flyways
food
for thought
Sustaining
the sustainable
In Turkey, ancient indigenous methods of cultivating olives are providing age-old answers to the
questions modern practices are beginning to force the world to ask. But can they survive the
onslaught of intensive agriculture long enough to speak them?
magine a world where agriculture
is taking place without sowing the
soil, without irrigation and even
without planting trees. It’s hard to
believe, but it’s possible, and it has been so for
the last 4,000 years at least. The indigenous
olive pastures of Western Anatolia, Turkey, have
nurtured generations of people and the web of
life for many centuries. Olives in these areas are
not planted, but are grown by grafting wild olive
trees, which find their home in this unique part of
the world. This ancient anthropogenic ecosystem
is extremely diverse, hosting numerous endemic
Mediterranean birds and plants, chameleons,
large carnivores such as the Golden Jackal Canis
aureus and Caracal Caracal caracal.
Here, people aren’t really the owners of their
land. Instead, they act as one of hundreds of
species having their home in olive pastures.
I
Güven Eken
Senior Science Advisor,
Doğa Derneği (BirdLife
in Turkey)
Photos: Doğa Derneği
REMNANTS OF
THESE LANDSCAPES
IN TURKEY
SHELTER SIMPLE
ANSWERS TO
COMPLEX MODERN
QUESTIONS
Hence, harvesting the olives is not recognised as
labour here. It is a feast, where children, women,
men and grandparents meet every autumn to
celebrate their life, collect the olives by hand and
transfer their knowledge from one generation to
the next. The result is one of the healthiest olive
oils on earth – not only for those consuming it,
but also for the wider ecosystem.
Olive pastures are just one of several
indigenous production landscapes in Turkey.
Turkey continues to pursue agricultural
Please
check
this from
is the Neolithic era
practices
that date
(10,000
to 8,000
BC), stretching between
the
correct
author
high mountains and the sea, and resulting
in various forms of living landscapes. Over
generations, indigenous communities have
devised countless innovations to cultivate their
surrounding environment for their livelihoods.
Ancient varieties of livestock
continue to graze in Anatolia’s
indigenous olive pastures
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birdlife • Xxxxxx 2018