Month: October 2025

Iran is a warning to every society that treats water as infinite. Over the summer, Iran’s water crisis turned into an emergency. Wells collapsed and some reservoirs ran dry. Taps went dry for half a day in Tehran, and state media warned that the city of about 10 million people could hit “Day Zero,” the point at which water resources can no longer meet demand, within weeks.

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Temperatures rose above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, air conditioners droned, and power cuts followed. Millions of Iranians baked in the punishing heat. In a rare admission of failure, Masoud Pezeshkian, the Iranian president offered 100 billion tomans (about a million dollars) to anyone who could solve the crisis.

Iran isn’t facing a mere drought. Iran faces water bankruptcy, with demand far outstripping supply. The collapse of water security in Iran has been decades in the making and is rooted in a mania for megaprojects—dam building, deep wells, and water transfer schemes—that ignored the fundamentals of hydrology and ecological balance.

For millennia, qanats—ingenious underground aqueducts—balanced survival with scarcity across the central plateau of Iran. Those traditional systems are now collapsing alongside aquifers, and ancient settlements in Yazd in central Iran, Kerman in southeast Iran, and Khorasan in northeastern Iran have been abandoned as qanats dried up, aquifers caved in, and land subsided. Satellite imagery and field surveys show entire farming communities disappearing because their groundwater sources failed.

Successive Iranian rulers believed that dams, deep wells, and inter-basin transfers could outsmart geography and climate. The mismanagement of resources by the Islamic Republic compounded the crisis. Political hubris and mismanagement have reduced one of the oldest water civilizations to a parable of collapse.

Origins of the water crisis

The environmental unraveling of Iran began with a fascination for concrete. In 1949, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, visited Las Vegas and marveled at the Hoover Dam. The Shah was enthralled by colossal structures as symbols of control.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the United States and the Soviet Union competed for influence in Asia and Africa, packing their ideological visions in the guise of development, and luring modernizing Asian and African leaders with loans and technical assistance in dam building and hydraulics.

President Harry S. Truman’s Four Point Program offered the Shah technical assistance, sending American engineers to train Iranian specialists, transferring modern irrigation and drilling technology, and introducing deep well drilling equipment and powerful pumps that enabled Iranian farmers to drain aquifers at an unsustainable pace. The Shah placed water-hungry industries such as steel and petrochemicals in Iran’s driest central plateau in Isfahan and Fars provinces, tying development of heavy industry to regions with no water of their own and dependent on diversions from other basins.

In 1963, the Shah introduced land reforms to modernize the countryside by redistributing large estates to small farmers, breaking up control of feudal landlords, and promoting mechanized farming with state credit. More than two million peasant families were given land. The reforms hastened the break with traditional systems. Many farmers abandoned the ancient qanats for motorized wells. But the Shah’s failure to provide support to the peasants led to their farms failing, and sent waves of impoverished migrants to Tehran and other Iranian cities—many of whom would later fuel the 1979 revolution.

The age of the Ayatollahs

After the fall of the Shah in January 1979, the nascent Islamic Republic denounced his aggressive modernization drive inspired by the West. In November 1979, radical Iranian students seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, demanding the Carter Administration extradite the Shah, who had been granted asylum in the United States. President Jimmy Carter froze Iranian government assets in the U.S. and imposed a trade embargo on the country.

The Iran-Iraq war broke out in Sept.1980, and the Islamic Republic faced intense pressure to feed the people. Food rationing was introduced. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic, championed self-sufficiency and food sovereignty. Almost overnight the number of wells in Iran doubled.

My father, Sayyed Ahang Kowsar, was a scientist, who worked on preventing desertification in Iran by using floodwater to recharge aquifers since the early 1970s. Before the 1979 revolution, Iran had just 14 major dams and fewer than 80,000 wells, but within three years the number of wells had doubled and the new government was planning hundreds of dams.

Between 1980 and 1988, as the war with Iraq drained the national budget, only a handful of dams were under construction. After the war, my father and his scientist colleagues warned that dams and water-intensive farming were unsustainable in a warming climate. But their voices were drowned out when Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the relatively moderate leader, took office as President of Iran, a few months after the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, and aggressively championed privatization of the economy—a policy outlook that ignored ecological concerns.

The rise of a water mafia

President Rafsanjani empowered some key institutions: Khatam al-Anbiya Construction Headquarters, the engineering arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the Iran Water and Power Resources Development Company (I.W.P.C.O.), a state-owned enterprise founded by regime insiders. And there was Mahab Ghodss, an incredibly powerful and opaque consulting firm run by regime insiders, which drafted the studies for dam projects and lobbied for approval.

The trinity formed a closed loop: I.W.P.C.O. commissioned the dam building projects based on outdated Western blueprints and without environmental safeguards; Mahab Ghodss lobbied; and Khatam, the I.R.G.C. engineering wing, walked away with the construction contracts. From this collaboration emerged Iran’s “water mafia”— a cartel of ministry officials, politically connected consultancies, IRGC contractors, and their academic allies.

Dams and water diversions became engines of patronage, enriching insiders, killing rivers and exacting a terrible cost from rural communities. Projects were approved without proper reviews, and hundreds of dams rose without environmental safeguards.

Lake Urmia in western Iran is the starkest instance of ecological destruction. Once the largest lake in the Middle East, it was reduced to a salt-crusted basin by the 2010s, starved of inflows after a dam-building frenzy throttled the rivers feeding it.

Even in regions without dams, farmers pumped recklessly from unmonitored wells. Aquifers collapsed, fertile plains subsided, and deserts spread. It was all justified in the name of self-sufficiency. Inter basin transfers created the illusion of abundance. Rain-fed fields in arid areas that had relied on dry farming for centuries were converted to water-intensive farms growing rice, and alfalfa.

The cycle of mismanagement spanned administrations. President Mohammad Khatami, who was in office from 1997 to 2005, grew up in Yazd province in central Iran, an arid region that relied on qanats for survival and development. Khatami backed water transfers to his home region and supported I.W.P.C.O. ‘s relentless drive to build multimillion dollar water megaprojects. In 2001, I published some essays in Norouz, an Iranian newspaper, criticizing his administration’s unsustainable water management plans. Khatami summoned me and heard my warning. Soon, I was banned from writing about water.

In the late 2000s, as the climate warmed further, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad loosened restrictions on well drilling and started another dam building spree. Policies supposed to appease farmers destroyed their land and water. Farmers once proud of living and working their ancestral land were driven into poverty and forced into shantytowns. By the summer of 2024, more than 10,000 villages in Iran had no access to drinking water. A broader water crisis was affecting some 27,000 villages, stripped their residents of work and status.

The water mafia kept building dams that would never fill. Plains sank as water tables fell mostly from the 1990s and fertile lands turned to dust. Aquifers could be recharged on modest budgets through flood-spreading and rainwater harvesting that had proven effective in countries like India. But these nature-based solutions were dismissed in favor of multi-million dollar contracts that enriched regime insiders. Oversight bodies and parliament looked the other way; some lawmakers aligned with the water mafia’s agenda.

How to confront Iran’s water scarcity

Iran is a stark case study of governments doubling down on bad policies. Iran has already crossed into water bankruptcy and no hidden reserves remain. Many experts, including a former agriculture minister, have repeatedly cautioned that Iran must keep water use below 40% of renewable supplies, leaving enough for rivers to flow, wetlands to breathe, and aquifers to naturally recharge. Instead, agriculture accounts for nearly 90% of water usage, including withdrawing non-renewable water reserves.

Iran faces a grave threat and needs to rethink its catastrophic mismanagement of water. Many of the world’s top water scientists are Iranian, who have been forced into exile or sidelined at home by Iran’s entrenched water mafia. They are well equipped to help Iran if they were allowed to.

Iran may need an independent water authority insulated from partisan politics. A serious plan to confront the water bankruptcy would begin by balancing water consumption to the land’s natural supply and reserving a share for the environment. Iran can achieve that by abandoning water-hungry crops, shifting to smart farming, conserving every drop, and reviving flood-management techniques Iranians once mastered to recharge depleted aquifers. Tehran also has to say no to megaprojects that devour budgets and ecosystems. Reckless schemes like scaling up desalinated seawater transfers will only worsen the damage.

Tehran loses nearly a third of its water through broken pipes.Smarter city systems—leak detection, pressure control, wastewater reuse—are essential fixes. Securing a livable future demands collective responsibility and public participation in reshaping governance before the wells run dry. The water crisis won’t stop at Iran’s borders as disputes over shared river basins with neighboring Iraq and Afghanistan could ignite the region’s next security flashpoint.

Unlike Ayatollah Khamenei, the future leaders of Iran will not be able to dodge global standards forever. Supporting exiled expertise, tying international aid and diplomacy to sustainable water governance, and treating access to water as a human right would send a clear signal that the crisis is not just technical—it is existential.

If you’ve been planning a national park trip, the government shutdown likely won’t keep you from hitting the trails—at least for the time being. But with thousands of National Parks Service (NPS) employees expected to be furloughed, a number of park buildings and indoor attractions are set to close and former officials have warned that leaving other sites open will pose serious risks to the public, the parks themselves, and the wildlife living within them.

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According to a contingency plan posted by the Department of the Interior Tuesday night, “park roads, lookouts, trails, and open-air memorials will generally remain accessible to visitors”—but “as a general rule, if a facility or area is locked or secured during non-business hours (buildings, gated parking lots, etc.) it should be locked or secured for the duration of the shutdown.”

That means buildings that require staffing—including visitor centers or sites like the Washington Monument—will be shuttered. Updates to park websites and social media accounts will also be put on pause with the exception of emergency communications.

If the shutdown persists, NPS may adjust the plans.

Read more: The Federal Government Has Shut Down. Here’s How It Could Affect Your Life

It’s unclear how long the situation will last, as Republicans and Democrats appeared to remain deadlocked in their showdown over government spending on Wednesday after failing to reach a deal to fund the government by the midnight deadline. 

The last shutdown went on for 34 days and left behind damage to national parks that lasted much longer, fueling concerns over how the parks would fare in a similar situation nearly seven years later.

In a letter last week, a coalition of more than 35 former park superintendents pleaded for President Donald Trump to close all national parks in the event of a government shutdown to protect both the sites and visitors’ safety.

“Past shutdowns in which gates remained open with limited staff have hurt our parks: Iconic symbols cut down and vandalized, trash piled up, habitats destroyed, and visitor safety jeopardized,” they wrote. “If you don’t act now, history is not just doomed to repeat itself, the damage could in fact be much worse.”

How will the shutdown affect National Parks workers?

Under the contingency plan, 9,296 NPS employees out of a total of 14,500 who work at the agency  are expected to be furloughed.

Among those who are set to remain on the job, 2,700 fall under the category of “excepted activity” that is “necessary to protect life and property.” These groups of workers include those involved in law enforcement and emergency response, border and coastal protection, fire suppression, and public health and safety, among other categories.

Also retaining their positions are 2,500 “exempted activity” workers whose “compensation is financed by a resource other than annual appropriations”—though NPS added that is “subject to the continued availability of funds.” The plan notes an unspecified amount of overlap between the two categories of workers, and that certain exempted employees may transition to an excepted or furloughed status.

Read more: Vance Warns Federal Layoffs Could Come Soon If Shutdown Drags On

The NPS Washington Support Office, the agency’s headquarters, will retain “no more than” 25 employees responsible for financing, budgeting, communication and human resources. Meanwhile, no more than five to ten staffers will remain working at each regional office. 

Concerns about damage to parks

Former park officials and advocates have expressed fear that protected land will be damaged by visitors if sites are left partially open while thousands of workers are furloughed or fired, and therefore absent from supervising lands. 

During the last government shutdown, which went on for more than a month between December 2018 and January 2019, national parks were vandalized and trash and human waste overflowed. At Joshua Tree National Park in California, multiple Joshua trees, which can be more than a century old, were chopped down. Also in California—the state with the most national parks—Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks were forced to close as a result of human waste and trash accumulation.  

The former parks superintendents noted that national parks have already been impacted by the Trump Administration’s sweeping cuts to the federal budget and workforce in recent months as well.

“This summer, our parks were pushed to the brink by budget cuts and staff reductions,” they wrote, pointing to an August New York Times article that reported on strain and understaffing at more than 90 parks amid the cuts. 

“If national parks are to be open to visitors when National Park employees are furloughed, these nascent issues from the summer season are sure to erupt. Leaving parks even partially open to the public during a shutdown with minimal—or no—park staffing is reckless and puts both visitors and park resources at risk.”

Read more: Who the Trump Administration Says Is ‘Essential’ in a Shutdown Is Raising Eyebrows

Theresa Pierno, President of the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA), raised similar concerns in a press release on Wednesday.

“The administration is once again putting our national parks and visitors at risk, effectively directing staff to open park gates and walk away,” said Pierno, whose organization seeks to defend the country’s national parks. “It’s not just irresponsible, it’s dangerous.”

“The damage that occurred in our national parks took months to recover from. And in some cases, the damage was irreparable. Unfortunately, Americans should expect much of the same this time around if this shutdown drags on,” the release said. 

What happens if the shutdown goes on for a long time?

An extended government shutdown would have a “cascading effect” on national parks, Kym Hall, a former regional director at NPS, tells TIME. 

Her primary concern in such a situation, she says, would be the safety risks posed to visitors going to parks that are not supervised as a result of staff being furloughed. 

“I can’t even begin to imagine the safety risks this time of year in, say, Glacier National Park,” says Hall, who managed the park when she worked for NPS. “This is Bear hyperphasia season, which means they are more aggressive, they’re more in search of food as they prepare for the winter. That is the most dangerous time of year for visitors to be engaging with wildlife unmanaged.”

Americans, she says, won’t feel the impact of the situation “until they feel it, right, until somebody has an interaction with wildlife that could have been prevented. Somebody falls and there’s nobody to help them.”

Read more: Will Social Security Be Affected by the Government Shutdown?

Hall also stressed that the agency will be unable to provide services in locations it oversees that are not national parks, such as cultural sites like those in Washington, D.C., stretches of nationally protected seashore, and museum collections.

“It’s not just lakes and forests,” she says.

NPCA Senior Vice President Kristen Brengel tells TIME that the timing of the government shutdown is particularly bad for parks due to their popularity during the fall season.

“The ripple effects of a shutdown are great when it comes to parks, and it really always depends on the time of year,” she says.

In places like Acadia National Park in Maine or Shenandoah National Park in Virginia, she notes, it’s “leaf peeping season.” The NPCA has warned that the shutdown could carry significant costs in terms of lost revenue from park visitors, estimating that parks could lose $1 million a day and nearby communities as much as $80 million.

The last government shutdown occurred in the winter, typically a season that sees lower visitation than the fall. That’s why much of the damage to parks was seen in California, where in the winter it is quite popular to visit national parks sites, Brengel noted.

“It will take a much bigger toll on the local economies this time of year than it would if it were later in the year,” Brengel says.

It’s also hunting season this time of year in many parts of the country, she notes, which means there may be instances of unintentional or intentional poaching on protected lands, many of which border legal hunting territories. 

“If someone in the hunting community doesn’t mean to cross the border into the parks, there will be fewer staff people at both agencies to monitor what’s going on this hunting season,” Brengel tells time. 

“This is just a terrible time for parks.”

As a child growing up in a Spanish-speaking, immigrant household, I had limited resources available to teach me English. My parents came to this country out of necessity in the 1980s from war-torn Nicaragua. My father worked in construction and only picked up enough English words to get by. Being a former teacher, my mother did her best to teach me to read and write in Spanish. And while my older brother picked up more of the language from playing with neighborhood kids, it wasn’t exactly enough to fully teach me. Fortunately, we had a TV set with plenty of English-language programming, including our local PBS station. 

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Through this, I watched English-language children’s shows like Sesame Street, Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, and Reading Rainbow. These wonderful programs helped plant the seeds of respect, kindness, a love of learning, and the English language in my mind. But it was also bilingual programs like Saludos (featuring puppets alongside people, similar to Sesame Street) and ¿Qué Pasa, USA? (a sitcom about a Cuban-American immigrant family living in Miami) that not only taught me English, but also offered some representation of households like mine. By the time I began kindergarten, I was already fully bilingual as a result. And thanks to these shows, I felt less alone in my bilingual, bicultural existence.

My story isn’t so rare. There are countless immigrant families that have learned English thanks to the programming on their local PBS channels. Ana Regalado, a popular Mexican food content creator who goes by the handle @SaltyCocina, came to the U.S. at the age of six and says she and her sister would watch PBS throughout the day, especially when it was too hot to play outside. 

“Programs like Sesame Street, Reading Rainbow, and Villa Allegre taught us basic math and English words,” says Regalado. “We did not understand at first, but I feel it was a big help.”

Marisel Salazar, author of Latin-Ish: More Than 100 Recipes Celebrating American Latino Cuisines, says she also quickly learned English thanks in part to PBS programming.

“The pacing, framework, and structure of Sesame Street, plus the adorable characters, made it very easy for me as a child to engage in learning a second language,” says Salazar.

And Paulette Erato, Founder of Latinas in Podcasting, says she doesn’t recall a time when PBS wasn’t on the TV for her and her brother. So much so, in fact, that when her mother (who spoke little English) went to check in with her kindergarten teacher to see if Paulette was getting on alright, “the teacher laughed and said I spoke English just fine and understood everything perfectly!”

Educational programming, including bilingual programming, continues to exist on PBS stations around the country. Young immigrant children are still being supported in learning English via shows like Rosie’s Rules and Maya & Miguel. In the same vein, young English-speaking children are getting to learn Spanish and embrace multiculturalism. They are the same shows I share with my own bicultural son. Sadly, our country’s leaders appear to be wholly uninterested in raising more generations of empathetic children, much less helping immigrant children and families to feel safe and welcomed in their new homeland.

Read more: What the Corporation for Public Broadcasting Shutting Down Means for PBS And NPR

In recent months, the president signed a bill cancelling a whopping $1.1 billion in funding for the Center for Public Broadcasting. In it, he claimed government funding of news media today is “outdated” and “unnecessary.” As a direct result, the CPB later announced they would need to shut down their operations. 

While PBS itself won’t shut down anytime soon, they have now lost their largest source of financial support. This loss more directly impacts the local stations that viewers turn to. Not only does PBS reach more than half of all U.S. household televisions, their stations also reach more children and families than any other children’s TV networks. 

These are households like the one I grew up in. Channels like Disney and Nickelodeon were a rare treat as I got older, but it was PBS that was always there, always available, free for all. PBS programming on my local station brought me the educational shows I needed and loved. And there’s no doubt the ripple effects of local PBS station shutdowns that will be long felt among lower-income immigrant communities. This is especially true for the young Latine children and families who are striving to learn the local language and customs of a country that’s already waging war against them.

Fortunately, there are some efforts underway to help ease the financial burden these PBS stations are now facing. Philanthropic organizations like the Knight Foundation and others are banding together for this purpose.

“While PBS as a national institution is not going away, we are deeply concerned about local access, especially in rural communities where a local station may be the only source for trusted news, emergency information, and educational programming,” says Maribel Pérez Wadsworth, President & CEO, Knight Foundation. “That access is now under threat as many stations face potential closure or severe cutbacks.”

Pérez Wadsworth says the Knight Foundation hopes the bridge fund will help stabilize the system and ensure continuity of service. She also says the foundation is still seeking additional funders who recognize what’s at stake.

While it’s entirely possible I would have learned English once I finally began school, I was fortunate to have PBS programming at my disposal that helped kickstart my education. The puppets on Saludos and Sesame Street offered lessons in reading, writing, and counting in English. The characters of Luis and Maria gave me a glimpse of what two happy, thriving Latinos looked like living in a neighborhood where kindness was always in high supply. And that was at a time when kids that looked like me didn’t have to worry about ICE Agents coming to take them or their families away; Immigration and Customs Enforcement was not created until 2003. 

So many of us are still so grateful to PBS for giving us a place to turn to for learning and acceptance. Continuing to offer immigrant children and families at least this one source of education and comfort is the least we can do.

Perhaps few other cities have experienced the consequences of a fracturing American consensus as sharply as Portland, Oregon. Our city has the largest perception gap between men and women (a staggering 30 points), vastly disparate coverage by news outlets favored by the political right and left, and, too often, a yawning chasm between national coverage and how we see ourselves. 

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As mayor of Portland, I see an even more intractable and frustrating gap between what the president has said and what I see every day. He has called Portland “a hellhole,” “war ravaged,” a controversial federal facility facing predominantly peaceful protests is “under siege,” and that he’ll “do a number” on our city with “Full Force.” There is no squaring these words with the Portland I see every day, a Portland of creativity and natural beauty, of kindness and compassion, and of community principles and purpose. 

To those who are most aggrieved by Portland, I would ask this: If you visited our schools, would you fund teachers or would you send troops? If you drove our bridges, would you send engineers or would you send troops? If you saw our hospitals, would you support Medicaid, or would you send troops? If you worked with our homeless, would you send outreach workers and addiction specialists or would you send troops? If you met with the daughters whose immigrant fathers were ripped away on their way to school drop-off, would you still send men in masks to further traumatize our neighborhoods?  

The federal government is retreating from its longstanding housing and economic  responsibility to cities across the nation. This has left a leadership vacuum in place of a partnership for the future of Oregon’s prosperity and freedom. Anyone willing to lend a hand to Portland has a seat at the table, including the federal government. We want them back at that table, the sooner the better.

We must recognize that the American consensus on Portland was purposefully broken, and it’s hurting our city. That perception was shattered by the 24-hour ecosystem of divisive clips, some new, most from a half decade ago, all intended to feed anger and division. This ugly ecosystem cannot build togetherness, and it cannot serve the shared interests of our nation; it can only hold us back.

Read more: Trump Sends Troops to Portland, Authorizes ‘Full Force, If Necessary’

Portland, which now faces a moment of profound fear and uncertainty, needs clear answers. What is the role of domestic peace officers, including federal agents, and what now falls under the grip of national security and the Department of War? What is the mission of this deployment, and how will we know whether it has succeeded or failed? Will that mission weigh the needs of our community as equal to national political expedience, or is the safety of our people less important than fleeting political optics?  

We do not ask, but demand to know, what the authorization of “Full Force” means to  Portlanders. As Mayor, should I tell our teachers to teach, and our workers to work, and our parents to parent like any other day, or should I tell our hospitals and morgues to prepare for the unthinkable?  

We know the National Guard troops who will come to our city. They are us, fellow Oregonians. They work in our stores and offices. They are the moms and dads and teachers we wave to in the halls of our schools. They are also the ones who come to our aid in our darkest times. They are here when wildfires rage, or floods destroy, or overseas conflicts demand their service. When these citizen soldiers answered this call, they made a solemn promise to their communities and our nation that I believe the federal administration is now dishonoring.

Portland is having a moment of clarity. We have learned that reforming our public safety system and halving our homicide rate in a single year is not enough to stop troops from coming. We have learned that focusing on our economy and caring for our most vulnerable is not enough to stop troops from coming. Perhaps most troubling of all, we have learned that avoiding national conflict, listening, de-escalating, and focusing foremost on our responsibility to our community has not stopped troops from coming.  

I cannot express the sadness and disappointment I feel when I hear the leader of our  country call for the militarization of a situation that does not exist, with murky, unknown, and potentially deadly rules, and no clear definition of success or failure. There is no military strength without moral strength, no good outcome when summoning tempers alongside uncertainty and rifles, and no margin for error in what may come next.  

As Mayor, I support our community’s desire to repair our fractured portrait. I support  Portland’s long tradition of large-scale, peaceful protests. Our city has a proud track record of being at the forefront of positive social change, and the entire nation has benefited from that passion and moral clarity. 

The fight the federal administration seeks is not in our city, and I call on our national leaders to chart a course that leads to our future, and not to further fear and division.