NO WAR FOR WETLANDS!:

An Iraqi way of life is back from the dead (James Glanz, March 8, 2005, The New York Times)

The family of marsh Arabs who had lived in this smashed house was named Tweresh, said Hamid Muhamed Hashim, walking carefully over the fallen bricks in his cracked leather sandals.

He had visited them; his cousin used to live right over there, Hashim said, pointing to another ruin sitting amid the rubble of its collapsed roof.

A dike that Saddam Hussein's government finished nine years ago had drained this marsh, once part of an incomparable ecosystem in southern Iraq spread across 18,000 square kilometers, or 7,000 square miles, that Saddam systematically destroyed.

After sealing this dike, the government gave families 24 hours to leave and never come back, Hashim said. The ruined houses were left sitting on dusty little hills in a barren and bone-dry desert.

He was 15 then.

But when Saddam's government fell in April 2003, villagers went to the dike and gouged holes in it using shovels, their bare hands and at least one piece of heavy equipment, a floating backhoe.

Since then, something miraculous has occurred: reeds and cattails have sprouted up again; fish, snails and shrimp have returned to the waters; egrets and storks perch on the jagged remains of the walls, coolly surveying the territory as if they had never left.

As Hashim walked down a short muddy embankment to his boat, the air filled with he was surrounded by a cacophony of frogs croaking in full-throated for appeal to their potential mates. The re-emergence of life from the bleak Iraqi desert, said Ali Messen al-Asad, another marsh Arab, from the town of Chubaysh, has made him feel "like a person detained in prison who is set free."

The marshes, though only in certain places, and with a fraction of their former bounty, have started to come back from the dead.

Now, financed by an array of American, Canadian, British, Italian and Iraqi agencies, teams of scientists are trying to determine how fast and how fully this region can return to what was.

And still George Bush won't apologize....

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 8, 2005 7:29 AM