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Caterina Scaramelli, How to Make a Wetland: Water and Moral Ecology in Turkey. Stanford, 
California: Stanford University Press, 2021. 240 p. IBSN 978-1-5036-1540-3.  
 
Keywords: environmental anthropology, Turkey, infrastructure, political ecology, water, 
more-than-human 
 
Wetlands are one of the biomes that have suffered most under the auspices of modernisation 

and development, having often been imagined as antithetical to progress as places of disease, 

stagnation, and illegality. Now, they are having a mild renaissance, becoming worried over and 

emerging as potent terrain for new struggles. In How to Make a Wetland, Caterina Scaramelli 

takes us through the histories of two Turkish wetlands, the Gediz (outside İzmir, on the Aegean; 

the focus of the first three chapters) and Kızılırmak (near Samsun, on the Black Sea; the focus 

of the latter two chapters), demonstrating how they have been continually politically, 

materially, and culturally remade through the moral claims of various groups.  

 

Scaramelli’s core thesis is that wetlands, as category and material environment, are not given, 

but made. Her explorations of both wetlands examine this making by unveiling the historical 

contingencies around this process, periodising the wetlands’ histories to demonstrate the 

changing imaginaries around it; from malarial threat and developmentalist obstacle, to birders’ 

paradises and scientific marvels, to nationally vital conservation areas. This takes us through 

their turbulent political lives, from swamps and marshes that were understood as desolate and 

dangerous geographies to be ‘civilised’ and rendered productive, to wetlands, presently chiefly 

taken as biomes whose preservation is imperative and that must be managed stringently. 

However, this layered history importantly tracks how in each iteration of the ‘wetland,’ it is 

not a simple and sharp transition, but a muddled one, with tools and logics repurposed from 

previous projects and visions (p. 14).  

 

Scaramelli suggests moral ecology as a theoretical lens to help elucidate this (ongoing) process, 

using it to interrogate the “forms of ecological practice and thought in which morality—the 

concern with what is of value in life—is at stake” (p. 10). She argues that the root of many 



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people’s claims and actions within these wetlands are moral, though clarifies that “moral 

understandings of ecology […] are not necessarily emancipatory, inclusive, progressive, or 

sustainable” (p. 85); instead, it just foregrounds that people’s understandings and practices are 

undergirded by an affective relation with elements of the wetland, complicating our 

understanding of scientists, farmers, birders, urbanites, and conservationists’ intents and 

interactions within the wetland, and shows how alliances, camaraderie, and rivalries can form 

and fade on the basis of affective pressures. This is smoothy melded together in Scaramelli’s 

use of ‘care’ as a concept, which emphasises both affect and practice, to show that different 

actors’ projects are multiple, intersecting, and, often, contrasting (p. 121). Fundamentally, her 

approach hones into the fairly precise point that “moral ecological claims are connected to the 

imagination and control of material processes” (p. 83).  

 

These moral claims are not made on an abstracted wetland, though; Scaramelli identifies two 

chief proxies for these moral conflicts: infrastructure and non-humans, in Chapter Three and 

Five, respectfully (although, the wetland itself is a proxy for wider nationalist discourses [p. 

14]). It is in discussing these two subjects and the moral contentions around them that she most 

interestingly nuances and advances understandings of their roles in human politics.  

 

With infrastructure, she contends that there is no binary to ecology and infrastructure, and that 

her interlocutors did not conceive of the “delta ecology outside its built infrastructure, yet they 

saw different connections and attributed contrasting moral salience to the changing delta” (p. 

88). This is a large thrust of the work: that there is not a binary between infrastructure and 

ecology, but ecologies are made through infrastructure, such as dams, irrigation projects, 

bridges, and bike paths, and ecological interventions can be infrastructural, such as with 

flamingo islands and wild horses. She maintains they cannot be meaningfully divorced from 

one another, as infrastructures alter ecologies, becoming parts of them, and ecologies are 

infrastructural. This is a valuable point that advances a more nuanced understandings of 

disputes around infrastructure, recasting what could be flatly resisted as ‘damaging’ as instead 

more multifaceted and variably contested.  

 

For Scaramelli animals, too, are “lively proxies for the profound questions of environmental 

politics” (p. 159), taking an approach that acknowledges and interrogates their participation in 

and imbrication with human societies, while not unduly lingering on their agency or influence. 

She consistently foregrounds human protagonists and how they use and invoke animals in their 



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moral claims, detailing how conversations about animals were actually “everyday politics 

extended to nonhuman animals but not fully detached from human politics” (p. 135). They are 

not relegated to a subordinate or overdetermined role, however, as she highlights that animal 

practices are not reflective of human concerns, but instead that “the valuation and governance 

of animals… are intrinsic to human politics” (p. 135, emphasis added). This is a constructive 

framing of nonhumans’ roles in politics: maintaining a vital and fundamental place within 

politics, but does not smother them by insisting they are our echo.   

 

She positions all of this within a complex web of ecological relationships, leaning into 

metaphors of water and amphibiousness to emphasise the flow of and entanglements in these 

environments; how the “wetland itself muddles, sediments, and transforms the political” (p. 

14). This can sometimes slide into an overdetermination of the landscape’s influence upon 

politics—is the inability for national politics to be cleanly reflected in the wetland because the 

wetland is particularly complicating, over other environments, or because there is nothing 

clear-cut to reflect? Nonetheless, the creative usage is evocative, and functions well as an aid 

to her exposition and theorising.  

 

Overall, Scaramelli advances several interesting perspectives throughout the text, but could 

have benefitted from subjecting her concept of moral ecology to a more sustained dialogue 

with political ecology. Conceptually, political ecology is present, but foggily, only openly 

addressed in the closing pages where it is asserted that moral ecology may be an aid to political 

ecology’s longevity in the present era through its changed focus to moral claims (p. 170). 

Lacking this more substantive case, the moral ecology’s contribution is left somewhat 

imprecise, instead seeming more to be an advancement of political ecologies already extant 

emphasis on moral claims implicit in ‘politics.’ 

 

How to Make a Wetland is a fine-grained and rich ethnography of a politically and materially 

muddled terrain, and Scaramelli provides several compelling ideas to enrich understandings of 

varied people in their variable environment. It ought to be of interest to those engaged in 

infrastructural and environmental politics, the anthropology of water, and political ecology 

more widely, as well as those interested in specifically Turkey, its environment, or politics. 

 

Gabriel Urlich Lennon is from Aotearoa/New Zealand. He is a graduate of the MA 

programme in the Department of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University. His thesis 



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focused on the process of constructing fictional worlds and the ontological disruptions this 

generates. 

 

 

© 2022 Gabriel Urlich Lennon 

 


