Before the Master Plan - Restorative Redevelopment of Devastated Ecocultural Landscapes - page 27

years? A thousand years? How far? And what is the periodicity of sustainability or
even its overall effectiveness?
The problem is that we have billions of alternatives when we try to visualize all
the restoration strategies that have been raised about the marshlands as a combina-
tory set—billions of alternatives which you want to avoid like the plague. Then there
are possible ones. You can't do that either. Then there are plausible ones. “Plausible
ones” are things that more than one person believes are possible. And then there is a
much smaller set that may be feasible, meaning that we could actually do that or this,
or this, or this. And what you want to be able to do is to narrow the range toward the
feasible, knowing that you're not going to hit the best. Then you should hope that you
can implement something, knowing that once you get there, the process starts again
and people can change their minds. So what you're looking for is a short time plan
with high adaptability: maybe ten years, maybe twenty years, but not longer than that
because conditions will change, especially in a country like Iraq and especially in a
traditional culture like that of the marshlands. How do you get to that point?
One way is to design an alternative future. Let's say that we want a large wetland;
we want people to live in grass huts, we want ecotourism, we want this, we want that.
If you're designing a master plan, the problem becomes how you get there, and the
big question mark concerns the implementation strategy. And usually you fail. The
second approach is to start with the present and then to design a set of programs and
policies and ask in a simulation of some kind, “Where is that going to take us?” The
problem in this approach is that you don't know where it's going to take you. So each
of these two approaches has a serious and risky flaw.
Then there is the incredibly difficult problem of the chain of decisions. Here we
are, and we know we have a history. And we know we have facts on the ground. And
we know we have some constants. We know our geographical location. We know
we're a part of the water system of Iraq and Turkey. We know we're ultimately subject
to Turkish decisions. We know some things, such as assuming that we want to keep
the people in the marshes despite their possibly inhospitable nature. And then we're
going to embark on a set of assumptions. We're going to say, well, if this happens
first, then this is assumption number one, then two, three, four, and so on. The master
plan for the Iraqi marshlands (USAID 2004) probably had one thousand assump-
tions, each of which had its own budget. The problem is that if you embark on the
most influential assumptions, the ones that drive the system, and if you have chosen
the wrong primary assumption, you've lost. In other words, you've gone forward in
one direction, whereas according to your original master plan you should have gone
forward in another direction. Therefore, every combination of those assumptions
leads you to a different master plan in space, time, consequences, and so on. So the
idea that you can hit that ideal master plan and get it done is absurd. And this is espe-
cially true for a large, complicated, changing area such as the Iraqi marshlands.
So what do you do about that? The answer is to try to deal with the strategic
policies and let the tactics go. It doesn't matter what the tactics are if you lose the
strategy. And the questions, then, are “What are the leading issues?” and “Shouldn't
you spend time assessing the likelihood of feasibility from the combinations of the
leading issues before you go into the tactics?” The answer is “yes.” And that's why
it turns out, in my experience in the last two to three decades, that scenario-based