Duke Scientist Plans to Help Restore Iraqi Marshlands

The Duke University Wetland Center's director hopes to visit Iraq this summer as part of an effort to restore some of the Mesopotamian marshlands, a crucial wildlife sanctuary and home to an ancient human culture that has been largely destroyed by upstream water removal and deliberate government depredations.

"This is the largest degradation of any wetlands in modern times in the world, an amazing tragedy that took place mostly in the last decade," said Curtis Richardson, who is also a professor of resource ecology at Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences.

In an interview, Richardson called the marshlands "a treasure of unbelievable environmental proportions." Some scholars consider it the site of the Biblical Garden of Eden. Richardson is a member of an international technical advisory panel that has estimated that more than 90 percent of the original 7,700 square mile reed-filled maze of shallow lakes and waterways has now been degraded to salt-encrusted dust pans.

The degradation began more than 20 years ago when upstream damming in Syria, Turkey and Iraq began reducing water flows in the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Then, in retaliation for local uprisings in the wake of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Saddam Hussein's regime organized a campaign to eliminate the 5,000-year-old Arab Marsh Dweller culture.

Hussein's campaign included digging drainage channels such as the "Mother of Battles River," coupled with slaughter of inhabitants' water buffalo and the burning of their homes. The Marsh Dwellers homeland was reportedly even poisoned with herbicides. As a result, nearly 100,000 former residents now live in refugee camps outside Iraq.

Efforts to restore the marshlands, called the Eden Again Project, were organized prior to Hussein's ouster in California by Azzam Alwash, an Iraqi civil engineer, and his wife Suzie. Richardson said he was invited to become an Eden Again technical advisor because of Duke Wetland Center's research and restoration projects in Florida's Everglades, themselves now undergoing massive efforts to reduce pollution and improve water flow.

The Everglades restoration has some similarities to what is envisioned in Iraq. "The scale of Eden Again would be about the same as the Everglades," he said. "Both are in extremely warm climates."

The two projects are also "vastly different," he added. "There were never 100,000 people living inside the Everglades. There are millions living outside, but not inside. And of course the Everglades are not fully drained and annually receive nearly 55 inches of rainfall compared to 4 inches of rainfall in the marsh areas of southern Iraq."

The Mesopotamian marshlands were essentially a giant oasis within a hot, dry desert climate and the river water that fed them was always naturally high in salts, Richardson explained. The water adequately diluted and flushed those salts as long as the marshlands were flooded and continually flowed to the Persian Gulf. But where the marshes have been drained the salt accumulated and has risen up through the dried soil to encrust and contaminate it.

"One of the great concerns is that a lot of these soils won't re-wet properly after having dried out and baked for eight or 10 years in the hot sun," he said. "The real question for us starts with how much water can we put back in?"

With so much of the original water permanently diverted for irrigation and human use, technical advisors have already concluded that only a portion of the marshlands can ever be restored, he said. Currently only one section, the Haweizeh Marsh along the Iraq-Iran border, still has water. And it is the last remaining refuge for plants and animal species in the marsh. Other candidate places for reflooding would first have to be purged of excess salts and toxic chemicals.

"We want to go into the areas first and do a soil and seed bank survey and determine which would be best for restoration," he said. That's something he would like to do this summer, if both Iraqi and American participants, including the U.S. State Department, agree.

"I don't think people would want to go on their own," he added. "That could be quite dangerous. No one has been allowed to go into those areas for over 10 years. There are even concerns about huge numbers of mines on the Iraq-Iran border."

After the preliminary survey, "We're going to have to do some smaller scale restoration trials to determine optimum procedures to restore ecosystem structure and functions to the marshlands," he said.

"Nothing has been restored on this massive a scale. So I think real care will have to be taken to look at the best areas and then do it on a scale that makes sense, perhaps 500 to 1,000 acres at a time. It is critical that this is done to make sure we don't spend the limited resources that will probably be available and then find we did it wrong.

"Unfortunately, the pressures are already mounting for a large release of water into these areas and the native Marsh Arabs want this done quickly so they can return to their lives. If this is done it could be an ecological disaster due to release of high salinity and toxins. Marsh restoration is not rocket science; it is far more difficult," he said

Another challenge will be reestablishing the giant reeds that were a keystone species in the original wetland as well as the Marsh Arabs' main building materials. "This plant species was the building block of their civilization," Richardson said. "They built their homes and boats from the reeds and fed their water buffalo young shoots from them as well. In fact their entire village was supported by mounds of mat materials."