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  • From: dtv@mwt.net
  • To: permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org, dreamtime@yahoogroups.com
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  • Subject: [permaculture] Re: Restoring the Marshes of Mesopotamia (fwd)
  • Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2004 15:30:42 US/Central

(fascinating article, well worth reading thru.... mIEKAL)


---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 14 Nov 2004 21:30:42 -0500 (EST)
From: moderator@portside.org
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To: portside@lists.portside.org
Subject: Restoring the Marshes of Mesopotamia

IRAQ: EDEN AGAIN?
Restoring the Marshes of Mesopotamia

By Azzam Alwash with Suzanne Alwash

Reprinted by WORLD WAR 3 REPORT, Nov. 6, 2004

http://www.edenagain.org

I discovered the Mesopotamian marshes as a boy when my father,
an irrigation engineer for Iraq, took me on a motorboat that
puttered between reeds towering tall overhead. The air was
perfectly still, thick with a dank algal smell and the buzz of
flies. It was blazingly hot. Suddenly, we emerged onto an open
lake, blown by a crisp breeze, where the whole world was
dazzling blue and green and brown.

In the clearing was a village where each house was its own
island, built from centuries-old accumulations of reeds and
mud. We brought the boat to the largest island, disembarked
and were greeted warmly and loudly by the villagers. They
grandly showed us to the guesthouse (know as a mudhif)
constructed of bundles of reeds bound together, where men sat
on richly embroidered carpets, arguing and laughing and
tending endless pots of strong black tea.

The air inside the mudhif was blessedly cooler. The villagers
insisted we stay for dinner, and I slept in my father's lap on
the way home, rocking through reed beds under the moonlight.

Such was my introduction to Iraq's Marsh Dwellers, a people
whose culture is shaped by their coexistence with the
marshlands, and whose cultural roots extend to the time of the
ancient Sumerians. The Mesopotamian marshes lie within
Southern Iraq, along the confluence of the Tigris and the
Euphrates. The Marsh Dwellers live deep within these wetlands,
their villages accessible only by canoes called mashhoofs.

Each home is its own island, and families travel to their
villages via the water. They harvest and feed the sprouting
reeds to their water buffalos and use buffalo dung for fuel.
They depend on fishing and hunting, and planting rice,
fruits,vegetables and date palms along the margins of the
marshes.

Cuneiform tablets reveal that the Marsh Dwellers have
essentially followed this way of life for the past 5,000
years. Their home is the birthplace of western civilization,
ancient Sumer. The world's first epic poem,Gilgamesh, was
written here. Tradition holds that this was the site of the
biblical Garden of Eden, sacred to Islam, Christianity, and
Judaism.

In 1988 a half million Marsh Dwellers lived in the marshlands.
At the end of 1991 Sadam Hassein drained, dried and burned the
marshes and their villages. At least 300,000 Marsh Dwellers
died, fled or were resettled. By 2000, less than a tenth of
the original population remained close to the Euphrates and
the Tigris.

A 2001 United Nations Environmental Program report called "the
disappearance of the Mesopotamian marshlands" a major
"environmental catastrophe that will be remembered as one of
humanity's worst engineered disasters."

I shared the report with my wife, an environmental geologist
who had fallen in love with the marshes, and we committed
ourselves to seeing the marshlands restored. We established
the Eden Again Project to promote the restoration of the
Mesopotamian marshes. The project seeks not only to restore
the marshes for their own sake, but also for the Marsh
Dwellers, whose culture and lifestyle depend on them.

The Iraq Foundation, a non-governmental organization led by
Iraqi expatriates who work to promote democracy and human
rights in Iraq, agreed to sponsor the project. The project
leaders were optimistic and eager to find innovative ways to
revive the marshlands.

The initial evaluations were challenging: a US government
scientist told project leaders that there was too little water
left in the rivers to restore the marshes. A humanitarian
group contended that the Marsh Dwellers would really prefer to
live in towns, making the need for restoration less pressing.
Despite the nay-saying, the Eden Project convened a panel of
international experts to serve as technical advisors. The
panel decided that restoration was warranted because the marshes provided
environmental
services, ecological functions, economic goods and socio-
cultural values: restoration effects were technically judged
feasible and worthwhile.

In the summer of 2003, I returned with a team to the country
of my birth. The marshes were in bad shape. The Central and
Hammar Marshes were mile upon mile of dried, desiccated land.
Parched earth was split by foot-deep cracks. We occasionally
found an area that had been recently inundated, where facility
operators and local populations were removing
embankments,disabling pump stations,or opening sluice gates.
Already, people had begun moving back to the re-flooded
areas,a powerful sign that Iraqis wanted their marshes
restored.

Eden Again staff advocated on behalf of the marshlands to
Iraq's government, and the project members celebrated when in
October 2003 the new Minister of Water Resources declared
restoration his highest priority. Italy's Ministry of the
Environment supported a comprehensive survey of water resource
needs in March 2003. The ministry also provided the Iraq
Foundation funding to monitor environmental changes in the re-
flooded Abu Zarag Marsh. The Eden Again Project hired
professors and graduate students from Iraq's major
universities to work with the experts, monitoring
environmental conditions in re-flooded areas. The country has
committed two million euros and has pledged an additional five
million euros to our project. Italian experts and Iraqi
scientists are working collaboratively on restoration: the
Italians providing the science of restoration and the Iraqi
providing local knowledge about the marshes.

The United Nations Environmental Program has other roundtable
discussions for donor nations.And they have engaged Iran in
discussions of management of its Hawr al-Azim Marsh. The U.S.
provided $4 million in funding and sent of team of experts to
consult on the restoration, agriculture, fish, and water
buffalo. Slowly, this committed effort is beginning to achieve
results.

The Iraqi people began efforts to break down embankments as
soon as they could without fear of reprisals. Consequently,
the restoration partners are treating these re-flooded areas
as ready-made demonstration projects. One of these sites is
Karmashia, about 15 miles east of Nasiriyah.

I first visited Karmashia in September 2003. Already houses
made of mud and brick lined the riverbanks;the water turned
from deep brown to green as sewage flowed into the river. At
the end of the distributary was a security embankment built by
the former regime to provide fast access to the marshes;
satellite images from 2001 suggested that beyond it, we would
find an entirely dried marsh bed.

Instead there were thick forests of green reeds. In a nearby
field, people were singing as they harvested rice and waved to
visitors. It was difficult to believe that all this had grown
in only six months, after the local population opened the
sluice gates and allowed the water to flow naturally. Newly
constructed reed huts lined the edge of the embankment, and
their inhabitants were herding livestock.

These settlers were not originally from Karmashia, they said,
but were from the Central Marsh; when their marshes were dried
they had left to find work as servants. Now they were
returning home, waiting in Karmashia until their own marshes
were restored.

Women were collecting dung to burn for fuel, and men were
fishing in canoes. Everywhere there were signs that life in
the marshes was progressing as it had for hundreds of years- -
except that when we drove further and looked beyond the edge
of the embankment, all we could see was desert.

Through the direct actions of the Marsh Dwellers and Iraq's
Ministry of Water Resources, the size of the marshlands has
dramatically increased in recent months. In 2003, only five to
10 percent of the original marshlands remained. By February
2004, about 20 to 30 percent of the marshlands were covered
with water. Six separate areas have been re-flooded.

Within the re-flooded marshes, some have been re-vegetated and
are visually indistinguishable from the marshlands of the
1980s. However, the extent to which wildlife has recovered has
not yet been assessed. Some areas resemble flooded deserts,
with sprouting reeds and dying desert vegetation. Other areas
are flooded and barren - the water may be too deep or too
salty for germination, the seed bank may be too old, or the
soil conditions may be toxic to reed growth. Studies to
resolve these questions are ongoing; the answers are far from
clear.

Fish have returned to many of the re-flooded marshes,
migrating with the floodwaters from the rivers. However, few
of the re-flooded areas are as interconnected as they once
were. Fish still have few pathways for upstream migration
through the marshes,and Gulf species, such as the Penaid
shrimp,still cannot reach their marsh nurseries.

The uncharacteristically small size of the fish in some of the
re-established marshes may be a result of over-fishing by
hungry settlers with few other options to feed their families.
It may be difficult to convince the Marsh Dwellers to use
sustainable harvest practices while accommodating their
immediate economic needs.

On a positive note, the Marsh Dwellers are returning. The UN
High Commission on Refugees estimated that there were 80,000
Marsh Dwellers remaining in the marshes at the end of last
year's conflict. Since that time, observers have witnessed a
significant influx of Marsh Dwellers returning from peripheral
agricultural areas. More than 50,000 people have left the
Iranian refugee camps that provided shelter to many Marsh
Dwellers throughout the 1990s. The Marsh Dwellers are
returning, and with them they bring old traditions and new
dreams.

The newly-established Center for Restoration of the Iraqi
Marshes has a dedicated staff that works from Ministry of
Water Resources offices. The Eden Again Project currently is
helping the center develop a roadmap for achieving its first
goal, the development of a sustainable restoration plan for
the marshlands. Using the recommendations of Eden Again's
technical panel, we are identifying the type and extent of
data necessary to build a scientific basis for decision-
making. It is the priority of Eden Again that decisions about
marsh management and restoration be made in a stakeholder-
based, participatory process- -a process that accounts for the
wisdom and preferences of the people who have lived in the
marshes for thousands of years.

As Eden Again's project director, I now live and work in Iraq,
dividing my time between Baghdad and the marshes. It pains me
to be separated from my children and my wife, who continue to
promote the restoration project from the opposite side of the
globe. However, it is a blessing to be able to assist in
healing my homeland.

I remember the years of frustration as I helplessly watched
the destruction of the marshlands from afar. Now I find joy in
paddling through the marshlands and witnessing their
miraculous rebirth.

=======================================================

Azzam Alwash and Suzanne Alwash are the founders and directors
of the Eden Again Project. This version of their article
appeared in the Fall, 2004 issue of PULSE, the newsletter of
Planet Drum Foundation (http://www.planetdrum.org/), a voice
for bioregional sustainability and culture based in San
Francisco. Membership is $25 a year. A longer version of this
article appeared in the Environmental Law Institute
newsletter, 2004 =========

RESOURCES: Eden Again: http://www.edenagain.org Iraq
Foundation's website for the initiative:
http://www.iraqfoundation.org/projects/edebagain

Reprinted by WORLD WAR 3 REPORT, Nov. 6, 2004 Reprinting
permissible with attribution

WW3Report.com

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  • [permaculture] Re: Restoring the Marshes of Mesopotamia (fwd), dtv, 11/15/2004

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