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A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.
Following its 2003 invasion of Iraq, the US government partnered with Iraqi exiles, global environmental institutions, donor states, and corporations to conserve Iraq's marshlands at the delta of the Tigris and Euphrates, an area purported to be the Garden of Eden. Though this conservation effort is often touted as a success story of the US war and occupation, Warzone Ecology shows that it did not result in the holistic repair of an ecosystem. Instead, it paved the way for war profiteering and the wholesale destruction of southern Iraq's ecology by oil multinationals. Drawing on more than twenty years of ethnographic and archival research across three continents, Bridget Guarasci describes a warzone ecology populated by foreign donors, experts, environmentalists, and the nonhumans they recruited to their projects. With attention to the energy, actors, and epistemes of war, Warzone Ecology points to the Iraq War as a turning point in which war became justified as repair and environmental remediation served as a vehicle for proponents to secure their control over another country’s natural resources.
Bridget Guarasci is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Franklin and Marshall College.
"Recounts the riveting history of a vast international project to restore Iraqi marshes after their drainage by Saddam Hussein—and how its leaders then sold out the marshes to oil companies. Based on extensive interviews with scientists, NGOs, and donors, Warzone Ecology is a chilling tale of conservation as imperial war."—Anna Tsing, coauthor of Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene: The New Nature
"A brilliant and highly insightful book that reveals the deep entanglement of war-making and biodiversity conservation in late capitalism. Through a rich account of conservation efforts in Iraq's marshlands, Warzone Ecology pushes us to rethink the history of post-invasion Iraq—and the nature of the global oil industry—in new and compelling ways. A powerful intervention that speaks directly to the realities of ecological collapse and the enduring colonial dynamics that continue to drive it forward."—Adam Hanieh, author of Crude Capitalism: Oil, Corporate Power, and the Making of the World Market
"Bridget Guarasci provides an entirely novel way to understand war-making and ecological collapse. The destruction of Iraq's marshlands was not a side effect of war, and the attempt to conserve them was not a reparative response. Rather, conservation was folded into warfare, enabling the profit making and poison making that have rendered the region uninhabitable. The book is a remarkable study of ecological expertise at its most violent."—Timothy Mitchell, author of The Alibi of Capital: How We Broke the Earth to Steal the Future on the Promise of a Better Tomorrow