It was the year 58 when we left Tehran for Noorabad Mamassani. My father was involved in his research project “Flood Control” which was supposed to be implemented in the Jungan section of Mamassani. The story was that if we could control the floods on the flood plains, soil erosion would be minimized and with the increased possibility of water absorption in waterlogged lands, the underground water table would also be strengthened.

We lived in Noorabad for a while and my father used to drive us to Jongan in a 15-minute distance by car. But after a while, our whole family lived in a caravan in the village of Poodnak and later in Dehshour. We covered the distance from living in America to Poodnak village in 3-4 years.

At that time, one of the main goals of the revolutionary country was to find ways to increase agricultural production. In fact, due to the efforts of the flood distribution team and the canals and dams they had built, and the water that was allocated to the region, the amount of crops also increased. Life alongside the villagers was very attractive when the combines harvested the wheat and the owners became aware of the weight of the wheat that year. Those who harvested more crops were extremely happy. More wheat meant more income and the possibility of buying trucks and other lands. However, many farmers from other regions pursued other ways to reach higher yields and income: digging legal and illegal wells and installing diesel or electric pumps…

Motor pump: The disaster that came upon Iran.

Our civilization is a canal. From several centuries before the rise of the Achaemenid Empire, the inhabitants of the land of Pars had learned that using the technology of qanats, they could draw water from the heart of the water-rich plains, but they did not overdo it. The amount of water taken was proportional to the amount of water available in the underground aquifers. Water management for drinking and agriculture was also based on the available resources. The engineers of ancient Iran, known as the mohandesan-e-ab, knew how to dig a limited tunnel with a gentle slope from the floodplain towards the foothills to reach the water at the “mother well”. The mirab, or water master, knew the output of the water and how it should be managed. The mirab was responsible for distributing the water among the shareholders. The farmers knew that they had to build with the limited water and be compatible with the climatic conditions of the land. Therefore, there was

After land reforms and the division of many agricultural lands among more owners, the role of the qanat also became a role in water, and drilling machines softened many plains. The sound of pump engines in Iranian plains increased more and more, and valuable water was easily accessible to both old lords and new owners. However, the speed of extracting water from aquifers was still limited. Obtaining a permit took time, and the decrease in groundwater levels in some plains led experts to declare them “off-limits” until balance was restored. The concept of balance was that the amount of water withdrawn should not exceed the amount of water replenishment. Replenishment is a concept that may mislead many. The groundwater table is replenished naturally through rainwater, seepage from rivers, or snowmelt. If the extraction rate is in harmony with the replenishment rate, the groundwater table does not change, but if the extraction rate is higher, the table drops and sometimes they had to dig

After the revolution, in most areas, the water supply gradually increased and with the decrease in the water table, some villagers were forced to migrate. In 1982, my father was told that in a region 50-60 kilometers southeast of the city of Fasa, due to the lowering of the water table in a dry area called Garbaygan, many villagers had either migrated or sent their husbands to work and earn a living in the outskirts of the Persian Gulf. In 1983, my father and his colleagues, after experiencing the “Jonghan Memseni”, were limited to that area with two bulldozers and several caravans. The Garbaygan area was very dry and perhaps two or three times a year, heavy rain would cause damage. The task of this group was to divert the path of the flood and spread it over the gentle slope of the plain, to create conditions for more water absorption. The flood occurs when the possibility of infiltration of the ground

At that time, we were living in Shiraz and my father was always traveling between Shiraz and Garmsar.

In 1984, my father expressed his concerns during a meeting with Mir Hossein Mousavi and his deputy, Abdullah Jassbi. I remember the outcome of that meeting was the approval of a trip to Mecca for three hardworking colleagues who were affected by the flood. Isa Kalantari, who was known to still have the American mindset, had to take on new responsibilities after his brother was killed in the explosion of July 7th. He came to our house several times and the topic of discussion during dinner was always about providing water for agriculture. I remember my father sharing his concerns about the state of underground water resources with the future Minister of Agriculture.

Although I was in high school and busy with studying and homework, I would still listen to discussions and read typed articles being edited. I knew the meaning of taking more than what is needed from the underground water table. I had seen how migration from the region and the displacement of waterless farmers affected the fate of their children, and at the same time, I witnessed some migrants returning to their hometowns. It was during those years that I became familiar with the concept of “reverse migration”. I spent my summers in 1965 and 1966 as an apprentice in Garmsar and got to know many farmers in the area. I heard their concerns and understood their worries better. Some of the farmers who had very little salty water in their wells just a few years ago now had so much water that after selling their watermelons and melons, they would each buy a few new Japanese trucks and show them off to the locals.

In the year 67, during a period when some universities were temporarily closed due to the Iraqi army’s missile attack on some cities, my father gave me a photocopy of an American security report on the Middle East water situation until 2000 to translate, so that I wouldn’t be unemployed. In that same year, when he was meeting with Mir Hossein Mousavi, he had explained to him that the water and climate situation in the Middle East would move in a direction that would require us to make the underground water resources richer than the surface water, and that relying on dam construction would not be a logical policy for many hot and dry areas in Iran, given the gradual increase in temperature and the possibility of changing rainfall patterns. In that meeting, he also warned about the management of agricultural irrigation and the need to reduce water consumption. Many of the discussions in that meeting were based on the same report and security predictions about the water situation in the Middle East. (The following year,

Isa Kalantari joined the Ministry in 1367, and I was also a student at Tehran University. It was my duty to take care of some of the entrusted items, and I would occasionally go to see him. These occasional meetings were held at 6 am on the 19th floor of the Ministry of Agriculture. Having morning tea with the Minister before going to class was an interesting experience. Once he proudly said, “We are becoming self-sufficient in wheat production”… Self-sufficiency may be an attractive concept from a nationalist perspective, but if you, like me, had spent some time working on water collection projects in water-scarce areas, you would probably ask yourself, “Now with which water?”

After the division of some organizations and institutions between the Ministry of Jihad-e-Sazandegi and the Ministry of Agriculture, the Institute of Forests and Rangelands came under the control of Jihad. Communication with the police station became less and less… In the 1970s, I saw him four or five times, and one time was in 1975 when I went to see him for a conversation. When he saw me taking notes, he asked, “Are you drawing my caricature?” And I replied, “God has done his work, I have nothing to do with it!”. Those days, his and Hashemi’s pride was getting closer to the government’s goal of wheat production.

In the years 75 and 76, I was involved in the work of the news headquarters of the International Conference on Rainwater Harvesting Systems and the publication of its bilingual newsletter. Reading the articles of professors and experts and reviewing translations had brought me back to the issue of water and soil, to the extent that I had abandoned my master’s thesis work in practice. Working in the media as a cartoonist on one hand and heavy management work on the other. In meetings with university professors, I repeatedly noticed that if wheat production continues at this rapid pace and groundwater is extracted without proper calculation, and the extraction exceeds the amount of nutrition, we will face land sitting and desertification. Desertification would result in many rural areas and the only solution would be migration.

In those years, the name of the flood distribution plan had changed to groundwater management. The concept of groundwater management was the same as flood distribution over floodplains to recharge the aquifer, but its definition was evolving step by step. One of its definitions was “water conservation above and below ground”, which used water conservation methods to prevent soil erosion, control floods, and enrich the aquifer underground. Professors and experts from the Education and Research Department of Jihad, under the supervision of Taghi Amanpour, the deputy minister at the time, were trying to gather convincing statistics and figures to present to Hashemi Rafsanjani, the commander of construction, to persuade him to pay attention to groundwater alongside dam construction. Based on calculations and research at the time and examining the country’s plains, they became aware that nearly 42 million hectares of the country’s land had small and large floodplains, but only slightly less than 15 million hectares of large floodplains had the

After the second of Khordad and the arrival of the Khatami team, some were hopeful that the president of the reformist government, who had come from the land of Kariz, would pay some attention to the plans for reviving aquifers and saving the dried-up qanats. However, he too was in love with self-sufficiency on one hand and under the influence of his energy minister, Habibollah Bitaraf, on the other. The rapid pace of dam construction did not decrease during his time in office and the Khatami team, who seemed to only compete with themselves, were looking for new valleys to build new dams. The water budget had also been forgotten, as if he had forgotten that nearly 60% of agricultural water comes from underground, not from dams. But money was only following the path of dam construction. During those years, rainfall was not far from expectations and according to the calculations of the Ministry of Energy, more dams could be

In those years, even though I was mostly occupied with drawing cartoons or writing satirical articles in the media, I would occasionally express my concerns on the scientific program “Kavosh Radio”. However, it was shut down in 1998. Later on, I would occasionally write articles, but it was in the spring of 2001 when I turned my attention to the sea and published two critical articles on the construction of dams in the Norooz newspaper, whose managers were also dam builders. The editors did not understand them, but Mr. Mohammad Khatami read both of them. He contacted me from the presidency and said that Mr. Khatami wants to see you and explain the reasons for criticizing the policies of the Ministry of Energy. Three days after the election of June 9, 2001, I went to the presidency and informed the president about the government’s negligence towards underground waters. I emphasized that Mr. Khatami, being a child of the desert,

The result of that meeting was gradual censorship of my criticisms of the government’s water policies. Even Norouz newspaper did not publish my response to the Ministry of Energy’s justification. I also left the newspaper. It was unbelievable to me that those who were supposed to be impartial and knowledgeable about the underground water resources, including Mr. Ardekani, the deputy minister of energy, who were from Yazd province, were ignoring the aquifers and disregarding climate change.

At the same time, I read numerous reports about the situation of the plains whose groundwater levels had dropped. These plains could have been saved through aquifer management, but the government’s budget was spent on projects such as Karun 3, Karkheh, Gotvand, and the surrounding dams of Lake Urmia and inter-basin water transfer plans.

Lake Urmia, which has its own tragic story. During the era of Hashemi Rafsanjani, when the water level rose so high that some landowners became concerned about their interests, lobbying for the construction of dozens of dams began.

The volume of the lake had reached over 30 billion cubic meters. The government decided to increase cultivation and farming in the Urmia Lake basin and build dams on the rivers, causing the lake to dry up. This trend intensified during the Khatami era, to the point where even Eisa Kalantari, who had left the ministry in 2003, raised his voice and warned that this trend would lead Urmia Lake to the same fate as the Aral Sea in the former Soviet Union…

In the area of Lake Urmia, tens of thousands of wells were dug. Dozens of dams and barriers were built, causing an imbalance between the lake and the aquifer of the basin. Now, the situation has reached a point where in order to restore the lake to its former state, not only do we need to close a large number of wells in the region to prevent groundwater extraction, but we also need to open the gates of the dams. Additionally, we raised our hands to the sky and prayed for some rain, hoping that the amount of precipitation and water collected would exceed the annual evaporation rate.

The human rights aspect of the story.

Today, I was reading sections related to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, according to the interpretations of relevant committees. The destruction of the environment violates several rights mentioned in the covenant. The destruction of the environment affects the standard of living of people, makes it harder to provide food, and prevents access to sufficient and sanitary water. It also harms the physical and mental health of people and even has cultural consequences. Now, let’s consider the fact that the government, through irrational exploitation of land and water by farmers, has accelerated the process of destruction of water, soil, and natural resources. This has not only made many of them homeless, but has also made it harder for them to access clean water and sufficient food.

The agriculture, which for decades has indirectly been under the control of government policies, now lacks access to safe drinking water. If the government fails to provide water for its citizens and ignores their rights, it is violating human rights. This violation is systematically occurring in various parts of Iran. It is bitter that instead of having a steady flow of water to meet the needs of farmers, this violation of human rights is ongoing and prevalent.

Which justice for the environment?

Agriculture in our country is poorly managed. Irrigation efficiency is low in Iran. Rainwater harvesting systems have not been established for better utilization of occasional and sporadic rainfall. The reliance on expensive projects is the basis of the management structure. Development in our country is unsustainable and there is no local environmental justice.

But the bigger issue is that in Iran, many projects have harmed another group in order to meet the needs of a certain sector of the population. In the name of development, dams were built, causing many villages, farmlands, orchards, and forests to be submerged. Not only have the human rights of the residents of these villages been violated, but the environment has also been destroyed. Building dams may have provided water for a group of farmers, but it came at the cost of harming another group.

Large agricultural projects, such as the sugar cane development plan, also had their own problems. They reduced water quality and made life difficult for people in areas of Arvandkanar and southern parts of Karun.

In addition, the use of poisons and chemical fertilizers and the pollution of groundwater at a lower cost of production, puts the health of people in different regions at risk. This in itself is an exacerbation of environmental injustice, when we know that the government and power are somehow behind it.

The campaign is at a time when work is difficult.

Everywhere you look in Iran, you see that work is scarce. Many wetlands and surrounding areas have dried up. The fortunate have become unfortunate. From overgrazing, there are carcasses left behind. The Jazmurian has become a memory. The troubled lake is a symbol of turmoil. The death of every wetland and lake is usually accompanied by a gradual decline in the underground water tables of that basin. As Dr. Ehsan Daneshvar says, we are caught in a cycle of misfortune. He says, “The cycle of misfortune is created by human interference in the natural cycle of water, and these continuous changes cause even more damage and make the problems of water resource management worse.” We consume more water than we have, and we go bankrupt. Then agriculture, which has been encouraged by the government (parliament or state) to produce wheat or rice in water-scarce areas, reaches a point where the well dries up and there is no

Governments encouraged farmers to plant more without considering the level of consumption and water supply, by providing loans, incentives, and rewards. The farmers also planted, maintained, and harvested…

The farmer is condemned to migrate, but today he has no land or water to cultivate, no crops to harvest. Many lands have become dry and turned into deserts. Becoming a desert is not good news. Over the past few decades, many lands have become unsuitable for farming and cultivation after enduring years of severe erosion.

In recent decades, many of the country’s plains have become water scarce and the land has subsided. The continuation of subsidence is leading to the death of the land and consequences such as the occurrence of large cracks and the creation of sinkholes are signs of this gradual death. Today, more than two-thirds of the country’s plains are either prohibited or critically prohibited, meaning that water should not be extracted from the heart of these plains, but if you visit many of these areas at night, you will hear the sound of pump engines. The farmer wants bread, but with the continuation of this situation, he will dry up the land and water that brings him bread and will kill the inheritance of future generations.