It is time not to possess, but to protect!

Greetings from a beautiful holiday morning. Many of you woke up to this holiday morning by the seaside to make the most of the 9-day break. Those who stayed home will visit their elders, perhaps set a holiday table with friends, and take a short break from the difficult conditions of life to enjoy the holiday. I intended to do the same. However, what I learned last week while filming for our new documentary in the Büyük Menderes Basin, in the villages of Söke and Aydın, and in the countryside of Manisa Demirci, has quite dampened my spirits. If you have been following, I have been writing about the great disaster that awaits us for the past two weeks.

WATER; SCARCITY AND POLLUTION!

On the day the LGS and YKS exams were held, we were filming at the Tahtalı Dam. While you were waiting excitedly in schoolyards for your children sweating over their LGS and YKS exams, dreaming about which school they would get into, we were above the dam that provides drinking water to İzmir. What I saw was chilling. The waters of the Tahtalı Dam had receded. Tree roots were visible. Officials were saying that they were experiencing such a waterless period for the first time.

I witnessed the Büyük Menderes River, the lifeblood of Aegean farmers and the heart of the Büyük Menderes Basin—the richest agricultural region in Turkey, spanning an area the size of 700 thousand football fields—gasping for air.

The Büyük Menderes is flowing so thinly that there is no water left in its tributaries. Industrial and chemical waste has turned the Büyük Menderes into a sewer. Farmers, who claim that many industrial facilities in Uşak, Denizli, and Aydın discharge their waste into the river without treatment, are helpless. And unfortunately, farmers are irrigating their crops with that dirty water given to them from the Büyük Menderes. Those products are then transported all over Turkey. This holiday, you will be consuming watermelons, cherries, apricots, tomatoes, and cucumbers that come from the Büyük Menderes at your tables.

Scarcity and pollution will create a chain reaction. The contamination that experts refer to has already begun. Food Engineer Bülent Şık, in his report titled "Rivers and Children" published last month, defined the devastating effect the Büyük Menderes River has on children as "Slow Violence." When I went to the region and saw what was happening on-site, I lost sleep. The situation is very serious!

We cannot live without water and food. Models predict that there will be interruptions in our taps by 2030 and that water will be cut off in cities. Water pollution will hurt us as much as water scarcity. We must emerge with a demand before our children, for whom we dream beautiful dreams for the future, fall ill with cancer. We must form a pressure group.

THOSE WHO MAKE THE IMPOSSIBLE POSSIBLE

I do not want to distress you further. I say, "It is possible to make the impossible possible!"

There is always a solution to the problem. As long as we put our hands to the stone. During the filming of our documentary, in the farthest corner of Manisa, on the high hills of Demirci, on a farm where the spirit of the Demirci raiders is reflected, I saw that a miracle could be possible. I am talking about the Karaoklar, who grow Turkey's most productive almonds on barren land that the Ministry of Agriculture calls "marginal," meaning land where agriculture cannot be practiced, and who, instead of keeping what they do to themselves, share what they have learned with patience and the ancient wisdom of the soil with all the farmers in the region, adding value to the Demirci district by making the so-called barren region fertile. Karaoklar is like an oasis in the desert.

Founded on the principle of not possessing, but protecting, Karaoklar has adopted Atatürk's saying, "The peasant is the master of the nation," as its principle. It not only supports farmers in the region but also extends a helping hand to producers seeking support from all over Turkey, from Van to Konya. It also teaches all sorts of lessons to white-collar workers living a life far from the soil and nature.

One of the founders of Karaoklar is someone we all know, whose books we read, whose seminars we attend, and who is the first person that comes to mind when Leadership Training is mentioned in Turkey: Ahmet Şerif İzgören. Orhan Aztekin, who ensured that Karaoklar was chosen as Turkey's best ecological farm (to me, he is the "man who talks to nature"), is an incorrigible idealist. I wish there were more incorrigible "good people" like Şerif and Orhan in our country. Only then would this country be a different Turkey...

Happy holidays...