Satellite images show the Mesopotamian marshes in the 1970s (left) and again in 2000 (right), with densest marsh in dark red. Images courtesy Hassan Partow, UNEP
In the arid land of southeastern Iraq, where the Tigris meets the Euphrates, marsh lands are reappearing. The new growth is a result of a concerted effort to reverse the damage caused by Saddam Hussein, who drained the wetlands with the deliberate intention of destroying a vibrant ecosystem and driving away its human inhabitants.
Restoring the region's native ecology has been an important part of rebuilding Iraq, and newly released satellite photos reveal that much of the environmental damage can be repaired. But can the recovery of the land spur the recovery of a people? At a time when more and more people are fleeing uninhabitable landscapes, what becomes of the Marsh Arabs will reveal how the health of an environment affects the success of the society that calls it home.
The marshes of Mesopotamia have been home to the Marsh Arabs, or Ma'dan, for at least five millennia. The wetlands—originally almost as large as the state of New Jersey—are legendary for their fertility and biodiversity and may, some scholars say, have been the inspiration for the Biblical Garden of Eden. The Ma'dan, once half a million strong, were well-adapted to the habitat. They built floating islands, houses, and boats with mud and reeds and survived by fishing, hunting, and herding water buffalo.
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But for Saddam Hussein, the territory was troublesome. It was a haven for anti-Hussein rebels and difficult for the Iraqi army to control, says Azzam Alwash, an Iraqi exile and civil engineer who grew up in the region. After a failed Shi'ite uprising against his regime in 1991, Hussein began systematically destroying the swampy wilderness, building dikes, dams, and drainage canals that diverted water away.
"Once you cut off the water from the marshes, they die a slow death," Alwash said. "Saddam could not wait for the marshes to die slowly. He started burning the reeds to flush out the resistance and kill all the wildlife so people would not have an ability to survive."
By 2000, about 85 percent of the marshes had been destroyed, replaced by barren land or expanses of salt crust, according to the United Nations Environment Program. And the Ma'dan had made their exodus. It is difficult to determine an exact number, but tens of thousands of Ma'dan left Iraq for Iran, and hundreds of thousands were internally displaced. According to some estimates, as few as 20,000 may have remained in the marshlands.
The precise mechanisms by which environmental destruction becomes societal destruction are nuanced and varied. At the simplest level, deterioration of the land can ruin the natural resources that people require for day-to-day survival. But environmental ruin can also affect a society or culture in more complex ways. "There are some societies that are very, very tied to places, whose worldview, whose religions, whose social structures are articulated through a relationship with the environment," said Tony Oliver-Smith, an anthropologist at the University of Florida who studies displaced peoples and the impact of natural disasters.
For these societies, an ailing environment can unravel the social fabric. In his book Collapse, an account of societies that have self-destructed after abusing their natural resources, UCLA geographer Jared Diamond illustrates how. Diamond, for instance, argues that environmental degradation contributed to the devastating ethnic warfare between Rwanda's Hutus and Tutsis. Overfarming and overpopulation degraded the country's farmland; the growing economic disparities and agricultural property disputes that resulted divided families, neighborhoods, and communities and fed the incredible violence that tore the country apart.