Birding under fire

Abstract

AbstractBirding for nature conservation becomes violent in war when foreign states and industry use it to extract value from countries like Iraq. In wartime Iraq, birding became a pathway to multinational resource extraction by producing “eco‐value,” a form of economic value for species life and, by extension, the ecosystems they inhabit. Iraqi marshland conservationists, including private contractors, produced eco‐value in the context of extreme violence for the purposes of environmental rehabilitation. This eco‐value was then leveraged to mine natural resources that were embedded in the same geological field. Compounding the violence of extraction was the violence conservation introduced for Iraqi citizens who alone performed the dangerous labor of birding; they were recruited to do this in order to safeguard the lives of foreign experts, who did not travel to the marshes of Iraq. The result was a form of nature conservation that made Iraqi lives uniquely expendable in the project of building the occupation's lifeforce.