our forests, ourselves

Environmental dilemmas require social solutions. In North America, urbanites frequently lead the charge on environmental activism, often implicitly constructing rural people as oppositional to their goals. However, along the Aegean Coast of Turkey—a region governed by men in the mining and forestry industries—rural women have inspired positive environmental outcomes. A new study published by Nihan Bozok in Gender & Society investigates what prompted these rural women to protest deforestation.

The data for this paper comes from a decade of ethnographic research and 110 interviews with rural Turkish women. Bozok argues that women’s lives are structured by forests along the Agean Coast for three reasons: childhood memories, foraging and managing the forests, and social connections. The forests provide women with traditional lands of socialization, giving generations shared memories of foraging and learning to become stewards of nature. Deforestation risks erasing these central aspects of rural Turkish women’s lives and culture. Nature is also the epicenter of belongingness for these women, who nurtured relationships in nature while managing the land. Therefore, to lose woodlands also meant losing the ecology of their lives, the place where they felt they belonged. Collectively, for the study’s participants, defending the forests of Turkey was inseparable from fighting for themselves.By learning how to work with instead of against rural peoples, we may find new ways to sustain our planet—and our ways of life.

Maybe, just maybe, our world’s most key resources include the people tied to our forests, such as these rural women in Turkey. Bozok’s work underscores how the capacity for environmental activism can come from populations that by all other indications lack power. By learning how to work with instead of against rural peoples, we may find new ways to sustain our planet—and our ways of life.