No more haggis!

The traditional Scottish dish, made by taking a sheep’s heart, liver and lungs, onion, oatmeal and spices and boiling it in a sheep’s stomach, is at risk because lung worms are thriving in the warming climate. The parasite has always been an occasional problem, but infections in sheep are rising because there are less hard frosts on grazing land and the worms can stay on the surface longer, where they’re eaten by the sheep. The more sheep that get infected with lung worm, the harder it is for butchers to get their hands on a decent lung.

Adding to the problem is the fact roundworm and fluke, have become less common in sheep. If evidence of these parasites isn’t found in sheep droppings, then farmers tend not to give the animals de-worming treatments.

Haggis makers have their fingers crossed and some are sourcing lungs from Ireland during shortages. Offal lovers everywhere are no doubt anxious for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to tackle the problem.

Photo: Ian Britton, supplied by FreeFoto.com

In any history class you’ve ever taken, the first thing you probably talked about was the Fertile Crescent. The half-moon shaped chunk of land in the Middle East, watered by the Nile, Euphrates and Tigris rivers, was the birthplace of human civilization. Today, we associate the area with endless deserts, oil and improvised explosive devices.

But that’s about to change. The endless desert part, anyway. Last Friday, the United Nations announced a plan to restore Iraq’s wetlands (according to some scholars, the site of the Garden of Eden) and list them as a World Heritage Site.

The Iraqi wetlands (saying it over and over doesn’t make the idea seem any less weird, does it?) once covered a tens of thousands of square miles and were home to snakes, lizards, frogs, fish, water buffalo, gazelles, jerboa, birds and tribes of people known as the Marsh Arabs or Ma ˤdān (’dweller in the plains,” a disparaging name given to them by desert tribes).

Today, the wetlands are mostly decimated. First, fighting during the Iran-Iraq War spilled into the area. Then, in the 1990s, Saddam Hussein began draining the area and diverting water flow in order to expand military access to the land, gain more political control over the Marsh Arabs and flush out rebels after a failed Shia uprising.

When U.S. forces invaded in 2003, only some 400 square miles of marsh remained. Once Hussein’s regime was brought down, locals began destroying the dams that held water back and allowed the wetlands to flood again. Today, more than half the original wetlands have been restored, and thousands of birds and fish, as well as the Marsh Arabs, have returned to the land.

The U.N.’s project, which is being partially funded by Italy, will concentrate providing safe drinking water and renewable energy for the Marsh Arabs, planting reed banks and beds and managing the re-flooded areas to ensure the return of plant life. If all goes well, Iraq could be able to approach the World Heritage Committee for listing in two years.

Image: “Marsh Arabs poling a traditional mashoof in the marshes of southern Iraq.” Wikimedia Commons/U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Digital Visual Library