In this presentation, I argue that the development of the Keban Dam in eastern Turkey by political elites and foreign engineers facilitated the creation of the natural environment into a political subject. Built to harness the downward flow of the Euphrates River as a way to stimulate and transform the predominantly agricultural-based economy of the Kurdish east, construction of the Dam started in 1965 and was completed in 1974. The second largest dam in the region after Aswan in Egypt, the implications of the Keban Dam bring into light the relation between capital accumulation, Cold War imperialism, and the environment. Political expressions such as development and modernization were never in scarce use by the Turkish political elites since the inception of the Republic of Turkey in 1923. These terms were often deployed euphemistically to describe the process of capital accumulation and the submission of local Kurdish power in the eastern provinces. Decades following the 1930s pacification campaigns of two Kurdish-led revolts, the center-right government of Suleyman Demirel turned to a multinational Italian civil engineering firm, Impregilo, to alleviate the burden of its underdeveloped and potentially restless provinces. This effort was to be realized with the construction of the Keban Dam. In a scenario reminiscent of Timothy Mitchell’s account of post-war Egypt, the construction of the Dam unraveled a series of unintended consequences. Sources indicate that the evictions of some 20,000 Kurdish villagers were ordered by the Italian engineering managers, prompting Kurdish migration into the larger, more modern cities of Istanbul and Izmir. Scientists cite the rise in the region’s water table, introducing an influx of different species of insects, and prompting a change in the traditional methods of cultivation by Kurdish farmers. Akin to Robert Vitalis’ work on Italian and American oil workers in 1950s Saudi Arabia, the politics of race and ethnicity were ever present in the construction of the Dam. Keban laid the foundation of a brief solidarity labor movement between the predominantly Italian workers who were sent to manage and build the dam, and some of the local Kurdish workers. This confluence of labor unrest, environmental change, and internal displacement are illuminated in the pages of Italian and Turkish newspapers, logs of visiting American charitable organizations, and the archives of the State Planning Organization of Turkey.