Last week, Emagazine.com featured an interesting commentary about the environmental destruction taking place in the Middle East, as a result of the Iraq War. Apparently, the man who wrote the commentary (Steven Hanks) lived and worked in Iraq and is writing from first-hand experience with the issues. While I haven't heard anything else about this issue, I found the article intriguing, albeit, depressing. Here are some of Hanks' main points: 

• "Civilians create excess amounts of garbage that is included in the military’s massive open burns. Choking the sky with black smoke, these burns can be seen from miles away. The stench of burning trash permeates the air and infects the soil, containing high levels of carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, lead, arsenic, mercury and barium. These compounds cause reactions ranging from mild irritation to deadly disease among the local population and wildlife."

• "At central military bases and sub-compounds, raw sewage is trucked off-site and pumped directly into roadside canals. Rarely is waste transported more than a mile from a base or compound before being recklessly discarded. At some sites, the waste is taken directly to a hole in the exterior wall of the compound and simply sprayed into the desert." 

• "[hundreds of thousands of] plastic water bottles must go somewhere. They are certainly not trucked out of the country and recycled. Without a sufficient system to recycle these items, they often end up buried, burned, or strewn across the countryside."

• "Hundreds of miles of open junk fields scar the Iraqi landscape. Thousands of vehicles, ordnance items, construction materials, air conditioning units, armor, tires, and parts litter these fields. Never is this vast destructive creation reused, recycled or rebuilt. It is all left to decay in the sand, poisoning the very land upon which it sits." 

This made me realize, once again, that even after foreign troops have left, the devastation —economic, social, and environmental —will affect the Iraqi region, and the Iraqi people, for centuries to come.