Iraq is one of the most oil rich, water abundant states and yet it is today the fifth most vulnerable country in the world to climate change due to decreased water, food insecurity, and rising temperatures. How did this happen? This paper argues that the human impact on the environment is not agnostic, but the direct result of a legacy of political violence that produced Iraq’s current state of crisis. It develops this argument by analyzing life in one of Iraq’s most potent symbols of national heritage: the southern marshlands, which in 2016 became a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Water insecurity is a major contributing factor to the environmental vulnerability Iraqi citizens face today. The paper first charts a history of Iraq’s post-war reconstruction policies that amplified biodiversity conservation of the marshes, but gave foreign country donors carte blanche to direct the project in ways that fit their extractive interests in the water and oil resources located within the same geological field. It then analyzes how marshlands residents developed strategies to stay on the land, asserting their inheritance to the wetlands in spite of rising levels of salinity and pollution that make the marshes nearly uninhabitable. In so doing, the paper foregrounds a theory of environmental justice Tishreen revolutionaries have articulated that begins not with the call to “green” the future—campaigns which have fueled extractive industry in Iraq—but with an economic and political reckoning that re-centers Iraq’s citizens and their sovereign right to land.