An environmental look at Turkey

I won't claim to be the world's greatest environmentalist. My favourite car was our Honda CR-V, which counts as an SUV (but a very small one, really!). I waste as much as the next person. I drive too much and walk too little. I use more electricity in a day than a third-world village does in a year. I enjoy the occasional shop-till-you-drop experience when I'm feeling blue. But I do know that everything I buy, like my own body, wıll end up in the garbage dump sometime. And garbage ain't pretty.

You'd think after 10,000 years of civilization Turks would be more aware of the environment around them than an uncultured Canadian. But you'd be wrong.

Gas here costs $2.50 a litre. And everyone who can afford it drives a car. They drive fast and they drive loud and they drive dirty, leaving trails of trash behind. Highways here are filthy. So are the streets. So are the lanes. When the wind blows you're likely to be blinded not just by dust but by flying plastic bags. That in spite of the cities' and towns' commendable efforts to clean the streets, which seem to be washed daily.

People spit and blow their noses onto the street. Dogs dressed in embroidered jackets on rhinestone-studded leashes leave their deposits in the middle of the sidewalk. The first sentence I mastered in Turkish, on a rainy morning in Büyükada with its picturesque horse-drawn carriages was "I've got horse shit between my toes". The roads are not pretty. No wonder they're washed often.

Turks smoke. They smoke when they get up in the morning and when they go to bed at night. They smoke before, during and after meals. They smoke inside and they smoke outside. They smoke in hospitals, restaurants, hotels, internet cafes - not airports, though. And when they're done the butts lie where they're left.

The Sea of Marmara around Istanbul is an ocean of plastic - bottles, bags, tampon applicators, and unidentifyable crap. I don't know why the dolphins still swim there. No one else does, except the street kids.

Putting out the garbage is an experience. After thirty years of composting and recycling we're not used to dumping everything into a plastic shopping bag and tying it to the fencepost to be picked up in the morning. We're told that there are people who pick over the garbage at the dump and make a good living from what they find, so we shouldn't worry about throwing away everything. I don't feel good about it.

What archaeologists are rummaging through at places like Troy and Çatal Höyük is the accumulated detritus of the aeons. Without garbage they'd have nothing to study. Maybe that's why Turks are so good at leaving their messes lying around. But I wish they weren't.

Some of the younger generation are beginning to think about what they're doing. Greenpeace has a few members, and there are other organizations beginning to form around specific issues. I wish them luck. I know I'm going to do what I can - pick up garbage when it's not too hazardous, be careful about what we buy, try to find some place to live where we can compost. And ask questions and talk about the issue, of course.

I hope future archaeologists have a hard time tracking down evidence of this civilization.