While much of the contemporary focus regarding climate change, water scarcity, and toxicity in Iraq pertains to the environmental impacts of fossil fuel extraction, construction and war, this paper discusses how the nationwide replacement of abundant building materials that date back millennia in the Tigris and Euphrates River basis, such as clay, gypsum, lime slake, bitumen, and reed, with industrial materials (e.g., kiln-fired brick, Portland cement) spawned overlapping environmental, economic, and social crises of scarcity in the twentieth century. Today, the production of cement alone contributes to eight percent of global carbon emissions, a figure which continues to rise as concrete maintains its position as the most produced synthetic material in the world. Through a re-narration of large-scale infrastructure, construction, and housing projects in the mid-twentieth century, this paper suggests ways to unravel material, labor, and aesthetic hierarchies through a mapping of material abundance in twentieth century Iraq. For example, the National Housing Program, which was launched in the 1950s, contributed to the large-scale transformation of Iraq’s environment and the industrialization of architectural production. Technical training and vocational schools for young Iraqis urged a decontextualized approach to building the physical landscape, while alternative contextual approaches that suggested innovative approaches to building with materials already abundant in the region were swiftly suppressed. Although this deliberate shift in material systems and architectural production was designed to usher in Iraq’s commercial future, it actually signaled environmental demise. This paper thus argues that this epistemic shift, which aesthetically, economically, and politically devalued existing material systems, substantially contributed to ongoing environmental crises in Iraq, which have been further exacerbated by fossil-fuel extraction and war. By unraveling the underlying assumptions and assumed hierarchies of current material systems in Iraq, it might be possible to not only map abundance once again, but also move beyond a crisis-oriented disempowering imagination of global climate apocalypse.