Hypersaline
My grandfather, Recep Hepdeniz (in white coat, to the right) was the chief mechanical engineer at Çamaltı Saltworks (Çamaltı Tuzlası) in İzmir, roughly in between 1930 and early 1960s. His three daughters and a son (my mother, aunts and uncle) grew up in this vast landscape as children.
I, in turn, grew up with stories of this beautiful place, of the abundance of nature, the fish and marine life, and of the game birds and other fowl, trying to imagine the cartloads of wild geese and fish catch to be distributed among the workers and staff: a carnage from times when nature appeared inexhaustable. The shallow sea, hatcheries, marshes and the salt ponds make up the vista (almost) on the sea level extending for kilometers, only to be interrupted with few mid-size plants and trees that can survive in this environment, especially the Eucalyptus that was introduced sometime in 20th century. Otherwise, the wetlands and the sea fuse together all the way to the hills in the far distance. From above, in maps and pictures, the whole area seems very orderly, a grid of minimally elevated embankments applied on a vast, wild, flat territory, a functional order unlike R. Smithson’s Spiral Jetty on the Great Salt Lake in Utah. What the two share in common is the reddish color of water induced by halophillic bacteria at certain times of the year, close to the pink color of the flamingo.
The saltworks, (in proper terms, ‘multi-pond coastal solar saltern’) an area of some 60 sq.km. is part of the Gediz (Hermos) River delta, reaching the sea close to the entry to the gulf of İzmir. Established in industrial scale in 1863 by the Italians, the operation is still active and expanding, producing roughly one third of the salt consumed in Turkey, by employing natural processes (evaporation by sun and wind.) In simple terms, the seawater is pumped into the shallow ponds, gradually transferred among the ponds as evaporation increases the percentage of salt which finally chrystallize during the summer months. The remaining salt is collected and carried by a rail system and conveyors to form huge white mounds visible from the other side of the bay in the distance. The site is also incorporated into the greater network of the delta, together with an air base, an industrial zone and massive housing developments to the east, and with one of the most important bird reserves in the world to the north. In scientific literature, the attributes of the delta are ‘a coastal aquatic ecosystem’; ‘a heterogeneous habitat’; ‘a plural ecosystem’; and the like, incorporating populations of microscopic organisms, bacteria, algae and varied fauna and flora.(1) In short, it is a place of extreme biodiversity, very rich in biota, microscopic life, chemical and biological cycles, etc., but a little short on charismatic animals except for more than 260 species of birds, distributed in annual cycles. The most visible and charismatic, and the most populous of the birds is the Greater flamingo, in this case Phoenicopterus Roseus.
Flamingo tongues were a delicacy for certain Roman emperors, Stephen Jay Gould reminds in The Flamingo’s Smile.(2) “…The flamingo, much to its later and unanticipated sorrow, evolved a large, soft, fleshy tongue. Why?” he asks, to continue with possible answers in an excellent search that encompasses the naturalists of the past who took interest in the matter, Audubon’s sketches, the flamingo’s feeding mechanisms, the unusual shape of the beak and its structure, form and function in adaptation to its environment, and in comparison to other life forms that survive ‘upside down.’ Eventually it becomes clear that the Greater flamingo survives in the harsh environment of shallow hypersaline lakes, that it feeds by pumping water using its tongue (up to four times per second) and, like whales, filters the water through its bill to catch prey. And ultimately the upper bill, much larger and curved downwards, has evolved in contrast to most other birds: the flamingo feeds with its head upside down in the water, slowly walking and using its long and curved neck to adjust the position of the bill.
Ever since Darwin’s finches, morphological analysis had been one of the most important tools in studying evolutionary biology: how forms change to adapt to the needs and the environment, how natural selection works and how and why species diverge. This appears to be quite a mechanical field of observation not very unlike the analysis of forms in archaeology, the form and function of every (silent) human made/shaped object and its evolution, in comparison to similar forms at other sites in synchrony, or in some temporal and physical distance. Since the time I took up photography more than forty years ago, archaeology, its methods, findings and the ways it leads to writing the story of material culture had intrigued me as an artist. Living in Anatolia, it is as though the buried past slowly reveals itself to illuminate the present on the same piece of land. This kind of kinship with the (long) dead is not about ethnicity or ancestry, and certainly not about history written by strongmen, wars and monuments, to be repeated as tragedy or farce. It is not even about wisdom we attribute to the ancients who lived in varied facets of ‘harmony.’ It is more about perseverance, about sensations, watching the same landscape, feeling the same air and the seas, tasting the fruits of the earth that belong to these lands. I always regard this to be a transcendent experience, somewhat extra-bodily, supposedly charitable and humbling, and poetic. While this perception appears like an esoteric belief in which one becomes part of a cosmic consciousness, I felt it to be just the opposite: down to earth and very much bound to landscape, objects, language, manners and simultaneously linked both to positive vibrations and to a sense of doom (not the apocalypse.) Meanwhile, it possibly leads to false impressions that one sees archaic traces in work, speech and faith of one’s contemporaries, and that one senses the ‘origin’ of an object or a piece of architecture. In this sense, an exemplary approach can be found in Ian Hodder writing on the findings at Çatalhöyük, in how one has to be extremely cautious in deducing social organization, daily life, rituals and beliefs, while looking into material remains, tools of mineral essence, traces of organic substance, animal bones, wall paintings, neolithic art, neolithic garbage, and human burials.(3) Furthermore, the political discourse that comes out of this ‘transcendent experience’ is rather oblique while the class struggle as the engine of history is buried deeper in the earth, among all else: one has to look harder to bring out the memories of oppression. Deep history does not easily yield “…to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger.” (Benjamin) But then, what else do we have to realize the self and the community: One’s body and its memory? The unconscious? What is the body politic? What is art?
Another (supposedly) mystical belief, according to certain scientists and neo-Darwinists, is the Gaia theory as masterfully initiated by James Lovelock, and fiercely defended by Lynn Margulis. In this case, chemistry, biology, physics and geology have ‘conspired’ in claiming the cult of the mother earth (sic) as one giant organism, regulating the atmosphere, oceans and the earth for the benefit of life, for eons. Yes, in one very unlikely twist worthy of the ‘cult of science’, natural sciences sanctify the planet as alive, with one realistic aim to survive and make the thin layer (critical zone) composed of the atmosphere, the oceans and the earth’s surface comfortable for the living matter: By the regulation of temperature, of atmospheric chemistry, of salinity and pH, of carbon and nitrogen cycles and by transforming mineral earth, almost since the beginning. Here archaeology, deep history and genesis fuse together.
“… From this moment on, everything changes in the way stories are told, so much so that the political order now includes everything that previously belonged to nature” writes Bruno Latour in Gifford Lectures,(4) commenting on the reversal of roles of two revolutionary turns: between what Lovelock achieved in spite of an antithetical scientific milieu, and what Galileo found out against the will of the church. Instead of earth being a planetary body like any other (in extension) and not in the center of the universe, it becomes (centrally) unique in the foreseeable heavens, bearing life and shaped by the biosphere. Rather than adapt to the given environmental conditions, organisms ‘bend’ the environment to their benefit and effect the conditions, foremost chemically. It took a NASA scientist (Lovelock) to ‘come down to earth’ in Latour’s words, labeling Gaia “as a (finally secular) image of the earth.”
The way Lynn Margulis writes of the most ancient (3000 million years) and the smallest life form of all, the bacteria, is very much like about a distant relative: “…Bacteria can carry out every biological process known in the biosphere , except talk.”(5) In explaining things to nonexperts, most intelligent and passionate scientists talk and write about natural phenomena as something very intrinsic and intertwined to our lives. Margulis goes one step further and incorporates crucial concepts and the existential plight of humankind today to physical realm, to smallest life forms, to biochemistry and physics. “…Ultimately, a nation’s gross national product can only be biological, not industrial.” she writes, in agreement with George Bataille: “… General economy is not human but solar. Sun-produced food, fiber, coal, and oil … are the living foundation not only for bustling animal life but for industry, technology, and the wealth of nations.” (6)
Here I am, back in Tuzla. “…Thought, like life, is matter and energy in flux; the body is its complement. Thinking and being are aspects of the same physical organization and its action.” writes Margulis and her son, Dorion Sagan.(7) How simple and illuminating! For a moment one can dream of philosophy, history, economy, art, and one’s desiring self in the fluid media of natural science. The muck that pull my feet in the pond stirs imagination, exactly at a time the State of New York discusses the legality of human compost. On one hand, roughly 9000 years later we are once more in Çatalhöyük territory, where the ancestors were buried under the platforms inside the house. But on the other, in highly secular and symbiotic way we can finally grasp the possibility (or the improbability) of survival of the planet on equal footing with living and non-living matter, molecule by molecule…
January 2023
1. Edis Koru, Fatih Perçin. Characteristics of Biological Systems in Çamaltı Solar Saltworks.
https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/download/article-file/565779
2. Stephen Jay Gould. The Flamingo’s Smile: Reflections in Natural History. Norton, NY 1987. p.33
3. Ian Hodder. Çatalhöyük: The Leopard’s Tale. Thames and Hudson, London 2006
4. Bruno Latour. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Polity, Cambridge 2017
5. Lynn Margulis, Dorion Sagan. Slanted Truths: Essays on Gaia, Symbiosis and Evolution. Springer Verlag, NY 1997
6. Lynn Margulis, Dorion Sagan. What is Life? Un. of California Press, Berkeley 1995. p.199
7. Margulis and Sagan in Slanted Truths. p. 181