Can a government addicted to concrete and profit turn around an appalling environmental record?
Everything in Muhammet Şahin’s garden is dead: the plants, his chickens, the bees. This summer’s unusually ferocious wildfires in south and west Turkey swept down on to his restaurant in the village of Osmaniye from two directions. As the flames rushed down the hillside, he and his wife had to evacuate, leaving their home and livelihood behind.
The couple have managed to pay for a new roof and fixed glass windows that shattered in fires over two devastating weeks in August, when the blazes reached a heat intensity four times higher than Turkey’s previous record. But for Şahin and many of his neighbours there is still a lot of repair work to do, and serious questions remain.
