Earlier today, Eddie C had an excellent diary on degenerating wetland ecosystems and its effect on amphibians and their survival. Our ecosystems are dependent on amphibians, yet the runoff from weed killer from farming (among other things) has exacerbated the crisis. He noted that the Hawizeh Marsh, the homeland of the Marsh Arabs, was slowly undergoing restoration in Iraq. It’s now on the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands of International Importance list.
These wetlands in southern Iraq, bordering Iran, are part of the alluvial salt marsh fed by the Tigris-Euphrates Rivers, the Cradle of Civilization. In the 1950’s, there were half-a-million Marsh Arabs living in this region, but they now number 20,000 as they were displaced by the irrigation dikes built in the 1970’s, the dams built in Turkey and Iran that blocked the natural flow of the waters, and then the draining of the marshes by Saddam Hussein to ferret out political dissenters. It all led to the devastation of these marshes.
The Tigris-Euphrates river system is part of the Tigris-Euphrates alluvial salt marsh ecoregion of West Asia, and is characterized by two large rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates. The rivers have several small tributaries which feed into the system from shallow freshwater lakes, swamps, and marshes, all surrounded by desert. The hydrology of these vast marshes is extremely important to the ecology of the entire upper Persian Gulf. Historically, the area is known as Mesopotamia. As part of the larger Fertile Crescent, it saw the earliest emergence of literate urban civilization in the Uruk period, for which reason it is often dubbed the "Cradle of Civilization."
In the 1980s this ecoregion was put in grave danger as the Iran–Iraq War raged within its boundaries. The wetlands of Iraq, which were inhabited by the Marsh Arabs, were completely dried out, and only recently have shown signs of recovery.
The Tigris-Euphrates Basin is primarily shared by Turkey, Syria and Iraq, with many Tigris tributaries originating in Iran. Since the 1960s and in 1970s when Turkey began the GAP project in earnest, water disputes have regularly occurred in addition to the associated dam's effects on the environment. In addition, Syrian and Iranian dam construction has also contributed to political tension within the basin, particularly during drought.
Picture from Wikimedia Commons: Marsh Arabs in a mashoof
But today the marshes are recovering due to the breach of some dikes by local Iraqi communities and the invasion of Iraq by the U.S. forces. The unintended consequences of war among other things has halted the ecocide of the Marsh Arabs and their region by Saddam. The marshes have undergone a "substantial rate of recovery."
The permanent wetlands now cover more than 50% of 1970s levels, with a remarkable regrowth of the Hammar and Hawizeh Marshes and some recovery of the Central Marshes
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Now it’s on to the TOP COMMENTS OF THE DAY submitted from our Kossack readers today in the Top Comments mailbox... TYVM to everyone who sent these excellent comments!
From Eddie C:
Eddie C sends in an elegant how-to that demonstrates a positive reach out that gets the Beck crowd to tune-in (and not to the WATB Beck). In his diary For Earth Day: Make Television a Tool of Progress Today, Eddie C brings the 8PM showing tonight of The Thin Green Line on PBS we are wiping out the frogs and amphibians... the greatest mass extinction since the dinosaurs..."Some of these habitats will fall apart without their amphibians. It's an indication to us that there is something wrong. At what point are we going to turn around and say 'Hang on we needed those frogs?'".
Eddie says someone should read it and many of us wholeheartedly agree (and this diary is a result).
From sardonyx:
After Daily Kos's front-page doctor DemFromCT posted What's The Matter With Doctors? this morning, other medical professionals spoke up in the comments. Dallasdoc had a few thoughts, and fayea, responding to some earlier comments, ends her own comment as she started: feeling weird.
From bronte17 (tonight’s diarist):
In Deoliver47's diary It's just one group of racists protesting another group of racists, plf515 tells the story of a police chief, Wayne Inman of Billings, MT, whose thoughtful pro-active idea made headway against bigotry (studies have shown that police chiefs set the tone for their police departments) while sc kitty and others expanded the discussion.
In Patric Juillet's diary, Dada, ontheleftcoast takes note of the Surrealist as capitalist Dadaist...and check out that sig line. Hubba-hubba.
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