Field of Dreams

Hareer, Iraq 2 May 2013

Image (C) Badir N. Albadran. Reed Fields near Hareer, Iraq.

Most of us would look at this emerald expanse, sigh, and think of the Low Country, or the Everglades, or the Bayous, or some other half-wild place of shrimping, crabbing, crawfishing, and trolling from a john-boat.

Image (c) Jennifer R. Pournelle. Water Buffalo Rancher near Hareer, Iraq.

Abu Fathi (not his real name) looks at this and sees a hay field. Do not be fooled: there's nothing Rousseauian about this expanse: it did not even exist two years ago. The field was leveled, water diverted, and the reed allowed to grow to young lushness for the sole purpose of feeding cattle. Specifically, water buffalo.

Abu Fathi's brother has a thriving business in Chicago, but Abu Fathi, along with his rather extended family, eschewed the winters of the windy city to pursue a more agrarian business venture at home. He sold up, packed up, and invested all in water buffalo. It's a new departure: in these fields his father tended orchards, not beasts. With salinization the orchards died, but the less-than-ideal waters that killed them are handily digested by Phragmites. To maximize growth, the beasts are penned in mud-walled corrals, fed on vast piles of hand-cut reed-hay.

It's a good living, says Abu Fathi. Hard work, but a good living - he's turning a tidy profit on his investment. But more to the point, he says, the kids are all healthy and strong, with brilliant white teeth. I have to agree: a convivial pack, just released from their classroom, followed me about, giggling and practicing their school-boy English as I snapped photos of outrageously ridiculous things like old boats and dung-heaps.

For us, a living proof-of-concept that expanding reed beds is practicable, locally welcomed, and immediately beneficial. #cmarsh

The Rooftops of Basra

Basra, Iraq 29 April - 1 May

Image (c) Jennifer R. Pournelle. View of Shatt Al Arab from Shams Al Basra Hotel.

Cor, what a sight. Our trip to the Majnoon Oilfield was cut short by a noon luncheon meeting at the U.S. consulate, hard by Basra International Airport. A useful meeting, with introductions to the new Consul-General, who thankfully will be in residence for two whole years. Then, runors confirmed that Iraqi airspace would close for the elections, the rest of the team bugged out, leaving me to hold the fort at the University Guest House.

Except that the fort capitulated at the moment of my arrival. Not through any grave security concern (indeed, I was by then the only guest, tucked away in a corner room far from any prying eyes). No: the concern was occupational - or rather lack thereof. It seems that, with no prior notice, in honor of the elections, the powers-that-be declared a three-day holiday, making for a five-day weekend. Thus closing all national, regional, and local government offices, as well as the university. Including the guest house. On the spot, my lovely guest house staff, only that morning only too pleased to guard the gate, cook, and make tea, had urgent and undeniable cause to be at home. They could not possibly be expected to remain at their duties for the benefit of one paltry guest. I guess I can't really blame them.

It's this sort of day-to-day reality that makes discretionary funds so essential for operating here. No problem: I did what one would do in any normal city: I packed off to a nice hotel. At the Shams Al Basra, frequented by air crews, I joined a bare handful of guests stranded by flight cancellations, and settled in for three days of waiting, reading; waiting, writing; waiting, sleeping; and waiting, re-booking meetings. At this jucture, I must note that in this corner of the world, waits are usually measured in weeks, not days. Think not, in this case, bureaucratic stonewalling. Think instead of the mix of exasperation and secret relief that accompanies snow days. Unexpected by all, unwanted by all, inconvenient for all, but secretly a chance to catch up on niggling tasks and empty the in-box.

The photo above is a wonderful illustration of point-of-view. No doubt, to most of you dear readers, it looks a rather ugly study in dust and concrete. But on arrival, we all gasped at its beauty. After a few days here, the eye is instantly drawn to the stretch of sparkling blue that is the river. The sun rises directly thereover, reflected in a shimmering disk on the waters. Swallows circle and wheel, doves coo, and finches cheep in the dawn chorus. Ashar boats and motor launches cruise past, and traffic cruises over the pontoon bridge to the shopping and restaurant districts on the other shore. It is a pleasant sight, and one I have revisited again and again these past several days, tracking the hours through the river's changing moods. #cmarsh

Water and Oil

Al-Qurna, Iraq, 28 April 

Images (c) Jennifer R. Pournelle. "Pipes Bridge," Majnoon Oilfield.

This 250-meter-wide canal was cut 25 years ago to drain marshes along the Iranian border. At that time, water levels topped the culvert pipes beneath the bridge, allowed that precious commodity to flush down the Tigris. Now, a dam conserves what little is left, creating a precious green strip of marsh habitat to the west. To the east, de-watered for over a decade, desiccated reed beds stretch to the horizon.

Royal Dutch Shell, the operators of this oilfield, are, like their national homeland, sensitive to the importance of wetlands and wetland management, and take multiple precautions to protect this small refuge.  No return water is currently produced here, but it may be at some point in the future. When that happens, one option may be to turn the 20 km-long dry bed, for which there is no longer any water supply, into salt- or brackish-marsh. That will be tricky, though. Protecting groundwater from salt intrusion would require lining the bed - and before that could be done safely, the entire 300 m - wide basin would need to be cleared of explosive ordnance left from the 1980s Iran-Iraq wars. #cmarsh

Nature Finds a Way

Zubayr, Iraq, 27 April 2014

Image (c) Jennifer R. Pournelle. Raw sewage flows into the Basra River at Abu Al Khasib near Az-Zubayr, Iraq

​Even with the foulest of raw materials, life emerges. Just a few miles upstream from its outlet into tidal flats at the head of the Gulf, raw sewage flows into the Shatt Al Basra from the municipal cloaca - all that remains of the primary and secondary sewage treatment systems destroyed and abandoned during war and decades of economic sanctions. Yet, in the hinterground, amid salt-fouled dirt, sewage-fouled water, and petrochemical-fouled air, sandpipers and egrets scuttle and poke around a rough patch of marsh grasses, eking out a few small clams and fingerlings. With a bit of help, this drainage system can be improved and expanded into a larger, healthier remediation marsh - something more like that in my previous entry - eliminating the need for expensive new waste treatment plants, while vastly improving downstream water quality. #cmarsh

Sheep, Sedges, and Sustainability

 Basra, Iraq, 26 April 2014

Image (c) Jennifer R. Pournelle. Sheep grazing near the U. Basra Marine Science Center Field Station, Hareer,

The first field day was spent viewing firsthand the opportunities and limits for broad-scale freshwater marsh restoration outside Basra City. This stand of cattails (Typha), rushes (Juncus), and bulrushes (Scirpus) is scarcely four years old - re-formed when brackish irrigation return water was allowed to re-flood areas desiccated for over a decade. This mix of marshy plants provides good grazing, and supports local production of mutton, wool, and dairy products.
However, extreme, and unpredictable, fluctuations in salinity due to upstream water releases are more than the date and fruit orchards that used to cover this plain can bear - new trees that manage to survive seldom bear fruit. Likewise, those random fluctuations kill off both fresh- and salt- tolerant fish fry. Unlike in a natural estuary, subject to predictable daily ebb and flow, they cannot follow a salt gradient within their range of tolerance.
#cmarsh

Postholes Redux: Promises Kept, Albeit Delayed

Half a decade and several trips later, I am prepping for another trip to Iraq. Last Fall, we pioneered the return of American archaeologists to southern Iraq. My latest outing? Filming with National Geographic Television in the Iraq Marshes! Stay tuned - that episode should air in August. Now, it's off to Erbil for a conference. About time I reinvigorated this blog, eh?

Outies Takes Iraq Out of This World

I thought about the post-war (or was it still war?) period of 2003-2004 for a good long time after returning home. Of the many things I thought about, one was war fiction, and especially military science fiction. War books have compelling plots, generally along the lines of : there are good guys; there are bad guys. Sometimes some bad guys, that is, guys who were individually bad, redeem themselves and become heroic good guys. Anyway, the good guys win, or die valiantly trying. War's over. The End.

But nothing I saw in Iraq was ever that cut-and-dried. On any given day, it was hard to tell if, when & where we were having a war. It was generally impossible to tell good guys from bad guys - and there were many shades of both, on both sides.

Outies is science fiction, set a millenium hence, on a fictional planet. A lot of this blog makes it into the backstory. (Plus a lot more: See Kris Hirst's review in About.com,  where she discusses Outies as Social Science Fiction.)

Visited Today Ain Qasr and Ain Soda (Azraq Marsh)

Off at 8 am, on a jaunt down the Baghdad highway, into the Jordanian panhandle. We trundle through the city into and through the house furnishings souk: rolls of linoleum stacked against sleeping windows; parking lots lined with velvet-upholstered furniture. Out past Ain Gazal, where I am told Chalcolithic-Early Bronze Age horse burials inhabited limestone caves above the spring. Through the industrial district of Zarka, choked with smog; lined with vehicle graveyards that escalate from diminutive taxis to rusting semi tractors, the latter incongruously piled on rooftops. The highway is lined with trucks, truckers, truck traffic: a free zone with tarp-covered trailer loads of every make and model; then fuel tankers in line after line.

Main destination today is the Azraq wetlands: once vast marshes; maybe continuously so since the Pleistocene, fed by aquifers seeping from beneath the Druze mountains. Vast tracts outside the marsh are demarcated into lines and squares by piles of basalt stone. Within these censurations sprawl Bedouin encampments, brown burlap tents fluttering in the wind, the livestock off grazing the thin pasturage somewhere out of view. Aquifer pumping has so lowered the water table that exposed peat is cracking and sloughing off. The Royal Water Authority diverts 10% of water back into the wetland to maintain a small fraction of its former extent. The fringe of palms with tamarisk are reminiscent of Borrego Springs or Ocotillo Wells, although, if left ungrazed, the surrounding countryside would revert to salt scrub, not cactus desert.

Reed brakes choke the open water—water buffalo keep patches of open water open. The springs are divided by an Umayyad wall designed to keep the salt from fresh water during medieval times. apparently one end had stone arches carved in animal reliefs, including elephant. A current rehabilitation project is adding a second pool system. The water buffalo are also a nuisance, damaging fencing and nets designed to protect fringe pools during rehabilitation. The reed is hard to identify—heavily cut over, it has dwarfed. Phragmites? It does not seem to be dense or tough enough to be Arundo. Staff poured us honey-sweetened tea in little glasses, then off we wandered through the brakes to an adobe observation hut overlooking a (literally) bucolic wallow. Happy, happy water buffalo.

Then north through Azraq itself—a two-dinar tire repair; shops catering to the highway trade bedecked with plush and plaster and plastic Tweety Pies (do people here even know of Sylvester and Tweety Pie?), because every trucker in the world must take presents home to his kids. One wonders: is it plush for girls, plastic for boys, and plaster for the garden? Cascades of nuts and seeds and spices and tins of olive oil; cheeses in oil; halvah and tahini. The road into town crosses onto the basalt fields sharply as crossing a watered pitch, past a series of once grand, now abandoned guest houses, and then suddenly looms the black blocks of Azraq castle: Lawrence's wartime HQ with its two-ton solid granite door.

Onward to Amman, the southern road, through horizon-wide pebble plains, trackless and capped with desert varnish, grazed clean of any puff of chaff. Along a long-dry wadi lies Qasr Amra—a little Umayyad bubble with its touristic roadway sign, as for a stagecoach inn along the Butterfield stage. Concrete cones, a meter high, run parallel awhile: these are markers along the old Mandate track to Baghdad. We careen behind, through, alongside truck convoys ferrying limestone nodules the size of squashed Volkswagens to facing-tile plants around the city. Qasr Kharanah, foursquare, turreted, heads a second wadi, overviewing an Epipaleolithic tell.

Dust devils boil past flocks of desolate sheep, fed from trucked-out grain; watered by tankers, but nonetheless allowed to graze to scorched earth any seed that dares germinate under the moisture-sapping wind. We pass a truck overtopped with green—cattail? reed? Headed toward the sheep camps.