This talk develops the conceptual framework “warzone ecology” to analyze how war and the biosphere have been forged in inextricable relation in Iraq, thereby rejecting any facile distinctions between nature and culture in order to emphasize mutuality, intra-activity, and relationality of lifeforms and livelihoods. With a focus on Iraqi biologists who counted birds in the marshes in order to attribute value to the ecosystem needed and undertake biodiversity conservation after the fall of Saddam Hussein, the talk explores how birding becomes violent in war when foreign states and multinational industry use it to extract value from countries like Iraq. The result was a form of nature conservation that made Iraqi lives uniquely expendable to facilitate multinational resource extraction and build the lifeforce of the occupation.

Bridget Guarasci is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Franklin & Marshall College. She is an environmental anthropologist whose work examines the intersections of war and ecological life in the Arab-majority world. Her first book Warzone Ecology: Iraq’s Marshes as Battlegrounds considers how the management of nature during the Iraq War was particularly vicious warfare because of the way marshlands conservationists targeted not just lifeform, but the life systems it depends on. She has published with American Ethnologist, the Annual Review of Anthropology, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Arab Studies Journal, Journal of Contemporary Iraq and the Arab World, and the Society for Cultural Anthropology’s Theorizing the Contemporary series as well as with Brown University’s Costs of War project and Slate magazine.