Moving Through the Age of “Ecological Transformation”: The Investigation of Ecological Imperialism Practices in Turkey

In the midst of a global crisis of capitalism, the industrialised economies have begun to transform their policies to challenge with the rising issues of climate change. While states and the EU have adopted new industrial policies and international organisations promote emergent protocols and measures, the destructive impacts of climate change has been tried to be controlled. These developments seem to be justified by new policy paradigms such as ‘European Green Deal’ or ‘green transformation’, while the EU continues to implement phased measures through that policy paradigm. Nevertheless, amid the so-called progressive industrial change for the benefit of environmental sustainability, we have been observing a deepening divergence of human and nature relationship in various regions of the world. As a part of this change and embedded economic and political relations, the metabolic rift was first developed by Marx and has been used to understand capitalism's problematic relationship with nature and the problems that this tendency can create by the time. The rift of natural metabolism first intensified with the development of cities and then spread to every part of the world with capitalism and led to the explosion of ecosystems in many regions. This can be further argued by ‘ecological imperialism’, various forms of relations between industrialised economies and Global South have started to be intensified during the last decades. In order to grow, capital must continue to obtain raw materials from countries in the Global South, and environmental concerns that arise during this process are not important to them. As part of this relation, Turkey becomes one of the regions that experience the exploitation of its ecosystem. The thesis therefore investigates the case of waste exportation of European Union to Turkey and the case of Çöpler gold mine in İliç, Erzincan within this relationship.