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I'd like to welcome everyone to the Friday seminar or in this guy's webinar,

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and I'm going to say a few words about our guest speaker and we're extremely pleased to

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have sparing his time despite the best efforts of the Chinese system to keep him alive.

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So it's a big lorry completed in history, so us in 2020.

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Before that, he was an AI student and saw us and had a B.A. from the University of Cambridge.

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He's now a research associate and teaching fellow at so, as his research focuses on the intersection of energy,

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environment, infrastructure and labour, especially but not only in the history of Iran in the Middle East.

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His doctoral thesis, which I should mention was awarded the very prestigious 2021 business Lee Douglas Memorial prise for the best dissertation,

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examines the techno politics of Iranian oil nationalisation, especially focussing on expertise,

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labour and anti-colonialism in Abadon is monograph based on this thesis entitled Refining Knowledge, Labour Politics and Oil Nationalisation in Iran,

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1933 Fifty One will be published with Edinburgh University Press in 2023,

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and I very much hope you'll come back and talk to us about that book when that happens.

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So today Martin is going to talk to us about the global climate emergency, especially as this impacts Iran and.

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The floor is yours. Thank you very much. Firstly, thank you very much to the Middle East and to Stephanie, to Michael for your invitation.

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It's really great to be here virtually and especially to be part of the series on the environment that you have in such a pressing time.

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So I'll just show my screen. OK, so let me start as so as we witness, 26 struggled to deliver on its promises.

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We are reminded once again that a major hurdle for tackling climate change remains the refusal

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of countries in the global north to take responsibility for their historical culpability.

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And connected to this issue that we see playing out at COP26 is the lack of representation from countries in the global south,

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with there being numerous complaints about the inaccessibility of the summit has excluded people on the front line of the global environmental crisis.

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After all, the global south will be disproportionately affected by global warming.

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This is especially so in the Middle East and North Africa,

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where climate catastrophe is already too apparent as evident this year in forest fires in Turkey and Algeria.

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And the sudden drying up of entire rivers include a song like the cartoon pictured here in Davos.

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These events make it increasingly difficult to leave the environment as a discrete domain of enquiry separate from political,

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social and economic matters.

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And of course, this is a point that has long been at the heart of subjects like geography and the environmental humanities,

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but which has been relatively slow to gather pace in Middle East studies until recently.

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It's relatively easy to see how the events that I just mentioned, you know,

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these instances of environmental crisis may be incorporated in the humanities and social sciences.

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For example, how the drying up of rivers in Iran this year led to political mobilisations over water scarcity.

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However, there are still less spectacular environmental issues that are no less urgent,

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but which have captured less attention, perhaps because of the ubiquity.

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One of these is air pollution. It's estimated that exposure to air pollution resulting from fossil fuel combustion

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is responsible for more than 10 million premature deaths globally each year.

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That's more than HIV, TB and malaria combined.

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And I think there are three main problems in its detection,

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which perhaps partly explain why it hasn't received more attention, at least in the social sciences and humanities.

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First, like other forms of pollution, it's often so dispersed that its specific origins and effects can be difficult to pin down.

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So, for example, pollution in one city or in one country may actually emanate from another country or continent altogether.

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Second, despite its hyper visibility in the form of smoke or smoke, its true extent is often invisible and only detectable with special equipment.

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And it's particulate matter which is actually most damaging to the lungs, which is microscopic.

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Third, its damage is often incremental or what Nixon is called a form of slow violence taking place over many years.

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And this applies to both inanimate and animate bodies, and the exact extent and tempo of damage can differ from body to body.

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Now, as I'm sure many of you would know in the audience. Air pollution is a major problem in the region today.

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Any visitor will attest to immediate visibility when arriving at major cities like Tehran pictured here,

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and the effects are quickly felt in the body, especially in the nose and throat.

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So although there is uncertainty about the exact origins and the effects of air pollution,

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and although not all embodied experiences of it are going to be the same.

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Most people exposed will know at least it's causing some harm.

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And I think this highlights how we need to consider embodied situated knowledge seriously in being able to detect environmental hazards.

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Indeed, our bodies are as material as the material environments and might be the first parameter of any environmental transformation.

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And yet, time and time again,

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we see that such knowledge is marginalised in grand plans for environmental solutions excluded from a domain of expertise,

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which is based largely on calculating macro level processes.

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So why is this the case? Well,

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without attempting to provide a comprehensive answer to this big question or trying to present an exceptional case in the remainder of this talk,

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I want to offer one intervention by turning attention to air pollution caused by the oil industry in Iran.

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As a historian, I will do so through a historical lens focussing on pollution.

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As oil became central in political discourse in the years leading up to the country's oil nationalisation in 1951.

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Now, there are lots of studies on oil nationalisation,

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and these largely focus on high politics in Tehran for understandable reasons, especially figures like Mossadeq.

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But as I argue in a forthcoming book that Stephanie mentioned,

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we should root this important event in the supports and experiences of those living and working in the centre of Iran's oil operations in Khuzestan,

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especially the City of Abadon pictured here.

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This was home to the largest oil refinery in the world at the time, operated by the soon to be expelled Anglo Iranian oil company IOK.

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I think that this more focussed history can provide some lessons for how we may tackle environmental crises today.

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First, like a burgeoning body of work in the environmental and energy humanities shows highlights how imperialism

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has been historically responsible for global pollution in the Middle East and global south more generally.

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Moreover, by understanding how the situation in abaddonn was then translated into mainstream political discourse

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in Tehran and how Biden has more generally been marginalised in histories of oil nationalisation,

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we encounter a more fundamental issue about expertise, namely who has the legitimacy to speak and what forms of knowledge are valued over others.

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I argue that this history not only further demonstrates the importance of

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situated and embodied knowledge and solutions to environmental challenges today,

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but also that environmentalism must not be detached from wider issues of social justice, such as workers rights and infrastructural inequality.

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So I'll present this history in free parts. First, I'll show how pollution from the refinery was symptomatic of structural inequalities in abadon.

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Then I'll shift attention more specifically to disputes between oil workers and the company over toxic exposure in the refinery,

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showing how these were emblematic of the company's efforts to render workers as political non-expert actors.

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Finally, I show how Tehrani,

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journalists and politicians then reproduced the separation between politics and technology of oil in mainstream political discourse,

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and this had important effects on the oil nationalisation movement.

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First, some background. The Anglo-Iranian oil company, or Anglo Persian, as it was initially called,

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constructed the first processing plant of the Aberdeen refinery in 1912 to refine crude oil recently found at Masjid Soliman.

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Now, as others have highlighted, the construction of such infrastructures depended on dispossessing local populations to secure territory,

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and this allowed the company to rapidly expand the refinery, which quickly grew to an exceptional size with a large workforce.

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Partly due to its strategic importance in the British Empire, the refinery was a major source of fuel oil, especially for the Royal Navy.

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This expansion continued during the interwar years to meet rising consumer demand for oil products and,

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of course, gasoline being one of the main ones at this time.

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Meanwhile, a large city had emerged around the refinery with its own social and economic

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life as people migrated from other parts of the country seeking employment.

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While the company had initially built accommodation adjacent to the refinery for British management and also for skilled artisans from India,

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the majority of domestic migrants to the city gravitated towards the local bazaar known as Sha or Abadon Town.

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And now scholars like Corvair Sanneh and Rasmus Ayling's show from the late 1920s,

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the company sought to control this so-called native town to prevent disease and also ultimately to maintain a disciplined population.

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And this happened through measures such as urban planning and also the provision of municipal infrastructures and leisure facilities.

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But these measures also resulted in a deeply divided city.

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So, for one, urban life was racially segregated, such that there were separate social clubs,

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transport sports facilities and even cinemas for British, Indian and Iranian workers and their families.

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In addition, there were deep economic and infrastructural inequalities, especially exacerbated by the British occupation during the Second World War.

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So to give one concrete example at this time, while each bungalow in the British management neighbourhood of Bahrain had its own septic

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tank and was connected to a purified water supply system in abadon in abadon town,

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that is, there was no water latrine system, no electricity, and there were only seven water standards.

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Conditions were even worse in shantytowns like the notorious courthouse about pictured here,

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which consisted of homes built a mud from scrap metal, which were also subject to sweltering heat in the summer flooding in winter.

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And the buildings were also highly flammable. So, for example, in 1948 49, there was a major fire that destroyed 84 homes.

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This infrastructural violence in abadon materialised social divisions along racialized lines,

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systematically exposing a section of the population to death or will remember, cause network politics.

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The network politics of abadon were perhaps best exemplified by pollution.

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The refinery's location in the middle of a large city meant that the entire population was potentially exposed to noxious gases like carbon monoxide,

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sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, which can all gradually cause serious long term health problems such as cancer,

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especially in hot temperatures like in abadon.

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But the direction of the prevailing winds meant that these gases tended to blow specifically towards the poorer neighbourhoods east of the refinery,

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predominantly inhabited by Iranian workers and their families. And this was something that residents and managers were well aware of at the time.

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So, for example, in the summer months, the winds blew in the opposite direction.

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And so the British residents actually left the city during this period to escape the pollution.

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The delayed effects of pollution, damaging bodies, incremental speeds produced uncertainty about the extent of its existence.

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But it was undeniably a daily reality, and we see this in the way that visitors talked about it when they went to abadon.

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So, for example, when the famous intellectual challenge on Afrimat went to abadon for the first time in 1943, he did not see the city,

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but he could smell it from the boat that he was travelling on, and he characterised the odour as rotten turnips and garlic sat right beneath the nose.

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Likewise, the writer, Hassan Cumshot,

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recalled that the harsh and pungent odour of the refineries gases afflicted his sense of smell so much that he could never get used to it.

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Racialized harm to bodies extended into the refinery itself,

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Iranian workers who carried out maintenance work in the refinery were disproportionately

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exposed to occupational hazards compared to their British superiors.

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Former workers accounts testify that work in the refineries processing areas was highly dangerous due to the constant threat of fires,

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explosions and gas leaks. This harm could also take the more incremental and less visible form.

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In September 1949, Workers' representatives in the Works Factory Council reported a gas leak in the sulphur dioxide plant.

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Management dismissed the concerns and forced the staff to continue working there.

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But then, in the months leading up to the announcement of oil nationalisation in March 1951,

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workers in Aberdeen sent a petition to much less and to the Ministry of Justice complaining that they had become sick.

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Matt. As a result of poisoning gases like sulphur dioxide and also exposure to lead and acid.

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They said that as a result, they were now dying a slow death.

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The urged the government to intervene as the company's refusal to pay compensation for illness contravenes the new Iranian labour law.

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Even the company's own investigation actually detected constant levels of sulphur dioxide that would result

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in serious health problems and sometimes levels even high enough to pose an immediate threat to life.

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Yet in its commissioned reports, this was completely omitted. Its report was published in the British Journal of Industrial Medicine and concluded

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that there were no adverse health effects caused by exposure in the plants,

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attributing ill health instead to factors external to the refinery.

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In this regime of intercept ability, as in the words of the historian of science Michelle Murphy.

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Workers lacked the technical instruments needed to prove that their ailments stemmed from the refinery itself,

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giving rise to toxic uncertainty that the company was able to exploit by externalising workers health problems as endemic to local society instead.

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The controversy reflected a more fundamental division between workers and management

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about the legitimacy of different forms of knowledge as a basis for oil expertise.

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Since 1946, the company had operated a disciplinary programme to systematically inculcate safety consciousness.

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For instance, one former worker recalled that every day workers had to read a safety booklet,

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which they all had to have in their pockets, and this contained up to 47 regulations.

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The content of these guidelines was focussed on accident prevention through

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eliminating so-called carelessness management consistently blamed accidents

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on workers in discipline based on long standing assertions that Iranians lacked the capacities for acquiring scientific and technical knowledge.

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Compared to European and Indian employees and this formed the basis for the company dismissing growing calls for Iranian ization,

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which would mean the promotion of Iranians to more senior positions in the company.

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It also meant that management claimed to monopolise expertise through helping workers protect

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themselves in framing safety expertise in terms of accident prevention management claims.

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This could be calculated in advance and also from afar communicated to workers don't actively top down.

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This relegated the significance of in situ embodied knowledge on the grounds

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that might help detect processional damage that might lead up to accidents,

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for example, smelling gas leaks that arise from corrosion.

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And this kind of knowledge could be communicated bottom up by workers.

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And in fact, this is what workers did. Despite management's safety regulations,

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workers regularly challenged management's claim to expertise by bringing up problems about inadequate safety provisions.

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Nevertheless, the company excluded such technical controversies on the grounds in maintaining

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its exclusive claim to expertise as a set of abstract disembodied knowledge,

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and use this as the basis for the ongoing marginalisation of workers as political rather than technical actors.

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This also extended to the way the company projected its expertise to the wider public.

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So in its extensive PR machinery, it represented the refinery as a complex scientific domain.

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A black box where only the inputs and outputs were known in various images.

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The refinery was depicted as a self-regulating objective system devoid of human subjectivity,

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concealing bodily damage within the system caused by toxic exposure.

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And this was especially how the company started representing the refinery to

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the Tehran press amidst growing scrutiny following the 1946 general strike,

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which halted its entire operations.

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The company aimed to allay fears about its colonial intentions while demonstrating the indispensability of its expertise to the Iranian nation.

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Newspapers were important because they'd helped create space for Tehran's middle class to discuss national development,

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especially in the context of heightened territorial anxiety in the 1940s.

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And as Sue Roszak shows, Western science and technology occupied a central place in these debates.

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So starting from spring 1947, I invited journalists from Tehran on guided tours of the oil installations, especially the abadon refinery.

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And these tools included famous figures such as Ibrahim Khalistan, Khalid Malachy, Mohammed Massoud and Abas Khalili on these tours.

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The company took visitors to the main processing plants and emphasised the gargantuan nature and at the same time,

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marginalised or omitted the contribution of manual labour to the functioning of the refinery,

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reinforcing the effects of the refinery as the self-regulating automated system.

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In subsequent reports, these journalists then reproduced this image of the refinery,

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praising the installations as the most modern in the world and a source for emulation.

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In contrast, they criticised the living conditions in the town and blame this on the company.

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So what was happening was that they were distinguishing between the apolitical nature of the refinery and then the quasi colonial enclave around it.

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Notably, absent in these accounts were reports of pollution emanating from the refinery,

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and in some articles even praised will be expressed all at the sight of smoke coming out of these tall smokestacks.

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These messages were important in shaping the emerging nationalisation movement, simultaneously fuelling growing opposition to the company.

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At the same time as reinforcing the legitimacy of its expertise.

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Many publications of the Emerging Pro Nationalisation Coalition, the Premier League,

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the National Front delineated between IOCs technical accomplishments and its politics.

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For instance, even the agitation and anti-imperialist newspaper Shah had admitted that despite its disgust for IIRC quote,

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the administrative and technical organisations of the company are amongst the most perfect in the world end quote.

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So the point was to gain access to iox expertise rather than to reformulate its contents.

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While these pro nationalisation newspapers did feature complaints of workers in

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Aberdeen about poor living and labour conditions throughout 1950 and early fifty one,

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they did not acknowledge their expertise in any way, thereby rendering them as political and non-technical actors, much like the oil company had done.

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Indeed, the National Front often expressed an ambivalent attitude towards the workers, even condemning the general strike.

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In April 1951, for fear that it would damage the installations and these dynamics really came to a head when

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the much less mixed oil committee investigated exactly how nationalisation could be implemented.

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This was in early 1951, so Mosaddek, who was then chair of the committee, draughted a questionnaire enquiring into the feasibility of nationalisation.

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And this questioner explicitly separated technical considerations from political ones.

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He sent this to engineers who had not even visited abadon.

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Instead of those who'd worked there for many years.

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Significantly, despite the oil workers petition about toxic exposure, which had recently been submitted,

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no mention was made about pollution or toxicity in the questionnaire.

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In response, the engineers advised that nationalisation would not be possible without retaining an existing foreign experts, especially in refining.

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Hence, as the newly established national Iranian oil company NAOC took over operations in June 51,

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the foundations were set for the continuation of IOCs practises, even as the company itself was expelled.

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Although Mosaddek did evicts iOX British staff in September,

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the national Iranian oil company maintained the existing employment structure, training schemes and crucially,

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the safety policies in the two years leading up to the 1953 coup, which ultimately allowed for the reintroduction of multinational oil companies.

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The following year. Fundamentally, then the Iranian government reproduced the expertise of the very oil company,

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its expelled acting on the premise that oil expertise was exclusively an apolitical,

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standardised set of knowledge that could be applied regardless of local particularities.

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And crucially, regardless of the embodied knowledge of workers.

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So just to wrap up, I think the history of how this comes about can provide free mean lessons for environmental politics today.

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So first, we see the role of imperialism in spreading pollution,

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and this seems quite obvious when looking at the material construction of these oil infrastructures,

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these polluting oil infrastructures, which still operate today. But it was also in the role of the company in concealing this pollution.

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True racing workers, bodies in the technical system and this laid the foundations for the reproduction of epistemology in which

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the environment was this external domain to be exploited rather than something entangled with human bodies.

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So when we're thinking about environmental politics today, it needs to factor in this historical culpability and the active work done to erase it.

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Second, it points to the importance of including so-called lay actors in environmental policymaking today.

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This is because toxic exposure in the abadon refinery was detected through in situated knowledge, rather than from some calculation from afar.

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So we should expand the scope of knowledge that we deemed to be a legitimate basis for environmental expertise.

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Any environmental expertise that's based exclusively on abstract knowledge of macro level processes

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runs the risk of overlooking the unequal distribution of environmental hazards on the local level.

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And finally, I think that this history indicates that environmentalism cannot be detached from wider issues of social justice.

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Workers in Aberdeen did not articulate an environmentalism passé but rather situated an

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environmental issue within wider issues of workers rights and infrastructural inequality.

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And in this way, I think they expressed what Ramachandra Guha has called an environmentalism of the poor,

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which does not treat the environment as a discrete domain, but instead is intertwined with questions of survival and lived human experience.

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Any environmentalism that delineates between environmental and political issues runs the risk of reproducing this

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view of the environment as this external entity to be calculated to be managed and ultimately to be utilised,

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rather than something we have any ethical obligation towards.

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So I will leave that leave there and thank you for listening.

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I look forward to your questions. Thank you very much for that, Martin.

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You have a huge amount of information and theoretical perspective here.

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I have a question of my own, but perhaps we'll begin with a question from Dr. Abdul Razak in the audience.

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Thank you, team! She said.

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I was wondering if you can comment on the to the trade unions, whether they had any interest in environmental issues and other the.

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This is actually something that I also wanted to ask you about a slightly different angle because I know by the time of the war, the Second World War,

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British trade unions and the British Labour Party were beginning to be a little

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bit concerned about the oil companies treatment of its workers in Iran.

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And I wondered if you had any,

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if you found any evidence of contacts between Iranian trade unions and British trade unions about generally living conditions

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and obviously the way you you posed the issue of embeddedness and environmental issues within within the bigger picture,

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it's quite interesting, but I think no one or two reports, maybe towards the end of the war,

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about dissatisfaction on the part of the Brits about conditions.

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I wonder if you've found that. And yes, thank you very much,

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and I think the first time I actually came across this issue of sulphur dioxide or sort of toxic exposure in refinery was actually in it

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was sort of passing reference was made to it in a parliamentary commission that was sent to abadon to investigate labour conditions.

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And this was from the Labour governments and basically after the 1946 strike,

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the British government was was trying to investigate and and put pressure on the company to reform its Labour policy.

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And they picked up on this issue of there being exposure to sulphur dioxide.

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And I think that this we can kind of see this within the context of growing awareness of toxic exposure in the West.

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In the 1940s, we really see in the trade union movement and in the labour movement more generally that

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there's this growing awareness of the need to control pollution in industrial workplaces.

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So it's not framed as such as like an environmental issue, but more alive issue, really.

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So yeah, in terms of direct correspondence between trade unions in Britain and in the Tudor party, I didn't necessarily see that.

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But certainly, I think you can situate this within a global moment in which toxic exposure becomes a more central labour issue.

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And in fact, this is reflected in the Iranian labour law, which is draughted in 1946,

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and this kind of puts it actually makes industrial hygiene like a central issue as well.

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I should say, if people have questions put, they put them through the Q&A function, because that's the only way I can access them.

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I noticed that there was someone who had a hand up,

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but we can't actually allow people to put their own questions directly so that you could use the Q&A function.

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That would be quite helpful. From watching your very carefully modulated presentation,

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I want you to conceals quite a damning indictment of the National Front on also in particular, which you didn't really expand upon.

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I wonder, have you had any pushback on this question because people don't like to see the idols criticised in this way,

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and it's quite a serious criticism. So that's one thing I like to that is.

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Is it too strong to say that the oil nationalisation made no difference to the workers or is not extrapolating too much?

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Well, firstly, I of course, I'm anticipating there will be pushback and I think we need to.

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But I think that it's important to acknowledge the systematic efforts to prevent nationalisation from really happening on the ground.

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So, you know, when oil was nationalised, there was a British blockade.

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There was a systematic effort to deny spare parts from entering abaddonn.

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And so it made it. Yeah. So in that sense, I I am sympathetic.

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In terms of did it did it actually make much difference? I think that again, it comes back to this question.

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Were they allowed to enact much difference, but certainly workers at the time, they did see the relevance of the National Front and Mossadeq.

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So they did actually sense this opportunity to finally realise a lot of their aspirations for promotion for better living and labour conditions.

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And they saw that they they situated their struggle as part of this sort of wider anti-imperialist

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moment in which they could redress these grievances that it held for for many years.

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So I don't think it's yeah, in that sense, I don't.

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In terms of political consciousness, I see it as being very significant.

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The National Front, Mosaddek, the National Front was very important in terms of political subjectivity, whether or not it's translated into.

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Improve living in labour conditions on the ground. I think that's more open for debate.

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Yeah. Thank you. OK, so we have a question from Frank de Monet.

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And he says typically I would expect differential health records to exist in cities due to pollution.

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I would expect to see raised cancer, respiratory and other bad effects downwind of sources of pollution.

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Part of smart city design includes monitoring, cross-referencing to health records.

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Do such records exist in Abidjan or other Iranian cities?

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And there's a follow up question which I'll give you at the same time in the case of the Bhopal disaster.

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There was never a liability trail that the parent company in the US, if that in international law,

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any redress to Iranian citizens harmed by the pollution promotion of any.

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Well, yeah, thank you very much for that question. What we see is that in terms of systematic records, it's very difficult to come by.

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There was no kind of systematic systematic monitoring. And in fact,

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I think this is a wider methodological problem in doing environmental history is being able to kind of historically measure things like pollution.

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And I think this it doesn't really become recorded into in Iran until much later until the 60s,

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when pollution starts entering the sort of political consciousness in Tehran.

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What we do see in academe is a very sort of localised investigation, which was conducted by the company.

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So the company commissioned this report after these complaints were made by workers,

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and the reports did actually show that there was increased rates of cancer, not cancer, but respiratory diseases, bronchitis, tuberculosis.

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And so in this kind of local small scale report, we do see there is kind of some kind of correlation between exposure and ill health.

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And yet your second question is that international any any redress to Iranian citizens harmed by the pollution for the refinery, as far as I know not.

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And this is the thing that actually the oil company when it published this report, when it did this investigation,

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there were already international standards agreed upon about acceptable levels of exposure to gases like sulphur dioxide.

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And this was being done in the U.S. and Europe.

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So there was already some kind of regulation, and the company knew this, so were well aware of it, but still contravened these standards.

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So in other words, they were meeting standards where where it was harder to contravene.

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But in a place like Ibadan, they they were able to kind of circumvent these standards.

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Yeah. OK. Can you tell us whether you think the Islamic Republic has got a better record in this kind of area or not?

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Well, it's I mean, certainly we see that there have been quite a few air pollution measures during the time of Islamic Republic,

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for example, you know, focussing especially on driving cars, for example, alternating number plates.

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You can only drive a car under this number plate one day and so on.

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It's difficult to it's difficult to really say whether this is because of something particular in this

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Islamic Republic or more reflection of globally there being increasing awareness of air pollution.

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Because even in, you know, like the US and Europe,

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even though there was awareness of air pollution and its dangers, you're going back to the 19th century.

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We don't really see a systematic effort to regulate it or control it until the 60s and 70s.

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So it's difficult to know. Yeah, it's difficult to say, is it?

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To give credit, or, you know, I mean, but also, I mean, we certainly see, for example, this instance of toxic exposure.

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This is an ongoing issue. I mean, we've seen, for example, a major gas leaks recent in recent years in petrochemical complexes.

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We also see that the workers, the major oil workers strike this year.

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Well, one of the main grievances was over working conditions, safety essentially and hazards.

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So of course it's not. It's not like it's it's dead yet.

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It's still there's still continuities there. But your picture of the car in river was quite shocking.

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I haven't seen that before. It's quite ironic that you have a province with no water, not so much oil.

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And I wonder,

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to what extent were you able to find anything out about the recent political turmoil that we know that was in the system as the water issues?

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Is this impossible to investigate or we've been able to work out what was going on?

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I mean, it's not my it's not my area of expertise, but certainly, I mean, I know a lot of people I've been writing about this and of course,

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environmental activism or, you know, the grassroots environmental activism in Iran drawing attention to this.

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We can obviously see that there's a combination of macro level factors to do with climate change,

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but also more local level issues to do with mismanagement, diversion of water extraction from groundwater sources.

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So it's definitely this combination as far as the exact details, I can't, I can't say.

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OK, I can encourage anyone who has a question to put it through the Q&A before we have to close.

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Want could take you back to the bigger picture, if we can.

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Can you give us a sense of the Iranian studies is not something which has a long record of research and environmental humanities.

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What do you think Iranian studies can bring to the table regarding environmental studies generally?

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Yeah, I mean, I actually I think that the in general, the environmental, humanities, energy,

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humanities, the very burgeoning fields, but they are still dominated by a Eurocentric ism.

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There's still a big focus on the global north.

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Of course, there are some. Like, for example, there's a lot of work being done in South Asian studies,

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Latin American studies in environmental humanities, but still the Middle East and Iranian studies less.

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And I think that given that Iran is one of the major oil producers,

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I think this is a major problem because it means that we hardly know anything about in terms of free environments

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with humanities lens about a region that is actually centrally responsible for this global environmental crisis.

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And this is, I think,

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reflected in a lot of the major environmental histories completely erasing or brushing over lived experiences of environmental crises in the region.

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So, for example, some of the major histories of pollution in the 20th century,

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they actually make this these big claims that oil production in the region happens in these remote settings.

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In these deserts,

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far away from any communities completely overlooking the fact that there are these huge populations living in the vicinity of these oil installations.

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So I think that's that's a major problem.

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And of course, Iran is a very diverse country ecologically, and there's a rich tradition of environmental activism in the country.

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I think that environmental humanities would gained a lot from the the insights in challenging these kind of Eurocentric views of environment.

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And also, these diffusion is narratives because you also see that there is this prevailing

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narrative that environmentalism spread from the West and then to the rest of the world,

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especially Rachel Carson's famous book The Silent Spring.

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After that, it's supposedly then the rest of the world gets inspired,

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and this completely overlooks kind of the local indigenous traditions that were already in existence.

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Yeah, thank you. We have a couple of questions.

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One from sorry. Well, it's not a question of the comment, which I'll summarise,

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which says the attitude of the British was very much the same towards their own people, which I think is probably the case.

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But it might be quite interesting to have some comparative study with other oil

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producing areas such as Venezuela to see how they dealt with similar issues arising.

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Let me have a comment from my knowledge to Harvey. Thank you for your excellent talk.

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She agrees with your last comment that we don't know enough about the oil producers. But we should also note that the record of the Islamic Republic,

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the use of the energy subsidies over the years has contributed to some of the world's highest energy use and per capita emissions levels.

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So I don't agree with this, absolutely.

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Thank you very much for raising that point. And I don't mean to when I'm talking about the historical culpability of the global north.

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That's not to let countries like Iran off the hook. And we know Iran is one of the world's great emitters as well.

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So thank you. Thank you for raising that. And we see that also, Iran's involvement in COP 26 isn't hasn't been that pivotal either.

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Again, I will ask another question and then see if we were ask questions from the audience.

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This was an environmental history that you've written, that is it a social history of political history?

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How would you locate yourself in terms of ordinary?

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Well, I mean, I embarked on the project, you know, knowing nothing about environmental history,

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and it's very much it was for a labour history, land and social history lands.

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And it's it's through this specific these industrial issues over toxic exposure

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that then led me to trying to link this to an environmental history as well.

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And I think that that's part of the problem is in kind of treating environmental history when

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environmental history is this kind of discrete sub field that isn't connected to social political history,

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etc., which the best environmental issues are not like that.

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I don't mean to mischaracterise it, but that that's exactly part of the problem is when we divide environmental issues from social political ones.

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And for me, environment is completely in this history that I've looked at.

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Environment is completely intertwined with issues of social justice in terms of, you know, who experiences.

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The adverse effects of pollution is intricately linked with questions of class, gender, race, questions of power.

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And yeah, so in that way, I kind of see that being a natural compatibility.

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And also really, I mean, I see both as being quite critical projects, social history, environmental history, the both.

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Ultimately about critiquing power structures. Ultimately, they kind of both arose out of the new left and that writing history from below.

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And in that sense, they also have quite similar methodological issues in terms of what's erased from the archive.

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And, you know, trying forcing yourself to find alternative sources like oral histories, traditions etc.

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But the archives of the oil company are a pretty good resource in terms of reading against the grain and extracting material from them.

393
00:45:26,670 --> 00:45:34,700
I mean, I think you can find quite a lot to produce the counter-narrative to what the company presented itself.

394
00:45:34,700 --> 00:45:38,990
When you look at the archives, it's a different story. Yes.

395
00:45:38,990 --> 00:45:46,400
Yeah, that's very true, actually. And even like the BP archive, for example, you have to you'll find, you know,

396
00:45:46,400 --> 00:45:55,310
environmental issues or problems only come up incidentally like it would be in a miscellaneous folder or an industrial relations folder.

397
00:45:55,310 --> 00:46:01,220
Yeah. And likewise, you know, these, for example, you have to then you have to, you know,

398
00:46:01,220 --> 00:46:07,670
measure them against so archival sources from like the Iranian archives.

399
00:46:07,670 --> 00:46:11,900
You know that the petition, for example, from the workers, was from Iran.

400
00:46:11,900 --> 00:46:18,320
It's quite interesting that in this this age, looking at whether the Tudor and its trade unions were quite important,

401
00:46:18,320 --> 00:46:26,260
but workers are still using this very old fashioned traditional method of addressing petitions to the institutions.

402
00:46:26,260 --> 00:46:33,710
You know, so they they carry on. I mean, this is again, it's it's an indigenous tradition which is often overlooked.

403
00:46:33,710 --> 00:46:35,660
This is how people like that protest it.

404
00:46:35,660 --> 00:46:44,930
And it's absolutely there's a couple more questions which will probably take us to the end of our time from Frank Delaney again.

405
00:46:44,930 --> 00:46:52,690
Yeah. One. Plant samples, trees, etc. Give a history of pollution in there, cause it is where I would be looking.

406
00:46:52,690 --> 00:47:02,070
That's on one of the rather technical questions. In fact, we have two more comments question, Manal.

407
00:47:02,070 --> 00:47:07,440
She's saying indeed, Iran and other oil producers don't have the largest emissions globally,

408
00:47:07,440 --> 00:47:11,250
while the industrial nations are historically responsible for climate change.

409
00:47:11,250 --> 00:47:17,250
No, not Iran promised in its submissions to the UNFCCC to reduce 12 percent of the emissions,

410
00:47:17,250 --> 00:47:24,240
but the cost to do that is very large constrained by sanctions and was made dependent on financial support from abroad.

411
00:47:24,240 --> 00:47:33,810
Does Martin have any insights from this historical studies on what can be done domestically to improve the effects on the environment?

412
00:47:33,810 --> 00:47:43,240
And the final comment? As a general comment, Fariba would say the richest Americans do have particularly strong journalistic attitudes.

413
00:47:43,240 --> 00:47:46,930
She used to work for NAOC in the late 1970s,

414
00:47:46,930 --> 00:47:53,200
and at that time there was an effort which I was a part to break away from the influence and control of not in the South,

415
00:47:53,200 --> 00:48:00,100
which is, I think is now well known. But we canvassed 73 when the Shah discovered that the consortium had a secret deal under the table,

416
00:48:00,100 --> 00:48:06,970
which in effect dictated to have Iran's economy could operate. So I'll leave you two to deal with those.

417
00:48:06,970 --> 00:48:12,870
I'm sorry for the moment with ones reaching the end.

418
00:48:12,870 --> 00:48:17,400
Yes. Thank you, Frank, for mentioning the tree samples.

419
00:48:17,400 --> 00:48:25,320
And this is one of the thing that environmental history has to do is kind of bridge with the natural sciences and use things like tree samples,

420
00:48:25,320 --> 00:48:29,850
ice cores to kind of show this historical record.

421
00:48:29,850 --> 00:48:36,090
So it's an inherently an interdisciplinary project. Manuel, thank you for raising that point.

422
00:48:36,090 --> 00:48:40,530
And also, yeah, of course, the it's not even like a historical probability.

423
00:48:40,530 --> 00:48:49,890
The Global North is still predominantly contributes to global emissions and is actually, of course, the transition to green technologies.

424
00:48:49,890 --> 00:48:55,710
The global office has pledged to provide that money 100 billion per year, and it's still unable to do that.

425
00:48:55,710 --> 00:49:03,480
So that's that's the failing and then insight from historical studies on what can be done domestically to improve the effects on Iran.

426
00:49:03,480 --> 00:49:09,870
That's perhaps where I'm going next in my in the direction in terms of thinking more

427
00:49:09,870 --> 00:49:18,500
broadly about history of environmental policy in Iran at the early stages of that.

428
00:49:18,500 --> 00:49:27,470
Thank you very much for your comment. Very burned, John, about the imperialist attitude of the oil company and I mean,

429
00:49:27,470 --> 00:49:32,930
that's something that that's the thing that kind of continues from the 50s, 60s.

430
00:49:32,930 --> 00:49:38,460
We see this kind of abaddonn is still kind of this foreign enclave.

431
00:49:38,460 --> 00:49:45,300
But with that, it's kind of there's a lot of nostalgia about as well as it's very cosmopolitan place,

432
00:49:45,300 --> 00:49:50,670
which you know, the most still, you know, the most modern city in Iran.

433
00:49:50,670 --> 00:49:59,950
Yeah. I mean, not today, but at the time. OK, I think we've reached in the last session.

434
00:49:59,950 --> 00:50:10,000
Thank you very much, Maxine. And that was extremely informative, and I hope you don't mind the grilling that we gave you some of the questions,

435
00:50:10,000 --> 00:50:17,470
but it's it's obviously it's an immensely important subject, and I very much look forward to seeing your future work.

436
00:50:17,470 --> 00:50:21,970
So thank you very much. Thank you very, very much for having me here.

437
00:50:21,970 --> 00:50:27,110
And it's a pleasure. OK, and we'll see you when your book comes out.

438
00:50:27,110 --> 00:50:30,840
And you can tell us, hopefully, yes. Yes. Thank you very much.

439
00:50:30,840 --> 00:50:42,750
All right, thank you. Bye.