı Içinde Yer Alan Cernek Gölü Ve Sulak Alaninin (Kızılırmak Deltası, Samsun) Ekolojiv ve Sosyo-Ekonomik Önemi,” Tubav Bilim Dergisi 2 (2012): 1–11Google Scholar; and Kızılırmak Deltası Sulak Alan Yönetim Planı (Ankara: T.C. Çevre Bakanlığı, Doğa Koruma ve Milli Parklar Genel Müdürlüğü, Doğa Koruma Dairesi Başkanlığı, Sulak Alan Şube Müdürlüğü, 2008). On endangerment, see Timothy Choy, Ecologies of Comparison: An Ethnography of Endangerment in Hong Kong (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011); Heise, Ursula K., Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Vidal, Fernando and Dias, Nélia, ed., Endangerment, Biodiversity and Culture (London: Routledge, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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³⁴ For a detailed account, see Scaramelli, Swamps into Wetlands.

³⁵ IUCN, ICBP, and IWRB, Proceedings of a Technical Meeting on Wetland Conservation, Ankara-Bursa-Istanbul, 9 to 16 October 1967 (Morges, Switzerland: IUCN Publications, 1968).

³⁶ IUCN, ICBP, and IWRB, Proceedings of a Technical Meeting, 52. On the collaboration between the DSI and other state departments, see Heper, Metin and Criss, Nur Bilge, Historical Dictionary of Turkey (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2009), 109Google Scholar. On political debates about land reform, see Karaömerlioglu, Asim M., “Elite Perceptions of Land Reform in Early Republican Turkey,” Journal of Peasant Studies 27 (2000): 115–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁷ IUCN, ICBP, and IWRB, Proceedings of a Technical Meeting, 52.

³⁸ Ibid., 51.

³⁹ The Kızılırmak Delta (Ankara: General Directorate of Environmental Protection, Ministry of Environment, Republic of Turkey, 1998).

⁴⁰ Özesmi, Conservation Strategies.

⁴¹ Kızılırmak Deltası (Ankara: Turkish Republic Ministry of Environment, 1998), 10.

⁴² McAfee, Kathleen, “Selling Nature to Save It? Biodiversity and Green Developmentalism,” Environment and Planning 17 (1999): 133–54Google Scholar.

⁴³ No. 25818, revised on 17 May 2005, and in April 2014

⁴⁴ The conferences took place in Bursa (2009), Kirşehir (2011), and Samsun (2013).

⁴⁵ Yeniyürt et al., Kızılırmak Deltası.

⁴⁶ The word longoz, meaning “swamp forest” in Turkish, is of Greek origins; Csató, Éva Ágnes, Isaksson, Bo, and Jahani, Carina, Linguistic Convergence and Areal Diffusion: Case Studies from Iranian, Semitic and Turkic (London: Routledge, 2005), 338Google Scholar. Its synonym, su basan, means, literally, “that which steps in water.”

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⁴⁸ See Yılmaz, Bafra Ovası.

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⁵³ Educators at the “wetland school” sought to instill in the students a sense of care embodied in place, as the basis for acquiring and transmitting knowledge of the delta. For a report and evaluation of a later edition of the school, see Ali Kemal Ayan, Yeliz Genç Bekiroğlu, and Ahmet Dürüst, eds., Kızılırmak Deltasında Bilim Işığında Doğa Okulu (Samsun, Turkey: 2016).

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