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Changing Planet Revealed In Atlas
ring writes "The United Nations Environmental Programme (Unep) has released a new atlas 'One Planet Many People: Atlas of our Changing Environment', to mark World Environment Day (WED). It compares and contrasts spectacular satellite images of the past few decades with contemporary ones." From the BBC article: "Among the transformations highlighted in the atlas are the huge growth of greenhouses in southern Spain, the rapid rise of shrimp farming in Asia and Latin America and the emergence of a giant, shadow puppet-shaped peninsula at the mouth of the Yellow River that has built up through transportation of sediment in the waters."
Where can I find more picture comparisons?
Get your Unix fortune now!
Your insane, and off-topic.
For a moment I thought it read: United Federation of Planets... Too bad it wasn't about the next Star Trek movie or TV series, or William Shatner's bald spot. :P
Geologic evidence supports that earth was in a steady state before the emergence of Homo sapiens and all change begins after that. Change has brought about all problems, and the quicker we can make things stop changing, the better.
I think that pretty much sums up your point. There will never be enough "good enough" evidence to convince you that that sustained, unlimited development is a pipe dream and that we must aim at zero growth at some point. After all, unlimited growth is the fundamental doctrine of the libertarian faith.
The owls are not what they seem
I'm more afraid of the oligarchs who want to see their countries develop by forcing developing countries to starve to death.
Unlimited population growth has nothing to do with libertarianism.
Though a libertarian would know that population growth slows as economic freedom and prosperity grow.
A libertarian would also know that care for the environment increases as prosperity grows. And that more efficient farming and GMO plants will decrease the water and landspace needs for a population. Smaller farms providing more food than traditional farming means more land goes back to a natural state.
I'd like to see those same satellite images for the United States. There was a recent story on New Hampshire, how only 20% of New Hampshire was forest covered at the turn of the 20th century. Now it is 80% forest.
I'm a nuclear engineer and physicist and I can tell you we're quite a long way from developing profitable and useful fusion power. We've made amazing leaps in the last few years, but getting the technology anywhere will take decades.
"I want to see this happening on a global scale"
This shows a fundamental lack of understanding.
But can it tell that my lawn service came today?
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
I was curious to find that 5th picture, talking about using insects to control a green swirl of something that appeared somewhere.
I wish they could visit our lake. Last year it had a huge crop of lemna, shown here.
What you see is not a tennis court but a big piece of the lake being covered in the thing. This lake is lake maracaibo in venezuela.
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
Hah, I love the amusing hippie consipiracy theories. It seems as though some people really beleive that environmentalists are making all this stuff up. That myopic view wasn't chosen, it's all we have. Try not to see motives where you should be seeing circumstances.
After all, unlimited growth is the fundamental doctrine of the libertarian faith.
With appropriate use of technogoloy and a more selfless economy, unlimited growth is feasable and not all that difficult. From what we know so far, the universe is pretty big. I see no reason why we can't infest the galaxy at least. It might take a while, but we have up to 4 or 5 billion years to work out the details. Note: IANAL (I am not a libertarian...well... social yes, economic no)
What?
Unlimited growth is also a fundamental propery of cancer.
In North America at least, the trend has been going largely in the opposite direction. We are seeing REforestation rather than DEforestation. This is in despite of an increasing population.
m l
m ap1.htm
It can be a little tough to find good data given all the bullshit flying around but here's a map that shows the amount of forest land in the US from 1620 onwards:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/1605/gg96rpt/chap7.ht
The interesting things is that we are see a dramatic resurgence of forest land here in the US. A big part of the reason, apparently, is more efficient farming practices which have allowed us to restore a lot of farmland back to forests. Here's a map showing the trends from 1982 to 1997:
http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/LandUse/Gallery/
A move to more densley packed cities is also a contributing factor to reforestation.
Article such as the one Zonk cited are a favorite of the hard left environmental movement. These 'studies' cherry pick data to paint an alarmist picture. The media usually swallow these article whole with little crtical thought. In the end, these distorted pictures don't do anything to help real environmental progress.
I think common sense is evidence enough. This is happening on a world scale, unless you can point out areas of the planet's surface that have been devoid of human interaction over the last 20-30 years. As far as seasons go, the effects that the study concentrates on tend to be long-term rather than seasonal, so seasonal evidence would be pointless.
Look at the basic facts; we are on a planet with finite resources. World population is growing, and human consumption of resources is growing.
Long term, the math doesn't work out. It's not a case of if we screw up this planet, it's a case of when, and more people equals acceleration towards that point, more space used, more fuels used, more products consumed.
The main problem is that as a planet, we all have to act to make it a sustainable environment. This means actually reducing what we use, not slowing down, or keeping it the same, but actually reducing the amount of resources we use. If one country *cough* decides to ignore this fact, it undermines the point of the exercise.
As far as your comment about hippies who want the developing countries to starve to death; well, they already do starve. But if world poverty was wiped out tomorrow the world over, the developed world would have to change its consumptive habits overnight for the world to sustain itself.
At the end of the day, everything on this planet is not okay, and all of our eggs are in one basket.
The UN estimates war, pests and salt have destroyed 14 million palms.
All that good Rosie luvin gone. Tragic.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
To see more photos than the BBC offers, you can either order the book here (and murder another tree), or view some of the images in these PDF reports.
I'm all for raising funds for sustainability of ventures like this however a project of this magnitude should be far more accessible to the public than having to drop $250 on the book. A significant problem beyond our negative impacts on the planet is the ignorance surrounding subjects like climate change, pollution, and toxic contamination. If people have only a vague idea that what they use is causing so much damage then limited access to usable information is certainly a problem. The biggest problem though is that consumers really aren't all that aware of what they do, and don't care to think about of how big an impact they have on the environment or geopolitics. Unfortunately climate change is apathetic about apathy. Scenarios range from big storms to sea level altitude causing a super-volcanic event but the real data generated does show clear reaction to the industrial revolution.
Increasing wealth in places like China is the reason for a lot of the environmental destruction we are seeing now.
The world simply can't support 6.5 billion people living at 1st world standards. So, in the long run, more humans = lower standard of living for everyone.
Well, yes. To paraphrase the South Park underpant gnomes' plan: 1) Obtain appropriate technology, 2) ???, 3) Unlimited growth!!
The fundamental problem is that sustainable unlimited growth is physically impossible in the nature. Yes, as one AC already pointed out in this thread, there is cancer, but I am not sure you want to use that as a model of a sustained unlimited system as it kills the host in the end.
I don't understand why this is so hard for the economically indoctrinated people to understand? You cannot expect that the physical reality conforms to your economic theories -- it works the other way around.
The owls are not what they seem
What will we run out of? SPACE. Every person takes up a certain amount of space, and furthurmore, an additional amount of space is required to support that person in terms of manufacturing of goods, growth of food, and housing. Housing can be minimized by putting most people into skyscraper cities, but agriculture is still very much 2 dimentional, and results in space that people can't live in.
You need to expand industry, housing, and food production faster than the population expands. All this expansion results in developed land that then can't be used to gather those supposedly infinite resources.
Yes, the critical point has not been reached yet but it is time to slow down a bit. Why now and not later? It is better to err on the side of caution -- just like one should slow down from 65 when approaching a tight turn.
In fact, I don't see why I should make a case for slowing down and developing more sustainable technologies. The burden of proof should be on you if you wish to continue on this same, unsustainable path. Can you say when the critical point will reached? No? So let's slow down, develop the necessary technology and living style (yeah, you might have to give up that SUV) for environmentally sustainable societies now. If it turns out things weren't as bad as expected, no real harm done. Some people didn't make as much money as they could have. Big deal.
The owls are not what they seem
Yes, as one AC already pointed out in this thread, there is cancer, but I am not sure you want to use that as a model of a sustained unlimited system as it kills the host in the end.
Yes, we are a "cancer" or "virus". If we're good at it, we try to keep the host alive as long as possible. And yes, the host will eventually die. We just move on to the next host. I'm not concerned about economics. That's an animal thing. I'm talking about life. We don't need economics to live. We just need life. By the time we cover the entire planet, we will have outsourced most of our (mineral at least)needs to other planets. Or do you think we'll never get off the planet. You might be living with a closed mind, but we are not living in a closed system. It appears that we are due to our ignorance of what's "out there" and our failure to exploit it up to now, but we aren't.
The fundamental problem is that sustainable unlimited growth is physically impossible in the nature.
Well, as human beings, I like to think that we can work "beyond" nature. Besides, how do you know it's impossible in nature? How do you know that the universe isn't doing just that? You're limiting yourself to planet earth. You might want to think a bit more "macro" and a bit farther into the future. It's ours to make or break.
Oh, and it's not "obtain appropriate technology". It's - use technology appropriately. In fact, that's how I stated it before, so I'm uncertain as to where you came up with "obtain appropriate technology".
What?
All of the cities in India that have a Coke plant blame part of their water shortage on Coke.
Coke in India has toxins in it.
Coke's defence is, well it is a drought, and the USDA doesn't have a problem with what we are selling. They have never challenged (to the best of my research) the fact that their is lead in the soft drinks, just the fact that it is unsafe
Coke is trucking water into the villages that it has plants, as a good will gesture
Coke offered Coke as fertilizer to farmers, but it turned out to have lead in it that made the land unfit for farming.
We don't use up the water. We contaminate it. and while extracting plutonium from water is fairly stright forward, it is very expensive due to the fact that you really do have to get essentially all of it not 99% of it.
Most farmers vote on a single issue. Water rights.
So yes we will not run out of water, but we may well wind up with far less potable water than there is demand for.
As a bit of indirectg evidence that Humans are the problem. The only place on the planet that has a healthy eco system of large mammals is in the areas of Cambodia that have so many land mines that pochers refuse to go, and large crocs only exist in the war torn regions of Africa.
The statement that there are enough resources for humans, falls apart if you asume that we are to be living in an ecosystem and not trying to manufacture everything we need.
Back to water. Have you noticed the number of public drinking fountains lately? They were everywhere thirty years ago. Now They are almost extinct. Do you pay a water bill? Have you pulled on up from twenty years ago?
Why do you think that Intel recycles 3 million gallons of water a day, and puts it on their website?
I am not someone who is anti-development. 500,000 people are going to move to California next year, and I am one of those lobbying that we should be building housing for these people, and that the new housing should be near the city centers.
Yes, many of the Indians that are objecting to Coke are Marxists, and Coke is doing a lot to sanitize thier image. But, that does not change the fact that their is a big fight over potable water, indicating the potable water is indicating that it is a limited resource.
Work bio at MMWD
Ok. Fine and dandy, but it sure sounds a lot like the stage 2 in my previous post. Where's the technology? Where are the plans?
Well, as human beings, I like to think that we can work "beyond" nature.
Quite frankly, as a physicist I don't know what you mean by "working beyond nature". You can't break the laws of nature. The only thing you try is to work around the limitations, but even then you're limited. Yes. I've got a closed mind in the sense that I don't gamble our grandchildrens' existence on "oh well, we'll have things figured out by then".
The owls are not what they seem
We have unlimited resources wherever there is mass.
Even if we had the technology to utilise that mass as you are clearly thinking, the resources are obviously limited by the amount of mass available.
The laws of physics have not disappeared, and so there is no such thing as "unlimited resources".
It's official. Most of you are morons.
It wouldn't be so bad if people in first world countries didn't waste so much resources. Everytime I see someone commuting to work in an SUV, I think, wow, what a a waste of resources. There's no reason they couldn't be driving a smaller, more efficient vehicle, except that driving an SUV makes them feel special. Which they aren't, because everybody has one. There's a lot of other waste going on too. With energy and all that. There's no reason to have the A/C on to 15 Degrees Celcius. You can live in 30 degrees. Just drink more water. Oh, and in the winter let it be 15 Degrees in your house. Just put a sweater on if you are cold. I'm not a saint when it comes to the environment, but at least I try. I use public transit, and even ride my bike when possible. At least give it a little effort. Most people don't even try to help the environment. It almost seems like they are trying to see how much damage they can do to the environment.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Hi, may I react on this, as i think i know where i am talking of.
I am wanting to preserve some 50 square KM, yes KM of forrest down in the chaco Paraguay.
However everyone calls me a nut.
The problem is that it is almost impossible to control. to get there is a 2 to 3 day travel. up and down a week.
It is not people in paraguay cutting there but bolivians and yes your beloved argentinians stealing the trees. As they have good roads on the other side of the borders. (check the maps)
A big problem is that the border ad forest police is so coccupt and it is very easy to steal trees.
Then there are the farmers without earth. That always claim new land. Funny that they alwas claim a forest and never an empty farm land. Well if it is not cut while they are present there, it is very fast cut after they got their will and then they are gone again. A better name would be farmers without trees
Luckely the politics here are slowly shifting their position on these matters
I even thought of hiring several of these farmers to replant trees, but they rather don't it takes effort.
Then there is another maybe bigger problem
Soja delivers a 10 times higher profit then forest, meat (cows) a 5 times. Unless people will pay the real price for wooden it will be cut and not replanted
Well so if you are not going to invest from ideology, likely loosing your investment anyway through stealing, having a lot of headacke yes i have to agree with them, I would be a nut.
One way to balance the cost would be payment for greenhouse reduction, but polluting countries see saving trees not as a way of reducing greenhouse gasses. (I do monitor the COP Conference of Partys on these issues)
But if you have a 100.000$ laying around be my guest and save the world, yes 50 square KM of naitive forrest is likely cheaper then your house you are living in.
Do your calculus
geetings
ing. John van der Pol
If people want more info feel free to reply and i will answer
There are no stupid questions, Just a lot of inquisitive idiots. (from a good friend)
Note that the *cough* in parent's post should be aimed at Canada, not the US as was likely intended. Unfortunately, my country does tend to be a little frivolous with things...
The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say. -Anais Nin
/spends far too much time on the internet
I am trolling
We passed the point of fully "sustainable" around 1850 or so - every year after that we produced more waste products that can be broken down by natural processes in a year. I'm not talking about CO2 or iPods here - I'm talking about vegetable matter and human waste. Heat is another consideration as well - our current use of energy produces significant amounts of heat and not all of it is radiated into space.
To consider a "sustainable" environment and a closed system you are going to have to look at how things are going to be in several hundred years. Recycling is going to be a big deal, because the energy required to smelt ore into "new" metal isn't going to be around. Nor would any right-thinking individual let someone produce the waste products and heat from lighting up a forge. Why would you anyway, when you can just go over to the dump and pick up something ready to be "reclaimed"? Remember, that if we really want "sustainable" we better start thinking about some significant population reductions. Quickly, too.
Pollution and waste management are but one side of the equation - the other is input resources. We can spend money today on the future and building our ability to obtain resources from elsewere, or we can spend money today on reducing the population so we don't have to later. There is a third alternative - let everyone keep knocking up their Significant Other and having 14 children. Especially popular in third-world countries. We will, of course, drown in our own waste products if we don't bake from our own waste heat.
The population in 1850 was less than 100 million people. At that level we can be 100% fully "sustainable" and the natural processes on the planet will recycle all of the waste products. Waste heat won't be a problem either. We just need to decide between "open" or "closed" system and plan for the future. Should we decide on "closed", we better start reducing the population, drastically, and soon.
Ok. Fine and dandy, but it sure sounds a lot like the stage 2 in my previous post.
We're still in stage one.
Where's the technology? Where are the plans?
In stage 2. What's the rush? We'll get there...if we do it right and develope sustainable lifestyles.
Quite frankly, as a physicist I don't know what you mean by "working beyond nature". You can't break the laws of nature.
Not trying to. But I am thinking beyond the planet. And beyond my lifetime. By working beyond nature, I mean stop acting like animals. None of our motivations are exclusively human by any means. Our ability to choose not to kill or harm others is the only thing that seperates us from the animals. Our willingness...well...that's other story.
My point is that there are more enough resourses right here on this planet to sustain everybody quite nicely. The problem is a political one where there are those who want everything exculsively for themselves. I'll repeat myself to say to you that all shortages and scarcities are no more than an agruement over the price. Once we get over that, we can all live like kings. And I would wager that the planet could easily support more than 20 billion of us. The only thing stopping us is the will.
What?
The link in the article just goes to the press release.
The actual book (full content for both screen and printer resolutions) is here
My brother works for http://new-chapter.com/ - they carry medicinal mushroom products and do a lot of research in that area. There is a certain species of mushroom that releases a high level of nutrients into the soil, accelerating the growth of plants and trees growing near the mushrooms. I don't feel that it would be such a difficult task to re-forest the world if we really wanted to.
World population is growing, and human consumption of resources is growing.
Buckminster Fuller and other have successfully pointed out that as we progress, we can always do more with less. So consumption doesn't necessarily have to be directly related to population growth. More and more evidence is surfacing that all our problems with "limited" resources is political, not natural in any way. Consumption by itself is not a problem. The real problem come from those who want those resources exclusively for themselves. The problems of developing countries has nothing to do with nature. It has everything to do with powerful, selfish humans...many of them from "1st world" countries.
What?
Seriously, when people are expressing scepticism, other people try to muzzle the sceptics. What has happened to the academic freedom of expression and development of science through critique and open debate? When it comes to the global environment it seems that critique is muzzled instead of being refuted with arguments in an open scientific debate.
For an example of this here on /. just see the post you replied to. This person was expressing his scepticism, and the post is modded down as flamebait. Looks to me like some moderators don't want an open debate on this topic.
For an example of this in the scientific world, just look at what happened when the accredited scientist specializing in game theory and environmental statistics Bjørn Lomborg published a book that (among other things) pointed out that the United Nations Environmental Programme (who published TFA) had abused statistics to paint a more devastating picture of the global environment than could be concluded if statistics were used correctly.
Maybe the point to be highlighted is one of judgement. If you're crossing a rope bridge, over an abyss, and, you think it's showing signs of giving way, do you sprint for the other side or do you go gingerly, testing as you go, looking for more proof of what's happening? In the first world, the infrastructure that maintains our lifestyle is not ruggedly robust, or, highly redundant. Redundancy as a concept is, historically, only yesterday's news. The internet is an example of an infrastructure built with redundancy in mind. So, if the biosphere is showing signs of change, do we hope for benign change and/or for science to sprint to the rescue? Sir Francis Bacon, one of the fathers of deductive reasoning, suggested we had to wrest the secrets of life from nature, like a mythological hero wresting a prize from some monster. I think many, maybe all of us, are subject to living, in part, in the heroic age, and, I think that is the greatest danger. The ancient Greeks fostered the idea of hubris as one of mankind's greatest weaknesses. The philosophy of the heroic age doesn't hold in an indeterminate universe and science shouldn't be seen as the ultimate big stick that will beat back the threats of nature.
Life, as we know it, is characterzed as an non-equilibrium, open-system. The sun rains down ~10^24 calories per year on the biosphere. Carbon based life forms, in the perfect mileu of water, harness this energy in various ways.But it's a system of systems and subject, as much as we know, to Systems Theory. If we know change is in the works do we risk positive feedback and trust in science to carry us past any threat?
There is a strong consensus that climate change is happening. Will climate change force a parameter shift that will invite a runaway state? The concept of key species tells us that specific species are necessary to maintaining the ecology of an eco niche. Could climate change destroy key species and cause collapse of ecosystems. This brings on the old bogey man of the domino effect.
Change is inevitable, so it's really a matter of placing your bet on science as the ultimate super hero, or, do we begin to exercise caution now to mitigate against change. After all there's no place like home.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
The changes on the Brasil and Paraguay side are mainly caused by the construction of the Itaipu plant, the largest hydroelectric plant of the world (or at least it was... is the one in China finished yet?). The net result in terms of environment preservation is positive, since this is a renewable and clean energy source. In fact, Brazil is one of the world leaders in clean energy.
The filesystem is the package manager
So we have absolutely plenty of space left on Earth; the question is how well we use it. Clearly with the current problems of the world, we're not doing so efficiently.
The best way to predict the future is to create it. - Peter Drucker.
For years I have been looking for an atlas that shows both the ancient political boundaries and the ancient geographic boundaries.
Agreed -- an ancient/modern atlas would be instructive and interesting.
Perhaps best implemented as a digital atlas? Flash animation, something like that, with a slider for timeline so you can cruise the centuries?
-kgj
-kgj
Do you realize that you just wrote that just one person not acting will prevent making a sustainable environment?
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
You'll have to provide some sort of definition here. I'm sure the word I'm familiar with is spelled "capitalism". Or, is that an attempt at snide political humor?
Capitalism is a better answer than communism. Why? We have observe that capitalism works better than communism in the real world with real people. Socialism is demonstrating the same end result as communism right now.
Now, it won't answer questions along the lines of "what is 2 + 2", but I don't think that's what you meant.
Your third line is self-contradictory. A solution is a solution. If, however, you mean we might think something is a solution when it's not, then all your thoughts and conclusions are in that basket as well. You have no magic knowledge.
"But if world poverty was wiped out tomorrow the world over, the developed world would have to change its consumptive habits overnight for the world to sustain itself."
Yep. That's why simply sending gigatons of grain is not ever going to work. It will only create a dependant welfare state. Better to raise those people to a higher technological and informational level so they can also enjoy higher production, lower birth rates and greater personal freedom.
You'd be for that, wouldn't you?
At the end of the day, you just described all of Earth's history. And?
It's not so much that the current view is necessarily myopic, it's that certain peoples would enforce long range changes based on such shallow information. And, they would do it based upon poor models and distorted data.
"Why is this bad?" - As an experiment to demontrate why it is bad, get yourself a goldfish in a bowl and then don't clean the bowl for a few weeks.
As for your suggestions...
a) Do you have any idea the amount of water you would have to pump up hill?
b) Coastal water's are dying or dead and the ocean is not looking healthy either.
c) I'm not affraid of "hippies" but I am affraid of people who think you can purchase a replacement rainforest once it has gone. Leaving the mess to "clean up after we get rich" is what caused the problem in the first place.
"Hippies want developing countries to starve to death" Don't let the facts upset your consumption driven political bias: The US consumes 50% of the total output of the planet, so you have to ask who benifits when poor countries rape thier local environment? I'm damm sure it's not the "hippies" or the poor bastards that live there.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Change is not the problem, it's the rate of change. I would not like to here when a 5 mile wide rock slams into the planet but 1000 years later nature would have done her work and the earth would look pretty much unchanged....except for the lack of fauna. Rapid change is doing the same thing now, we are observing "the sixth great extinction" and we are precariously perched at the top of the food chain.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Why is it useless, because it does not have the features YOU want?
"Does the atlas show the climate changes from the last few 1000 years?"
A - No, why don't you support them by adding it.
"Does it show what things looked like when you could grow olives in the UK?"
A - No, why don't you post some snaps from that time to help them out.
"Does it show that Hastings was much much closer to the shore in 1066 than it is now?"
A - As per another post, satellite photos in 1066? Acurate measurement in paces?
"Does it show the human settlements on the Mediterranean that are now underwater due to sea level changing hundreds of years ago?"
A - Not sure what you are talikng about, Vennice is SINKING, stone age settlements were THOUSANDS of years ago.
"Or does it take a myopic temporal view specifically chosen to "prove" their political point?"
A - INA Phycologist but I would rate that statement as a classic example of "projection". The rate of change is what has thinking people concerned, not the fact that Californian mansions are sliding into the sea.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Hmmmmmm, greeeeen.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Aparrently the Sunni's built lots of small dams to regulate the water in the marshes and screwed things up. The Shites have been busy blowing-up the dams and putting the water ways back on thier original paths. Saddam is not alone however, Ethiopia was known as the "bread basket of Africa" in the early 1900's and then off course there was that whole "dustbowl" thing in the USA.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The BBC are quoting the UN, your own quote from TFA starts with "The UN estimates...". Also the quote includes the word "salt", in other words Saddam's water plan. Your post makes it sound as if Saddam were the only "leader" to ever deliberately fuck up the enviroment to enforce his will. Maybe you don't realise it but sprinkling depleted uraninm all over Iraq is also considered to be an environmentally unfreindly thing to do.
Here is a list of BBC articles concerning the marshes, even the oldest article from Mar 2003 describes in detail the plight of the Marsh Arabs. You will also note that besides reporting many times on Sadam's input to the problem they also have an article about the US aiding in thier restoration.
If you look at the facts instead of the posters on the wall of your own political bubble, you will find an infinte number of shades nestled between black and white.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.