A Big Award for the Iraqi Who Helped Restore Iraq's Marshlands

An Iraqi immigrant returned to his birth country in 2003 and has since accomplished an incredible environmental feat: He has helped restore half of Iraq's devastated marshlands.

Over the course of ten years, Azzam Alwash has undone about half the damage to the once lush river valley between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which were desiccated over the 30-year period that Saddam Hussein ruled in Iraq. Now Alwash has won a $150,000 award - only given annually to six people - called the Goldman Environmental Prize, for his efforts.

During the period of his dictatorship, Hussein purposely laid waste to the marshlands, which often first enters our awareness as the ancient Mesopotamian Valley that gave birth to a civilization and agriculture, for predictably short sighted reasons: to punish opponents, real or perceived, of his regime.

Hussein did this by building canals to drain water from the marshlands on which the Marsh Arabs, indigenous Iraqis for whom the valley was their lifeblood, lived. Given time, the vindictive obstructions left the valley dry as a desert, and the Marsh Arabs became refugees.

Alwash undid this damage by organizing flow regulators, which re-flooded the valley each year. This construction cost around $100 million to complete, with funds coming from the Iraqis themselves and international fundraising.

According to an article in the Los Angeles Times, Alwash said the marshlands might become post-war Iraq's first national park, with ecotourism centers and a robust program of nature guides. However, despite all the progress, the marshlands will forever be a managed environment, as much of Hussein's damage has permanently altered the ecology of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers upstream.

Lorrae Rominger, the executive director of the Goldman Environmental Prize, awarded Alwash the prize for managing to make the environment a priority in the last place you would expect it. "To bring bring enviormental protection to the forefront in war-torn Iraq, where people are focused on restoring peace and staying alive, that would seem an impossible challenge," said Rominger, "but not to Azzam."