The Iranian physical environment has been fundamentally shaped by the tides of global affairs in modern times. But to what extent can we observe an effect which the environment exerted on those who lived in it, or on those who endeavoured to manipulate it? Is it a story of a reciprocal relationship between humans and nature, or rather a tragedy of a careless and short-sighted manipulation of the environment, the repercussions of which millions of Iranians experience today? To what extent was the interaction between the environment and human actors influenced by dominant narratives of nationalism, development, and environmentalism? This panel will offer diverse perspectives on these questions. The chronological time frame of the panel will begin in 1902 with the dawn of oil exploration efforts that would result in the formation of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in Iran’s south-west. The first paper will discuss the reciprocal impacts of the oil company’s operations on the one hand, and the local climatic and disease environment on the other. It will also explore the real and perceived effects of the environment on the well-being of those whose lives and livelihoods were tied to the oil industry – such as Indian and Iranian workers, European technical and managerial staff, and local residents. The second paper will look at major nation-building projects throughout the Pahlavi era, such as the construction of the Trans-Iranian Railway (1927-1938) and that of the Karaj dam (opened 1961), through the prism of the correspondence between colonial environmental narratives, the nationalist Pahlavi ideology, and environmental change. It will examine in what ways the Iranian environment transformed as both Iranians and foreign experts strived to impose upon it their own perceptions of development and progress. The third paper treats the encounter between the natural environment and infrastructural projects over the last decades of the Pahlavi Dynasty. Examining projects such as the construction of hydroelectric dams, modern roads and irrigation canals, the paper will discuss how material elements in the natural environment shaped these projects, and informed their planners’ perception of nature. The last paper will complete the multi-dimensional approach, tracing the emergence of trans-national ties around environmental action throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Studying diplomatic/technocratic and academic networks through environmentally-oriented journals and international conferences, this paper will describe the mutual influence of the Iranian and global environmentalist communities on each other in a manner that de-centers the state without disregarding it.
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The rich body of scholarship on the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) has made invaluable contributions to an elucidation of the political and economic dimensions of the oil company’s power in Iran and the lived experience of Iranian oil workers. It has also left room for investigations into the ways in which the oil company’s operations were shaped by, and in turn shaped, the environment in which it developed. This paper explores the interrelations between the emergent oil industry and the environment of southwest Iran through the lenses of sickness and health. Matters of health and unhealth were, from the inception of oil exploration, intimately bound up in the emergence and success of oil imperialism in Iran, mandating the Company’s investment in public health programs and a robust modern medical infrastructure. In its examination of the climatic and disease environment of southwest Iran, this paper addresses three main topics pertaining to the rise of the oil industry and corporate colonialism in Iran: 1) environmental dangers to the health of Iranian and Indian labor and European staff, and the AIOC’s response to those dangers. Such hazards included the heat and endemic and epidemic diseases; 2) British perceptions of the environment of southwest Iran as threatening to the physical and mental health of European employees and their families. Exploring the discourse of climatic peril places the development of the oil company’s mostly British enclave within the context of European scientific debates about the suitability of the colonization of the “tropics”; and 3) the impact of petromodernity on the disease environment of the region, including the flow of diseases in the Persian Gulf and the frequency of disease epidemics.
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In this talk, which represents my ongoing dissertation research, I will ponder upon the intersection of environmental history and Iranian nationalism in the context of the Pahlavi state, very rarely discussed in the literature. In what ways interventions in the environment shaped, and were shaped by, nationalist discourse during the Pahlavi era? Were state projects such as railroad construction, swamp draining, land reclamation, forest conservation, dam construction, and natural disaster recovery, a direct result of nationalist world views, whose prominent banner was the conquest of nature? I will focus on two of the more environmentally-impactful undertakings, namely the construction of the Trans-Iranian Railway in the 1920s and 1930s, and the campaign to dam Iran’s major rivers (such as the Dez, Karaj, and Sefidrud) during the Post-War decades. Relying on the records of governments and private firms, memoirs and oral histories, daily newspapers, prose and poetry; I will argue for the centrality of an environmental narrative commonly used in Middle Eastern colonial settings, which compelled the Pahlavi state to transform its environment, considering this environmental transformation a key to restore the lost fertility, power and grandeur of pre-Islamic Iran. Foreign experts and diplomats involved in these undertakings, such as the engineers of the Danish-Swedish consortium Kampsax or the head of the American Development and Resources Corporation David Lilienthal, tended on the other hand to contemplate the extraction of Iran from a medieval, Oriental state, relating both to its natural and social landscape. Imposing Western development upon the diverse Iranian environment encountered grave challenges and consequences, which exposed the blind spots of the appealing narrative, as well as social tensions along national, cultural, and class lines.
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Mx. Shima Houshyar
Following World War II, Iran underwent a rapid process of technological development and modernization, aimed at national regeneration and the integration of territories. From the 1950s through the 1970s, the Iranian government employed foreign corporations and other international institutions, such as the World Bank and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), to carry out a program of regional rural development in southwestern Iran. These projects included building large hydroelectric dams, high-tension electrical transmission lines, modern roads and irrigation canals, and the modernization of agriculture through the use of chemical fertilizers and tractors. As planners, policymakers, and engineers attempted to remake nature and nation, they confronted multiple social and material obstacles. This paper examines the affordances of the natural environment in the unfolding of development and engineering projects in Iran. I argue that the biotic and abiotic elements of nature, such as water, soil, rocks, mud, and parasites actively shaped the ways that these infrastructures and development schemes were envisioned and executed, while also creating frictions and obstacles to these programs. At the same time, these large-scale engineering projects drew on and mobilized varied and contradictory understandings of nature as “beautiful/bountiful” or “dangerous/in danger” while inspiring literary, visual, and cultural productions that critically engaged with these new infrastructural developments and visions of a “pastoral past.”
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Bryan Sitzes
This paper will outline two avenues of Iranian participation in global environmental movements in the 1960s and 1970s: the diplomatic/technocratic and the academic. In recent years, historians of Pahlavi Iran have begun to more extensively examine the country’s entanglement with the world, via the arts, drug control regimes, and intellectual networks, to name only a few. The diversity of global connections means many avenues remain available for elucidation.
Iranians increasingly engaged their global peers on matters of “the environment” (as it came to be popularly known, or mohit-e zist) via intergovernmental conferences, professional training exchange programs, and by forging transnational links between universities. Tracing these links can help us understand how global trends affected Iranian environmental thinking and policies, as well as help identify the roles Iranians played in shaping environmental agendas on the global stage. The latter approach contributes to ongoing efforts to decenter EuroAmerican histories of environmentalism. Iranians hosted international conventions (the 1971 Ramsar Convention) and actively participated in major international conventions elsewhere (the 1972 Stockholm Convention). They also participated in regional activities that tightened their connections with neighbors in ways not always noticed in the historiography (e.g., the 1974/75 Convention on the Protection of the Caspian Sea, the 1975 IUCN International Meeting on Ecological Guidelines for the Use of Natural Resources in the Middle East and South West Asia). Tracing academic links brings in an aspect of forging ties that relies less on the viewpoint of the state.
This paper will draw from the journal published by the Game Council of Iran, Shekar o Tabiʿat (est. 1959), published memoirs, and the journal of the University of Tehran’s Center for the Coordination of Environmental Studies, Mohit-shenasi (est. 1974/75). These sources expand our knowledge of Iran’s environmental networks, the policies Iranians advocated on the global stage, and how Iranian environmentalists presented their country to the global community.
