Salvage work: The making of movable nature for post-submergence life

Abstract

This article critically examines environmental salvage projects undertaken in northeastern Turkey by focusing on political and technoscientific actors who design and implement them. In 2012, Turkey's first project to salvage rare plants before their submergence in a dam reservoir was implemented in the Çoruh Valley. This was the first instance of resettlement and restoration efforts associated with large dams to encompass plant life. A few years later, when another dam upstream was to be built in the same valley, fruit trees and fertile soil were designated as valuable ecologies to be salvaged. By examining these state-led projects, this article examines the inextricable relationship between ruination and restoration, in which state officials and experts play a central role. I argue that state-led salvage projects legitimize and exacerbate the very ruination they claim to mitigate by portraying it as inevitable. The governmental practice of making nature movable is a salvage work that ends up moving nature out of the way of infrastructure and extraction projects.