After decades of denial and obstruction, the global Right is increasingly willing to acknowledge that climate change is a threat to lives and lifeways everywhere. Moreover, some seize on the specter of ecological collapse to advance fascistic politics. Mass shootings by White men who propose that eliminating racialized people will ease environmental pressures—including in Christchurch and El Paso—have been the most spectacular manifestations of this shift. But close observers note kindred shifts at borders and in boardrooms all across this planet, as far‐right groups work not merely to “save the earth” but to save it for specific people, and from the allegedly “polluting” force of racialized others. This commentary brings together scholars who share the sense that anthropology is uniquely suited to grappling with this complex political terrain, as a science of emergent and quotidian formations. Together, they map the weaponization of the environment in explicitly extremist spaces across Zimbabwe, Germany, Romania, Turkey, the Philippines, the United States, India, and the UAE—and also in more mundane sites where ecofascist ideologies pulse beneath the surface of the everyday. This conversation represents a work of theory‐in‐the‐making and conveys the value of collaborative, comparative thought at a moment of resurgent fascism and intensifying ecological apocalypse.

The reuse of abandoned late-industrial sites for renewable energy projects has emerged as a promising strategy for decarbonization and environmental justice in a time of climate emergency. Although challenged by the roll-back of renewable energy policies in the United States, governments and companies frame the use of “unproductive” lands for solar and wind power development as viable solutions to problems of land use, economic decline, climate change, and the demands for energy transition. While the vast majority of existing research instrumentally addresses brownfield redevelopment, project siting challenges, and community acceptance, our historically and ethnographically informed approach seeks to reconcile their toxic legacies and contested valuation techniques with alternative practices of repair that link energy investment to recuperation of damaged lands and burdened communities. The article cautions against energy transition practices that continue patterns of coloniality and capitalist extractivism and gestures toward alternative visions of ecological relations and transformation.

This article traces how forests in Turkey acquire meaning through their entanglement with nationalism, securitization, and racialized governance. The catastrophic wildfires of 2021, which destroyed over 150,000 hectares along the Aegean and Mediterranean coasts, became a site where ecological devastation was quickly translated into nationalist paranoia. Refugees and Kurdish insurgents were accused of arson, and fire was narrated as evidence of invasion, conspiracy, and betrayal. These claims drew on deeper histories in which forests have been managed through militarized strategies-burned during counterinsurgency operations, surveilled for signs of fugitivity, and recast as threatened zones in the service of territorial control. Building on the concept of "political forests," the article shows how wooded landscapes in Turkey function as terrains of belonging, where ecological crisis intensifies nationalist claims, legitimizes violence, and reinforces exclusionary forms of governance. The 2021 fires illuminate the ways forests matter as stages for securing identity, policing movement, and naturalizing punitive state power.

The reuse of abandoned late-industrial sites for renewable energy projects has emerged as a promising strategy for decarbonization and environmental justice in a time of climate emergency. Although challenged by the roll-back of renewable energy policies in the United States, governments and companies frame the use of "unproductive" lands for solar and wind power development as viable solutions to problems of land use, economic decline, climate change, and the demands for energy transition. While the vast majority of existing research instrumentally addresses brownfield redevelopment, project siting challenges, and community acceptance, our historically and ethnographically informed approach seeks to reconcile their toxic legacies and contested valuation techniques with alternative practices of repair that link energy investment to recuperation of damaged lands and burdened communities. The article cautions against energy transition practices that continue patterns of coloniality and capitalist extractivism and gestures toward alternative visions of ecological relations and transformation.

Conceived as an analog environment to early Mars, Lake Salda, a large, shallow tectonic lake located in southwestern Turkey, known for its stunningly clear azure waters, white sands, and unique geomorphological formations, is one of the few known lakes on Earth that scientists believe contain carbonates and depositional features like those found at the Jezero Crater on Mars. Between 2020 and 2021, NASA’s geobiologists studied microbial fossils in Lake Salda to prepare for the Mars 2020 Perseverance mission, which aimed to search for ancient life on Mars. This extended photo essay pushes against dichotomies of familiar and alien, relation and separation, past and present, in order to trace the weird encounters and disjointed temporalities that characterize the biogeological and geopolitical relations and separations between Mars and Earth. In doing so, the essay points at the impossibility of working through a logic of past/present, geological/astronomical, and familiar/alien dichotomies, and a cosmic demand for facing ambiguity and disjointed, even anachronistic temporalities when it comes to non-anthropocentric imagination about life and living on other planets. In the disjointed temporal, political, and biogeological relations, or modes of time-telling between Salda and Jezero, where agnostic musings over life and anachronistic political relations might flourish, we might find weird openings. The juxtaposed trajectories of the blue and red planets force us to confront our assumptions regarding life and non-life, past and present, possible and impossible.

The introduction to this special issue, Contesting Transitions: New Directions in the Anthropology of Energy, Climate Justice, and Resource Imaginaries, takes stock of the current state of debate within anthropology and allied fields over the contradictions, slippages, and inequalities at the centre of the global energy transition. Across a wide range of critical case studies, the contributions underscore the importance of attending to what is being elided by dominant discourses and forms of production, such as alternatives to socio-material understandings of energy and resistance to the inevitability of extractivism as the basis for new ways of living. Even more, the collection takes up and problematizes the concept of ‘transition’ itself on historical, ethnographic, and epistemological grounds. After describing the themes that emerge from the special issue, and explaining how these themes point toward new configurations of research, theory-building, and critical intervention, the introduction concludes with a broader argument about the indispensable place of a critical anthropology in debates over energy and Anthropocenic harm.

In the Kurdish-populated Southeastern Turkey, oil theft carried out by Kurdish villagers who live near the oilfields in Diyarbakir are sometimes criminalized. But often, the matter is resolved by the state-owned oil company's engineers and technicians. This paper argues that rather than an exterior problem, oil theft and its management are central to the governance of the colonial and militarized petro-geographies of Turkey's Northern Kurdistan. The governance of kacak oil, I argue is a technology of rule that is predicated in a moral economy of debt, reciprocity, negotiation, and collaboration that reproduces state territoriality and sovereignty. Yet the relations around oil and oil infrastructures, not only operate as technologies of governance, but also become the means through which Kurdish villagers reappropriate such infrastructures through acts of misuse and sabotage, which in turn, expose the fragility of state power. In arguing so, this paper situates kacak oil as a distinctively political commodity whose management both reinstates the contours of the sovereign state and proper citizenship as well as a site where Kurdish actors redefine the limits of colonial state power by refusing the relations of indebtedness imposed by a violently benevolent state.

A striking effort is under way to use energy investment, a key feature of US federal climate policy, to build solar farms on former mining lands and in legacy mining communities in central Appalachia. Focusing on community solar initiatives, we consider the geosociality of energy transitions from the perspective of communities where many people have considerable knowledge of energy systems and how they work. We note that the politics of place-making in the context of environmental sacrifice and capital abandonment enables negotiations around energy that often seek to bridge deep social contradictions. We highlight how solar energy’s diffuse networks of power, both social and electrical, privilege forms of temporal labor that are alliance-building, compositionist, para-ethnographic and intimately concerned with the capacity to build relations. Vernacular energy expertise can play a major role in creating novel forms of political sociality. In West Virginia, this both builds on and significantly shifts the emphasis of long legacies of energetic place-making. We expect the ongoing development of community-led solar investment to contribute to substantially important diversifying effects in West Virginian communities, especially when these efforts can more explicitly address the state’s extreme geographical, race, and class-based inequalities.

The fraught tectonic history of Anatolia has given oil in Turkey an absent presence. In this article, I examine how oil’s absent presence produces a series of speculations in Turkish public life regarding oil’s alleged abundance and its obstructed production. In particular, I trace widespread speculations that claim that the Treaty of Lausanne, which founded Turkey in 1923, will expire on its centennial anniversary in July 2023. I argue that speculations about the expiration of Lausanne harken back to both anxieties around territorial partition and neo-imperial desires of expansion in contemporary Turkey. Such speculations are further utilized by the AKP government to reinterpret Turkey’s history and to legitimize expansionist and irredentist politics in the present. In this context the ground—what’s under it and who exerts political claims over it—becomes a productive zone in which multiple ethno-nationalist and imperialist notions of territorial belonging, loss, and desire are played out. I conclude that by recalibrating anthropological analyses around the generative powers of the geological, we can better understand how the indeterminacy of the underground entwines with the political legacies of post-imperial collapse and nation-state formation that emerged in the aftermath of World War I.

Abstract How might an attention to the role that the geologic plays in everyday social and political formations help reveal and politicize the geographically, temporally, and stratigraphically distributed forms of violence in the Anthropocene? Building on recent work in environmental humanities, anthropology, geography, and feminist geophilosophy that aims to rethink racialized forms of violence alongside planetary forces and earthly formations, this article explores how geosocial relations and exclusions register distributed forms of violence that are often kept separate from each other. Through an ethnographic account of a state-led oil shale exploration project in southwestern Turkey during the eruption of war between Kurdish freedom fighters and the Turkish state in southeastern Turkey in the summer of 2015, the article traces the links and disjunctures between the everyday disavowal of resource exploration and colonial warfare. It explores how the disavowal of war and hydrocarbon exploration forecloses political and ethical possibilities. It further examines how emergent geosocial relations between people and rocks carry the possibility of reckoning with anti-Kurdish war and violence. In doing so, the article invites environmental humanities to rethink methodological and analytical ways of rendering violence visible. The article concludes by speculating about the possibility of geosocial solidarity, or a mode of relation with geological formations and humans that forges connections between racialized forms of othering and planetary scales of time, space, and materiality. As a mode of earthly praxis, geosocial solidarity is what might come after the unfinished task of detangling distributed forms of violence in the Anthropocene.

Oil has acquired an elusive materiality in Turkey, situated between presence and absence, visibility and invisibility, abundance and lack, loss and desire. This chapter explores the profound political effects of oil’s absent presence in the oil-poor Republic of Turkey. Oil’s intangible yet elusive presence, and the modes of expectation and anticipation that surround it, have become a characteristic feature of a tumultuous period in Turkey during 2016 and 2020. Prospects for oil discovery not only helped grant legitimacy to the increasingly authoritarian and nationalist government trying to re-consolidate its power in the aftermath of the coup attempt and decreasing popular support, but also exposed many of the fault lines upon which state power and national politics were built in Turkey. The absent presence of oil becomes a precisely productive vantage point from which to explore the social and political worlds it has nevertheless composed and continues to bring about. In this material-political space that oil occupies, the chapter argues, national pasts and presents are reconfigured, repressed histories of violence and resistance are conjured up, and state power is both reproduced and exposed as highly fragile and fragmented.

How might an attention to the role that the geologic plays in everyday social and political formations help reveal and politicize the geographically, temporally, and strati graphically distributed forms of violence in the Anthropocene? Building on recent work in environmental humanities, anthropology, geography, and feminist geophilosophy that aims to rethink racialized forms of violence alongside planetary forces and earthly formations, this article explores how geosocial relations and exclusions register distributed forms of violence that are often kept separate from each other. Through an ethnographic account of a state-led oil shale exploration project in southwestern Turkey during the eruption of war between Kurdish freedom fighters and the Turkish state in southeastern Turkey in the summer of 2015, the article traces the links and disjunctures between the everyday disavowal of resource exploration and colonial warfare. It explores how the disavowal of war and hydrocarbon exploration forecloses political and ethical possibilities. It further examines how emergent geosocial relations between people and rocks carry the possibility of reckoning with anti-Kurdish war and violence. In doing so, the article invites environmental humanities to rethink methodological and analytical ways of rendering violence visible. The article concludes by speculating about the possibility of geosocial solidarity, or a mode of relation with geological formations and humans that forges connections between racialized forms of othering and planetary scales of time, space, and materiality. As a mode of earthly praxis, geosocial solidarity is what might come after the unfinished task of detangling distributed forms of violence in the Anthropocene.

The fraught tectonic history of Anatolia has given oil in Turkey an absent presence. In this article, I examine how oil's absent presence produces a series of speculations in Turkish public life regarding oil's alleged abundance and its obstructed production. In particular, I trace widespread speculations that claim that the Treaty of Lausanne, which founded Turkey in 1923, will expire on its centennial anniversary in July 2023. I argue that speculations about the expiration of Lausanne harken back to both anxieties around territorial partition and neo-imperial desires of expansion in contemporary Turkey. Such speculations are further utilized by the AKP government to reinterpret Turkey's history and to legitimize expansionist and irredentist politics in the present. In this context the ground-what's under it and who exerts political claims over it-becomes a productive zone in which multiple ethno-nationalist and imperialist notions of territorial belonging, loss, and desire are played out. I conclude that by recalibrating anthropological analyses around the generative powers of the geological, we can better understand how the indeterminacy of the underground en-twines with the political legacies of post-imperial collapse and nation-state formation that emerged in the aftermath of World War I.

Abstract What conditions of possibility have emerged for learning to live on a new earth? This special section builds on scholarship in the environmental humanities, critical Black studies, and geophilosophy to explore how emergent ways of becoming human are forged in relation to powerful earth dynamics, even while earth’s powers are constitutive of contemporary forms of domination. Geologizing Sylvia Wynter’s understanding of being human as a praxis, it proposes that earth as praxis (a) provides a diagnosis of the deeply embedded forms of power that have been materialized, over several centuries, in the earthly conditions of life itself; and (b) represents a critical potential for creating new ways to live on earth through the practical exploration of geosocial relations. We highlight three modes of earth praxis. Inhuman territorializations calls attention to the landscapes and earthy matter subjected to racializing and territorializing modes of power. In turn, such practices participate in the constitution of dehumanized, racialized, and dispossessed bodies and peoples. Becoming geological refers to the ways human forms of living have become shot through with earth system dynamics, mineralogical relations, and energetic possibilities, to the extent that people cannot be who they are without these pervasive anthropogenic geologies. Finally, planetary predicaments helps diagnose the politically vital and collective but deeply unequal and nonhomogeneous conditions of the present. Earth as praxis offers an analytical grip on emerging planetary earth relations that breaks with abstract, universalizing categories, and is capable of diagnosing the wide range of today’s violent, creative, and liberatory planetary practices.

What conditions of possibility have emerged for learning to live on a new earth? This special section builds on scholarship in the environmental humanities, critical Black studies, and geophilosophy to explore how emergent ways of becoming human are forged in relation to powerful earth dynamics, even while earth's powers are constitutive of contemporary forms of domination. Geologizing Sylvia Wynter's understanding of being human as a praxis, it proposes that earth as praxis (a) provides a diagnosis of the deeply embedded forms of power that have been materialized, over several centuries, in the earthly conditions of life itself; and (b) represents a critical potential for creating new ways to live on earth through the practical exploration of geosocial relations. We highlight three modes of earth praxis. Inhuman territorializations calls attention to the landscapes and earthy matter subjected to racializing and territorializing modes of power. In turn, such practices participate in the constitution of dehumanized, racialized, and dispossessed bodies and peoples. Becoming geological refers to the ways human forms of living have become shot through with earth system dynamics, mineralogical relations, and energetic possibilities, to the extent that people cannot be who they are without these pervasive anthropogenic geologies. Finally, planetary predicaments helps diagnose the politically vital and collective but deeply unequal and nonhomogeneous conditions of the present. Earth as praxis offers an analytical grip on emerging planetary earth relations that breaks with abstract, universalizing categories, and is capable of diagnosing the wide range of today's violent, creative, and liberatory planetary practices.

American AnthropologistVolume 124, Issue 1 p. 231-232 BOOK REVIEW The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time by Hugh RafflesNew York: Pantheon Books, 2020. 374 pp. Zeynep Oguz, Zeynep Oguz [email protected] University of LausanneSearch for more papers by this author Zeynep Oguz, Zeynep Oguz [email protected] University of LausanneSearch for more papers by this author First published: 02 February 2022 https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13683Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat REFERENCES CITED Oguz, Zeynep. 2020. “Introduction: Geological Anthropology.” Theorizing the Contemporary, Fieldsights, September 22. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/introduction-geological-anthropology. Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 2016. Geontologies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Todd, Zoe. 2020. “Fossil Fuels and Fossil Kin: Re-Imagining Alberta's ‘Energy Heritage’ through a Métis Feminist Lens.” Speculative Fish-ctions. January 19. https://zoestodd.com/2021/01/19/weaponized-fossil-kin-and-the-alberta-economy. Volume124, Issue1March 2022Pages 231-232 ReferencesRelatedInformation

This article expands upon recent attempts to shift focus to the material and earthly aspects of power to explore territorial politics and state power in Turkey's Kurdish-populated southeast or Turkish Kurdistan. It focuses on the limestone caves scattered along the Upper Tigris Valley as a locus of geopower, examining the sociopolitical life of limestone caves in relation to the environmental geographies of oil extraction, development, and counterinsurgency. Examining three historical segments where the limestone caves of the Upper Tigris Valley have become objects of the Turkish state's attempts to govern Kurds and territorialize Turkish Kurdistan, this paper demonstrates the shifting configurations of geopower in Turkey vis-à-vis the Kurdish Question. As geological formations fundamental to the Turkish state's attempts to exert and secure territorial power, the caves of the Upper Tigris Valley have also been central to the ways in which Kurds in Turkey have attempted to unsettle state power and territorial politics. Surveying the workings of geopower through caves in Turkish Kurdistan, the article reveals the uneven and violent ways in which geological formations are entangled with hegemonic territorial politics and counter-hegemonic politics.