In Iraq, there’s
hope of restoring
Garden of Eden
Guest opinion by SUSAN TWEIT
Susan Tweit is a contributor to
Writers on the Range,
a service of High Country News in Paonia, Colo. (hcn.org).
She writes books and essays in Salida, Colo.
Watching the chaotic aftermath of
repression and war in Iraq hurts my heart. As an antidote, I conjure a vision of
hope: a shimmering expanse of water and life that may once again grace the Iraqi
desert.
Until a decade ago, southern Iraq boasted
one of the world’s largest wetlands, the Mesopotamia Marshes, almost 7,800
square miles of vibrant pond, canal, and reed-thicket, a watery oasis the size
of Massachusetts. Biblical scholars claim that the vast area of wetland fed by
the Tigris and Euphrates rivers was the real-life Garden of Eden.
If so, humans were only recently expelled
from this marsh paradise: Until the 1990s, the expanse of 6- to 12-foot tall
giant reed was home to some 300,000 indigenous Ma’dan people, a culture that
traces its origins five millennia back to the Sumerians, inventors of the
world’s first alphabet.
The rich mix of open water and marsh
nurtured an astonishing diversity of life including lions, wild boar, gray
wolves, goitered gazelle, honey badgers, hyenas, jackals, red foxes, and Indian
crested porcupine; plus smaller mammals, birds, fish, insects, and aquatic
invertebrates. In migration, a flood tide of water birds, cranes, sacred ibises,
geese, ducks, and sandpipers inundated the sea of cattail and reed.
This isolated oasis evolved unique lives
as well: the smooth-covered otter, bandicoot rat, the thrasher-like Iraqi
babbler, and the buni fish are found nowhere else, along with the Ma’dan, living
in reed houses on floating islands.
The Mesopotamia Marshes acted like a giant
and very efficient water-treatment system, absorbing the Tigris and Euphrates
drainages with their loads of fertilizer salts from farms as far away as Syria
and Turkey, plus sewage and industrial pollutants, and releasing clean water
enriched by the marsh to the Gulf. Nutrients from the wetlands spawned a
thriving Gulf fishery; that fishery fed the people of southern Iraq and Kuwait.
The story of these once-lush wetlands is
written in the past tense: after the 1991 Gulf War, when thousands of Shi’ite
rebels took refuge in the reed-thickets, Saddam Hussein spent vast amounts of
money to drain the marshes and expose their hiding places.
Today, 95 percent of the great marsh is
gone; the soil surface ranges from fetid mud sprinkled with garbage and land
mines to dust-dry desert. Without the buffering effect of the marsh, the
groundwater is being polluted by salt creeping up from the sea and human-created
wastes flowing downstream.
The Gulf fishery has crashed; millions of
migrating birds find no green respite; the smooth-covered otter and bandicoot
rat may be extinct; the Ma’dan and the Shi’ite rebels fled to refugee camps in
Iran.
The tale of the Mesopotamia Marshes echoes
the story of the Colorado River Delta, once a similarly Eden-like wetland in the
midst of the North American desert where the Colorado River emptied into the Sea
of Cortez.
By the 1970s, the 3,000-square-mile oasis
of the Colorado River Delta had returned to desert, the river flow siphoned off
to irrigate lettuce fields and fill swimming pools, and the delta-building
sediment sieved out by upstream dams. One small marsh remained at the delta’s
edge, kept alive by runoff from irrigated farms.
The rich diversity of the delta seemed
lost: the endemic vaquita porpoise holds the dubious honor of being the world’s
most endangered mammal; the unique totoaba fish, which grew to seven feet long
and 300 pounds in the rich estuary, is rare; the flood-agriculture and fishing
culture of the native Cocopah people is nearly forgotten.
Efforts are under way to revive the
Colorado River Delta, a politically complicated but biologically straightforward
matter of re-establishing river flows and seasonal flooding. There is hope for
the Mesopotamia Marshes, too: Scientists and environmental organizations around
the world have begun planning to restore part of the wetland once Iraq is
stabilized.
Marshes boast some of the highest levels
of biological diversity on Earth. In an ironic echo of the biblical tale of
Eden, our relationship with these fecund ecosystems is warped: it seems that we
must ruin them to understand what we have lost.
I dream that someday my husband Richard
and I will be able to guide a kayak through the shallow channels of desert
wetlands like the Colorado River Delta and Mesopotamia Marshes, watery havens
that bless us with the voices and stories of a cacophony of lives, wild and
human. Whether or not we can return to the Garden of Eden, we can surely work to
restore the vibrant marshscapes that gave birth to that metaphor of paradise on
Earth.