Human Ecology of the Marshes

This paper places the fate of the Iraqi marshes within the deeper history of man-made environmental change in the Middle East. Irrigation was crucial to every society inhabiting the Tigris-Euphrates basin. Modern engineering promised to overcome Iraq’s natural hydrological limitations. Environmental manipulation became the lynchpin in wider projects of social engineering. Using a theoretical perspective inspired by James C. Scott’s work on the tensions between societal resistance and state-building processes, the paper argues that the marsh ecology endured as a kind of anti-state space, immune to the surveillance and domination of central governors. Marsh dwellers, in turn, sought refuge from political domination. As the Iraqi states accumulated scientific and economic prowess, the ability to resist or evade declined. Engineers and technocrats deployed a variety of techniques to alter the human ecology of what they saw as wasteland. Saddam adopted and deployed these plans in an even more desperate gambit to augment state control. The final solution to the problem of the marshes came with eviction of the marsh inhabitants and the obliteration of the marsh habitat.