Professor involved in genesis of Eden restoration project

Before coming to Sac State, Environmental Studies Professor Michelle Stevens had a different calling—restoring the Garden of Eden.

From 2002 to 2004, Stevens was the project manager for the Eden Again project sponsored by the Iraq Foundation, a non-governmental agency started by Iraqi expatriates living in the U.S. The program was started to find ways to restore the Mesopotamian marshes in southern Iraq.

Stevens helped set up a team of international scientists to restore the ecological system and cultural heritage of the 12,000-square mile collection of interconnected lakes, mudflats and wetlands located between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Based on biblical descriptions, some believe the wetlands are the famed garden.

“The area is considered by many Muslims, Christians and Jews as the site of Eden,” Stevens says.  

The marshes support a vast network of plant life and are a natural habitat for millions of birds and large numbers of mammal and fish species. The wetlands are also the traditional homeland to about 500,000 mostly Shiite Marsh Arabs whose families have inhabited the area for thousands of years.

The wetlands once covered an area twice the size of the Everglades. Dam construction and water diversion projects in the 1980s reduced the size of the marshlands, but the greatest damage came in the 1990s when Saddam Hussein began systematically draining the marshes in retaliation for the Shiite uprising after the first Gulf War, Stevens says. “In the course of 10 years, the third largest wetland in the world had been reduced to just 5 percent of its original size.”

But, the garden is starting to flourish again. After the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Iraqis began tearing down levees and other barriers set up by the former Iraqi dictator and releasing water back into the marshes. Continued restoration and monitoring is being conducted by Nature Iraq, an Iraqi non-governmental agency.

Almost 60 percent of the wetlands has been restored, Stevens says. “People have returned to live in the marshes, and the ecosystem has been revitalized. As one Iraqi said, ‘the bottom is boiling to the top,’ meaning things are all stirred up but ready to settle again.”

Stevens’ work on eco-cultural restoration of the marshes was recently published as a chapter in a book titled, Peace Parks: Conservation and Conflict Resolution. The book has been nominated for the Grawemeyer Award, presented by the University of Louisville and given for ideas that help improve world order.