More-than-Human Lifeworlds: Ethics, Ontology and Relationality in Local Environmental Struggles

Abstract

Local environmental conflicts are often framed as “resource conflicts” in the political ecology literature. Based on ethnographic research on local community struggles against run-of-river hydroelectric power plants in Turkey’s East Black Sea Region, this article aims to demonstrate the limitation of the “resource” frame in explaining the grievances of environmentally dispossessed communities and their motivations to fight against it. The article discusses how and why rivers are more than “natural resources” for the rural communities of the region, maintaining non-human entities as integral not only to the umwelt (environment, surroundings), but also to the lebenswelt (lifeworld). It develops a bodycentred, phenomenological perspective demonstrating how non-human entities become an essential part of our experiential and social world through habitual and corporeal encounter and interaction. It maintains the centrality of the more-than-human lifeworld in the constitution of relational ontologies and ethics of coexistence, and in the formation of political agency.

Keywords:

• environmental ethics
• environmental conflict
• relational ontology
• phenomenology
• more-than-human lifeworld
• body
• Turkey
• hydropower
• environmental movements

Notes

1 All quotations are taken from interviews conducted by the author; unless stated otherwise, all names are pseudonyms. I use the actual names of villagers only when I refer to interviews with them that have appeared in the news media. The villages and valleys mentioned in the article are all located in Turkey’s East Black Sea Region. Most of them are located in the district of Fındıklı (Rize Province), with the exception of Senoz Valley which is located in Çayeli (Rize Province), and the village of Konaklı, which is in Arhavi (Artvin Province). See map for exact locations.

2 Run-of-the-river HEPPs do not flood large areas, as they require little or no water storage. Rather, they make use of the natural downward flow of steep rivers, taking water from the river at a higher point, diverting it to electricity generating turbines by a weir or a pipeline, and then releasing it back into its downstream flow. The recent boom in hydropower development in Turkey is characterized by run-of-the river HEPPs, except for a few highly controversial mega-dams such as Ilısu (Eberlein et al. 2010; Hommes, Boelens, and Maat 2016) and Yusufeli (Evren 2014).

3 Because of local community resistance and project cancellations due to lack of feasibility and changing economic circumstances, it now seems impossible that the AKP government could reach this number by 2023. As of the end of 2021, 743 HEPPs were in use, 26 were under construction, and 469 more were in the project phase, bringing the total number to 1238 if all the planned projects are constructed, which is highly unlikely. See https://cdniys.tarimorman.gov.tr/api/File/GetFile/425/Sayfa/759/1107/DosyaGaleri/2021_yili_faaliyet_raporu.pdf, last accessed on April 10, 2022.

4 “Extending out” (Burawoy 1998) from the field, however, does not imply making any claims to a universal, “overarching explanatory framework” (Mol 2010) that would explain environmental struggles or human–non-human relationality in every social, cultural, historical, and geographical context. Acknowledging the situated character of knowledge (Haraway 1988), this article understands the task of bottom-up theorizing as an effort to take up particular elements of a specific case and elevate them to a level of abstraction that allows one to establish certain connections, mark certain relations, and introduce certain concepts that might help in analyzing other cases beyond the specific context.

5 There are, of course, different approaches within political ecology, some of which go beyond the resource frame by acknowledging “the profound relationality of all life” and “relational ontologies … that eschew the divisions between nature and culture” (Escobar 2011, 139). The later work of Martinez-Alier also stresses that the value of environmental entities and environments is not reducible to their instrumental use, and their sacred, religious, and spiritual value cannot be monetized (see Temper and Martinez-Alier 2013). The case of the East Black Sea Region demonstrates that sacredness, belief, and spirituality are not the only contexts in which environmental entities assume a value beyond their instrumental use (see Yaka 2019b, 2020b).

6 For a broader analysis and a detailed discussion of the relevance of phenomenology in studying environmental struggles, see Yaka (2023).

7 The term “relational more-than-human sociality” expresses the idea that the world involves non-human entities and environments, that it is “a more than human one” (Simonsen and Koefoed 2020, 14).

8 I was able to determine this on the basis of media coverage, public visibility, and information from local contacts.

9 I conducted semi-structured, in-depth interviews (see Blee and Taylor 2002) with the members and representatives of local associations, as well as regional and national platforms such as DEKAP (Derelerin Kardeşliği Platformu [Brotherhood of Rivers Platform]), KIP (Karadeniz İsyandadır [Black Sea in Resurrection Platform]), and MEH (Mezopotamya Ekoloji Hareketi [Mesopotamian Ecological Movement]).

10 This focus on the lived experiences of villagers is necessary to provide a complete picture of the situation, as the motivations, narratives, and framings of people on the ground can differ substantially from the motivations, narratives, and framings of movement elites.

11 This includes content analysis of visual material (videos and photographs) and written texts produced by protesting communities and/or anti-HEPP associations and platforms (usually made available through social media), hundreds of news stories published in national media outlets, independent archives of local environmental struggles such as the Ekoloji Almanağı (Ecology Almanac) (Aksu and Korkut 2017), and documentaries by independent film makers.

12 See Yaka 2017 and 2019a for a detailed analysis of women’s anti-HEPP activism in relation to their routine bodily interactions with river waters, enabled by the gendered division of labor in the region. See Yaka 2020a for a detailed methodological reflection.

13 Between 2008 and 2018, 203 HEPPs were built in the Black Sea Region, concentrated in the eastern parts of the region. As of August 2021, total number of active HEPPs in the region was 246. See https://m.bianet.org/bianet/yasam/248676-karadeniz-de-246-aktif-hes-var, last accessed on April 10, 2022.

14 My findings involve a strong gender aspect that I do not discuss in detail in this article. Put briefly, even though river waters are central to the lifeworld of all residents of riverside villages in the region, it is mainly women who, due to the highly gendered division of labor, work in the fields in the region, which means being in continuous bodily—sensory and affective—contact with river waters, as the villages and fields are located by rivers and streams. This everyday corporeal connection fuels the radical and committed opposition of East Black Sea women against HEPP projects (see Yaka 2017 and 2019b).

15 On the concept of flesh, see Merleau-Ponty (1968) and Coole (2007).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Özge Yaka

Özge Yaka received her PhD in Sociology from Lancaster University. She currently works at the intersection of human geography, gender studies, and environmental humanities. She is interested in critical, feminist, phenomenological, and posthumanist theories of body, agency, and subjectivity, as well as the questions of justice, ethics and ontology, especially in the context of grassroots environmental struggles. She is currently based at the Institute of Geographical Sciences, Freie Universität Berlin.