REVIVING EDEN - The Iraqi Marshes

[Bianca]

                                                        






                                                R E V I V I N G   E D E N






Written by Pat McDonnell Twair

Photographed by Dana Smillie


THE MOIST, FERTILE DELTA WHERE THE TIGRIS AND THE EUPHRATES RIVERS CONVERGE IN SOUTHERN IRAQ WAS

EURASIA'S LARGEST WETLAND: TWO-THIRDS THE SIZE OF SWITZERLAND, LARGER THAN THE FLORIDA EVERGLADES

AND ROUGHLY EQUAL IN AREA TO MASSACHUSETTS.  ITS UNIQUE ECO-SYSTEM HAS SUPPORTED A UNIQUE

HUMAN CULTURE FOR AT LEAST 7000 YEARS.


   
The region known as Abu Zirig, above, is one of the marshland regions re-inundated last year, bringing the total area flooded to about 40 percent of the original expanse. Alwash and staff members of the year-old Center for the Restoration of Iraqi Marshes (CRIM) make regular journeys in the slim, poled boats of the Ma’dan people to record water levels, salinity, pH and temperature, and to count birds and fish.
 
 
Wherever he goes, Alwash talks to residents displaced in the 1990’s. “I was born here and know the culture. When I arrive for an inspection, I talk to the local shaykh,” says Alwash. “I don’t ask questions. I just listen.”
Its abundance of fish, wildlife and birds, together with soil suitable for growing barley, made possible the rise of the Sumerians and their city-states about 3000 BC.

A 5000-year-old engraved cylinder seal shows a house built of reeds that uses recognizably the same architecture that Iraq’s indigenous marsh dwellers, the Ma’dan people, used in the 20th century. These same reed houses also appear in a relief carved in the seventh century BC, during the reign of the Assyrian king Sennacherib, which shows men in battle among the famously impenetrable reed beds.

Around the same time, the marshes served as a haven for the Chaldeans, who defeated Sennacherib’s son Sargon II. In the ninth century of our own era, the Abbasid rulers of what is now Iraq couldn’t defeat the Zanj, a rebellious slave army that took refuge in the vastness of the wetlands. In their time, the Ottoman Turks proved unable to dominate the Ma’dan people, whose slim small boats gave them freedom of movement through the reeds. It was this protective aspect of the marshlands’ dense reed beds that, in the final decade of the 20th century, brought about their deliberate destruction.

In 1991, frustrated by stubborn political opposition in southern Iraq, Saddam Hussein launched a vast punitive assault that burned and poisoned the reed beds. He then built a system of locks, dikes, embankments and canals that turned the wetlands into a dust bowl. “It is absolutely phenomenal to see the destruction of an ecosystem on that scale in just five to six years,” says Hassan Partow of the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP).

An estimated 250,000 Ma’dan people were killed or dispersed throughout Iraq and Iran. Many bird and animal species, some of them endemic to the marshes, were deprived of large portions of their range.

Few people outside the region can have been as heartsick over this as Azzam Alwash, a Los Angeles engineer whose father had been one of Iraq’s preeminent irrigation engineers. As a boy living in Baghdad, Alwash had often visited the marshes with his father and traveled through them in motorized boats as his father recorded water levels and inspected irrigation systems. Of all his father’s tasks, the marshes were his deepest passion, and they constituted some of Alwash’s fondest memories of the country he left in 1978. As the younger Alwash read of their destruction, the marshes became his passion, too.

In 2001, Alwash and his wife, Suzie, a geologist, founded Eden Again, a non-profit organization that plans for the revival of the marshlands. Alwash consulted his retired father, who shared his lifelong knowledge of river routes and estuaries to support the planning.

 
In Chubaish, the “Venice of Iraq,” a grand mudheif, or communal reception hall, has been built. It shows the strong, light, flexible arches of bundled reeds that are the most striking feature of the once common traditional architecture of the marsh tribes.
 
 
Kermashia Marsh has seen water again for nearly a year now. “Look at how dense it is!” exclaims Alwash. “It’s a jungle!”
In 2002, Alwash received a grant from the us Department of State to construct computerized models simulating reflooding of the marshes. He also hosted a restoration planning workshop at the University of California at Irvine in early 2003 that 20 international experts attended. There, Dr. Thomas Crisman of the University of Florida called the Alwashes’ goal much more daunting than restoring the Florida Everglades—but achievable nonetheless.

The couple took their results to UNEP. And as the us invasion of Iraq grew imminent, they talked to government officials to persuade them not to bomb dams or dikes in the region: If new water flowed in too suddenly, Alwash knew, it would be contaminated by salt and toxins that had built up over the past decade, hampering future restoration.

In June of last year, Alwash resigned from his engineering firm and traveled to Baghdad as the project director of Eden Again, which now works closely with the Iraqi Ministry of Water Resources. His goal: to realize his plans to restore the Iraq marshes.

One year into the project, Alwash is optimistic. Roughly 40 percent of the marshlands have been re-inundated, and some 20 percent of the original marsh population—about 6000 to 7000 Ma’dani families, or 42,000 people, he believes—have returned over the past year.

On the other hand, returning families have not all been able to settle on the sites they previously inhabited, and Ma’danis who had been forced to begin farming the drained marshlands may themselves be displaced by the new inundations. So there is a clear need for conflict resolution and detailed planning. But “only about 10 percent of the relocated people want to continue farming,” Alwash says. “At most, these agricultural experiments are no more than five or six years old. Farming practices are primitive: The yields are about one-fourth what they would be in the us. It is more practical for them to cultivate rice on the perimeters of the wetlands.”

The traditional economy of the marshlands was based on fishing, reed weaving, production of water-buffalo dairy products and seasonal migrant farm work.

 
                  Above right: Alwash talks with representatives of three marsh tribes in Amarah. “I’m more than an engineer. I’m a diplomat, a mentor, a counselor, a problem solver,” he says. Above left: One of the man-made channels built during the 1990’s to drain the marshes was named the Glory River. Some displaced residents took refuge along its massive levees and earthworks. But their efforts to farm proved largely futile, and—after more than 6000 years of successful subsistence—most of the population became dependent on government social services.

“Water buffalos are being brought back,” Alwash says with characteristic enthusiasm. “Their meat is no good, but their milk is rich, high in fat and protein. Water-buffalo gaimer [heavy top cream] fills the stomach for hours. Best of all, the buffalos forage for most of their food in the water, and need little or no supplemental feeding. Reeds are used for traditional house construction; almost no manufactured products are needed for housing. The mats the Ma’danis weave are bartered for necessary goods from the cities. And in late summer, the men traditionally hire themselves out to harvest rice and dates.”

Even though Alwash cautiously estimates that it will take five to six years for new waters to flush toxins and salts out of the newly inundated areas and establish an equilibrium, the perimeters of those areas in the Nasiriya region are recovering better than anticipated. Natural seed beds made the ecosystem resistant to periodic drought.


                                 
Marsh residents, most of them recently returned to the Chubaish region from other parts of Iraq.
                                 

                       



Less successful are the Kurmet Ali and Hawr al Adel regions, which cover more than 500 square kilometers (193 sq mi). “This is in the southern interior section, which never dried out,” he explains. “Reeds are not as thick there and it will require time to stabilize plant growth.”

The quality of the water there is poor, too, with salinity ranging from 700 to 2500 parts per million (ppm)—three to 10 times the American maximum for drinking water. “That’s good enough for the reeds to grow,” Alwash says, “but not for human consumption,” and so drinking water is being imported in tank trucks in those areas. Meanwhile, a study is looking at using waste gas from the oil fields in the south, now flared off, to generate electricity to run desalination plants.

 
 
 
In an office in Amarah, Alwash looks over a map following a report of a breach in a dike—a problem where controlled reflooding is essential. “For the first time,” he says, “I feel that I’m doing something useful—really useful.”
Alwash’s overall prognosis is for partial, but not full, recovery of the marshes. “We can never expect to restore all the original wetlands,” he says wistfully. Dams built far upstream, in southern Turkey, since the 1970’s have reduced the water flowing into Iraq by more than 75 percent, while an international agreement between Syria and Iraq assures only that a minimum of 58.6 percent of the water that flows into Syria from Turkey will continue into Iraq.

“Ideally, an agreement among Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran to share the water in the river basins would be the long-term goal,” Alwash says. “The short-term solution is to restore the marshes with whatever water is available in southern Iraq. The medium-term answer is to improve irrigation techniques upstream in northern and central Iraq” to allow more water to flow to the marshes.

For now, Alwash finds the changes of the past year encouraging. “Ten percent of the original marshlands are in a robust stage of recovery,” he says. “The people are trickling back. The best news is that the Ma’danis, though they’ve been away for 10 years, are still proficient in reed weaving, reed-house construction techniques and water-buffalo husbandry. A 7000-year-old culture doesn’t die in a decade.”

The biggest outside assistance has been the eight to 10 million euros ($9.5–$12 million) that the Italian government has pledged toward a sustainable marsh program that will utilize water-management expertise developed in Venice. There is talk, Alwash says, of a sister-city relationship between the famously wet Italian port city and Chubaish, the economic heart of the marshes between Qurra and Nasiriya. Other help has come from UNEP, from the Canadian International Development Agency and from the us Agency for International Development, which sponsored research trips by wetlands experts such as Curtis Richardson of Duke University.

More good news came in December, he says, when the Iraqi minister of water resources announced that the restoration of the marshes was his ministry’s highest priority. “This shouldn’t have been surprising,” Alwash notes. “The marshes have always held a huge emotional pull for Iraqis, especially the Iraqis of the south.”

 Pat McDonnell Twair (sampat@cyberonic.com) worked for six years as a journalist in Syria. Based now in Los Angeles, she is a free-lance writer who specializes in Arab-American topics. 
 Dana Smillie (dana_smillie@hotmail.com) is a free-lance photographer based in Cairo and Baghdad.

This article appeared on pages 2-7 of the May/June 2004 print edition of Saudi Aramco World.

See Also: ALWASH, AZZAM

Check the Public Affairs Digital Image Archive for May/June 2004 images.



http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/200403/reviving.eden.htm

[Bianca]

For some reason, these wonderful people have always "tugged at the strings of my heart".........

I must check and see how they are "faring" during the present INVASION!


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Has anyone else seen how their life-style is very similar to the one the natives of Lake Titicaca

lead?

Love and Peace,
B

[Bianca]

[Bianca]

FROM:  NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC



News Front Page > Environment   
 
 
Iraq Marshes Mending, But Full Recovery Uncertain, Study Says
Nicholas Bakalar
for National Geographic News



July 7, 2006

The Mesopotamian marshes of Iraq once covered more than 5,800 square miles (15,000 square kilometers)—an area larger than the U.S.'s Florida Everglades.

The wetlands were so lush and full of life that some experts have speculated they inspired the biblical story of the Garden of Eden.



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But by 2000 the marshes were reduced to less than 10 percent of their previous size under a systematic plan by then Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to dam, dike, and drain them.

Since Hussein's fall from power in 2003, efforts have been underway to restore the region to its former condition.

(Read "Iraq's Eden: Reviving the Legendary Marshes" [2003].)

In a new paper, a pair of researchers from the U.S. and Iraq describes the present status of the marshes and assesses their future prospects.

Curtis J. Richardson, a resource ecologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and Najah Hussain, an aquatic ecologist at Iraq's University of Basrah, co-authored the study. Their report appeared in last month's issue of the journal BioScience.

Political Maneuver

The Mesopotamian marshes lie within the Tigris-Euphrates river basin, which spans Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey. The largest portion sits along Iraq's southern border with Iran (see a map of Iraq).

For years oil drilling, agriculture, and river damming had been steadily changing the character of Iraq's marshes, home to about 300,000 Marsh Arabs, or Ma'adan, and many species of wetland animals.

In 1991 Hussein's regime decided to counter Ma'adan participation in a southern uprising by wiping out their traditional homeland.

Villages were burned, rebels were executed, and water was drained and diverted from lands once teeming with life.

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From THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE                                         continued


News Front Page > Environment   
 
 
Iraq Marshes Mending, But Full Recovery Uncertain, Study Says



<< Back to Page 1  Page 2 of 2
When Hussein's regime fell, most of the 75,000 refugees who fled the marshes returned to live near them, according to the report.

But the condition of the marshes made it nearly impossible for the Ma'adan to resume a life dependent on fishing and raising water buffalo.

"It has been a harsh life for these people," Richardson said.

"When you go there, you quickly see that these people are extremely poor, isolated, without electricity, without education, and without access to medical care. They're living the way they've lived for thousands of years."

Fares Howari is a professor of geology at the United Arab Emirates University in Al Ain who was not involved with the report.

"The United Nations has declared this area one of the world's greatest environmental disasters," Howari said.

Richardson and Hussain's report, he said, "is a very interesting article trying to document the recovery process of these marshes."

Eden Again

Restoration efforts have made some progress in revitalizing the region, as noted by the new data Richardson and Hussain collected.

In 2003 local farmers began blowing up dikes and earthen dams to release water back into the marshes.

Within a year of reflooding, species recovery began. Small invertebrates, fish, and bird species all began returning, though in much reduced numbers.
                       
                                                                                                    BASRAH REED WARBLER
Rare bird species like the marbled teal and the Basrah reed warbler, thought close to extinction, apparently survived the wetlands' destruction—both were spotted in a 2005 census.

Within two years about 39 percent of the destroyed marshes had standing water, and vegetation was growing at a rate of 300 square miles (800 square kilometers) a year.

Recent overflows of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers are probably responsible for replenishing the marshes with even more seeds, insect larvae, and fish stocks, encouraging more birds to return, the report authors say.

Salinity in the three presently restored marshes seems to be at levels that will sustain freshwater fish. Analysis of the surface water shows no detectable pesticides or other pollutants.

Joy Zedler, a restoration ecologist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison who was not involved in the paper, is optimistic about the marshes' rehabilitation.

Zedler served on the Eden Again International Technical Advisory Panel, an international group of experts organized by the nonprofit Iraq Foundation to respond to the environmental disaster.

Cautious hope for the marshes' recovery turned to optimism "when people took charge and changed water flows that replenished desiccated wetlands far faster than we imagined possible," Zedler said.

"Perhaps we will never know what happened throughout these vast tortured lands. But we will have a glimpse of positive change and the hope that sufficient water of sufficient quality will sustain regional biodiversity."

Updating Agriculture

Not all the news is so promising. Reflooded soils are releasing toxins, such as hydrogen sulfide, from military ordnance. Land mines are littered throughout the marshes.

Also, report co-author Richardson says, vast areas of the marshes cannot be sustained as humans move back in unless new agricultural methods are adopted.

"Water usage is going up," he said, "and there will be a shortage, for sure, especially in the drought years.

"That's primarily true because the agricultural practices are ancient. They just pour water over the desert, which mostly evaporates and destroys the soil.

"They have to use modern drip agriculture, as they do in Saudi Arabia and Israel, because you can't afford to lose all that water. But that takes money, training, equipment."

Richardson is hopeful that the situation will improve, especially now that new government projects are underway.

"There have been training courses, putting in modern crops like alfalfa, training the farmers, bringing in new seed sources, improving animal husbandry," he said.

"But the amount of money [being spent on marsh restoration] is less than a hundred million [U.S.] dollars compared to hundreds of billions we've spent on the war and reconstruction."

Still, the progress so far, Richardson says, has been substantial. Restoration of significant portions of the marshes, though not all of them, is certainly within reach.

"It's come back so far, so quickly. I call it the miracle in the marsh."

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[rockessence]

LOVED those photos!!!

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 IRAQ: CONSERVATIONIST DISCUSSES MARSH-REVITALIZATION PROJECT




 
Marsh Arabs near Al-Basrah in March



(AFP)
June 1, 2007 (RFE/RL) -- Azzam Alwash, director of Nature Iraq, an environmental group dedicated to revitalizing the Iraq's marshes, recently spoke with RFE/RL Russian Service correspondent Irina Lagunina about the scientific and social achievements that have been made in recent months on this project.


RFE/RL: I wanted to ask you first, with the security situation in Iraq at the moment, which areas in Iraq are you able to work in?

Alwash: Well obviously, work around Baghdad is next to impossible. We had wanted to collect water samples from the Diyala River -- where the Diyala meets the Tigris River -- because of sewage pollution. We were not able to operate there because of the presence of terrorists, as well as the -- shall we say -- paranoia of the security service. So we decided to skip that project for this year and wait until the situation around Baghdad settles down, if it ever settles down.
"This story is actually one of the positive stories coming out of Iraq, in contrast to the other stories that you here with the gore and the violence and kidnappings and so on."Where we can work with relative freedom is the south of Iraq, as well as Iraqi Kurdistan. We have a team of about 20 people who go out every month to collect samples from over 60 peaks and sites all around the marshes. And they operate with relative ease, and I say relative ease because they can't just run around like regular scientists, collecting samples and conducting interviews. They have to be accompanied by guards and tribesman to assure that they won;t be kidnapped for ransom or be harassed by anyone.

Of course we have to provide them with all sorts of legal paperwork to prove that they're working on a real project and not imaginary, perhaps collecting intelligence for this entity or that entity. It's an interesting way of operating. I've never really operated in such a way before, but it adds levels of difficulty to the logistics of the situation. But we have not had any situation where our people were harmed over the past 2 1/2 years, and we have operated with relative ease in the south.

Just this past winter we conducting area surveying in [Iraq's Kurdish region]. We visited about 33 different sites, and we operated also without incident. But again we had to provide our people with paperwork and be accompanied by officials from the Ministry of Water Resources and the Ministry of Environment just so they won't be hindered under the suspicion of being in sensitive areas collecting intelligence, information for any entity other than Nature Iraq.

So it's an interesting way of conducting science, but we're working nonetheless. The work continues and we can collect data for our database, and we analyze the data and produce reports in preparation for making the data public. We have a lot of projects going on and this story is actually one of the positive stories coming out of Iraq, in contrast to the other stories that you here with the gore and the violence and kidnappings and so on.

RFE/RL: You had this project of restoring the marshes that, when we spoke last year, was developing pretty successfully. How are things there now?

Alwash: Well, we produced a final report basically providing a huge database. All of the database that we have collected over the past 2 1/2 years is available on the Internet on our website. You can connect to the FTP site and download the entire database and the entire study. It's about four volumes -- it's really very big. But in essence the major conclusion of the study is that in Iraq you can restore up to 75 percent of the marshes based on the limited water resources of Iraq.




 A Marsh Arab girl tends buffalo near Al-Basrah in March (AFP)In other words, we don't need an agreement with Turkey or any other entity. We can actually restore 75 percent of the marshes with water derivated from the territory inside Iraq. That's a huge finding, to be honest with you. But of course there's a little bit of a caveat to this finding -- that in fact we need to manage the water resources of Iraq in an efficient and scientific manner so that we assure balance between the competing interests for the limited water available at this point in Iraq.

There's demand by agriculture. There's demand by industry. There's demand by the greater city, and of course there's demand by the environment. And one of the biggest challenges that we actually were able to resolve is the idea of creating or recreating the hydropulse. The marshes evolved around this idea of a periodic hydropulse of the flooding that comes through the snowmelt of the mountains of Kurdistan.

Just about this time of the year, we used to get the maximum amount of flow into the marshes. Sixty percent of Iraq's water resources came in during the snowmelt between February and May. That flooding cycle was an important and an essential part of the evolution of the marshes. It comes in timed with the reed coming out of hibernation. It comes in timed with the fish spawning and the birds migrating and all of that. And what it does, it pushes out the brackish water that is collected from evaporation of the year before. It brings in silt and clay to renew the agricultural land around the perimeter of the marshes. It increases the depth of the water, and that pulse is needed if we are, in fact, going to return the marshes to their original biodiversity.

Our plan basically recognizes the existence of dams inside Iraq and outside Iraq that essentially has splintered, reduced, eliminated this hydropulse. Until 1975, we used to have periodically floods inside the marshes. In order to work around this problem, obviously, the dams are going to be here for the next 100, 150 years, which is basically the life cycle of the dams. We're not going to be able to get rid of the dams. So, in order to save the marshes for future generations, we came up with a plan that essentially controls and directs the water of Iraq during the late winter, early spring, and directs its way into the marshes, and holds it inside the marshes so that we can actually recreate a portion of this hydropulse. And that's why we can only recover 75 percent of the marshes -- because we have limited our studies, our models, to the water available in Iraq.




 Withering reeds in an unrevitalized portion of the marsh (courtesy photo)Obviously, if we reach an agreement with Turkey about creating a water or environmental share for the marshes that they can release the spring and we can direct it into the marshes, then all the better. Then we can restore up to 100 percent of the marshes.

The plan, as I said, requires the modern management of water. And for that, you need to construct structures to regulate the water, to force the water into the marshes and hold it inside the marshes. We also need to install mounting stations to estimate how much snow there is, where the water is going. And that, obviously, costs money.

This past year we have designed all the control structures that we need for the marshes. We have purchased 25 mounting stations out of 140 that are needed. The remainder of the mounting stations is going to be installed by the United States government, so the Italian government is contributing 25, and hopefully within two years Iraq is going to have in place all the modern tools needed to manage the water resources in an efficient and modern way.

What remains, obviously, is the training of the cadres of the ministries and creating a water policy that is equitable for all the stakeholders inside Iraq. So we will continue in future years to lobby the Iraqi parliament, the various political institutes that are going to be created under the federalization program. And we're going to lobby for the implementation of our master plan, and modify the master plan, because it is in fact a living document that requires its own evolution, as it were, with the various changes and constraints and conditions on the ground.

We're doing state-of-the-art design and engineering. It's 20 years ahead of where Iraq is at this point, but we have high hopes that Iraqi cadre will catch up with our plans and adopt them as their own.

RFE/RL: I know that you actually started to bring water back last year, but I read and heard that because of the lack of government services and the lack of a functional infastructure in Iraq, the rivers are really badly polluted. Is this really the case?

Alwash: Indeed, indeed. Iraq has been and is using the Tigris and Euphrates as essentially open sewers. Most Iraqi cities don't even have sewage collection networks, so most of the sewage and industrial waste gets dumped into the river.

Remember I was telling you about the Diyala. Bagdad sewage system dumps directly into the Diyala and because of the lack of a sewage system and lack of maintenance of the sewage plans, everything gets dumped directly into the the Tigris and, of course, the Euphrates.

"I have pictures of huts in the marshes with satellite dishes on top. This is beautiful, this is great! I mean, it's an ugly dish, but the fact is that a village in the middle of the marshes is no longer an isolated place from the global village."
The drainage water from irrigation canals on the Euphrates in western Iraq gets dumped back into the Euphrates. The water quality gets progressively worse from the north to the south. It gets really worse around Al-Basrah.

One thing that I am really afraid of is the activation of the state-owned industries. There're about 192 state industries that existed prior to [former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's] demise. Every one of these plants used to dump its sewage and output directly into canals leading to the Tigris and the Euphrates. If these plants get reactivated without the implementation of environmental controls over their output, my gosh, the water is going to get even more polluted.

Incidentally the marshes acted, prior to their drying, in the 1980s when the military and civilization of Iraq were at their epics, the marshes acted as a biofilter protecting the gulf from the 90 percent of the industrial waste. The marshes acted as the biggest biofilter that ever was. The roots of the reeds basically cleanse 90-95 percent of the hydrocarbons and the biological matter, shall we say, and even some of the metals get absorbed to the reed roots.

Water pollution is a major problem for Iraqis living south of Bagdad, because that's where the majority of the pollution really is created.

RFE/RL: Nevertheless one really great story that I've read on your website is that you managed to publish a bird book, "Birds Of Iraq." When Hussein drained the marshes, I really felt sorry for those poor birds that migrate from Siberia to that continent and stopped at the marshes, and now they don't have anyplace to stop. Does this mean that they have no place to stop and have to return to their roots?

Al-Wash: I have great news for bird lovers. Nature is really resilient. Those birds that used to rest in the marshes or end their migration and do their winter hibernation living in the marshes --when the marshes got dry, they just basically found other places. Yes, their numbers got reduced, but with the return of the marshes the birds came back in great, great numbers.




 Marsh Arabs gathering reeds near Al-Basrah in March (AFP)We have discovered 12 different species that were thought to be world endangered, that were on the endangered list. Every time our team goes to the field, they come back with new findings that make "Birdlife International."
And of course Birdlife helped us create this bird book, the first field guide for birds of Iraq in Arabic. We are growing the bird-watching hobby. Unfortunately, the truth the majority of the bird lovers are hunters who hunt them for meat -- but there are plenty of them, so no problem.
                             
                                     IRAQ BABBLER               
As long as the people value the marshes as a place where birds can come so that they can actually hunt them, that'll fine. Our book actually got spoofed by "The Daily Show" a week ago. In a country that is on the verge of civil war, it is kind of interesting that people are taking on to watching birds, but we have a growing constituency of bird watchers and we're actually extending that into the north.

We're doing biodiversity surveying, bird surveys in important areas in Kurdistan. We're discovering it's an incredible place. There are so many wetlands, so many areas where birds accumulate, and we're fortunate in the fact that the majority of people do not live in a dispersed way, they live in small villages and big cities.

Vast, vast areas in Iraq are in undisturbed natural condition and that is, of course, is conducive to wildlife. There are so many birds, so many different species that we keep on documenting. It's incredible.

RFE/RL: When we talked last year, you mentioned that the Marsh Arabs had started to return to the marshes and actually even represented a bit of a danger for the fish that returned back to the marshes. How is the process now? Are the people still coming back?
Alwash: The process continues, especially with the increased violence in Baghdad. That has caused a reverse migration process of a lot of people leaving the slums of Baghdad and coming back to areas that have been restored, so the pressure on fishing is increasing.

In fact, the need for additional wetlands has caused just recently...-- and I can document this to you, about 2 1/2 weeks ago on the 3rd of May people took it upon themselves to break the right side of the embankment of the Euphrates to create more flooded areas of the marsh so that the area of fishing can increase. In other words, restoration is continuously being done by the people themselves as an indication of their economic need. This is interesting.

Everywhere else marshlands or wetlands have been destroyed in the past 50 years because people wanted to cover land for agriculture. In Iraq, the process was reversed. Because they have realized that the marshland soil, at least in Iraq, is not very conducive to agriculture, and in fact they can create more of an income by fishing. They began taking down the dikes that [Hussein's] regime built to dry the marshes and creating more flooded areas.

So it continues to be a struggle between what nature can provide and the demands made by humans on the economic output, on fishing and reeds. I can tell you also that the number of buffalo just exploded. We don't even know how many water buffalo. At one point in time, we could count them at 6,000. We're not counting at this point.

Each water buffalo, by the way, is [worth] about $1,500. That's a huge fortune in Iraq, so when you multiple that by the number of water buffalo, you understand what an economic output that is. So I am concerned about the stress of fishermen on the fishing, but also encourage the fact that they are taking things into their own hands and creating more wetlands so that they could actually increase the output with the fishing.

We have started a program this past year with Al-Basrah University where, with Italian funding, we wanted to create 5 million hatchlings. We were only able to create 3 million, but these 3 million fingerlings we released into the marshes to help nature, give nature a push. We feed these fingerlings until they are about 6 months old so they have a better chance to survive in the marshes. We'll see what happens in the near future. As more business opportunities get created, hopefully stress on the environment becomes lessened and nature is given more of a reprieve or a lot more time to restore itself.

RFE/RL: And the New Eden Village. What is this project?

Alwash: The New Eden Village -- we're still looking for funding for it. We finished the final design and it's going to cost about $55 million. Because it is the very first village, it's a huge price tag, so we're trying to convince the Iraqi government to try to take it upon its shoulders as one of the projects that they will implement.

Obviously, they cannot implement only one village because that's going to create a war inside the marshes, because every community is going to want one of these villages in their neighborhood. But the design is completed. We are lobbying the Ministry of Environment of Iraq and the Ministry of Marshes to adopt this project as one of their future projects for 2008.

RFE/RL: And what is it about? Is it a new modern Marsh Arab village town?

Alwash: People in the marshes for the past 500 years built their houses out of reeds, and so what we did was take this building material, add to it a bit of modern technology, and design houses that look exactly like the traditional hut. But inside the hut, we created partitions and rooms and kitchens and restrooms. We design sewage-collection systems to treat the sewage water, instead of it being dumped into the marsh.

 Marsh Arabs near Al-Basrah in March (AFP)We also included solar cells to create enough energy to run a fan. We also put in a community generator to provide more current if people want to put in air-conditioning units. In other words, we're providing modern life technologies, which is what women want. I mean, when we did our initial work surveying whether people want to go back to the marshes or not, the men said, "yes, we want to go." But the women said: "Yeah, we'd like to go, but we want our TV. We want our telephones. We want light. We want schools for our children. We want a hospital for our children."

You know, the demands of men and women are different, so we try to create a community that is traditional, that uses local materials, that hopefully in a cheap way can replicate the designs themselves, and provide services and modern life conveniences in an environmentally sensitive manner.

RFE/RL: And those people who moved back, do they have any services at the moment? I remember last year it was a problem that there was no school, no services provided.

Alwash: Unfortunately, that problem continues. People are coming back nonetheless. Again, that is probably the result of the violence in Baghdad more that their desire to come back by themselves, but I guarantee you that when services are provided, there'll be a huge wave of reverse migration.

Why did people leave the marshes? Of course, because they dried up and [the people] lost their opportunities to make a living from fishing or reeds. They went to Baghdad. They went to the various cities to try to find ways to make a living. If modern life conveniences are provided and they can use the marshes to make a living, there'll be nothing that holds them back and ties them down to the city.

I have pictures of huts in the marshes with satellite dishes on top. This is beautiful, this is great! I mean, it's an ugly dish, but the fact is that a village in the middle of the marshes is no longer an isolated place from the global village.
 

 http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2007/6/2bcc66a5-c871-420a-b338-ef4484eddeb6.html  
 
Radio Free Europe

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