This paper addresses the basic questions relating to environment and ecology in early modern Ottoman Cilicia (modern-day Çukurova). Recently, historians have begun to consider the role of environmental factors and ecological change in Ottoman history, particularly the cooler and drier climate of the Little Ice Age period, which resulted in reduced agricultural yields throughout the Empire. This work offers an entirely new perspective on the early modern Ottoman experience while raising many questions, namely: what were the Little Ice Age experiences of the various provinces of the Ottoman Empire and how did climate and geography influence the historical development of these different regions? Drawing on contemporary scholarly debates within the historiography of the Mediterranean, environmental history, and climate change as well as travel accounts from the period, this paper targets a localized, regional picture of the Ottoman environmental history by focusing on the understudied region of Cilicia. Although today Çukurova is the most agriculturally productive region in Turkey, the plains of Southern Anatolia and Northern Syria were largely uncultivated during the early modern period due to colder temperatures, insufficient rainfall, frequent flood and poor irrigation methods. Within this context, the practice of transhumance spread. While the spread of semi-nomadic tribes of pastoralists has been often viewed as the “decivilization” of the Ottoman countryside, this paper explains the ways in which transhumance was in fact a successful adaptation to ecological change that brought drought and disease to settled populations. This discussion will include a consideration of the ways in which transhumant pastoralists were integral to the economy of Cilicia, moving beyond the image of the marauding “mountaineers” deplored by nineteenth-century Ottoman and Western modernists alike. Many have noted that modernization played out very differently in different parts of the Ottoman Empire. In the case of Çukurova, the lack of settled population as a result of agricultural difficulties meant that large estates with a relatively small number of landholders could be created through privatizing land tenure under Tanzimat reforms. The case of Ottoman Cilicia demonstrates that the regional study of the environmental history of the Ottoman Empire during the early modern era has major implications not only for our understanding of that period but also for the modernization that took place throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.