The efforts of former Iraqi exile Azzam Alwash to restore Iraq's Mesopotamian Marshes, thought by many scholars to be the site of the Garden of Eden, are detailed. In the early 1990s, Saddam Hussein laid waste to the wetland in order to eradicate the rebellious Marsh Arabs; he constructed embankments to block the Tigris and Euphrates rivers from feeding the marsh, reducing it from twice the size of the Everglades to a fraction of its former self and destroying what had been a thriving ecosystem.