Wetlands in Danger: A World Conservation Atlas.

For more than 5,000 years, the Ma'dan, or Marsh Arabs, have inhabited southern Iraq's wetlands and marshes. Their civilization has remained much the same as it was during Sumerian times: they harvest reeds for houses, boats, and fences, and catch fish and buffalo for food and rawhide. While demonstrating the concept of sustainable living at its best, the Ma'dan have remained mostly untouched by Middle East conflicts, with the exception of periodic violence and bombing during the Persian Gulf War.

But last year, the Ma'dan's peaceful existence was suddenly shattered and their homeland virtually destroyed by political violence. Fearing that Shia rebels fled to the marshes for refuge following the crush of their intifada, Saddam Hussein's Iraqi regime set about the systematic destruction of the Ma'dan's land. Iraqi troops allegedly exploded chemicals and gases to burn people out of the marshes, set marshland on fire, and accelerated the regime's program of draining wetlands that had been virtually untouched for thousands of years. The ancient wetlands, riddled by the soldiers' ditches, now lie brown and lifeless, and the Ma'dan face extinction.

Just months before, photographs of a lush, green Ma'dan homeland were published in Wetlands in Danger, a new atlas of the world's richest wetland areas. In a matter of months, the Iraqi government rendered the atlas's Ma'dan section obsolete--and drove home the urgency and relevance of the book's message. The sudden destruction of the Ma'dan wetland for purely political reasons demonstrated in dramatic fashion the atlas's premise that these valuable areas can be lost rapidly to human activities.

Wetlands in Danger is the first comprehensive atlas of wetlands ever published, and marks the first time that wetlands in some parts of the world have ever been mapped or delineated, let alone analyzed. Wetlands have come to public attention in recent years because of the belated recognition that they serve critical functions--yet are being destroyed rapidly because they are perceived as wasteland or because they happen to be in prized locations for farming or resort developments. Animals, plants, fish and people rely on wetlands for water, food, habitat, nutrients, sediment supplies, breeding grounds, flood control, natural filtering and stabilization systems, and energy resources. But there are as many threats to wetlands as there are reasons for their preservation. Globally, more than one-half of the wetlands...