In early August 2024, four environmental activists lost their lives while trying to control a wildfire in the Abidar mountains near Sanandaj, in Iran’s Kurdistan province. They were not the first to die this way. In recent years, at least 20 Kurdish environmental defenders have been killed in similar circumstances across the Zagros forests. These deaths are often reported as accidents, as if they were isolated misfortunes. In reality, they are part of a broader story about environmental destruction, political marginalization, and economic exploitation.
These deaths also reveal a fundamental truth: environmental safety cannot be entrusted to a state whose priorities are shaped by profit and repression. Only democratic control over land, water, and forests by the people who depend on them can prevent such losses.
Iran’s environmental crises are not only the result of natural hazards or local mismanagement. They are deeply tied to the structure of political power, the priorities of economic policy, and the treatment of marginalized regions such as Kurdistan. In this context, defending the environment becomes a political act. The struggle to protect forests, rivers, and land is inseparable from the struggle for justice, equality, and survival.
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Fires and Human Causes
Wildfires in Iran’s Kurdistan region are overwhelmingly caused by human activity. Local environmental organizations estimate that more than 90% of these fires are linked to human factors, while natural causes such as lightning account for less than 5%. At first glance, this statistic might suggest negligence by individuals. But the reality is more structural and systemic.
The “human cause” often lies in the political and economic systems shaping land use and resource management. Unregulated agricultural expansion, speculative land grabbing, and development projects with little ecological oversight create highly flammable landscapes. Construction without environmental assessment increases vulnerability, while forest protection agencies are underfunded and sidelined.
To stop the fires, it is not enough to regulate agriculture from above. The land must be managed by those who work it, not by corporations or political elites whose interest lies in short-term gain.
When fires break out, local activists often respond faster than state authorities, risking their lives to protect their ecosystems. Yet these same activists face harassment, arrest, or even violence from security forces. This contradiction points to a deeper problem: the state’s role in environmental destruction is not only about absence but also about active complicity in policies that degrade the land.
State Absence or State Complicity?
When discussing environmental crises in Iran, the question is often framed as a matter of state neglect — a government that fails to act. But in Kurdistan, the pattern suggests something more complex: the state is not simply absent; it is often a participant in the destruction.
The Iranian state operates not only as a political authority but also as an economic actor. In many cases, it behaves as what scholars call a system of political capitalism — where economic power is concentrated in institutions directly linked to political elites. In this model, profit is not generated through productive industries but through control over resources, extraction, and monopoly access to public assets.
One key concept in understanding this system is anfal — the appropriation of natural wealth without private ownership. In practice, this means that forests, rivers, and other ecological assets can be treated as property to be exploited by state-linked entities without accountability. Large sectors of Iran’s economy are controlled by “parallel institutions” such as the Revolutionary Guard, which oversee vast infrastructure and resource projects. These bodies answer neither to local communities nor to independent oversight, and their activities frequently result in severe environmental harm.
An alternative would see these commons removed from state-military control and placed under collective stewardship — where local assemblies, environmental workers, and scientists share power over how resources are used.
Political Capitalism and Environmental Destruction
Political capitalism in Iran has left a visible mark on the country’s ecosystems. Major infrastructure projects — often presented as symbols of development — have become engines of ecological collapse. Large dam constructions, river diversions, and water transfer schemes are carried out by institutions linked to the political elite, with little or no environmental review.
The IRGC’s engineering arm, for example, has built dozens of major dams across the country, including in ecologically fragile areas like Kurdistan. These projects have disrupted river flows, destroyed habitats, and contributed to deforestation. The same institutions have overseen water transfer projects, such as moving water from the Piranshahr region to Lake Urmia, which have further stressed local water systems rather than restoring them.
For the political class, these ventures generate revenue, expand control over strategic resources, and reinforce patronage networks. For local communities, they bring soil erosion, depleted aquifers, and biodiversity loss. Environmental degradation is not an unintended consequence but an accepted cost of a development model built on resource extraction for central benefit. This pattern is especially damaging in peripheral provinces, where ecological damage combines with chronic economic underdevelopment.
A socialist alternative would dismantle the monopoly of military-linked companies and redirect resources into community-led ecological projects — restoring rivers, reforesting land, and creating dignified local employment without destroying the environment.
The Self-Sufficiency Doctrine and Its Ecological Costs
Since its establishment, the Islamic Republic has treated “self-sufficiency” as a core development goal. Official policy links national independence to the ability to produce all essential goods domestically — from agriculture to heavy industry. On paper, this may appear as a strategy for resilience. In practice, it has often meant expanding production without regard for ecological limits, especially in already fragile environments.
Agriculture in Iran’s peripheral provinces has been reshaped to serve these national objectives. Water-intensive crops are promoted even in semi-arid areas, ignoring local ecological conditions. In the Lake Urmia basin, for example, vast tracts of rangeland have been converted to farmland, requiring massive irrigation. The result has been severe over-extraction of groundwater, drying rivers, and the near-collapse of one of the region’s largest lakes.
This approach is further undermined by inefficiency. Official data show that roughly 30% of agricultural production is wasted, meaning that large quantities of water and soil nutrients are lost for no public benefit. The push for self-sufficiency has also facilitated the commodification of nature — allowing private actors, often with state connections, to profit from the sale of environmental resources. For regions like Kurdistan, the cost is not only ecological damage but also the erosion of traditional livelihoods that depend on a healthy environment.
A fair economy would break with the logic of extraction for the centralized capital in the Tehran and instead create networks of production and exchange controlled by workers and communities, ensuring that self-sufficiency means shared sufficiency, not local depletion.
Internal Colonialism and Ecological Exploitation
The environmental crisis in Kurdistan cannot be separated from its political status within Iran. The region is part of what scholars describe as internal colonialism — a system in which certain territories and communities are politically marginalized, economically underdeveloped, and ecologically exploited to benefit the dominant center.
In Iran, this dynamic often follows ethnic and sectarian lines. Predominantly Kurdistan, Ilam, Kermanshah, and West Azerbaijan rank among the lowest in industrial development and income, yet they supply raw materials, labor, and natural resources to wealthier central provinces. Data from regime’s own statistical agencies show that industrial workplaces employing ten or more people are concentrated in central regions, while the peripheries remain extraction zones.
This imbalance means that environmental damage in Kurdistan serves development elsewhere. Deforestation, overgrazing encouraged by central policies, and unsustainable farming practices are imposed without meaningful local participation. In the process, land and water are degraded, biodiversity declines, and local communities lose control over the resources they have relied on for generations.
For many in Kurdistan, environmental exploitation is not just an ecological issue but part of a broader pattern of political exclusion and cultural erasure. Protecting the land becomes inseparable from defending the community itself.
Internal colonialism in Kurdistan is not only cultural and political; it is ecological. Any path to environmental justice must include the right of Kurdish communities to control their land and resources, breaking the chain of extraction for the benefit of the capital.
Activists from the Chia Environmental Association, an independent group in Kurdistan, are shown extinguishing the fire with simple tools and without any government support.
Environmentalism as Political Resistance
In Kurdistan, environmental activism is rarely a single-issue cause. It operates at the intersection of ecological defense, community survival, and political rights. Protecting forests, rivers, and farmland is also a way of protecting livelihoods, cultural traditions, and the possibility of a future in the region.
Because formal political organizing is heavily restricted, environmental work often becomes one of the few available spaces for collective action. Activists engage in community mobilization, awareness campaigns, and direct intervention during environmental crises such as wildfires. These activities frequently confront the same state structures responsible for ecological damage, turning environmental defense into a form of political resistance.
This resistance is also intellectual. In many Kurdish communities, there is a growing effort to challenge dominant views of nature as merely a resource for human use. Instead, activists and educators promote an understanding of the environment as part of a shared life system — where harm to the land is understood as harm to the people. Through this lens, environmental justice is not separate from struggles against ethnic discrimination, economic inequality, or political repression, but deeply interconnected with them.
The environmental crisis in Iran’s Kurdistan region is not the product of isolated mismanagement or unfortunate accidents. It is rooted in a political economy that prioritizes resource extraction and central development over ecological sustainability and local well-being. Policies driven by political capitalism, the doctrine of self-sufficiency, and internal colonialism have combined to degrade land, water, and forests while deepening inequality.
The defense of forests and rivers is inseparable from the defense of workers, farmers, and women against state repression. Building popular councils that unite these struggles can transform environmental activism into a broader movement for social emancipation.
For the people of Kurdistan, defending the environment is inseparable from defending their rights as a marginalized community. It is a struggle that links ecological health to social justice, recognizing that survival depends on both. Efforts to restore forests or protect water cannot succeed without confronting the systems that produce environmental harm in the first place.
Globally, this case challenges us to think beyond narrow definitions of environmentalism. It calls for solidarity between ecological movements and struggles against racial, ethnic, and economic oppression. Environmental justice, in this context, means not only repairing damaged ecosystems but also dismantling the structures that allow such damage to persist. In Kurdistan, as in many other places, the fight for a livable planet is also the fight for political freedom and equality.
