June Haimoff

June Haimoff MBE
June Haimoff at the sea turtle centre at İztuzu Beach
Born	Joan Christine Fairey Essex
Residence	Dalyan, Muğla Province, Turkey
Nationality	English
Occupation	Environmentalist

June Haimoff (MBE) is an English environmentalist who lives in Dalyan in the Turkish province of Muğla. In the period from 1984–1988 she and fellow-environmentalists such as David Bellamy, Lily Venizelos, Günther Peter, Nergis Yazgan and Keith Corbett launched a successful campaign to preserve İztuzu Beach as a habitat for the endangered loggerhead turtle (Caretta caretta). This beach is one of the main nesting places of the species in Turkey and the Mediterranean.

June Haimoff was born in Essex as Joan Christine Fairey, daughter of Christopher and Madeleine Fairey. As her father was a prominent petroleum engineer, the family often lived abroad (a.o. in Uganda and Iran).

In her adult life, she pursued the ambition of becoming an opera singer and did her studies in music, dancing and ballet. When married with Charles Haimoff, she was seriously engaged in painting and had her own art gallery in Gstaad, Switzerland.

She visited southwestern Turkey for the first time in July 1975, when the region was still outside the usual tracks of international tourism, by means of a boat (Bouboulina) purchased in Greece.

Between 1975 and 1981 she occasionally stopped at İztuzu Beach and Dalyan on her boat trips and was therefore called "Kaptan June" (Captain June) by the locals.In 1984 she settled in Dalyan in her own baraka (beach hut) on İztuzu Beach.

When it became clear that there were plans to exploit the beach for mass tourism, she started a campaign to preserve İztuzu Beach as a breeding habitat for the loggerhead turtle, which is on the IUCN Red List.

In April 1987 building started on an 1800-bed hotel complex by the name of Kaunos Beach Hotel. This caused a storm of protests world-wide. There were protests from the IUCN, Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund and the Zoologische Gesellschaft Frankfurt. Particularly in the former Federal Republic of Germany the building caused a major uproar, because the German DEG (Deutsche Finanzierungsgesellschaft für Beteiligungen in Entwicklungsländern) wanted to use an amount equivalent to 5 million euros from public means under the pretense of development aid.