Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the governmental project of salvaging and relocating trees and fertile soils in dammed landscapes in northeastern Turkey. I argue that the governmental act of enrooting a post-submergence life builds upon more-than-human uprootedness.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the governmental project of uprooting and enrooting more-than-human life in dammed landscapes in northeastern Turkey, specifically focusing on the Yusufeli Dam. Situated on the Çoruh River, renowned as the ultimate frontier for large-scale hydropower expansion in Turkey, the Yusufeli Dam is part of a series of ten dams. Praised as the country’s tallest dam, its construction began in 2012 and continued for a decade until its inauguration recently in November 2022. In this landscape, dam-led displacement and resettlement implicates not only the people and the built environment but also more-than-humans. The Municipality and the District Directorate of Agriculture undertake a project to salvage fruit trees and fertile agricultural soils before the flooding occurs, relocating them to the resettlement site. These salvaged ecologies, they envision, would enact the possibility of enrooting a new life in the face of approaching uprootedness due to submergence. This paper pays ethnographic attention to governmental practices of uprooting and enrooting trees and soils to demonstrate that rather than countering or mitigating destruction, the act of salvage is bound up with ruination that is rendered inevitable. What emerges from this practice is a “movable nature,” indexing the continuation of not only life but also ruination. Going beyond approaching salvage as a mere object of analysis, this paper contends for the significance of salvage as an analytic framework. It elucidates how the governmental act of enrooting a post-submergence life builds upon, both figuratively and materially, more-than-human uprootedness.