In the late nineteenth century, Kurdistan was the epicenter of environmental disasters – including frequent severe droughts, extreme cold spells, locust infestations, floods, and epizootics – famine, and violence. Peasants, pastoralists, and the urban dwellers, of the region, were in great anxiety while the Ottoman central administration and its officials in the provinces went about implementing a sophisticated policy based on political, economic, and ideological motivations. The Sheikh Ubeydullah uprising occurred in this imperial context under specific environmental conditions, as the spring of 1879 of drought conditions took an even more dramatic turn and was followed by an extreme cold episode in the winter of 1880. Ottoman and British archival reports routinely mention the severity of weather conditions and their consequences for the residents of Kurdistan. The peasants and pastoralists of the region sought help for ongoing drought conditions, crop failure, and livestock loss. Famine not only uprooted rural residents of the region but also drove them from villages and pasturelands into cities. Some of them sought shelter and refuge inside religious shrines. This paper intends to examine the Sheikh Ubeydullah uprising in the eastern portion of Ottoman Kurdistan against the Ottomans and Qajar Iran in 1880 from an environmental perspective. It will offer an alternative reading to conventional historiography that situates the Ubeydullah movement as the first Kurdish national struggle against Ottoman and Iranian imperial power. Thus, it reveals the role of transregional, global, and planetary factors in shaping an enduring political problem in the Middle East in general and Kurdistan in particular.