Host of nightly show The Program
At eleven o’clock each night, Tehran time, my studio, half a world away, seems to inherit the city’s fatigue. The callers gather like silhouettes behind a scrim of static.
As the lines open, I picture Tehran under its nocturnal dome, a sky not dark but dimmed, as if a giant thumb has pressed the horizon into a bruise.
The city breathes shallowly now. Pollution maps pulse in colors that feel less like data than diagnosis: orange, red, a purple so deep it suggests something beyond neglect, something closer to abandonment.
To the north, the Hyrcanian forests, once described by an old ranger as “green witnesses from before language,” have been burning for weeks. Flames move through those ancient stands with a slow, deliberate patience, as if obeying an unseen logic.
From a distance, these may appear as separate misfortunes, poisoned air in the cities, burning lungs in the mountains.
But the longer I listen to callers, the more the crises merge into a single story. In Iran today, even breathing has become contested terrain. Breathing itself is political.
Neither dawn nor dusk
Tehran, a metropolis of more than thirteen million, has offered its residents only a handful of clean-air days this year.
In Karaj, Ahvaz, Mashhad, Tabriz and Isfahan, air-quality readings have climbed into ranges Americans might remember from the rare weeks when wildfires smothered the West Coast.
In Iran, though, the crisis is not a season, it is a condition. Schools close. Emergency rooms fill. Children learn to recognize, by color alone, the days when they must stay indoors. The city moves under a half-light that resembles neither dawn nor dusk.
The voices that reach me on “The Program,” my nightly show, arrive with a clarity that often anticipates scientific explanation.
A mother whose children wake coughing. A factory worker whose exhaustion seems to begin in the mind, not the muscles. A man who runs a short errand and ends the day bedridden.
Later, experts explain these stories in clinical language: microscopic particles slipping through the lungs into the bloodstream, crossing the blood-brain barrier, raising the risk of heart disease, cognitive decline and dementia.
By the government’s own admission, roughly sixty thousand Iranians die each year from air pollution, or nearly 160 people every day.
Hyrcanian forest
Far from the capital, the forests fight their own losing battle for air. The Hyrcanian woodlands, recognized by UNESCO for their botanical uniqueness, have burned across the hills of Chalus and Dizmar.
Each morning, new smoke rises behind press briefings that insist the fires are “contained.” Despite years of warnings, Iran lacks any aerial firefighting ability.
These fires are not anomalies. They are symptoms of deforestation, unrestrained development and a bureaucracy that mistakes denial for strategy.
Nearly half the forests have already been lost. What should be a coordinated national response has instead become a volunteer effort carried out by the people least equipped to shoulder the burden.
Meanwhile a state capable of constructing an enormous surveillance apparatus remains unable to protect the most basic conditions of life: water that sustains, forests that stand, air that does no harm.
For years, Iranians have described political repression as a form of suffocation.
Now the metaphor has become literal. Cities are not simply policed, they are choking. Forests that once served as the country’s lungs burn in pale columns visible for miles.
The distance between living politically and living biologically narrows by the day.
Each night, as the program winds down, I repeat a simple invitation: send a message, and we will send you a link that connects you directly to our studio.
The microphone will pass from my hand to yours. It remains, against the scale of the crisis, a fragile gesture. But in a country where breathing grows harder each year, refusing silence is no longer only a political act, it is an act of survival.
My last caller tells me invokes rock band Nine Inch Nails in a proud, defiant voice: “I got my fist, I got my plan. I got my survivalism.”
I smile. She hangs up, and that is our show for tonight, I say. Take care of the person sitting next to you. I will see you tomorrow night at eleven p.m., Tehran time.
“We are off air,” my director tells me. I lower my forehead to the microphone, close my eyes, and take a long breath.
“In practice, administrations use pricing policies merely to cover budget deficits and may claim they want to develop renewable resources, while this has appeared in six development plans and has not been implemented,” Reza Sepahvand, a senior member of parliament’s energy committee, said in a roundtable discussion carried by Iranian media.
Sepahvand said political and commercial interference has pushed water policy off approved tracks, channeling investment into ill-suited mega-projects and heavy industry in arid regions and aggravating tensions between provinces and farmers. “What forces have pushed the country off the proper path of water management?” he questioned.
He cited the clustering of steel pellet plants around Ardakan in Yazd – a central desert region – and long-running fights over piping water from one region to another as choices that worsen shortages.
The debate comes as experts blame decades of over-extraction, unchecked urban growth and placing water-hungry industries in the desert – alongside drier weather – for pushing groundwater sources and lakes to the brink.
They say lasting fixes require enforcing ecological limits, curbing groundwater pumping, and shifting money from large dams and pipelines to watershed restoration and reuse.
Tariffs miss the real drain
Investigative journalist Amirhadi Anvari told Iran International that raising prices would make little difference and will be marginal at best.
“Iran uses more than 90% of its water in agriculture. The share of municipal drinking water is estimated at 6% to 8%, and industry at 2% to 3%. In these circumstances, changing the price of urban and industrial water will not make much difference.”
He said the core problem is not household behavior but the policy model guiding farms, arguing that the agriculture model is driven by ideology, not resource limits.
“The important point about the agriculture sector is that it is ideological. All top-level policy documents, laws and development plans under both leaders of the Islamic Republic – Khomeini and Khamenei – have been built on self-sufficiency.”
Anvari links self-sufficiency to expansion of irrigated farming despite dwindling supplies.
“To achieve food self-sufficiency, you must expand the cultivated area. Many of Iran’s rain-fed fields... have now been turned into irrigated lands. This was not the choice of farmers; it was an ideological program of the Islamic Republic’s leaders.”
Profiteering derails reforms
Mehdi Zare, a scientist who has studied environmental risk and infrastructure, said during the same roundtable that short-term interests across the system have repeatedly overridden sound planning.
“All of this has beneficiaries – from users to those who influence studies and decisions,” he said. “Unless we establish an order that can restrain short-term gains, stakeholders can bend trajectories and prevent the situation from reaching equilibrium.”
Zare warned that bias can creep in even at high-level policy meetings, shaping outcomes on issues such as securing Lake Urmia’s water rights, limiting new wells around Tehran, or managing migration to the capital region.
“Advisers may be top experts, but if they have a bias, they can guide decisions so that, for example, the priority is not the lake’s environmental flow or reducing extra abstraction,” he said.
Other specialists in the event echoed calls to sequence reforms. They argued that real-world pricing only works alongside non-price measures such as clearer water rights, enforcement, modern irrigation and industrial recycling, particularly calling for transparency on where revenue goes.
They also questioned utilities’ reliance on water sales to fund operations, saying the model creates pressure to sell more rather than conserve.
Sepahvand said policy should curb politically driven megaprojects and re-orient investment toward groundwater recharge and watershed management, adding that any tariff rises should follow – not replace – structural fixes.
The experts in the event, however, cautioned that without governance changes to insulate water decisions from narrow interests, higher bills alone will neither restore depleted aquifers nor ease tensions between regions competing for dwindling supplies.
The commander of Iran’s Forest Protection Unit, Colonel Majid Zakariaei, said fires this year have scorched about 46,000 hectares of national land, forest and rangeland.
He told state media that from March to November more than 2,300 fires were recorded nationwide – a 12-percent rise in the number of incidents compared with the same period last year, though the total burned area was about two percent smaller.
Zakariaei said around 95 percent of fires were linked to human activity, including careless visitors and campers, compounded by drought and rising temperatures.
“Climate change, reduced rainfall, and dryness have turned natural areas into tinder,” he said, calling for better public awareness and faster local response systems.
While the largest recent fires in the Hyrcanian Forests – the ancient, UNESCO-listed woodlands along the Caspian Sea – have been extinguished, authorities warned that dry conditions persist and that access will remain restricted until effective autumn rains arrive.
“The situation is still fragile. Until we have sufficient rainfall, unnecessary entry to the forests is prohibited,” Zakariaei said, announcing that bans now cover the Hyrcanian, Zagros and Arasbaran forest zones.
The measure, which includes parts of Mazandaran, Golestan, Ardabil and North Khorasan provinces, is aimed at preventing new flare-ups.
Firefighting teams remain on full alert and village councils near the forests have been told to prepare local emergency stations.
Political and media reactions
The government’s handling of the fires has triggered debate in Iranian media and on social networks.
The newspaper Farhikhtegan said in an article on Wednesday that several of the northern fires may have been intentionally set, describing them as “organized acts” rather than the result of drought or accident.
The paper cited unnamed officials who said about 20 suspects had been detained.
The article suggested that such incidents were meant to “undermine confidence in the state’s crisis management,” framing the destruction as part of broader attempts to disrupt the country.
Environmental officials have not endorsed those claims and maintain that negligence remains the dominant cause. They say most of the recent fires began near roads, farms or picnic areas rather than in inaccessible terrain.
Iran’s environmental community has urged a focus on prevention with experts saying that weak firefighting infrastructure, limited aerial equipment and late detection continue to leave forests vulnerable.
The Hyrcanian Forests, believed to be among the world’s oldest surviving temperate forests, are home to hundreds of endemic plant and animal species. Prolonged drought and land encroachment have already reduced much of their natural resilience.
Zakariaei said Iran plans to expand its firefighting bases and training programs, with 21 stations now designated nationwide and more in development. “With better readiness and local participation, we hope to reduce next year’s figures,” he said.