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Restoring the Garden of Eden
By Susan Tweit Denver Post http://www.denverpost.com/
Sunday, April 27, 2003 - As an antidote to images of the chaotic aftermath of war in Iraq, 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 Ma'dan lived in reed houses on floating islands. 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 inundated the sea of cattail and reed. In this isolated oasis, unique species evolved: the smooth-covered otter, bandicoot rat, the thrasher-like Iraqi babbler and the buni fish are found nowhere else. 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 to the Persian Gulf enriched by the marsh. Nutrients from the wetlands spawned a 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 drained the marshes and exposed 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, 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 diversity of the delta seemed lost: The endemic vaquita porpoise is the world's most endangered mammal; the unique totoaba fish, which grew to 7 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 underway 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. 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. Susan Tweit of Salida is a former Colorado Voices columnist for The Denver Post and a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News in Paonia.
Direct Link: --http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36~172~1348561,00.html#
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