Chapter One
Cradle to Grave
i. Origin
How, Azzam Alwash wonders, is it possible that he's never been here before? Born in this cradle land to a family from Babylon, taught by his father how to fish for shad and barbel in marshes where people still lived like the ancients in reed houses on floating islands, he knows his country's storied waterways like his own veins and arteries. But now he is seeing something for the first time.
Strange, because except for his years in exile, all his life it's been so near, just downriver from the city of Basra, where he attended university-although needing a police escort to get here might explain why he didn't come earlier. It's a tense spot, Iraq's tiny, 36-mile wedge of coastline between its wealthier, powerful neighbors at the top of what the Kuwaitis call the Arabian Gulf and the Iranians call the Persian Gulf.
"We just call it the Gulf," he murmurs, unable to tear his gaze away.
Azzam, still trim in his mid-60s, clean-shaven with buzz-cut silver hair that narrows to a widow's peak, his blue hoodie unzipped to the breeze, is considered a national hero in Iraq-internationally as well: winner of the 2013 Goldman Environmental Prize, the "green Nobel," for miraculously resuscitating the Mesopotamian marshes of his boyhood, the biggest wetland in the Middle East. In 1993, that lush convergence of the Tigris and Euphrates floodplains, believed by many to be the biblical Eden, had shriveled to barren, dust-blown expanses after Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein intentionally diverted the fabled rivers, draining thousands of verdant square miles in order to flush Shi'ite rebels out from hiding in the marshes' impenetrable reed and papyrus thickets.
The damage was irreversible, Azzam kept hearing from biologists, as he begged the US State Department for funds to reflood the marshes after US-led forces deposed Saddam in 2003. The roots and desiccated seed banks were over 10 years old, their chemistry irreparably changed, a CIA environmental contractor told him. "It's probably impossible to revive them."
Azzam was an engineer, not an ecologist, but navigating exile and building a career had taught him that impossible often masks a lack of imagination. If there was one lesson he'd learned, it was that nature is resilient: she's seen all of this before.
"How will we know unless we try?" he asked.
Today, with the fate of not just a wetland but his entire planet in play, Azzam Alwash’s stubborn persistence that proved experts wrong is needed everywhere, he believes. For our civilization to continue-if not our very existence-will demand vision that transcends conventional wisdom and boundaries.
Humanity's astonishing success as a species has resulted in a dangerously lopsided world. With most unfrozen land now devoted to the needs and nourishment of just one species, our own, we've literally pushed most of our Earthly companions off the planet: all but 4 percent of mammalian weight is either us or our livestock. Nature, the fossil record warns, doesn't permit such imbalance for long. Already, our exhaust has packed the sky with heat-trapping gases that wither our crops, trigger whirlwinds, and alternately and increasingly rain flood or hellfire.
Yet we can't seem to stop, so poles keep shrinking and plastic keeps coming. As an existential ultimatum threatens, what, realistically, are our hopes? What or who can get us through this?
Amid pervasive, chilling uncertainty, Azzam Alwash is among a worldwide legion of kindred visionaries, often unknown to one another, toiling in separate arenas to find humanity a path through this treacherous century to a livable future. Neither in denial nor naively optimistic, knowing full well how daunting the odds are, they nevertheless refuse to quit trying.
Sometimes their local challenges turn out to have global implications. Azzam Alwash went from saving his cherished fishing spots to designing a plan to revitalize all that was once Mesopotamia into the world's bridge from an oil-based past to a sun-blessed future. Though repeatedly thwarted, he keeps on, banging into hard realities until something budges.
The last half kilometer to Iraq’s southernmost point had taken them over a single-lane sand causeway atop an embankment barely higher than the mudflats and tide pools on either side. A tattered, wind-whipped black flag marked the road’s end, beyond which the tide pools continued, dissolving into an unreadable gray horizon.
On his iPhone Azzam checks Google Maps, which shows him surrounded by blue.
"It says we're underwater," he tells Ameer Naji.
Ameer, 31, with short wiry hair and a trimmed brown beard, is an environmental engineer at Iraq's sole port, Umm Qasr, on a nearby inlet by the Kuwaiti border. He's long wanted to meet Azzam and, thanks to an uncle who knows the police captain, was happy to arrange security for this excursion. "The tide is still out," he explains, indicating a faint band where open water shimmers a few hundred meters distant. He then points east, to a line of silhouettes: cargo vessels lumbering up the Shatt al-Arab, the river that forms where the Tigris and Euphrates merge, 200 kilometers north. Halfway down its length, the Shatt al-Arab becomes Iraq's fraught border with Iran. The ships hug the Iranian shore.
Heedless of the March wind in a light cotton pullover, Ameer is from Iraq's second-biggest city, Basra, an hour upriver. The world's largest date palm forest once lined the Shatt al-Arab's banks there. Then, in 1980, Saddam Hussein attacked Iran to annex its oil fields. The murderous war that ensued-Saddam used nerve gas; Iran laid waste wherever it counterattacked-ended in an exhausted truce after eight years and a half million deaths on each side. In Basra, on the front lines, millions of date palms also fell victim.
In January 1991-the year Ameer was born-a few months after Saddam had invaded Kuwait for the same reason came the Americans to rescue US oil interests. For five weeks they bombed Baghdad and Basra nonstop before storming Kuwait and pushing out the dictator's Republican Guard troops. As they fled, on his orders they set fire to 600 Kuwaiti oil wells. When US forces left without deposing Saddam, a nationwide rebellion erupted to finish the job, but the Republican Guard that cowered before the Americans had no qualms about mauling its own citizenry into submission.
A decade later, Afghanistan-based jihadis, most of them Saudi, crashed hijacked planes into Manhattan skyscrapers and the Pentagon. Under a crackpot pretext that Saddam was somehow responsible, Americans returned with British allies. The 2003 Battle of Basra was among that invasion's first, and worst. This time, the Americans stayed nearly 10 years. Between bomb attacks by guerrillas resisting their occupation and US military reprisals, Iraq, once deemed the flower of Arab culture for its poetry, became one of the most dangerous places on Earth.
After the Americans finally pulled out in 2011, giving a justification as fanciful as the one that had brought them-that Iraqi forces were now capable of defending their own homeland-ISIS leapt into the breach. The Islamic State's savagery made it possible to miss the hated American occupiers. It took four years and the intervention of Iran to finally drive ISIS out. Except now, Iran has stayed: with Iraq's weak government often locked in parliamentary paralysis, in much of the country Iranian militias are the tacit, corrupt local authority.
Ameer endures their highway checkpoints daily, going from his city, now rubbled by repeated wars, to his various jobs at the port. Sometimes he's a cargo inspector; sometimes a health, safety, and environmental supervisor for foreign petroleum companies operating here. "Everybody here works for them," he tells Azzam. Southern Iraq has three of the world's biggest oil fields. Dozens of tall flares there burn constantly, because neither Saddam nor any government after his invested in infrastructure to capture the methane.
When summer temperatures here reach 51ºC (nearly 124ºF), oil pipeline welders collapse. Ameer takes them to the clinic, where medics elevate their legs and give them ice and IV liquids. Once he saw 15 drop, one after another. He and coworkers shuttled them for treatment in a pickup truck bed.
"We must stop," he implored the Korean manager.
"We must continue," the manager told him.
What Ameer calls his real work begins after hours, as the Basra director for Humat Dijlah, a national river preservation network run by young activists. It almost feels like a lost cause, he tells Azzam. With Turkey, where 90 percent of Iraq's fresh water originates, building more upstream dams on both the Tigris and Euphrates, there's even less fresh water to resist the wedge of salinity pushing up the Shatt al-Arab from the Gulf, weakening what remains of the palms. The river, Basra's source of drinking water, already reeks from toilets flushing into urban canals that were lovely for swimming when he was young.
In 2018, as Turkey began filling a huge dammed reservoir upriver on the Tigris, Basra's tap water turned black. More than 120,000 were hospitalized.
On his fingers, Ameer ticks off people he's lost. "My cousin, brain cancer. My best friend, stomach cancer."
After 20 colleagues were killed in protests they'd organized, the Shatt al-Arab got a desalinization plant, but so inadequate that the water is still undrinkable. Trucks jam the streets bearing flats of plastic water bottles to slake the endless thirst of Basra's 3 million people, alongside more trucks stacked with air conditioners. Each summer, temperatures approach 54.5ºC (130ºF), far beyond where sweating can cool the human body, though with the humidity rising off the nearby Gulf, that point is exceeded here at even lower temperatures. So many windows have AC units that the grid crashes daily.
When the summers get that lethal, Ameer takes his wife and son north to stay with relatives in Turkey, then returns to work.
His wife, terrified he'll be killed or jailed like his protester friends, begs him to leave, or threatens to leave herself. Their son's severe ADHD, they're told, owes to toxicity from the water and the flares ringing the city. The air is greasy, every breath tastes oily. Frequent dust storms render everything invisible except the flares.
Even friends tell him to leave. "But if I go, who will lead? Who will protect Basra for my son's generation?" He carries a picture of his son, Muhammad, holding a sign that reads "Make Basra Green!" He loves the old city's mud-brick houses with ornate second-story cantilevered wooden facades, loves his environmental group that literally raises flowers amid the ruins.
Azzam claps him on the shoulder. "Failure is not an option," he says.
The tattered black flag here at the road’s end marks where each year, Shi’ite Muslims gather to begin Arba’een, a two-week, 686-kilometer trek to the holy Iraqi city of Karbala. By the time they arrive, their numbers swell to 22 million: the biggest pilgrimage on Earth, nearly 10 times larger than the annual hajj to Mecca. Arba’een commemorates the martyrdom of Imam Hussain, whose tomb is their destination.
Imam Hussain, who was beheaded while defending the faith, was the son of Imam Ali, who was also assassinated, and whose tomb in Najaf, another holy city, the pilgrims will stop to venerate en route to Karbala. Shi'ites believe that Imam Ali, married to Fatima, daughter of his cousin Muhammad, was the Prophet's chosen heir to his spiritual mantle. Sunnis, however, believe the lineage passed through Muhammad's closest companion, Abu Bakr, who was also one of Muhammad's 13 fathers-in-law. The disagreement has sadly continued the bloodshed that anoints Muslim history.
"A deadly feud between a couple of families," Azzam sighs. But although Jewish history's ceaseless Old Testament battles and Christianity's Crusades, inquisitions, and a messiah tortured to death are no less grisly, there's one thing, he notes, that Shi'ites, Sunnis, Jews, and Christians have in common.
"They all believe it began right here," he says, gesturing at the view before him.
In all the world, he reckons, there may be no better vantage point than the top of this Gulf to peer simultaneously into humanity's past and its future.
What became known as Eden, Azzam knows, wasn’t just his beloved Iraqi marshes, although they’re relics of the same ecosystem. Descriptions of Eden in the Judeo-Christian Bible, and in similar Sumerian and Akkadian stories predating it, don’t correspond with the creation of a universe 13.6 billion years ago. Rather, they resemble the end of the Pleistocene.
The epoch of Ice Ages, the Pleistocene represents one of the most drastic shifts in geologic history. For much of the previous 550 million years, this had been a far warmer planet. Then, around 2.5 million years ago, just as the hairy biped Australopithecus was morphing into tool-wielding Homo, great sheets of polar ice began advancing, receding, and returning. This happened more than 20 times. The last retreat ended just 8,000 years ago.
The glacial-interglacial fluctuations were due to periodic quirks in Earth's orbit that alter how much solar radiation reaches the surface. But what provoked the Pleistocene's great refrigeration in the first place began in the previous geologic epoch, the Pliocene, when turbulence deep in the planet's magma sent its tectonic plates-twelve vast slabs of rocky crust and several smaller ones that drift like soup crackers atop the semi-molten mantle below-colliding with each other.
As the Indian plate rammed the Eurasian plate to the north, it began to push up the Himalayas. The African plate, crunching into what is now Europe, likewise pushed up the Alps and squeezed the dregs of an ancient ocean into today's Mediterranean. What doomed Earth's balmier climate, however, was when the Pacific plate began to slide under the smaller Caribbean plate. About 2.8 million years ago, this touched off volcanic flows that turned a string of islands into the isthmus of Panama.
We mostly think of that isthmus connecting North and South America, but equally momentous was how it disconnected the Atlantic from the Pacific. With these oceans no longer sharing warm tropical currents at the Earth's midriff, the planet began to cool, setting the stage for the Pleistocene's Ice Ages.
During the previous epoch, several Homo species had appeared, but after repeated glaciations, by 40,000 years ago only one remained: our own, sapiens. Well before that, we modern humans had begun dispersing from our African origins. Fifty thousand years ago, we'd spread all the way to Australia, and 15,000 years ago, we'd arrived to stay in the Americas. What we call civilization thus had various cradles: in India, China, Mexico, Peru, and Egypt. But the one that emerged at the eastern tip of a fertile crescent our African forebears followed through the Levant into Mesopotamian Asia has special resonance for more than half the world's population, whose Abrahamic cultures hearken to the place called Eden.
Which, it turns out, was more than just a metaphor.
Copyright © 2025 by Alan Weisman. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
