"I used to call the marshes our Sherwood Forest," says Azzam Alwash, an Iraqi-American civil engineer and the founder of Eden Again, an organization committed to restoring the marshlands of Mesopotamia. "It was a place of refuge for people who didn't want to be under the control of the central government."

Restoring the Iraqi Marshlands, which lie where the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers merge, is incredibly challenging. There are the daunting technical hurdles and then, perhaps even harder, there’s cultural ones. Modern times do not mesh easily with this 2005 NY Times account of life in the Marshes: “With an ethereally tuned sense of balance in an element that is so plainly their own, the boatmen, who often stood upright and pushed the craft with poles, never came close to overturning. Veiled women dressed in bright colors picked up the bundles of reeds at the shoreline and carried them on their heads along the side of the road.”
Azzam has recently returned from Iraq and can update us on the successes and setbacks of this important and dangerous endeavor.
- David Holbrooke