Islamic Revolution and the Environment; Forty Years of Turning the Source
Different groups have highlighted various aspects of the detailed statement by the leader of the Islamic Republic known as the “Second Step of the Revolution.” Reform-minded newspapers have been accused of emphasizing aspects of the statement that contradict its spirit.
Statistics that provide an objective picture of the current state of the environment in Iran mostly resemble data from an indictment against a fallen government with state officials standing trial. Like the prosecutor’s statement in the Nuremberg court.
Statistics such as ninety percent of Iran’s wildlife has been eliminated over the past forty years, forest areas have been halved, Iran has reached first place in soil erosion in the world and loses two billion tons of its soil annually, soil erosion creates desertification, and therefore Iran ranks first in desertification (resulting from human factors) in the world, and every minute another thirty square meters of Iran’s land turns into desert. Seventy percent of Iran’s plains have dried up, in half of the plains conditions are so critical that cultivation is effectively prohibited, on average groundwater levels have dropped ten meters, and most of Iran’s lakes have either dried up or are drying up. And of course, to these statistics must be added the enormous volume of water, soil, and air pollution, whose descriptions themselves are stories that would bring tears to one’s eyes.
But this hypothetical indictment differs from what, for example, was or could be presented in a court like Nuremberg in one fundamental way: the defendant is an established government that has no intention of denying the indictment that the complainants have prepared against it. More precisely, it should be said that the bulk of the data that are the documents for preparing such an indictment have been published by state institutions and in Iran’s official media. And repeatedly, daily and in various forms they are republished.
Why do environmental agencies and media affiliated with the government have no qualms about repeatedly republishing reports and news of the land’s decline in Iran? This question can be expanded somewhat and the ambiguity arising from the aforementioned cases can be added to it: Do the terrifying statistics of environmental destruction and pollution in Iran and the indifference of Islamic Republic officials towards them indicate opposition to or at least indifference to this system on environmental matters?
On paper, that is, based on what experts consider upstream documents of the Islamic Republic’s system, the answer should be no. Environmental protection is among the principles of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran, there are comprehensive laws and regulations for various environmental sectors, and environmental pollution is considered a crime and subject to prosecution in Iran’s judicial system. Although there is no specific statement from the founder of the Islamic Republic on the necessity of environmental protection, the leader of the past thirty years of the Islamic Republic system has repeatedly spoken about the importance of this issue. Iran’s official media also constantly broadcast environmental reports and documentaries, inviting people to protect the environment.
The reality is that the Islamic Republic has no fundamental contradiction with environmental issues. But the point is that the environment is not a project and mission of this system. And to the misfortune of Iran’s living creatures, the environment and natural resources have become victims of one of the main projects of the Islamic Republic: ensuring food security through agricultural self-sufficiency. The Islamic Republic, like any other totalitarian system, sees itself as implementing a specific project (the expansion of Shiite Islam as a mission and the existential philosophy of the system) and all components of the vision must necessarily conform to the requirements of implementing this project.
Twentieth-century experience shows that there is little difference between totalitarians’ behavior in the human sphere and their behavior in the natural environment.(1) The denial of individuality in the human sphere becomes a denial of biological diversity in the natural sphere; an ideological ideal that in the human sphere forces everyone to conform to it, in the natural sphere becomes a quantitative goal that nature must necessarily achieve. Even if it is the barren deserts of Kara Kum that must compete with the water-rich plains of Georgia and Alabama in cotton production, or the sparrows of China that had to abandon this vast country so that the per capita wheat production in this country would reach the expected level.(2) Or the steep mountain slopes or even urban parks in Cambodia that all had to become rice paddies to provide food for Pol Pot’s soldiers who were supposed to conquer the Indochinese Peninsula and revive that country’s ancient empire.
From the beginning of the Islamic Revolution, agricultural self-sufficiency has been a fundamental policy for achieving complete food security. Based on the assumption that providing all of Iran’s population’s food within the country’s borders would insure the Islamic government against any hostility and attacks of global arrogance. The quantitative dimensions of this historical and unprecedented project are vast. The average production of agricultural products in Iran (despite droughts in the past two decades) is now approximately four times that of 1978. Part of this growth is of course due to the doubling of agricultural land area. In the very first decade of the revolution, the Islamic Republic added to Iran’s agricultural lands an area equivalent to everything that had been cultivated over the past seven thousand years on the Iranian plateau. But we said that the production of agricultural products increased fourfold, not doubled. Where did that other doubling increase come from? From increased productivity and mechanization of agriculture and irrigation? No. Only by increasing agriculture’s share of Iran’s water resources. Water and only water. This was the factor that helped the Islamic Republic of Iran in executing its project for developing agriculture in Iran.
Over these forty years, they built dams on every river and at the end of every valley wherever they could. Wherever they could, they drilled wells. The number of wells after the revolution increased twenty-five fold, from forty thousand wells in 1978 to around one million wells in the current situation. All of Iran’s dams before the revolution were 19 with a total reservoir capacity of 13 billion cubic meters. The number of dams built or under construction in the Islamic Republic is 315 with a total reservoir capacity of 75 billion cubic meters. In addition, the construction of 124 dams with a reservoir capacity of 22 billion cubic meters is also in the study and design phase.
Clear and transparent numbers speak to us. The volume of Iran’s renewable water resources is currently around 100 billion cubic meters annually. Of these 100 billion, a maximum of 40 billion is for human use (the environmental sustainability indicator of the United Nations Environment Program) and 60 billion cubic meters must go to nature. Of that 40 billion cubic meters of human share, 2 to 4 billion is used to provide drinking water and 4 to 6 billion for the industrial sector (in different sources these amounts may be mentioned as somewhat different, but this is the average). Therefore, agriculture’s share of Iran’s renewable water should have been at most 30 to 35 billion cubic meters. How much is it currently using? At least 80 billion cubic meters! That means nearly 50 billion cubic meters (which is itself half of all of Iran’s renewable water) in excess of its legal share and in accordance with the ecological requirements of Iran. Where has this 50 billion cubic meters been extracted from? From Iran’s nature.
This is why we hear every day that another lake or river has dried up. This is why even Iran’s most water-rich rivers, the Karun and Caspian rivers, now have less than a third of their previous volume, and the discharge of Iran’s longest river, the Karun, has fallen to one-fifth of its normal average. Most of Iran’s inland lakes have either dried up or are drying up. And of course, the loss of soil moisture over most of Iran has created the chronic and difficult-to-cure disease of soil erosion and desertification, which was described earlier. Interestingly, humans in Iran’s sphere only have the right to use 40 billion cubic meters of renewable water, but the Islamic Republic system has built or is building dams with twice this volume.
In summary, the system’s project for Iran’s agricultural self-sufficiency has effectively led to the drying up of Iran. What is called the land’s decline and the destruction of the environment in Iran is in fact the side effects of implementing this very project. It is worth noting that besides these devastating side effects, the project itself has not succeeded, as after forty years the amount of food imports to Iran has increased and whereas before 1978 less than ten percent of Iran’s food needs relied on imports, this need has now reached more than forty percent.
Of course, in what directly relates to environmental management, that is, in the realm of responsibility of organizations such as environmental protection and forests and rangelands and fisheries in the natural environment and municipalities and the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development in the human environment, inefficiencies and systematic corruption similar to other sectors are also seen. But the decline of the environment, rather than being caused by inefficiency and corruption in environmental management, is, as stated, the side effects of imposing the agricultural self-sufficiency project on Iran’s landscape.
This ambitious project turned every water source and river it found to behind dams. Wherever there was even slight moisture in the lower layers of the earth, it sucked it into the fields. The soil moisture that was lost caused the vegetation and yield of the land to decrease. As vegetation and the yield of the ecosystem declined, biological diversity also began to decrease. That ninety percent of Iran’s wildlife that was destroyed in the past four decades were not mainly victims of excessive hunting or insufficient habitat protection, but were actually victims of ecosystem change due to the crude manipulation of humans in the hydrological system of the landscape.
With less water, soil, and vegetation available, it is natural that no ecosystem can have the same living conditions as before. What is concerning is that despite the obvious emergence of the effects and consequences of imposing the agricultural self-sufficiency project throughout Iran’s landscape, its implementation continues. In the law of the sixth development plan of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which is considered the upstream document of all the country’s implementation planning, it has been stipulated that the food for at least ninety-four percent of Iran’s population must be produced within the country. In the same law, the optimal population limit of the country is set at 150 million people, meaning it is expected that Iran’s land can provide food for nearly 130 million people.
Currently, a maximum of 45 million people’s food is produced domestically and the rest is imported. To triple the current amount, the system has seen no way out but after four decades of completely overturning Iran’s hydrological system and consuming ninety percent of renewable water and depleting most of the groundwater, to turn to new projects such as extracting deep water and cloud seeding and desalination and transferring water from the Caspian Sea and Persian Gulf.
Poverty, by clinging to nature, has brought people along with the system (and incidentally the most victimized of them in the face of Iran’s drying up, the rural people). Civil society, even the most extreme opposition groups, do not currently give much priority to controlling Iran’s drying up among the country’s varied issues. The prosecutor and complainant and defendant and judge and jury are engaged in assumptions other than the crime that has occurred.
The system, just as it has never been concerned about the side effects of its upstream project on the environment, is not concerned about the political and social consequences of these side effects either. There is no indictment for Iran’s environment. No Nuremberg either. At least on this account, the system’s mind is at ease. This is how, on the fortieth anniversary of the Islamic Revolution, the revolution’s export reaches Iran’s deepest underground layers.
Source: DW
