By Jamie Watt
This week I am half a world away from Kurdistan, the place my family has called home for more than a decade. I am back in America, camping with my boys in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness of northern Minnesota, a million acres of lakes and forest. We paddled in, made camp, and for days saw almost no one. At night, no city lights, only stars. In the mornings, no trash on the ground, not so much as a bottle cap, because everyone who enters carries out everything they carry in. My sons felt the beauty of it without me saying a word. And the whole time, one thought kept pulling me east: Kurdistan deserves a place like this, and Kurdistan can build one.
Because here is the secret of this wilderness: none of it is an accident. The Boundary Waters looks untouched because Americans spent a century choosing not to touch it, laws passed at the highest level, and millions of ordinary visitors honoring a simple ethic. Preservation is one of the most deliberate things a nation can do.
Kurdistan never needed to borrow this idea from anyone. In Barzan, a conservation tradition has held for more than a century, since Sheikh Abdul Salam and Sheikh Ahmad Barzani placed the natural world under protection. Hunting is forbidden by custom. Even in the hardest winters, when firewood would have been the easy answer, the people refused to cut their trees. Today those forests shelter brown bears and even the rare Persian leopard. Conservation did not arrive here from abroad; it took root in Barzan before most of the world’s national parks existed.
And now the Kurdistan Region is building on that heritage in a formal way. Last October the KRG joined the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the global standard-setter for protected areas, and signaled its intention to designate sites including the Barzan Nature Reserve, Qara Dagh, and Halgurd-Sakran National Park: more than a thousand square kilometers around the highest peaks in Iraq. This is the same government that has lifted the Region’s green cover from 15 to 20 percent and is planting seven million trees in the Erbil Green Belt. The vision is already underway.
For proof of what formal designation can deliver, Kurdistan need only look at a neighbor. Jordan’s Dana Biosphere Reserve covers 320 square kilometers of canyon and highland, draws more than 30,000 visitors a year, and has created enough local jobs that the reserve largely pays for its own protection. A developing, Muslim-majority country took a stretch of rugged land and turned it into both a sanctuary and a livelihood. And Kurdistan’s mountains rise higher and greener still.
The Boundary Waters taught me that keeping a wilderness takes two commitments at once. From the top, the steps are practical: write the park boundaries into law under the international standards the Region has now signed onto; train a ranger service, something Barzan’s own protection force already models; build marked trails, campsites, and certified local guides; and let village families run the lodges and keep a share of every entry fee, so the people who live beside a park become its fiercest defenders. Start with one flagship, Halgurd-Sakran finished properly, because a country’s first great park teaches it how to build the next. And from all of us: the ethic. Take out what you bring in. Leave the springs clean. Teach the children that an unspoiled valley is a gift each generation hands to the next.
My boys will remember this week for the rest of their lives. I want the families of Kurdistan to have that same gift to give: a night of stars over Halgurd, a valley with no sound in it but water, a park with a Kurdish name on the world map. There is a saying that Kurds have no friends but the mountains. Friendship runs both ways. The KRG is already planting trees whose shade today’s leaders may never sit in. A national park is that same act of faith on a grander scale, and everything I saw this week, in a wilderness my own country chose to keep, tells me Kurdistan is ready to keep its own.