Nik Ahang (“Nik”) Kowsar is an Iranian-American journalist, cartoonist, and environmental activist currently living in the Washington, DC, area. Having enraged successive Iranian governments and, more recently, the monarchist opposition, he has to remain constantly on guard. Still, he maintains a sharp sense of humour that is as relentless as his commitment to environmental journalism. Neither of his two passions can thrive in Iran.

Children respond to expectations, and both of his parents expected trouble from Nik. His artistic vein as a political cartoonist stems from his mother, an artist. His water activism stems from his late father’s scientific integrity. His father, Professor Sayyed Ahang Kowsar, was an American-educated watershed manager who collaborated with the UN University. He moved back to Iran a few years before the Islamic Revolution, in late 1976, to protect, restore, and manage the balance between land and water.

Professor Kowsar took his cosmopolitan family to rural Fars Province, making his project a family mission. Living from time to time in a caravan next to scorpions and snakes, the Kowsars shared in the cycle of water that kept life going for farmers. Responding to his father’s expectations while making his own trail, Nik became a geologist. With a mixture of national and family pride, Nik refers to his father as someone standing on the shoulders of giants, as Persians managed aquifers for centuries through the qanat, tunnels fashioned into man-made aquifers, resistant to evaporation, allowing the land to sustain agricultural surplus, the foundation of great civilizations, even in apparently hostile desert settings.

For years, father and son preached a ‘back-to-the-roots’ message that enraged Islamic Republic officials almost as much as cartoons did. He left Iran as humour and water dried up.

When did your water politics first become a problem for the Islamic Republic?

It was the Reformist president, Khatami, who first summoned me. He knew me as a cartoonist. We had met several times when he was the minister of culture or the head of the National Library, and he had even visited my office when I was working for a newspaper to talk politics and cartoons. During his first term as president, I drew that cartoon of a cleric, Ayatollah Mesbah, as a crocodile, and that turned into a national security crisis and a problem for his administration. When he read my op-ed and noticed that I was criticizing water policy, he wanted to talk to me personally.

I went and took my father as a scientific resource. As we entered the meeting, my father started explaining, but he was so polite that he was missing the harsh realities of the crisis we foresaw. I took over to protect him, as he was a public servant after all, and an employee of the president. I told Khatami, “Mr. President, you can’t keep building dams and transferring water from one water-rich basin to a water-poor watershed. You come from Yazd Province, which has relied on qanats for thousands of years. You can’t transfer water by stealing it from elsewhere. This won’t work out.” I warned him that 10 to 15 years down the line, they would hit a wall. It was 2001. Things got ugly in the mid 2010s.

Khatami was a reformist, was he not?

He was considered the leader of the reform movement, and the Participation Front party stood behind him at a cost. The government partnered with the IRGC’s Khatam al-Anbiya Construction Headquarters in building dams and water transfer schemes. I was censored weeks after that meeting and noticed that I had messed with the “wrong crowd.” In 2003, I received a death threat from a group of Islamist assassins, whom I believed to be connected to the IRGC, and neither the reformists nor the Islamists were willing to stand in their way. 

To avoid turning my wife into a widow, I fled. Today we know that the IRGC was behind digging tunnels and creating underground galleries that are now known as underground rocket cities. There is a geological and security element here. In certain regions with hard rock, such as granite, Iran has installed nuclear facilities. For instance, the Ghomroud project was about diverting tributaries of the Dez and Karun rivers from the west of the country, in the Zagros Mountains, to central Iran, in Qom, but it also most likely provided water for the Fordow underground enrichment facility. As a young geology student, we worked near a salt plain near Fordow, where underground nuclear installations were later famously dug.

Currently, what features in the news are U.S. and Israeli attacks on a desalination plant, which was met in kind by Iran. Desalination is spreading as a technology, creating a close loop between energy and water. Is this a magic solution?

For places that don’t have fresh water and where that is your last resort, why not? But the fact is that they use this technology to send water to central Iran, where you have other means of collecting water.

However, particularly in Iran, it makes little sense. The cost of desalination when Iran is under sanctions is about one to one and a half dollars per cubic meter. Then transferring it to central Iran, with all the infrastructure and energy required, hikes the price to five to seven dollars. You can collect floodwater for as little as 30 cents per cubic meter. But this would mean fewer construction contracts for the right people. Add to this the destruction caused by hot brine and chemicals in the Persian Gulf, which is shallow and one of the saltiest bodies of water, and you have a veritable disaster.

Is this happening also in the Caspian Sea?

There is a plan to transfer desalinated water from the Caspian Sea to the north-central region of Semnan. The pipeline is not yet completed. Although the salinity of the Caspian Sea is much lower, the cost will be considerable.

If I understand this well, building dams has its origins in the Iran-Iraq war, because it was a way to quickly expand arable land and gain popular support from farmers. Is that right?

There are many reasons behind this policy. In November 1988, months after the end of the Iran-Iraq War, my father briefed the cabinet about how climate change was going to affect Iran. We had received a report on the projected climate change effects on regional water reserves, and my father was arguing for a resilience strategy, using water from flash floods to replenish aquifers and save water for future generations. So, he was talking about adaptation.

But when Rafsanjani came to power in 1989, he followed the famous “economy-first” policy and was known as “sardar-e sazandegi,” or the “General of Reconstruction.” He was in love with dams. He came from Rafsanjan, in Kerman, a dry place that he wanted to turn into a major pistachio-producing region by building dams. It was a bit of a pet project for him.

There was also the issue of appeasing ideologically extremist members of the IRGC. He needed to create jobs fast, and construction was a fast way of doing that. He was borrowing money from Europe and channelling these funds into agricultural land expansion. He was addicted to inaugurating dam projects. My father had warned the government that a massive amount of water would be lost to evaporation. But even universities and colleges dared not challenge Rafsanjani’s plans and narrative. So, they kept building dams, digging tunnels, and creating pipelines without environmental impact assessments and without considering the costs to the environment and the public. That was when the “water mafia” gained power.

There are those who argue that Iran under sanctions needed food security and, therefore, flood irrigation and, therefore, dams.

There were alternatives. They could use floodwater for farming while also recharging aquifers. They could change the crop mix and stop producing water-intensive cereals, alfalfa, and rice. Some say that drip irrigation could replace flooding fields for irrigation, but many used the water saved through drip irrigation to produce more food. It didn’t save water at the end of the day. You can maintain flood agriculture by balancing your aquifers with the right kind of agriculture. Instead, they pumped more and more across Iran, while turning grasslands and rain-fed fields into irrigated farms.

Iran wants to become self-sufficient in rice and wheat production, but at a hefty price. We only have three provinces suitable for rice production. When you produce rice in 17 provinces, you are looking for trouble. And many provinces are not water-rich enough for wheat production.

It is said that 15 to 16 million tons of food are produced along the Caspian region. Two out of the three provinces adjacent to the Caspian Sea face land subsidence because farmers are overdrawing water from aquifers. Historically, in Golestan and Mazandaran, rain watered the orchards. Then they went extreme in cultivating rice. And now two water-rich regions are seeing land subsidence comparable to central Iran. That is dangerous.

The marshlands are drying. Paradise turns to hell. Parts of the Hyrcanian forests have been cut and turned into farms and orchards. The northern green belt under the Caspian Sea is turning from a green area into a dry zone.

There is a lot of corruption. The government looks the other way as farmers overdraw from aquifers because they produce food that is needed, and the country does not have the foreign currency to import enough food. This is the road to destruction, and we are heading toward expensive desalination.

Apart from being expensive, I understand the Caspian Sea is at its lowest point in 200 years.

Yes, it is. I haven’t seen all the data on what Russia is doing to the Volga River. But you’re getting less and less water into the Caspian Sea. Iran has built some dams that prevent most of the flow into the Caspian Sea from its northern watersheds. There are projects aimed at diverting water from a tributary of the Sefid Rud, or White River, to Tehran. And there are a couple of similar projects in Mazandaran. Tehran does not care about the effect on the region. They shut their eyes to river diversions and groundwater depletion. It’s similar to what they did years ago in Isfahan, which has now depleted most of its surface and groundwater resources.

To what extent is Iran a cautionary tale for the wider Caspian region, which is landlocked?

Politics often prioritizes short-term gains at the expense of the future. In two or three decades, parts of the region will most likely be facing a Mad Max scenario, where Caspian littoral states fight over ever-scarcer water resources. If countries surrounding the Caspian Sea and the Caucasus don’t pay attention to what Iran did, and avoid learning the lessons in time, they are going to face what Iran is facing, the hard way. People like my father warned the Iranian leadership. If the political leadership of littoral states repeats this mistake, they do so at their own peril. My father, in his 80s, was interrogated because of his opposition to a dam being built next to Shiraz, which he argued would harm the region. The contract was linked to the IRGC, which was decisive.

Wouldn’t you say that Iran’s suffering is in part due to sanctions?

I think it’s mostly poor governance. Iran didn’t need to go full throttle on water consumption for food self-sufficiency. It didn’t need to install water-intensive steel plants in central Iran. There were solutions for producing food in a better way. Look, Iran’s renewable water resources were once 100 to 130 billion cubic meters. Because of climate change, let’s say that has gone down to 80 to 90 billion cubic meters a year. The fact is, through floodwater control, aquifers could be recharged by 40 to 45 billion cubic meters a year. That is a lot of water that could be used for agriculture, for reviving grasslands and some forests. You’re not supposed to draw water from the ground when aquifers are not being recharged. When groundwater levels are raised, you can revive grasslands and forests you destroyed. That revival won’t make the water mafia rich.

Interview conducted by Ilya Roubanis for Caucasus Watch