So I'd like to welcome everyone to the Friday seminar or in this webinar, and I'm going to say a few words about our guest speaker,
whom we're extremely pleased to have sparing his time despite the best efforts of the train system to keep him running.
So it's a big lorry completed stage in history, so us in 2020, before that,
he was in student and saw us and had a B.A. from the University of Cambridge.
He's now a research associate and teaching fellow at Science Is.
Research focuses on the intersection of energy, environment, infrastructure and labour,
especially but not only in the history of Iran in the Middle East.
His doctoral thesis, which I should mention was awarded the very prestigious 2020 London business the Douglas Memorial
prise for the best dissertation examines the techno politics of Iranian oil nationalisation,
especially focussing on expertise, labour and anti-colonialism in Abbott.
That is monograph based on this thesis entitled Refining Knowledge, Labour Politics and Oil Nationalisation in Iran.
Nineteen thirty three eight fifty one will be published with Edinburgh University Press in 2023,
and I very much hope you'll come back and talk to us about that when that happens.
So today Martin is going to talk to us about the global climate emergency, especially as this impacts Iran and my team.
The floor is yours. Thank you. Thank you very much.
Firstly, thank you very much for, uh, to the Middle East and to Stephanie, to Michael for your invitation.
It's really great to be here virtually and especially to be part of this series on the environment that you have at this in such a pressing time.
So I'll just show my screen. So let me start.
So as we witness, 26 struggle to deliver on its promises,
we are reminded once again that a major hurdle for tackling climate change remains
the refusal of countries in the global north to take responsibility for their
historical culpability and connected to this issue that we're seeing that we see
playing out at COP26 is the lack of representation from countries in the global south,
with there being numerous complaints that the inaccessibility of the summit has excluded people on the front line of the global environmental crisis.
After all, the global south will be disproportionately affected by global warming.
This is especially so in the Middle East and North Africa,
where climate catastrophe is already too apparent as evident this year in forest fires in Turkey and Algeria.
And the sudden drying up of entire rivers includes a sun like the carbon pictured here in Davos.
These events make it increasingly difficult to leave the environment as a discrete domain of enquiry separate from political,
social and economic matters.
And of course, this is a point that has long been at the heart of subjects like geography and the environmental humanities,
but which has been relatively slow to gather pace in Middle East studies until recently.
It's relatively easy to see how the events that I just mentioned of these instances
of environmental crisis may be incorporated in the humanities and social sciences.
For example, how the drying up of rivers in Iran this year led to political mobilisations over water scarcity.
However, there are still less spectacular environmental issues that are no less urgent,
but which have captured less attention, perhaps because of the ubiquity.
One of these is air pollution. It's estimated that exposure to air pollution resulting from fossil fuel combustion
is responsible for more than 10 million premature deaths globally each year.
That's more than HIV, TB and malaria area combined.
And I think there are three main problems in its detection,
which perhaps partly explain why it hasn't received more attention, at least in the social sciences and humanities.
First, like other forms of pollution, it's often so dispersed that its specific origins and effects can be difficult to pin down.
So, for example, pollution in one city or in one country may actually emanate from another country or continent altogether.
Second, despite its hyper visibility in the form of smog or smoke, its true extent is often invisible and only detectable with special equipment.
And it's particulate matter which is actually most damaging to the lungs, which is microscopic.
Third, its damage is often incremental or what Nixon is called a form of slow violence taking place over many years.
And this applies to both inanimate and animal bodies, and the exact extent and tempo of damage can differ from body to body.
Now, as I'm sure many of you know in the audience. Air pollution is a major problem in the region today.
Any visitor will attest to its immediate visibility when arriving at major cities like Tehran pictured here,
and the effects are quickly felt in the body, especially in the nose and throat.
So although there is uncertainty about the exact origins and the effects of air pollution,
and although not all embodied experiences of it are going to be the same.
Most people exposed will know, at least it's causing some harm.
And I think this highlights how we need to consider embodied situated knowledge seriously in being able to detect environmental hazards.
Indeed, our bodies are as material as the material environments and might be the first parameter of any environmental transformation.
And yet, time and time again,
we see that such knowledge is marginalised and grand plans for environmental solutions excluded from a domain of expertise,
which is based largely on calculating macro level processes.
So why is this the case? Well,
without attempting to provide a comprehensive answer to this big question or trying to present an exceptional case in the remainder of this talk,
I want to offer one intervention by turning attention to air pollution caused by the oil industry in Iran.
As a historian, I will do so through a historical lens focussing on pollution and soil became central in
political discourse in the years leading up to the country's oil nationalisation in 1951.
Now, there are lots of studies on oil nationalisation,
and these largely focus on high politics in Tehran for understandable reasons, especially figures like Mossadeq.
But as I argue in the forthcoming book that Stephanie mentioned,
we should root this important event in the subaltern experiences of those living and working in the centre of Iran's oil operations in Khuzestan,
especially the city of Abadon pictured here.
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.
I think that this more focussed history can provide some lessons for how we may tackle environmental crises today.
Like a budget first, like a burgeoning body of work in the environmental and energy humanity shows,
it highlights how imperialism has been historically responsible for global pollution in the Middle East and global south more generally.
Moreover, by understanding how the situation in abaddonn was then translated into mainstream political discourse
in Tehran and how abadon has more generally been marginalised in histories of oil nationalisation,
we encounter a more fundamental issue about expertise, namely who has the legitimacy to speak and what forms of knowledge are valued over others.
I argue that this history not only further demonstrates the importance of
situated and embodied knowledge and solutions to environmental challenges today,
but also that environmentalism must not be detached from wider issues of social justice, such as workers rights and infrastructural inequality.
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.
Then I'll shift attention more specifically to disputes between oil workers and the company over toxic exposure in the refinery,
showing how these were emblematic of the company's efforts to render workers as political non-expert actors.
Finally, I show how Tehrani,
journalists and politicians then reproduced the separation between politics and technology of oil in mainstream political discourse.
And this had important effects on the oil nationalisation movement.
So first, some background. The Anglo-Iranian oil company, or Anglo Persian, as it was initially called,
constructed the first processing plant of the abadon refinery in 1912 to refine crude oil found recently found at Masjid Soliman.
Now, as others have highlighted, the construction of such infrastructures depended on dispossessing local populations to secure territory,
and this allowed the company to rapidly expand the refinery, which quickly grew to an exceptional size with a large workforce.
Partly due to its strategic importance in the British Empire, the refinery was a major source of fuel oil, especially for the Royal Navy.
This expansion continued during the interwar years to meet rising consumer demand for oil products and,
of course, gasoline being one of the main ones at this time.
Meanwhile, a large city had emerged around the refinery with its own social and economic
life as people migrated from other parts of the country seeking employment.
While the company had initially built accommodation adjacent to the refinery for British management and also for skilled artisans from India,
the majority of domestic migrants to the city gravitated towards the local bazaar known as Sha or Abadon Town.
And now scholars like Kaveh Ehsani and Rasmus Ayling's show from the late 1920s,
the company sought to control this so-called native town to prevent disease and also ultimately to maintain a disciplined.
Population and this happened through measures such as urban planning and also the provision of municipal infrastructures and leisure facilities.
But these measures also resulted in a deeply divided city.
So, for one, urban life was racially segregated, such that there were separate social clubs,
transport sports facilities and even cinemas for British, Indian and Iranian workers and their families.
In addition, there were deep economic and infrastructural inequalities,
especially especially exacerbated by the British occupation during the Second World War.
So to give one concrete example at this time,
while each bungalow in the British management neighbourhood of Bahrain had its own septic
tank and was connected to a purified water supply system in abadon in abadon town,
that is, there was no water latrine system, no electricity, and there were only seven water standards.
Conditions were even worse in shanty towns like the notorious courthouse about pictured here, which consisted of homes built a mud from scrap metal,
which were also subject to sweltering heat in the summer, flooding in winter and the buildings were also highly flammable.
So, for example, in 1948 49, there was a major fire that destroyed 84 homes.
This infrastructural violence in abadon materialised social divisions along racialized lines,
systematically exposing a section of the population to death, or will in Bombay cause network politics.
The politics of abadon were perhaps best exemplified by pollution.
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,
sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, which can all gradually cause serious long term health problems such as cancer,
especially in hot temperatures like in Aberdeen.
But the direction of the prevailing winds meant that these gases tended to blow specifically towards the poorer neighbourhoods east of the refinery,
predominantly inhabited by Iranian workers and their families.
And this was something that residents and managers were well aware of at the time.
So, for example, in the summer months, the winds blew in the opposite direction.
And so the British residents actually left the city during this period to escape the pollution.
The delayed effects of pollution damaging bodies at incremental speeds produced uncertainty about the extent of its existence.
But it was undeniably a daily reality, and we see this in the way that visitors talked about it when they when they went to Abdon.
So, for example, that when the famous intellectual challenge on Afrimat went to Aberdeen for the first time in 1943, he did not see the city,
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.
Likewise, the writer, Hassan Cumshot,
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.
The racialized harm to bodies extended into the refinery itself,
Iranian workers who carried out maintenance work in the refinery were
disproportionately exposed to occupational hazards compared to the British superiors.
Former workers accounts testify that work in the refineries processing areas was highly dangerous due to the constant threat of fires,
explosions and gas leaks. This harm could also take the more incremental and less visible form.
In September 1949, Workers' representatives in the Works Factory Council reported a gas leak in the sulphur dioxide plant.
Management dismissed the concerns and forced the staff to continue working their.
But then in the months leading up to the announcement of oil nationalisation in March 1951,
workers in abaddonn sent a petition to much less and to the Ministry of Justice complaining that they had become sick.
Maslen, as a result of poisoning gases like sulphur dioxide and also exposure to let an acid.
They said that as a result, they were now dying a slow death.
They urged the government to intervene as the company's refusal to pay compensation for illness contravenes the new Iranian labour law.
Even the company's own investigation actually detected constant levels of sulphur dioxide,
sulphur dioxide that would result in serious health problems and sometimes levels even high enough to pose an immediate threat to life.
Yeah, in its commissioned reports, this was completely omitted in its report was published in the British Journal of Industrial
Medicine and concluded that there were no adverse health effects caused by exposure in the plants,
attributing ill health instead to factors external to the refinery.
In this regime of intercept ability, as in the words of the historian of science, Michelle Murphy,
workers lacks the technical instruments needed to prove that their ailments stemmed from the refinery itself,
giving rise to toxic uncertainty that the company was able to exploit by externalising workers health problems as endemic to local society instead.
The controversy reflected a more fundamental division between workers and management
about the legitimacy of different forms of knowledge as a basis for oil expertise.
Since 1946, the company had operated a disciplinary programme to systematically inculcate safety consciousness.
For instance, one former worker recalled that every day workers had to read a safety booklet,
which they all had to have in their pockets, and this contained up to 47 regulations.
The content of these guidelines was focussed on accident prevention through eliminating so-called carelessness.
Management consistently blamed accidents on workers in discipline based on long standing
assertions that Iranians lacked the capacities for acquiring scientific and technical knowledge.
Compared to European and Indian employees and this formed the basis for the company dismissing growing calls for Iranian ization,
which would mean the promotion of Iranians to more senior positions in the company.
It also meant that management claimed to monopolise expertise through helping workers protect
themselves in framing safety expertise in terms of accident prevention management claims.
This could be calculated in advance and also from afar communicated to workers.
Don't top down this relegated the significance of in situ embodied knowledge on the
grounds that might help to detect processional damage that might lead up to accidents,
for example, smelling gas leaks that arise from corrosion.
And this kind of knowledge could be communicated bottom up by workers.
And in fact, this is what workers did, despite management's safety regulations,
workers regularly challenged management's claim to expertise by bringing up problems about inadequate safety provisions.
Nevertheless, the company excluded such technical controversies on the grounds in maintaining
its exclusive claim to expertise as a set of abstract disembodied knowledge,
and use this as the basis for the ongoing marginalisation of workers as political rather than technical actors.
This also extended to the way the company projected its expertise to the wider public,
so in its extensive PR machinery, it represented the refinery as a complex scientific domain.
A black box where only the inputs and outputs were known in various images.
The refinery was depicted as a self-regulating objective system devoid of human subjectivity,
concealing bodily damage within the system caused by toxic exposure.
And this was this was especially how the company started representing the refinery to
the Tehran press following amidst growing scrutiny following the 1946 general strike,
which halted its entire operations.
The company aimed to allay fears about its colonial intentions while demonstrating the indispensability of its expertise to the Iranian nation.
Newspapers were important because they helped create space for Tehran's middle class to discuss national development,
especially in the context of heightened territorial anxiety in the 1940s.
And as Sue Roszak shows, Western science and technology occupied a central place in these debates.
So starting from spring 1947, I invited journalists from Tehran on guided tours of the oil installations, especially the abadon refinery.
And these tools included famous figures such as Ibrahim Khalistan, Halil Maliki, Mohammed Massoud and Abbas Khalili on these tours.
The company took visitors to the main processing plants and emphasised gargantuan nature and at the same time,
marginalised or omitted the contribution of manual labour to the functioning of the refinery,
reinforcing the effects of the refinery as the self-regulating automated system.
In subsequent reports, these journalists then reproduced this image of the refinery,
praising the installations as the most modern in the world and a source for emulation.
In contrast, they criticised the living conditions in the town and blame this on the company.
So what was happening was that they were distinguishing between the apolitical nature of the refinery and then the quasi colonial enclave around it.
Notably, absent in these accounts were reports of pollution emanating from the refinery,
and in some articles even praised will be expressed all at the sight of smoke coming out of these tall smokestacks.
These messages were important in shaping the emerging nationalisation movement, simultaneously fuelling growing opposition to the company.
At the same time as reinforcing the legitimacy of its expertise.
Many publications of the Emerging Pro Nationalisation Coalition, the Premier League,
the National Front delineated between IOCs technical accomplishments and its politics.
For instance, even the agitation and anti-imperialist newspaper Shaw had admitted that despite its disgust for IIRC quote,
the administrative and technical organisations of the company are amongst the most perfect in the world.
End quote. So the point was to gain access to iox expertise rather than to reformulate its contents.
While these pro nationalisation newspapers did feature complaints of workers in
Aberdeen about poor living and labour conditions throughout 1950 and early fifty one,
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.
Indeed, the National Front often expressed an ambivalent attitude towards the workers,
even condemning the general strike in April 1951 for fear that it would damage the installations.
And these dynamics really came to a head when the much less mixed oil committee investigated exactly how nationalisation could be implemented.
This was in early 1951, so Mosaddek, who was then chair of the committee, draughted a questionnaire enquiring into the feasibility of nationalisation.
And this questioner explicitly separated technical considerations from political ones.
He sent this to engineers who had not even visited abadon instead of those who'd worked there for many years.
Significantly, despite the oil workers petition about toxic exposure, which had been submitted recently been submitted,
no mention was made about pollution or toxicity in the questionnaire.
In response, the engineers advised that nationalisation would not be possible without retaining IOCs existing foreign experts, especially in refining.
Hence, as the newly established national Iranian oil company NAOC took over operations in June 51,
the foundations were set for the continuation of IOCs practises, even as the company itself was expelled.
Although, Mosaddek, did Alex iOX, British staff in September,
the national Iranian oil company maintained the existing employment structure, training schemes and crucially,
the safety policies in the two years leading up to the 1953 coup, which ultimately allowed for the reintroduction of multinational oil companies.
The following year. Fundamentally, then the Iranian government reproduced the expertise of the very oil company it expelled,
acting on the premise that oil expertise was exclusively an apolitical,
standardised set of knowledge that could be applied regardless of local particularities.
And crucially, regardless of the embodied knowledge of workers.
So just to wrap up, I think this history, the history of how this comes about can provide free main lessons for environmental politics today.
So first, we see the role of imperialism in spreading pollution,
and this seems quite obvious when looking at the material construction of these oil infrastructures,
these polluting oil infrastructures, which still operate today. But it was also in the role of the company in concealing this pollution.
True racing workers, bodies in the technical system and this laid the foundations for the reproduction of epistemology in which
the environment was this external domain to be exploited rather than something entangled with human bodies.
So, so let me thinking about environmental politics today.
It needs to factor in this historical culpability and the active work done to erase it.
Second, it points to the importance of including so-called lay actors in environmental policy policymaking today.
This is because toxic exposure in the abadon refinery was detected fruit in body situated knowledge, rather than from some calculation from afar.
So we should expand the scope of knowledge that we deemed to be a legitimate basis for environmental expertise.
Any environmental expertise that's based exclusively exclusively on abstract knowledge of macro level
processes runs the risk of overlooking the unequal distribution of environmental hazards on the local level.
And finally, I think that this history indicates that environmentalism cannot be detached from wider issues of social justice.
Workers in Aberdeen did not articulate an environmentalism passé but rather situated an
environmental issue within wider issues of workers rights and infrastructural inequality.
And in this way, I think they expressed what Ramachandra Guha has called an environmentalism of the poor,
which does not treat the environment as a discrete domain, but instead is intertwined with questions of survival and lived human experience.
Any environmentalism that delineates between environmental and political issues runs the risk of reproducing this
view of the environment as this external entity to be calculated to be managed and ultimately to be utilised,
rather than rather than something we have any ethical obligation towards.
So I will leave that leave there and thank you for listening.
I look forward to your questions. Thank you very much for that, Martin.
You have a huge amount of information and theoretical perspective here.
I have a question of my own, but perhaps we'll begin with a question from Dr. Abdul Razak in the audience.
Thank you, Martin.
She said I was wondering if you can comment on the two to the trade unions, whether they had any interest in environmental issues in at the time.
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,
British trade unions and the British Labour Party were beginning to be a little
bit concerned about the oil companies treatment of its workers in Iran.
And I wondered if you had any,
if you found any evidence of contacts between Iranian trade unions and British trade unions about generally living conditions
and obviously the way you you posed the issue of embeddedness and environmental issues within within the bigger picture,
it's quite interesting, but I think there were one or two reports,
maybe towards the end of the war, about dissatisfaction on the part of the Brits about conditions.
So I wonder if you've shown that. Yes, thank you very much.
And yeah,
I noticed in the 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 was sort of passing reference was made to it in a parliamentary commission that was sent to abadon to investigate labour conditions.
And this was from the Labour governments and basically after the 1946 strike,
the British government was was trying to investigate and and put pressure on the company to reform its Labour policy.
And they picked up on this issue of there being exposure to sulphur dioxide.
And I think that this we can kind of see this within the context of growing awareness of toxic exposure in the West.
In the 1940s, we really see in the trade union movement and in the labour movement more generally that
there's this growing awareness of the need to control and pollution in industrial workplaces.
So it's not framed as such as like an environmental issue, but more alive issue, really.
And so, yeah, in terms of direct correspondence between trade unions in Britain and in the Tudor party, I didn't necessarily see that.
But certainly, I think you can situate this within a global moment in which.
Toxic exposure becomes a more central labour issue.
And in fact, this is reflected in the Iranian labour law,
which is create it's draughted in 1946 and this kind of puts it actually makes industrial hygiene like a central issue as well.
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.
I noticed that there was someone who had a hand up,
but we can't actually allow people to put their own questions directly so that you could use the Q&A function.
That would be quite helpful. So, Martin,
you're you're you're very carefully modulated presentation actually conceals quite a damning indictment of the National Front and also in particular,
which you didn't really expand upon.
I wonder, have you had any pushback on this question because people don't like to see the idols criticising this way,
and it's quite a serious criticism. So that's one thing that I lied to.
That is. Is it too strong to say that the oil nationalisation made no difference to the workers?
Or is it too much?
Well, firstly, I of course, I'm anticipating there will be pushback, and I think we need to um,
I think that it's important to acknowledge the systematic efforts to prevent nationalisation from really happening on the ground.
So when oil was was nationalised, there was a British blockade.
There was a systematic effort to deny spare parts from entering abaddonn.
And so it made it. Yeah. So in that sense, I I am sympathetic.
Um? I in terms of did it, did it actually make much difference?
I think that the again, it comes back to this question.
Were they allowed to? And act much difference, but certainly workers at the time, they did see the relevance of the National Front and Mossadeq,
so they did actually sense this opportunity to finally realise a lot of their aspirations for promotion and for better living in labour conditions.
And they saw that they they situated their struggle as part of this sort of wider anti-imperialist
moment in which they could redress these grievances that they'd held for for many years.
So I don't think it's yeah, in that sense, I don't I.
In terms of political consciousness, I see it as being very significant.
The National Front was attacked. It was very the national front was very important in terms of political subjectivity.
Whether or not it's translated into. Improve living in labour conditions on the ground.
I think that's more open for debate. Yeah. Thank you.
Okay. So we have a question from Frank de Monet.
And he says typically I would expect differential health records to exist in cities due to pollution.
I would expect to see raised cancer, respiratory and other bad effects downwind of sources of pollution.
Part of smart city design includes monitoring and cross-reference and cross-referencing to health records.
Do such records exist in Abidjan or other Iranian cities?
And there's a follow up question which I'll give you at the same time in the case of the Bhopal disaster.
There was never a liability trail that the parent company in the US, if that in international law,
any redress to Iranian citizens harmed by the pollution promotion of any.
Well, thank you very much for that question. What we see is that in terms of systematic records, it's very difficult to come by.
There was no kind of systematic systematic monitoring. And in fact,
I think this is a wider methodological problem in doing environmental history is being able to kind of historically measure things like pollution.
And I think this it doesn't really become recorded into in Iran until much later until the 60s,
when pollution starts entering the sort of political consciousness in Tehran.
What we do see in Ogden is a very sort of localised investigation, which was conducted by the company.
So the company commissioned this report after these complaints were made by workers.
And the reports did actually show that there was increased rates of cancer, not cancer, but respiratory diseases, bronchitis, tuberculosis.
And so in this kind of local small scale report, we do see there is kind of some kind of correlation between exposure and and ill health and.
And yet your second question is that in international, any any redress to Iranian citizens harmed by the pollution for the refinery?
As far as I know, I'm not. And this is the thing that actually the oil company, when it published this report, when it did this investigation,
there were already international standards agreed upon about acceptable levels of exposure to gases like sulphur dioxide.
And this was being done in the U.S. and Europe.
So there was already some kind of regulation, and the company knew this and were well aware of it, but still.
Contravened these standards, so in other words, they they they were meeting standards where there was more, where it was harder to contravene.
But in a place like Abaddon, they they were able to kind of circumvent these standards.
Yeah. OK, can you hear me?
Yes, yes. OK. Can you tell us whether you think the Islamic Republic has got a better record in in in this kind of area or not?
Is it possible?
It's I mean, certainly we see that there have been quite a few.
Air pollution measures during the tunnel, Islamic Republic, for example, you know, focussing especially on like.
Cars driving cars, for example, alternating.
No, no plates. You can only drive a car into this number plate one day and so on.
It. It's difficult to.
It's difficult to really say whether this is because of something particular in this Islamic Republic
or more a reflection of globally there being increasing awareness of air pollution because even in,
you know, like the US and Europe, even though there was. Awareness of air pollution and its dangers.
You're going back to the 19th century. We don't really see a systematic effort to regulate it or control it until like the 60s and 70s.
So it's difficult to know. Yeah, it's difficult to say, is it?
You know, to give credit, or, you know, I mean.
But also, I mean, we certainly see, for example, this instance of toxic exposure.
This is an ongoing issue. I mean, we've seen, for example, major gas leaks recent in recent years in petrochemical complexes.
We also see that the workers, the major oil workers strike this year.
One of the main demands, one of the main grievances was over working conditions, safety essentially and hazardous hazards.
So, yeah, so of course it's not. It's not like it's.
It's dead, yet it's still there, still continuities there. You should have the car in river was quite shocking.
I hadn't seen that before. It's quite ironic that you have a province with no water, not so much oil.
And I wonder, to what extent were you able to find anything out about the recent political turmoil that we know that was on
the order issues is is this impossible to investigate or have you been able to work out what was going on?
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,
environmental activism or, you know, the grassroots environmental activism in Iran drawing attention to this.
We can obviously see that there's a combination of macro level factors to do with climate change,
but also more local level issues to do with mismanagement, diversion of water extraction from groundwater sources.
So it's definitely this combination as far as the exact details, I can't, I can't say.
OK, I can encourage anyone who has a question to put it through the Q&A before we have to close.
Want to take you back to the bigger picture, if we can.
Can you give us a sense the Iranian studies is not something which has a long record of research and environmental humanities.
What do you think Iranian studies can bring to the table regarding environmental studies generally?
Yeah, I mean, I actually I think that the in general,
the environment for humanity's energy humanity is that the burgeoning fields, but they are still dominated by a Eurocentric ism.
There's still a big focus on the global north.
Of course, there are some like. So for example, there's a lot of work being done in South Asian studies,
Latin American studies on environmental humanities, but still the Middle East and Iranian studies, less so.
And I think that given that. Iran is one of the major oil producers.
I think this is a major problem because it means that we hardly know anything about, uh,
in terms of environmental humanities learns about a region that is actually centrally responsible for this global environmental crisis.
And this is, I think, reflect reflected in a lot of the major environmental histories completely erasing
or brushing over lived experiences of environmental crises in the region.
So, for example, some of the major histories of pollution in the 20th century,
they actually make these big claims that oil production in the region happens in these remote settings in these deserts,
far away from any communities completely overlooking the fact that, uh,
there are these huge populations living in the vicinity of these oil installations.
So I think that's that's a major problem.
And of course, Iran is a very diverse country ecologically, and there's a rich tradition of environmental activism in the country.
I think that the environmental humanities, which gained a lot from the.
The insights in challenging these kind of Eurocentric views of of environment and also these diffusion is narratives because you
also see that there's this prevailing narrative that environmentalism spread from the West and then to the rest of the world,
especially Rachel Carson's famous book The Silent Spring.
After that, it's supposedly then the rest of the the rest of the world gets inspired,
and this completely overlooks kind of the local indigenous traditions that were already in existence.
Thank you. Well, we have a couple of questions. One from three.
Well, it's not a question of the comment, which I'll summarise,
which she says the attitude of the British was very much the same towards their own people, which I think is probably the case.
But it might be quite interesting to have some comparative study with other oil
producing areas such as Venezuela to see how they dealt with similar issues arising.
Let me have a question, a comment from my knowledge to.
Thank you for your excellent talk. 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,
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.
So legit reasons for this, absolutely.
And that's 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.
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.
So thank you. Thank you for raising that.
And we see that also. Iran's involvement in COP 26 isn't exactly hasn't been that pivotal ever again.
I will ask another question and then let's see if we will ask questions from the audience.
Yes, this is environmental history that you've written that is it a social history of political history?
Well, how would you locate yourself in terms of ordinary?
Well, I mean, I embarked on the project, you know,
knowing nothing about environmental history and is very much it was for a labour history, land and social history lands.
And it's it's through this specific.
These industrial issues over toxic exposure that then led me to seeing this.
Trying to link this to an environmental history as well. And I think that that's part of the problem is in kind of treating environmental history when
environmental history is this kind of discrete sub field that isn't connected to social political history,
et cetera, which the best environmental issues are not like that.
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.
And for me, environment is completely in this history that I've looked at.
Environment is completely intertwined with issues of social justice in terms of, you know, who experiences.
The adverse effects of pollution is intricately linked with questions of class, gender, race, questions of power and I.
Yeah. So in that way, I kind of see that being a natural compatibility.
And ultimately, I mean. I see both as being quite.
Critical projects, social history, environmental history, the boat ultimately about critiquing power structures.
Ultimately, they kind of both arose out of the new left and that rewriting history from below.
And in that sense, they also have quite similar methodological issues in terms of what's erased from the archive.
And, you know, being trying, you're forcing yourself to find alternative sources like oral histories, traditions etc.
But the archives of the oil company are a pretty good resource in terms of reading against the grain and extracting material from them.
I mean, I think you can find quite a lot there to produce the counter-narrative to what the company presented itself.
When you look at the archives, it's a different story. Yes.
Yeah, that's very true, actually. And even like the BP archive, for example, you have to you'll find, you know,
environmental issues or problems only come up incidentally like it would be in a miscellaneous folder or an industrial relations folder.
Yeah, and likewise, you know, these, for example, you have to then you have to,
you know, measure them against salt archival sources from like the Iranian archives.
Hmm. You know that the petition for it sent from the workers was run from Iran.
It's quite interesting that in this this age, looking at whether the Tudor and its trade unions were quite important,
but workers are still using this very old fashioned traditional medicine that does address petitions to the.
You know, so they they carry on. I mean, this is again, it's it's an indigenous tradition which is often overlooked.
This is how people make that protest and. Absolutely.
There's a couple more questions which will probably take us to the end of our time from Frank Delaney again.
Yeah, won't plant side samples, trees, etc. give a history of pollution in there, cause it is where I would be looking.
So that's one of the rather technical questions. In fact, we have two more comments question Manuel.
She's saying. Indeed, Iran and other oil producers don't have the largest emissions level globally,
while the industrial nations are historically responsible for climate change.
No, not Iran promised in its submission to the UNFCCC to reduce 12 percent of emissions.
But the cost to do that is very large constrained by sanctions and was made dependent on financial support from abroad.
Does Martin have any insights from this historical studies on what can be done domestically to improve the effects on environment?
And just so you can. Just the final comment.
As a general comment, Fariba would say the richest Americans do have particularly strong journalistic attitudes.
She used to work for NAOC in the late 1970s,
and at that time there was an effort which I was a part to break away from the influence and control not of themselves,
which is, I think is now well-known. But we can.
And when the Shah discovered that the consortium had a secret deal under the table, which in effect dictated to have Iran's economy could operate.
So I'll leave you two to deal with those. I'm sorry to solve them all at once.
Reaching the end. Not to make. Yes, sir.
Thank you, Frank, for mentioning the the and tree samples.
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,
ice cores to kind of show this historical record.
So it's an inherently an interdisciplinary project. Manuel, thank you for raising that point.
And also, yeah, of course, the it's not even like a historical culpability.
The global north is still predominantly contributes to global emissions and is actually, of course, the transition to green technologies.
The global office has pledged to provide that money 100 billion per year, and it's still unable to do that.
So that's that's that's, uh, the failing and then insight from historical studies and what can be done domestically to improve the effects.
And that's perhaps where I'm going next in my in the direction in terms of thinking more broadly about.
History of environmental policy in Iran, the early stages of that.
Um. This.
Thank you very much for your comment. Very burned, John, about the the imperialist attitude of the oil company.
And I mean, that's something that that's the thing that kind of continues the 50s 60s.
We see this kind of abadon is still kind of this foreign enclave.
But with that, it's kind of there's a lot of nostalgia about it as well as it's very cosmopolitan place,
which, you know, the moat still, you know, the most modern city in Iran.
Yeah, I mean, not today, but at the time. OK, I think we've reached in the last session.
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,
but it's it's obviously it's an immensely important subject, and I very much look forward to seeing your future work.
So thank you very much. Thank you very, very much for having me here.
And it's a pleasure. OK, and we'll see you when your book comes out and you can tell us, hopefully, yes.
Yes. Thank you very much. All right, thank you.