Environmental Challenges in Today’s Iran

Drought, increased population, war, air pollution, climate change, industrial and agricultural production, sanctions, inefficient water and natural resource use, and lack of enforcement of existing environmental regulations have contributed to Iran’s current environmental crisis. Insufficient water resources are forcing people to migrate, putting pressure on others. Aquifers are being drained. Air pollution has made living conditions in Iran’s cities increasingly challenging. Wind erosion is furthering the desertification of agricultural land, creating greater production demand on remaining arable areas. Biodiversity is under threat. On the other hand, Iran’s environmental future can be positively influenced by the collaboration of the public, private and non-profit sectors. Awareness and education, along with greater financial and human resources, will be necessary to tackle the problem.     

Shia groups and Iranian religious influence in Azerbaijan: the impact of trans-boundary religious ties on national religious policy

Abstract

The Azerbaijani Government’s struggle against external influence from Iran has played a significant role in consolidating its secular self-identification since independence in 1991. Though strong, direct Iranian influence on Azerbaijani Shia groups belongs to the past, its effects are sustained. This article examines the religious transborder flows from Iran to Azerbaijan and their impact on Azerbaijani domestic religious policy. The analysis includes religion as a factor in the debate about transnationalism and about how transnational actors challenge nation states’ exclusive authority over their territory. The analysis uses data from government documents, newspaper articles, social media, and interviews with politicians and religious actors. As a result, the article shows that the Iranian intervention in Azerbaijan has effectively initiated the building of a more specific Shia identity among a small but growing number of Shia groups. This has led to the reconfiguration both of the religious field and of Azerbaijani political secularism.     

Iran in the Nazi New Order, 1933–1941

Despite a succession of scholarly studies over the years, the relationship between Reza Shah’s Iran and National Socialist Germany has not been fully explored. Rather than focusing on the supposed Aryan ideological sympathies that bound the two countries together, this article argues that the real driver of the German–Iranian relationship in the 1930s was economic and based in the mutual interaction of state economic initiatives. It states that Iran’s place in Nazism’s economic system was the outcome of two factors: the “New Plan” of Reich Economics Minister Hjalmar Schacht, and its focus on clearing agreements as a motor for depression-era trade, and the connections of Schacht’s system to Reza Shah’s strategy to modernize Iran. In exploring this issue the article focuses on relations between Germany and Iran during three distinct moments: first, the period from 1918 to 1928 and the working out of a new relationship after the First World War; secondly the period of Schacht’s New Plan in Iran in the mid-1930s; and finally the period from the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939 to the British–Soviet invasion of Iran in 1941. During this last period Iran both belonged to the Nazi–Soviet trade zone created by the Pact and attempted to defend its neutrality.     

The Conservation of Biodiversity in Iran: Threats,Challenges and Hopes

Because of its diverse geological formations, climates, and soils, Iran is home to outstanding biodiversity. National conservation started in Iran over fifty years ago and today nearly 10 percent of the country is protected. However, biodiversity in Iran is threatened, with about 100 species of vertebrate fauna vulnerable or endangered. Increased population and human activity, climate change, drought, desertification, agriculture, poaching, and economic sanctions have helped create this crisis. Many of these causes can be mitigated through better planning, sustainable policies, and increased civil society and local engagement. Promoting awareness about the impacts of human practices will also be important for the long-term sustainability of Iran’s ecosystems. Iranian conservation NGOs have already taken an active role in preserving biodiversity.     

The potential and pitfalls of global environmental governance: The politics of transfrontier conservation areas in Southern Africa

This article examines the potential and problems associated with global environmental governance with particular reference to Transfrontier Conservation Areas (TFCAs) in Southern Africa. By taking a political ecology approach, it reflects on theories and practices of global environmental governance through an analysis of transboundary environmental management. In particular, it examines the politics of the struggle over control of and access to key natural resources and how it impacts on the implementation of transfrontier conservation. In order to do this, this article includes an analysis of the complex role of local and global NGOs, the changing role of the state in relation to international actors, the importance of community based natural resource management, the commitment to tourism to make conservation pay its way and the problems associated with illicit networks of traffickers of wildlife products, cars and people.It is important to investigate the politics of TFCAs because they are part of a wider context of increasing forms of transnational management of the environment; such transnational forms of management are often deemed to be more effective than national level management because of the transboundary nature of environmental problems. This article argues that the assumption that transnational management can be neatly implemented needs rethinking. In particular, it highlights the ways that complex networks of actors constitute a significant challenge to global environmental governance. This in turn raises more general questions about the effectiveness of other forms of global environmental governance centred on managing problems such as climate change, pollution or trafficking of endangered species and tropical hardwoods.     

Forty-five years in climatology—a personal odyssey

This article presents a personal perspective on an academic and research vocation spanning a period of over 45 years. It starts with my early involvement in geography and climatology and terminates with my recent experience in a large interdisciplinary research venture. The presentation highlights, with specific examples, the importance of mentors. Also emphasized is the indispensable input of colleagues and graduate students to successful research endeavours. Most of my career has been centred on McMaster University, and I naturally draw on my experiences there. There have been great changes in the research world over the past few decades. Although the number of faculty and graduate students at McMaster remained relatively constant, the research output per person more than doubled. This is attributed in large part to the accelerating technological advancements in our ability to measure and our ability to process and manipulate data. In the environmental sciences, this has revolutionized the spatial and temporal scope of the scientific questions that can be addressed. Such major changes have stimulated a marked trend towards interdisciplinary research that has evolved from mainly wishful talking to active pursuit in a search to understand complex environmental interactions. Important among these is gaining insights into the processes and feedbacks driving climate change, whether natural or anthropologically induced. Equally important is gaining an understanding of the potential impacts resulting from climate change. My perception of my successes, failures and near misses divides chronologically into three periods that cover research in the early years, research in the central subarctic and research in the Mackenzie River Basin.     

The New Frontier Meets the White Revolution: The Peace Corps in Iran, 1962‒76

The Peace Corps brought an estimated 1,800 Americans to Iran from 1962 to 1976, coinciding with the unfolding of Mohammad-Reza Shah Pahlavi’s Enqelāb-e Sefid, or White Revolution. This article surveys Peace Corps Iran’s fourteen-year history by dividing it into three distinct moments defined by changing social and political conditions in Iran and shifting US?Iranian relations. Initially, the Peace Corps Iran experiment built on earlier American foreign assistance programs, while coinciding with the roll-out of the White Revolution. Second, during its heyday in the mid-1960s, the Peace Corps inevitably became entangled with the White Revolution’s unfolding, both experiencing a phase of expansion and apparent success. Finally, as Iranian social and political conditions moved toward instability by the 1970s, Peace Corps Iran also seemed to have lost its direction and purpose, which ultimately led to a vote by volunteers to terminate the program. Based on accounts by US Peace Corps volunteers and the Iranians with whom they worked, the Peace Corps Agency, and the US State Department, this article argues that, ultimately, the Peace Corps Iran experience left a more lasting legacy on individuals than institutions.     

2011 Cultural heritage legal summary

Abstract

This article summarizes the legal developments during 2011 that affect archaeological heritage. Among the more significant developments were advances in and challenges to the use of international law in deterring the trade in undocumented antiquities and questions of whether artifacts on loan to U.S. institutions from Iran could be used to satisfy judgments against Iran awarded to victims of terrorist bombings. Finally, the article presents a preliminary assessment of the impact of the "Arab Spring" conflicts on cultural heritage preservation.     

Assessing Socio‐Economic Vulnerability to Climate Change Impacts and Environmental Hazards in New South Wales and Queensland,Australia

This article systematically reviews and synthesises academic, peer‐reviewed literature to assess the state of knowledge concerning socio‐economic vulnerability to climate change impacts and environmental hazards in New South Wales and Queensland, Australia. It focuses upon empirical research that identifies socio‐economic factors associated with vulnerable subpopulations. Using systematic review methods, 35 articles met the inclusion criteria. These articles are analysed according to their general characteristics, the methods used, and the factors reported to be associated with socio‐economic vulnerability. This body of evidence reveals that (1) the majority of the knowledge about socio‐economic vulnerability in New South Wales and Queensland has only recently emerged; (2) more knowledge has been published about Queensland; and (3) extreme temperature is the most researched environmental hazard. Despite increased research activity over time, the number of factors repeatedly demonstrated to influence socio‐economic vulnerability is small. Age, gender, place of residence, and pre‐existing illness were the most commonly reported factors, although the influence of these factors upon socio‐economic vulnerability is complex. There is scope to extend the empirical research base across a broader range of climate‐related hazards and to better link findings from the domains of climate change vulnerability and population health.     

浅议榆林市地域生态环境建设

榆林市位于我国东部季风气候区和西北干旱气候区的过渡带,毛乌素沙漠前缘,生态环境问题极其严重。因此,榆林市地域生态环境建设问题是榆林市规划与建设的最主要方面。本文借鉴国外城市生态环境研究的现状与实践,针对榆林地区生态环境的特点,对榆林市的地域生态环境建设提出理论框架,提出了榆林市地域生态环境系统建设设想,以期创建榆林市优美的地域生态环境。     

Climate security,risk assessment and military planning

Climate and environmental changes pose emerging and unique challenges to international security—as the global community experiences issues of food insecurity, severe droughts and floods—and have cascading impacts on energy supplies and infrastructure. Environmental hazards may shift abruptly, posing new risks to vulnerable systems and critical nodes in ways that diverge from historical experience. Effective risk assessments and planning will require understanding of how climate change will affect natural disasters and disaster response, and how hazards may be more extreme or unique from past experiences. This article discusses the role of climate change in affecting security planning from a military perspective, and how integration of scientific data and intelligence methods can foster assessment and effective response.     

Psychoanalyzing Iran: Kennedy's Iran Task Force and the Modernization of Orientalism, 1961–3

Between 1961 and 1963, a political crisis in Iran prompted U.S. foreign-policy makers to briefly consider supporting political reform that would have pushed the Shah toward a more constitutional role and moved Iran toward democracy. Yet Washington instead decided to bolster the Shah's regime to carry out social and economic reforms that coalesced as the Shah's White Revolution in 1963. Policy-makers relied in part on a psychological profile of Iran to shape their decisions, believing that the Iranian people were psychologically unprepared to rule, and that the Shah was psychologically unprepared to give up power. This article encourages diplomatic historians to explore how the language and ideas of psychology influenced the modernization theories and policies that U.S. policy-makers applied to Iran, the Middle East, and the wider ‘Third World.’ After briefly exploring the history of U.S. racial, religious, and cultural perceptions of Iran - many of which fit traditional stereotypes of Orientalism - the article examines the influence of political and developmental psychology at a time when racial and religious bias were increasingly taboo. Psychology offered more acceptable, scientific ways to understand Iran and the Middle East, though it led to familiar conclusions. While attempting to modernize Iran, policy-makers modernized Orientalism.     

The Politics of Carbon Market Design: Rethinking the Techno‐politics and Post‐politics of Climate Change

Carbon markets have provided fertile ground for research on the changing nature of political contestation. MacKenzie locates a “techno‐politics” of carbon markets that creates new possibilities for a “politics of market design”. In contrast, Swyngedouw argues carbon markets are part of a “post‐political” shift that narrows potential pathways through “depoliticisation”. This article engages with these debates by examining three recent attempts to reform the ailing European Union Emissions Trading System: restricting industrial gas offsets, backloading allowance auctions and the 2030 climate and energy package. It conceptualises the respective episodes as contests over the reach, force and priority of value determinations in climate policy, emphasising the contradictory imperatives facing states on each issue. The outcomes of contestation between industry groups and environmental organisations—real but limited reforms and a consolidation of the carbon market over alternatives—demonstrate the constraints facing technocratic campaigning and the ongoing politicisation of climate change.     

What about Translation? Beyond “Persianization” as the Language Policy in Iran

Against the background of language policy research on Iran, and drawing on insights from recent scholarship on the role of translation in language policy, this article calls into question the claim that “Persianization” of non-Persian peoples is the main element of language policy in Iran. In so doing, the article examines closely the role of translation as enacted in two legal instruments: the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Law of Parliamentary Elections. The study illustrates that although official communication between Iranian authorities and citizens is a prototypical example of monolingualism and non-translation, voluntary translation happens between Persian and non-Persian speaking individuals, acting as a viable and cost-effective bottom-up alternative for the inclusion of non-Persian speaking peoples, far more effective than an impractical, top-down language policy reform implicitly found in the “Persianization” claim.     

Conflict on the urban fringe: Urbanization,environmental stress,and urban unrest in Africa

Most research on the security implications of environmental and demographic change does not explicitly distinguish between urban and rural areas. While statistical conflict analyses are increasingly sophisticated with respect to spatial and substantive disaggregation they largely ignore the possibility that urban and rural areas may be affected differently. In Africa, a continent assumed to be particularly vulnerable to the social and economic externalities of environmental and demographic change, less than one percent of the land mass is defined as ‘urban’. Yet, the population that lives in African cities is expected to increase by more than 150% between 2020 and 2050 according to UN population forecasts, massively outpacing rural population growth estimated at 35%. Given the vast social transformation associated with this process of rapid urbanization, understanding the dynamics and consequences of urban population growth in Sub-Saharan Africa, and its possible relationship with environmental factors is key to reducing vulnerabilities and facilitating sustainable urban growth on the continent. In this article we argue that high urban population growth may strain the provision of public services in urban areas, heighten competition over scarce urban land, and increase the chances of urban social unrest. We expect population pressure to have the most profound effects on social unrest in peri-urban areas, meaning the urban outskirts. We further investigate whether environmental push factors, operationalized as droughts happening in rural areas proximate to the urban centers, could be driving any effect of urban population growth on social disorder, possibly supporting concerns over climate change-induced social unrest. We test our expectations on a sample of similarly sized urban and peri-urban ‘grid cells’ covering the whole of the African continent for the 1997–2010 period, using geo-coded social unrest data. Our analysis shows that urban population growth is associated with increased unrest in the peri-urban areas only. We find no evidence, however, that this relationship is driven by environmental push factors in the form of nearby droughts. The study contributes insights relevant to the broader debates about possible security implications of hyper-urbanization and climate change.     

The Unfolding of Unreason: Javad Tabatabai's Idea of Political Decline in Iran

Javad Tabatabai, a leading theorist and historian of political thought in Iran, has presented a controversial theory regarding the causes of the decline of political thought and society in Iran over the last few centuries. His ideas on Iranian decline have affected the intellectual debates on modernity and democracy currently underway in Iran. Tabatabai's career-long research has revolved around this question: “What conditions made modernity possible in Europe and led to its abnegation in Iran?” He answers this question by adopting a “Hegelian approach” that privileges a philosophical reading of history on the assumption that philosophical thought is the foundation and essence of any political community and the basis for any critical analysis of it as well. This article critically engages with Tabatabai's ideas of “crisis,” and “decline” by challenging his exposition of the Persian tradition.     

Experiencing Climate: Finding Weather in Eighteenth Century Cumbria

This article examines whether Tim Ingold's concept of the ‘weather-world’ can be applied within discussions of climate in archaeology. Using a case study of eighteenth century Cumbria, the article first looks at the issues arising when environmental models are used to investigate landscape change. It then assesses the insights on landscape, weather and farming that can be gained from two historical diaries. It is recognised that advances in complex ecosystem and agent-based modelling have improved ‘climate change archaeology’, but that there are aspects of people's relationships with the weather and climate that are ill-suited to quantification. The article concludes by arguing that people's qualitative engagements with the weather are integral to how past people viewed and used the landscape.     

Canada–United States Energy Relations: Making a MESS of Energy Policy 1 , 2

Energy policy-making has become ever-more challenging over the last three decades, comprising a larger and more complex set of inter-related dimensions. Energy policy-makers have to deal with energy as a discrete market sector, pursuing competitive, efficient, safe, and affordable energy. They also have to address environmental imperatives, ensuring energy is developed with due regard for sustainability, ecosystems, air quality, climate change, and the like. In addition, energy policy must address security objectives, which themselves have broadened over time. Finally, energy must be developed in ways that are socially acceptable. This article examines how these four policy dimensions—Market, Environment, Security and Social acceptability, the acronym MESS—have come to characterize energy policy-making in the twenty-first century. It then explores what kind of MESS the Canadian and American governments are making of energy policy—both domestically and bilaterally—and offers some proposals for key sectors and activities that could benefit from greater collaboration.     

Concerning values: what underlies public polarisation about climate change?

Climate change is a partisan issue, with increasingly politically polarised responses, particularly in Anglophone countries. While politics clearly have a role in determining attitudes to climate science and policy, understanding the human values that underlie attitudes offers advantages over a focus on political differences. This study examines public concern about climate change in Hobart, the state capital of Tasmania, Australia. Hobart is a microcosm of polarisation about environmental issues due to its long history of conflict over natural resource use. Using a survey of 522 citizens of Hobart, the research examines the values underlying concern and unconcern about climate change. Applying an innovative analysis of human values to this area of research, I have found that, in the Tasmanian context, the unconcerned may be categorised into two groups with opposing values: people who prioritise national security, social order, and tradition; and people who value freedom of choice and the ability to make their own decisions. High levels of climate change concern are associated strongly with care for nature, suggesting that climate change is seen primarily as a threat to the environment, rather than to humanity. In this article, I argue that understanding the values underlying divergent interpretations of the threat of climate change is essential to resolving deadlock in political discourse. The work draws lessons for re‐engaging the unconcerned in inclusive conversations about climate change through narratives addressing a broader range of values.