Deforestation and the death of reciprocity

Taking a bird’s-eye view of the Köyceğiz-Dalyan area, we see the fertile Dalyan plain, natural forests, Köyceğiz Lake, Sandras and Ölemez Mountains, İztuzu and Ekincik Beaches, Mediterranean Sea, and the Dalyan River connecting the lake to the sea. This region exhibits significant Mediterranean biodiversity characteristics (Gardner and Gardner Reference Gardner and Gardner2019, 10). Muğla is one of the most naturally forested provinces of Turkey. Its forests are state-owned, like almost all forests of the country (Başkent et al. Reference Başkent, Köse and Keleş2005), yet integrate deeply into the local social fabric as villages nestle within these forests that provide sustenance, livelihood, and cultural identity. Between 2001 and 2023, Muğla lost 69,400 hectares of tree cover, representing an 18 percent reduction since 2000 (Global Forest Watch 2024). Köyceğiz experienced a loss of 6,840 hectares of forested area during this period, attributable to forest fires, construction activities, and the conversion of land for agriculture (Adıgüzel Reference Adıgüzel2023). This deforestation has triggered habitat loss, disrupted ecological rhythms, and unraveled multispecies life networks.

The forest destruction is perhaps most visible in the case of Oriental sweetgum trees. Historically, they formed extensive forests from Fethiye to Rhodes Island. However, this species is now critically endangered (IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2017), surviving only in fragmented forests or as isolated trees in gardens. These forests once wove together local peoples and cultures. The trees provided significant income for locals through their sweet-smelling storax, known as “sığla yağı” (sweetgum oil), used for medical and cosmetic purposes (Kılıç and Ildız Reference Kılıç, Ildız, Gürağaç Dereli, İlhan and Belwal2022). Tree peels served as incense for religious ceremonies and burials. Before the designation of protection in the early 2000s, the species was viewed as a forestry product with its institutions, statistics, and plans. Storax extraction provided local employment and income. An elderly villager from Kavakarası village, one of the last remaining locales of Oriental sweetgum forests, shared his experiences in 2021:

Official sweetgum storax extraction ended in 2009 (Ürker and Günlü Reference Ürker and Günlü2023), eliminating the trees as a revenue source. Construction of buildings and roads subsequently destroyed these wetland forests that housed diverse species, particularly birds. Surrounding areas were converted to agricultural zones and citrus orchards through systematic deforestation (Ürker and Benzeyen Reference Ürker and Benzeyen2020). Fragmented forests lost their self-repair capacity, surviving mainly in human imagination. Wedding venues, cafés, and streets now bear the sweetgum name, while actual forestlands have vanished. This transformation represents not only ecological destruction but also the unraveling of more-than-human life networks.

Oriental sweetgum trees had active multispecies relations with humans through storax production. This relationship persisted from ancient Caria to the present, spanning the Byzantine and Ottoman periods (Durak Reference Durak2022). The extraction process was inherently multispecies, with trees’ physiological responses shaping human harvesting techniques and timing decisions. Moreover, what enabled storax production was not merely human–tree interaction, but the co-functioning of water regimes, forest-floor processes, and seasonal resin cycles as a living assemblage. Villagers learned the trees’ rhythm, forming the foundation of an interspecies partnership. Even though this collaboration has been replaced by concrete structures, and memories were preserved only in names, sweetgum forests were active agents co-creating this region’s cultural and material world with humans until recently.

As the Oriental sweetgum forests disappeared gradually, the pine forests suffered sudden devastation during the catastrophic 2021 Sandras Mountain fires (Bozok and Bozok Reference Bozok and Bozok2025). The twelve-day blaze destroyed approximately 203,000 hectares of Turkish pine and black pine forests, marking one of Turkey’s most devastating forest fires (Tavşanoğlu and Pausas Reference Tavşanoğlu and Pausas2022). These natural pine forests, distinctive to Turkey’s Mediterranean areas, cover arid and sub-humid mountain slopes and lowland plains. Beyond their economic uses in construction, carpentry, pulp, and firewood, these forests define the region’s sensory landscape through their scent, crunchy needles, verdant canopy, and the cicada chorus which defines the region’s acoustic and visual identity. Sandras Mountain, part of the (Alpine) Western Taurus range, hosts more than scenic attractions: its Turkish pine and black pine forests are home to animals, streams, villages, clouds, snow, plants, rocks, and soil. The mountain villagers’ lives around the forestlands were woven like a tapestry on its slopes, looking out at Köyceğiz Lake.

Among the fire’s sudden losses was honeydew honey. This valuable product, produced across Mediterranean Turkish pine forests from Turkey to Greece (de-Miguel et al. Reference De-Miguel, Pukkala and Yeşil2014), depends on an endemic insect locally known as “basıra” (Marchalina hellenica), critical to the honeydew honeymaking process. The 2021 fires destroyed much of the basıra and bee populations, eliminating regional honey production capacity (see Nadworny Reference Nadworny2022). The destruction of the population of this insect has had a significant impact on the local economy and ecosystem, highlighting the interdependence of species within the region. From a multispecies perspective, this loss is not merely ecological or economic but relational: basıra, bees, and humans form an entangled web of co-dependence. The disappearance of this small insect disrupted not only honey production but also the shared lifeworlds sustained through these interspecies connections. In 2022, a year later, the fire’s painful memories persisted. A mountain villager recollected:

Bees depend on basıra for forage and habitat, while humans rely on both for honey production and ecological balance. Yet this dependence has become increasingly precarious as Muğla, Turkey’s province most affected by climate change (United Nations Development Programme 2022), renders local conditions uninhabitable for bees. As an elderly villager who showed us his beehives said:

This mobility reveals how the climate crisis transforms beekeeping from a settled practice into nomadic labor, with humans becoming agents of bee survival through moving them.

Beyond fire damage, the Sandras Mountain forests face another threat: large-scale mining operations. The mountain, especially its summit, confronts impending olivineFootnote ⁴ quarries requiring explosive blasting that will displace indigenous wildlife, dry mountain streams, displace rocks and soil, and remove thousands of trees (Dinlemez Reference Dinlemez2021). During our fieldwork, we observed locals and newcomers coming together under the Sandras’ı Koruma Platformu (Sandras Mountain Protection Platform) to combat ecological degradation in the mountain. They are endeavoring to safeguard the regional ecosystem via protests and legal measures aimed at the annulment of mining permits. Mines and forest fires are irrevocably altering the sociocultural fabric by undermining long-standing livelihoods and small-scale farming practices that depend on forest ecosystems.

This transformation of the landscape has severed the foundation for village self-sufficiency, making previous forms of small-scale subsistence practices increasingly impossible to sustain. The decline of agriculture and animal husbandry, interconnected with forest loss, has severed the multispecies relationships that were historically sustained by rural communities. This region was characterized by diverse human and animal cohabitation, with forest ecosystems serving as a foundation for animal husbandry. A resident of Otmanlar village described these transforming relationships in 2021:

Throughout our research, we found that people kept cows in their barns and benefited from their milk, while goats were among the most common animals. Fewer villagers had sheep, but everyone kept chickens in their gardens, and most had dogs. They used milk to make cheese. These animal-keeping practices occurred in homes’ gardens and fields, places intertwined with forests. All animal husbandry and herding were forest-integrated activities. The decline of agriculture in Turkey since the 1980s, combined with neoliberal transformation, has resulted in the abolition of animal husbandry in villages (Öztürk Reference Öztürk2012). Today, villagers rarely maintain goats and cows, keeping only chickens near their homes.

Participants described how past movements of humans and animals within the forests facilitated maintenance and established connections among various life forms. A retired forest engineer explained in 2021:

Animals roaming the forest, particularly goats, which were frequently mentioned in interviews, had naturally provided forest maintenance in the past. In Turkey, goats have long been portrayed as harmful to forests due to state forestry policies, yet assessments in forestry and pastoral ecology note that their browsing is concentrated on maquis and other low woody plants that are significant components of fine fuels in Mediterranean forest ecosystems (Özden Reference Özden2000). Consistently, all participants emphasized that goats are exceedingly advantageous for forest maintenance, as they decompose fallen pine needles, cones, and dried maquis during their movement, thereby decreasing the quantity of flammable material present. Today, goat herding, which was once sustained through the labor of women and children, required minimal upkeep, adapted easily to steep rocky terrain, and relied entirely on local vegetation, has almost entirely disappeared because keeping goats is no longer economically viable. A middle-aged Yörük woman from the Yayla village, who had grown up alongside 140 goats, revealed in an interview conducted in 2022 that she now struggles to afford food for the ten goats she cherishes. With the decline of goatherds, the forest’s accumulated knowledge of sheep herding gradually disappeared. The decreased forest activity of goats and humans increased the likelihood of forest fires.

Forest destruction parallels backlash in agriculture. The warm, humid climate and fertile lands of the area have sustained agriculture since ancient civilizations. However, neoliberal policies beginning in the 1980s prioritized its natural splendors, historical significance, and enormous tourism potential as national income sources, coinciding with Turkey’s broader agricultural decline. Historically, this area exhibited agricultural abundance. Since the nineteenth century, besides forestry and livestock breeding, the cultivation of cash crops such as cotton, tobacco, rice, and even wheat has fed and enriched the people in the valley from Dalaman to Gökova Bay and the plains of Dalyan Delta (Benedict Reference Benedict1974; United Nations Development Programme 2015). Long-time Mediterranean agrarian riches such as citrus, pomegranate, olive, fig, and grape orchards were plentiful.

In terms of agriculture, we see three significant waves of socio-ecological destruction here. A cultivation transformation occurred during the first wave. The Oriental sweetgum and Turkish pine forests, along with maquis, were cleared to make way for income-generating commercial agriculture in the plains. Aside from that, deep canals, which still exist in many villages, were dug to remove water from the floodplains. These processes occurred prior to the second half of the twentieth century. Dalyan was a small fishing village at the time. In one of our interviews, Günür Karaağaç, a local historian, described this period as “an era of agricultural riches.” Many local villagers told stories about their parents’ prosperous days when they earned money from cash crops. The Turkish Republic brought extensive cultivation of products such as cotton, tobacco, and sesame, which gradually stopped in the 1980s with the beginning of the neoliberal transformation in this region (Karaağaç Reference Karaağaç2006).

Another source of agricultural income brought about another period of deforestation in the second wave. Many trees were chopped down, and farmlands were cleared to create space for orchards. Today, there are large orchards in the region. Lemon, tangerine, orange, and bitter orange trees were planted in the late 1970s, and pomegranate trees in the 1990s. Finally, in the current third wave in the last two decades, which marks the current peak of neoliberal transformation, agriculture has almost lost its profitability. While the costs of inputs such as oil, pesticides, fertilizers, or human labor to collect fruits or crops rapidly increase, the income gained from selling them in the local markets is far from covering the costs (Öztürk et al. Reference Öztürk, Jongerden, Hilton and Jongerden2021). Uncollected citrus groves and piles of oranges tossed around trash cans are familiar sights in the area. A resident of Hamitköy, a village still surrounded by pomegranate and citrus trees, stated:

The mutually beneficial relationship between humans and forests deteriorated due to the changes we addressed regarding agriculture and deforestation. Although communities in the Köyceğiz-Dalyan region have never been forest owners, they maintained shared practices of care across generations: grafting wild pear and citrus saplings; pruning branches affected by disease; collecting fallen wood instead of cutting live trees; and walking goats to clear understory growth and reduce fuel load. Such practices were not merely extractive; they constituted long-standing relations of mutual maintenance through which villagers recognized tree illnesses (see Gürsoy Reference Gürsoy, Urquhart, Marzano and Potter2018), treated fungal damage, protected young shoots from animal pressure, and sustained floral diversity through grafting. Through these collaborative and interdependent efforts, humans, flora, and fauna co-produced a resilient multispecies web of life. Deforestation irrevocably disrupted these reciprocal relations, causing not only ecological imbalance but also the erosion of ethnobotanical knowledge, animal-assisted forest care, and embodied skills passed down through generations (Bozok Reference Bozok2024b).

Across rural lifeworlds of the past, households relied on diverse multispecies practices, with cows yielding milk and cheese, goats facilitating daily movement, chickens and geese offering eggs and meat, and bees contributing to both income and ecological balance (Erdem Kaya et al. Reference Erdem Kaya, Kaya, Terzi, Tolunay, Alkay, Balçık, Tozluoğlu and Yakut2024). The interrelated dynamics constituted the daily ecology of self-sufficiency. Seasonal rhythms complemented this ecology, with the autumn sun supporting the preparation of winter provisions. Olive trees served as long-term partners in household economies, producing olives, oil, and soap across generations (Loumou and Giourga Reference Loumou and Giourga2003). However, agricultural expansion and housing developments destroyed many olive groves, diminishing their significance as revenue sources. In the pre-1980 small-scale agricultural era, when livestock and crops coexisted without widespread pesticide use, they formed regenerative networks in which animals enriched the soil, plants fed animals, and households preserved seeds through human–plant collaborations (Rhodes Reference Rhodes2017). Socio-ecological crises now threaten these more-than-human, traditional, and small-scale practices. The ability to sustain life alongside forests, plants, and animals has vanished. As multispecies cohabitation customs diminish, conventional agricultural methods serve mainly as superficial attractions for newcomers, making it impossible for traditional village communities to flourish.

In pursuit of “a life in a small Mediterranean town”

Since the 1980s, “a life in a small Aegean or Mediterranean town” has been a dream narrative for urban residents seeking to escape problems such as crowds, career pressures, stress, traffic, pollution, or high living costs. Despite the natural losses and increasing costs, migration from cities to the Köyceğiz-Dalyan region continues to increase. Although it was one of Turkey’s least populated regions until half a century ago (Benedict Reference Benedict1974), recent data indicates that Muğla was the fifth most in-migrated province in Turkey in 2021–2022, with a net internal migration of 12,477 people (Turkish Statistical Institute 2023).

The region perpetually undergoes construction activities. Alongside whitewashed houses of generational residents with fruit-filled gardens, many uniform residences with smaller gardens have been built in recent years. Following the protection zone declaration in 1988, floor limits were set for houses in Dalyan and Köyceğiz (Bann and Başak Reference Bann and Başak2013; T.C. Çevre ve Orman Bakanlığı Özel Çevre Koruma Kurumu Başkanlığı 2007), and low-density tourism plans were implemented (Yolal Reference Yolal and Egresi2016). This increasing construction through the destruction of agricultural and forest areas stems from migration from major cities, especially İstanbul, Ankara, and İzmir (Kaba Reference Kaba2022).

The region’s demographic structure now comprises two main groups: generational residents and urban migrants who settled here in the last two decades, temporarily joined by tourist crowds enjoying Mediterranean vacations. Many participants told us they had moved here to escape city chaos and reconnect with nature, seeking healthy food, clean air, and the opportunity to keep animals and grow vegetables and flowers. Driven by socio-ecological crises and dreams of “calm,” “quiet,” “small,” and “green” Mediterranean living, they gain more opportunities for direct environmental engagement than in cities while simultaneously dealing with persistent contemporary ecological troubles that affect both locals and urban settlers. These movements should not be understood solely as a human pursuit of tranquility, since newcomers’ imaginaries are formed within a multispecies environment where wetland birds, sweetgum groves, pine forests, sea turtles, and freshwater species constitute the ecological backdrop of what is imagined as “calm” and “green” living. Thus, migration produces new surfaces of multispecies encounter through gardens, seeds, animals, and shared spaces.

Visitors to the region can be categorized into three sociohistorical groups. The first group includes individuals who vacation for a few days or a week during the summer. The second group consists of those who enjoy a multi-living experience, spending the entire summer in their homes. The third group comprises individuals who leave their bustling urban lives to establish permanent residence in this region. Throughout the twentieth century, the district of Köyceğiz served as a regional center, while Dalyan remained a remote fishing village (Karaağaç Reference Karaağaç2006). Access was limited then, and urbanites had not yet discovered the beaches. Dalyan attracted a few tourists, whereas Köyceğiz mainly remained pristine. As one of the participants who owned a tourism company in Dalyan since 1980 said:

The Dalyan River and İztuzu Beach have become the two natural attractions that attract tourists to this area. This period’s narrative of tranquility also signifies a time when the fragile ecosystems of the Dalyan River, reed beds, and sea turtles had not yet been overwhelmed by extensive human activity. The region’s histories of migration and tourism also reflect the progressive decline of non-human habitats.

In the 1980s, an attempt to build a large luxury hotel on İztuzu Beach that threatened the critically endangered sea turtles sparked one of Turkey’s most vocal environmental oppositions to dateFootnote ⁵ (Şahin Reference Şahin, Özerdem and Whiting2019). This international campaign led to the declaration of the Köyceğiz-Dalyan area as Turkey’s first SEPA in 1988 (Geven et al. Reference Geven, Ozdeniz, Kurt, Bolukbasi, Ozbey, Ozcan and Turan2016). Mass tourism began developing in this region in the 1980s, resulting in tourist hotels and companies (Arsel et al. Reference Arsel, Adaman, Akbulut and Jongerden2021; Yolal Reference Yolal and Egresi2016). Facilitating hotel construction, an asphalt road was constructed from Dalyan town center to İztuzu Beach in 1986 by blasting dynamite, destroying Turkish pine trees, and damaging the marshlands, destroying the tranquility of the sea turtlesFootnote ⁶ (Haimoff Reference Haimoff1997, 48). This construction was not just tourism infrastructure, but an intervention that radically altered the rhythm of human–sea turtle encounters and the day–night ecology of the beach. Human mobility thus reshaped multispecies relationships not only spatially but also at sensory and behavioral levels.

Many local houses were converted to motels. A tiny asphalt road from Fethiye to Gökova Bay was widened into a highway for tourist vehicles by chopping trees on both sides. The opening of nearby international airports, Dalaman Airport in the 1980s and Milas-Bodrum Airport in the late 1990s, rapidly increased the region’s transportation capacity for mass tourism (Yolal Reference Yolal and Egresi2016). The Köyceğiz-Dalyan area began attracting international lifestyle migrants from Western Europe, especially Britain, Germany, France, and the Netherlands (Ertuğrul Reference Ertuğrul2016). These accessibility developments connected this remote location to Europe and major Turkish cities, enabling tourism growth and increased exploration of the area’s natural beauty and historical landmarks.

The region’s popularity increased as tourism expanded along the Mediterranean coastline. Initially, urban residents acquired land or properties from locals to serve as summer residences, spending a proportion of the year in the area. Some of them eventually chose to establish themselves in this location. Most during the 1980s and 1990s were middle-class retirees and specialized professionals, dentists, physicians, engineers, attorneys, and tourism professionals, who were era-specific lifestyle migrants relocating from metropolitan environments to the Köyceğiz-Dalyan area to retire or begin new life chapters.

For instance, Caner, now seventy-six years old and spending time with his grandchildren, moved to Köyceğiz in 1983 as a young pediatrician and raised his son and daughter in this district. Another migrant of this era, Hamza, purchased a field near Dalyan in 1999. Four years later, Hamza retired, built a small house for himself, and has lived there ever since. Some also shared stories about their small-scale movements within the region, such as moving from a village to a town. Sonay, an interior architect from Bursa, now aged sixty-eight years, initially bought a peasant’s house in 1995 in Pınarköy village, famous for its agricultural riches in Köyceğiz, and redecorated it. After twenty-seven years, she stated she had relocated to the town center due to her fear of forest fires. Many of the migrants in this wave have formed links with nature over time since they “knew the names of trees from their childhood, unlike today’s youngsters,” according to Sonay. During our field research, we met individuals who implemented organic cultivation methods, including composting garden waste, pursuing a zero-waste strategy, utilizing local seeds for planting, employing pruning techniques without soil tillage, practicing integrated farming alongside animal husbandry, cultivating without pesticides, and engaging in agroforestry or syntropic agriculture. Paradoxically, urban residents who relocated to this area for its natural beauty contributed to environmental degradation, particularly through rampant expansion. In the 2000s, Turkey’s neoliberal and conservative governments embraced construction as an economic growth strategy (Erol Reference Erol2019). The region has experienced extensive and unregulated construction of residences and hotels (Bann and Başak Reference Bann and Başak2013). Köyceğiz developed more slowly than other Muğla resort locales due to its remoteness from the beaches, hence the Cittaslow moniker, which was officially awarded in 2019 after meeting stringent criteria related to environmental policy, quality of life, and traditional heritage (Bulut Keskin and Bozyer Reference Bulut Keskin and Bozyer2021). This has changed over the past twenty years. Individuals who arrived and settled established new neighborhoods, shifting from the sporadic village dwellings built by urban migrants in the 1990s. This erratic construction has accelerated the destruction of endemic Oriental sweetgum forests, particularly in Gülpınar forest, near Köyceğiz town center, and forest villages of Kavakarası, Tepearası, Küçük Köyceğiz, and Yangı. As one of the participants stated in 2020, the forests are increasingly losing their space to buildings:

We have also noticed a substantial rise in the number of constructions reported by the participants during our field trips since 2018. During our visit to the area, we observed the opening of new establishments such as restaurants, cafés, motels, hair salons, car washes, gas stations, supermarket branches, and a private hospital. We observe the emergence of wedding venues, various suppliers of building materials, and automotive repair businesses. As a result, construction has quickly taken over orchards and agricultural areas. These construction-driven transformations alter the habitats of birds, amphibians, and species dependent on Oriental sweetgum, thereby fragmenting the multispecies web that supports the region.

The COVID-19 pandemic launched a new epoch in urban–rural mobility and signaled a new turning point in the area’s transformation in 2020. The pandemic changed perceptions about space safety and exposed new rural settlement patterns. During the initial months, there was a widespread outmigration from Turkey’s big cities, as in other regions of the world (see González-Leonardo et al. Reference González-Leonardo, López-Gay, Newsham, Recaño and Rowe2022; Stawarz et al. Reference Stawarz, Rosenbaum-Feldbrügge, Sander, Sulak and Knobloch2022). After the strict lockdown declaration in April 2020, many villagers in the Köyceğiz-Dalyan region rented rooms to city arrivals. Rents, house prices, and land prices skyrocketed quickly, and settlement populations nearly doubled within days. Those who arrived during the pandemic were youthful, white-collar, remote workers, unlike previous middle-aged, retired, or upper-class migrants. They were also the first migrant generation to approach property ownership differently: unable to afford to purchase, they rented country houses instead. As a newcomer participant in Köyceğiz, said in 2022:

The urban newcomers of the pandemic have redefined the rural environment for themselves. Many use previously unheard-of methods to engage with local materials and ecologies: eco-print painting; pine needle basket weaving; and waste-paper art, creative practices that rely on the textures, pigments, and material affordances of local plants and forest matter, forming new sensory alliances between migrants and the region’s more-than-human world. Instagram is popular among young white-collar migrants for publishing daily life images portraying rural life on social media through photographs or short videos of forests, sea, and beaches. By connecting rural and urban, social media and lifestyle transfer “natural” and “healthy” commodities – herbal soap or herbs – from countryside to city, making Instagram a virtual market in rural–urban relations. The pandemic altered mobility patterns, leading to changes in local ecologies and seasonal pressures on beaches, wetlands, and forest trails. Simultaneously, the influx of individuals with the pandemic introduced the region to social media, leading to the development of distinct relationships and care bonds formed through the sensory experiences of smells, textures, and rhythms inherent to the locale. Digital representations convert non-human life into visual commodities, altering the ways in which forests, beaches, and wildlife are experienced, utilized, and assessed.

Within the broader pattern of those seeking a life in a small Mediterranean town, certain outstanding individual ventures represent more than lifestyle adaptations – they constitute genuine attempts to forge new socio-ecological practices within the Köyceğiz-Dalyan SEPA’s unique landscape. Dr Ragıp Esener, a former surgeon, established a palmetum in Köyceğiz in 1993 that became one of Turkey’s first private botanical gardens, promoting nature conservation and environmental awareness (Esener Reference Esener2023). The Functional Forests initiative, founded by Alp Pir and colleagues in the 2010s, employs agroecology and regenerative forestry for ecosystem restoration through participatory methods (Functional Forests 2023). İrem Çağıl represents another significant case: after migrating to Dalyan following the Gezi Resistance in 2013, she developed Sinek Sekiz as an ecofeminist publishing house and cultural center, operating until 2024 (Sinek Sekiz Reference Sekiz2022), before becoming a feminist influencer promoting nature-based experiences (Çağıl Reference Çağıl2024). These cases exemplify contemporary intellectuals from different generations who pursue alternative multispecies relationships within the SEPA’s socio-ecological context, moving beyond mere lifestyle migration to engage in substantive environmental experimentation. These initiatives treat non-human beings as active partners in socio-ecological transformation rather than merely elements requiring protection. Migration thus becomes, in some cases, not only spatial displacement but also the establishment of new interspecies care relations.

Recent forest fires have induced another transformation alongside the socio-demographic changes instigated by the pandemic (Bozok Reference Bozok2024a; Bozok and Bozok Reference Bozok and Bozok2025). Turkey’s 2021 forest fires illustrated the catastrophic consequences of the climate crisis, destroying forests, habitats, and species. They brought together different waves of urban migrants who worked together for the region’s benefit and formed their disaster response initiatives that brought diverse actors, such as villagers, entrepreneurs, migrants, and tourists, to coordinate fire response and recovery efforts and increase resilience (Bozok and Bozok Reference Bozok and Bozok2025, 1047–1048). Urban newcomers also led new ecological initiatives in the region. In the early 2010s, alongside locals, they struggled against the disastrous impacts of the construction of Akköprü Dam and Hydroelectric Powerplant (Çobanoğlu et al. Reference Çobanoğlu, Demirci, Karaağaç and Ulutaş2014). Lately, environmental awareness led them to support the İkizköy-Akbelen forest resistance during 2022 and 2023, which became one of the largest environmental protests in Turkey (Christensen and Christensen Reference Christensen and Christensen2024).

Consequently, the ongoing lifestyle migration to the region since the 1980s has increased the population and altered the socio-demographic composition. The newcomers vary in terms of the reasons for coming and their relationships with rural landscapes and the locals. They develop varied connections with the waters, animals, plants, mountains, lands, and the region, revealing that migration reorganizes not only human communities but also the movements, feeding patterns, and spatial negotiations of other species that inhabit the same landscape. Some of these newcomers view nature as a backdrop, some seek to develop alternative sustainable relationships, and others take responsibility for conservation by establishing participatory environmental or disaster initiatives with strong ties to the local population.