ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes reconsidering the historical stance for environmental conservation as an internal and necessary constituent of a struggle for life and livelihood, which is a socio-ecological process. It suggests reconceiving the movements as outcomes of geographically and historically specific relationships between capitalist development and socio-ecological change. The chapter examines the global and local socio-historical contexts through which Bergama’s villages and the Cerattepe hill adjacent to Artvin were transformed into mining frontiers and the emergence and development of environmental justice movements against the transformation. It argues that although the movements were spawned in locally specific political ecologies of conflict, they were locally differentiated outcomes of a similar transformation of human-nature interaction, i.e., social abstraction of nature through capitalist accumulation processes and alienation of the human-nature relation. The chapter explores Bergama and Artvin-Cerattepe anti-mining movements as instances in which to locate the local and global historical dimensions of the rise of the environmental movements in Turkey.
