The ways in which forests are used have undergone significant transformations throughout history. Once valued as commons, sites of subsistence production, and multifunctional ecosystems, forests have increasingly been reduced to resource areas for the production of timber and other raw materials as capitalist relations of production have deepened. This transformation has profoundly shaped both the production of knowledge about forests and forest management practices, narrowing them into a paradigm driven by efficiency, resource extraction, and capital accumulation, rather than ecological processes.
The destructive consequences of non-ecological approaches to forest management become particularly visible in regions where multiple environmental pressures intersect. The Kazdağları (Mount Ida), one of Türkiye’s most important regions in terms of high-mountain ecosystems and endemic biodiversity, faces not only anthropogenic pressures arising from tourism, mining, and other forms of resource extraction, but also increasing extinction risks intensified by climate change.
This seminar aims to reassess the accumulation of environmental pressures in the Kazdağları through the lens of ecological knowledge production. Drawing on analyses developed within my doctoral research—focusing on forest perceptions, the impacts of climate change, fire ecology, and interspecies relationships—I seek to explore how knowledge about forests can be rethought and produced within an ecological framework.
Nurbahar Usta received her B.Sc. in Bioengineering from Yıldız Technical University, her M.Sc. in Biological Sciences from Middle East Technical University (METU), and her Ph.D. in Ecology from Hacettepe University. She is currently conducting postdoctoral research at the Eurasia Institute of Earth Sciences at Istanbul Technical University (ITU).
Her research centers on forests, with a particular focus on the Kazdağları region. Her academic interests include climate change, interspecies relationships, forest policies, conservation knowledge and its production, and civil society initiatives grounded in nature conservation.
