This paper will address the emergence of a new environmental movement among Iranians in presently and their attempts to acknowledge numerous environmental concerns inside Iran through social media, personal weblogs or attending protests to focus the attention of the government the issue, for example to prevent the drought of the Lake Urmia in the North West of Iran. Further, the paper will conclude that the lack of support and commitment of the Iranian government in a state where more than 80% of the country is run by the public sector, has failed to prevent numerous environmental problems. In order to address such issues, small or larger nonprofit organizations have been established in Iran in the past decade but in order to implement the impact in society in a way that becomes a significant Indicated of daily lives of Iranians, the government sector and the non-government have been colliding more than cooperating. Although during the presidency of Mr. Mohammad Khatami, the government’s efforts have been somewhat tangible, and the outlook somewhat optimistic but gotten worse since 2005. The Iranian environmental law was formed in 1971 but here I address a few examples of the violation of environmental cases that have occurred in the past ten years and that have been left strategically unmanaged. These examples deal mainly with the destruction of forests, the drying-up of various rivers and lakes, the killing of protected species, and air pollution in big cities such as Tehran. The paper also includes the case of the drought of Lake Urmia where the government not only did not take any insert “remedial” action to address the issue, but also imprisoned thirty of the local activists in the region. In conclusion, with the growth of the environmental movement in the world Iran needs to at least make the effort on a par with some other developing countries in the region but as long as the attention domestically and internationally is concentrated on nuclear programs, the ecosystem issues are slowly being pushed to the side and that in the long term will affect not only Iran, but other countries in the region.

This paper is part of a project that investigates the politics of waste in the West Bank. By exploring a spectrum of waste sites and circulations - from land-filling to cross-boundary sewage flows and the growing Palestinian-Israeli trade in used goods – the broader project analyzes some of the effects of geographical separation, state-building and continuing colonization today. Waste is inseparable from the questions of value and visibility. To historicize and to observe its circulations and the discourses and practices to which it gives rise is therefore crucial to understanding shifts in value, visibility and the emergence of everyday categories. This paper examines how the emergence of a new ontological entity called “the environment” has intersected with the era of separation between West Bank Palestinians and Israeli citizens. Specifically, it investigates how sewage was made over in the latter twentieth century from a central issue of public health under the banner of “sanitation” into a transcendental concern of the (sometimes “shared”) “environment” – at times as a resource and at others as pollutant. I draw on two years of fieldwork to examine how the smells, expertise, bureaucratic tanglings and debates to which sewage flows, cesspits and infrastructures give rise help us understand the spatio-temporal experience of living in the West Bank today. The questions this paper will ask include: What are the properties of sewage as a substance, and the infrastructures that have been developed to manage it, that make it different from other infrastructures that today make up the Palestinian Authority’s practices of statecraft? For example, how do sewage and ideas of “infrastructural violence,” “good governance” and “cross-border” flows in the particular case of post-Oslo Palestine speak to questions of sovereignty, the temporal scope of planning and the geographic scales of autonomous government?

Historical records suggest that the cultivation of hulled wheat—wheat varieties with non-threshable grain, such as emmer and einkorn—began in the Fertile Crescent some 10,000 years ago. Together with barley, emmer was the dominant crop in the ancient Near East and later spread to Europe. The hulled wheat has almost disappeared throughout Europe and the Middle East in the second half of the twentieth century—surviving only in isolated areas in the face of agricultural modernization, market forces, high yield expectations, and national regulations that limit availability, desirability and marketability of hulled wheat. The loss of these varieties has profound implications not only for agricultural biodiversity, but for regional and global food security. Despite the odds, small farmers in Turkey still grow hulled wheat for food, for household consumption, market sales and as animal feed. In fact, the cultivated areas have increased in recent years in Turkey’s northeast, such as Kastamonu, after a significant reduction in the last four decades. Some of the factors for the revival and renewed interest in hulled wheat in Turkey can be linked to market mechanisms, direct marketing to urban consumers who look for healthy and minimally processed food, the emergence of niche markets and rising market prices for hulled wheat. This paper argues that, in the case of hulled wheat, market mechanisms have contributed to the conservation of agricultural biodiversity in complex ways. Relying on ethnographic and archival research in Turkey carried out 2007, 2009 and 2010, this paper demonstrates that market-mechanisms, especially in the form of marketing traditional crop products, provide an opportunity for the conservation of agricultural biodiversity. However, the emergence and maintenance of markets also depends on external interventions to manipulate consumer demand. With its investigation of the complex factors that have led to the revival of hulled wheat in Turkey and the effects of market mechanisms for the conservation of hulled wheat and livelihoods, this paper contributes to debates on food security and the future of agriculture in the Middle East.

This paper analyses Wadi Araba - a scarcely populated district in the South of Jordan considered as one of the country’s ‘poverty pockets’ - as a laboratory for different, often competing development projects and practices. Focusing on the type of knowledge that forms the basis of interventions, the paper points out the ambivalence and intertwinement between techno-political forms of expertise and attempts to include local knowledge, especially in the field of nature conservation. Based on field research in Jordan since 2009, the paper shows how both forms of intervention and understandings of knowledge are intimately tied together, and how development practitioners frequently shift between them. It argues that this shift becomes particularly visible when institutional strategies change, or when the articulation of local knowledge does not conform to the wishes of project planners or does not yield the expected results. As Mosse points out, “what is read or presented as local knowledge (such as community needs, interests, priorities and plans) is a construct of the planning context, behind which is concealed a complex micro-politics of knowledge production and use” (Mosse 2004:19). As a case study, the paper draws on conflicts around the set-up and management of Protected Areas in Wadi Araba. In spite of numerous forms of participatory intervention and negotiation, there are strong movements in Wadi Araba against new proposed Protected Areas. Local opposition has already led to the cancellation of one of them and the questioning of others. This opposition resulted in the involved experts’ shifting positions from hailing participation to frustrations about the stubbornness and limited vision of the locals. It has also lead to internal discussions about the usefulness of participatory approaches. The paper argues that when local knowledge is not articulated according to plan, it is made invisible or bent to suit planning requirements rather than used as a base for rethinking strategies of intervention. However, participatory approaches and practices have developed dynamics that cannot entirely be discarded any more. They continue to provide a challenge to the resurfacing of techno-political conceptions of knowledge.