Warzone Ecology: The Violence of Planetary Repair in Iraq

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.