Another caller to The Program, a Persian-language call-in show I host each week, is from a smaller town. He stands beside a trickle of wastewater coursing through the street: “We haven’t had municipal water for five days.”
The voices sound less like news than like prognosis—a country short of breath.
Iran is drying up. Not only its land, but its civic lungs. The skies over Tehran and Mashhad hang gray with smoke; taps sputter, rivers have turned to beds of dust.
Political choice
On the program, my guest was Kaveh Madani, an Iranian water scholar who briefly joined the government in 2017 to help address the crisis and left within months after being accused—without evidence—of espionage.
Madani’s view, refined over two decades of research and public warnings, is as bracing as it is simple: Iran’s environmental catastrophe is not primarily a natural disaster. It is a political choice.
The country has spent beyond its ecological income, mortgaging rivers and aquifers to service short-term promises. When scientists say so, their work is treated as a security risk. “When knowledge becomes ‘security,’ water is no longer security,” Madani said. The result is a landscape—and a society—running on a deficit.
In Iran, the term water bankruptcy describes a national ledger that no longer balances: demand far outstrips supply, aquifers are pumped down, the ground in places is subsiding, and, as Madani notes, land that sinks does not rise again.
The problem did not begin with climate change, even if warming now sharpens it. It began with governance—an edifice of big-build solutions (dams, canals, inter-basin transfers), political patronage and the reflex to appease unrest with engineering. Water is moved from province to province to quiet protests. More concrete is poured.
More rivers are chained. The political horizon, not the hydrological one, dictates the map.
By 2025, Madani’s argument is stark: environmental collapse is now braided with economic free fall and political isolation. You cannot fix the rivers without reforming the state.
Dried up
If that sounds abstract, the callers to the show provide the texture. A man from Sari, on the lush Caspian rim, described forests in retreat and soil racing to the sea.
A resident of Rasht said rivers he fished just three years ago are now lanes for cars. A Tehrani, furious and weary, ticked through familiar grievances—corruption, arbitrary arrests, a ruling class insulated from consequences—and asked whether anyone in power still believed in stewardship.
The only honest first step is to stop making things worse: tell the truth about the books, end prestige projects that burn scarce capital, align prices and incentives with reality and accept that some losses are irreversible.
After that, recovery is measured in years, not news cycles—and only if nature cooperates.
This is where Iran’s story diverges from the American impulse to frame environmental problems as consumer choices, solved by shorter showers and fewer flushes.
Individual virtue matters—especially in a crisis—but austerity at the household level cannot, by itself, balance a national water budget that is upside down by design.
The state sets the price of water and energy; it licenses (or averts its eyes from) illegal wells; it awards contracts that entrench use in the wrong places; it criminalizes data; it treats environmentalists as suspects.
In that world, scolding people for litter while subsidizing waste is a form of political theater.
The nearest analogue may be the Appalachia of extraction: places where policy, patronage and geology created a cycle of dependence and damage—then blamed the people who inhaled the dust.
'Luxury issue'
Iran’s twist is the securitization of science. If measurements are secrets and models are subversion, managers fly blind. You can’t manage what you refuse to count.
There is also a moral geometry to scarcity. For years, environmentalists were caricatured as elites obsessed with lakes and Persian cheetahs while ordinary people struggled with sanctions and inflation.
That framing has collapsed. When taps go dry in Tehran—the political capital and the country’s most privileged city—the environmental crisis stops being a “luxury issue.”
It becomes infrastructure, public health, and, in time, migration. In the program’s stray audio clips, you can hear the new rhythm: not ideology, but symptoms. Coughing. Fatigue. A neighbor’s bucket brigade. Politics is loud; dehydration is quiet.
The obvious question has two answers, and they are in tension.
The first is civic: keep attention on the crisis so politicians cannot look away. That means a culture of care (less waste, more local stewardship) but also a stubborn insistence on transparency: publish data, protect researchers, allow the press to ask hard questions without fear.
The second is structural: accept that environmental recovery is inseparable from economic and diplomatic reform.
Iran can, with humility and time, plan its way out of parts of it.
That will require a different politics: one that treats knowledge as a public good rather than a threat; one that measures success by the quiet arithmetic of aquifers; one that accepts, as a precondition for any national renewal, that nature does not negotiate.
The rain may come this year. It may not. But until knowledge flows freely, Iran’s drought will not be meteorological—it will be moral.
