There is a particular kind of violence that does not arrive in a single blow, but accumulates quietly: it is there in the over-extracted aquifers, in the soot lodged deep in lungs, and in the way foundations begin to crack beneath family homes. For more than four decades, the pursuit of autarky has functioned as a central technology of state power in Iran. Framed as resistance – against sanctions, against the specter of imperial domination, and against dependence on hostile powers – the doctrine of khodkafaee (Persian for self-sufficiency) promised sovereignty through economic independence. The strategic motivations behind that policy have long been clear: decades of sanctions, regional conflict, and external pressure have given successive Iranian governments powerful incentives to reduce dependence on foreign supplies.

Yet whatever the geopolitical rationale, the environmental consequences of pursuing self-sufficiency in the particularly extractive forms adopted by the Islamic Republic remain a separate question – and a devastating one. Today, many advocate for more sustainable models of self sufficiency – the sovereignty afforded by renewable energy systems for example, which  reduce exposure to volatile fossil energy shocks, such as those echoing out from the US-Iran War, or the sovereignty afforded to communities by local regenerative farming programs. Historically, however, sovereignty has been deeply rooted in extraction. In Iran, the ideological drive to produce everything at home has transformed the landscape into a sacrifice zone, where political survival is purchased at the cost of environmental collapse.

Extractive self-sufficiency did not originate in Tehran. As Iranian political economy researcher Hamid Asefi notes in a recent interview, this self-sufficiency imperative was inherited from the Soviet bloc during the Cold War, when communist states sought to shield themselves from Western food blockades. That logic migrated into Iran's post-revolutionary policy circles through leftist currents in the early 1980s, and it stuck, long after those factions lost influence. What began as a strategic response to geopolitical isolation hardened into dogma, insulated from cost-benefit analysis or environmental consequence. Once self-sufficiency became a ‘tangible value,’ Asefi argues, policymakers stopped asking whether production made economic or ecological sense. They asked only whether it was Iranian.

The numbers tell the story of what that refusal to ask cost us. Iran now consumes around 96 billion cubic meters of water annually, roughly eight percent more than its renewable supply. Agriculture claims 85 to 90% of this total, much of it devoted to water-intensive wheat cultivation in pursuit of food self-sufficiency. The result is that Iran has become the Middle East's largest groundwater extractor and ranks fifth globally, with over 300 of its 609 aquifers now in critical condition. In the capital Tehran, reservoirs are approaching empty. Across the central plateau, the ground itself is sinking – by several centimeters each year in some areas – damaging railways, pipelines, and UNESCO heritage sites like Persepolis, whose ancient foundations are slowly cracking under the strain of subsidence.

This is not a failure of governance; it is governance by other means. As a recent study published in Geography and Environmental Sustainability concludes, Iran's territorial governance has been so thoroughly shaped by self-sufficiency policy that it has become ‘the basis for double pressure and threat to Iran's biological and water resources,’ threatening the social and economic life of entire regions. When political ideology demands that the land produce beyond its capacity, collapse is not an accident; it is an outcome.

Now look away from the sinking fields and toward the cities, where the same logic chokes rather than sinks. The self-sufficiency mandate has long protected domestic automobile manufacturing from foreign competition, creating a captive market for vehicles with outdated technology and minimal emissions controls. In the name of industrial independence, the state allowed monopolies to form and quality to deteriorate. Meanwhile, chronic electricity shortages – themselves products of underinvestment, sanctions, and a state-owned energy sector insulated from accountability – force power plants to burn heavy mazut fuel during peak demand, blanketing cities in sulfur dioxide and fine particulate matter. Tehran, Isfahan, and Ahvaz regularly record air quality indices hazardous to human health. Schools and offices close for days at a time. Hospitals report surges in cardiac and respiratory emergencies. The World Health Organization attributes roughly 17 percent of deaths in Iran to environmental risk factors, much of it concentrated in urban populations breathing air thick with the residue of state-protected industry. Power, in this context, is exercised directly on bodies.

Recognising those environmental costs does not require denying the reality of security threats. It requires asking a different question: how should security be pursued, and at what ecological cost? There’s a broader, more unsettling lesson here that goes far beyond Iran's borders. We are witnessing the resurgence of a particular narrative: security as justification for extraction, or, seen from a different angle, extraction as a form of security. Ben Jacob's recent essay, "Bad Romance: how inevitable is the green energy transition?," traces how the security framework offers fossil energy extraction as a measure of security on a vulnerable planet in an increasingly isolationist America. Under Trump, energy dominance meant more drilling, more pipelines, and more exports, framed as protection against foreign entanglements. The logic was simple: dependence is vulnerability; self-sufficiency is strength; extraction is the price of freedom. Never mind that a renewable-based system actually offers greater resilience, decentralised infrastructure being less vulnerable to attack and less exposed to supply-line disruptions, as European defence leaders have belatedly recognised. Never mind that importing food grown in water-abundant regions could relieve pressure on Iran's dying aquifers, a strategy researchers call ‘virtual water trade’. That strategy is now being explicitly advocated for Iran. In fact, in December 2025, Iran's energy minister officially announced the country would begin importing water and water intensive goods, marking a sharp departure from decades of self-sufficiency dogma.

The romance of sovereignty, as Jacob might put it, survives long after its practical viability has collapsed. In both Iran and the United States, national security discourse has been mobilised to defend ecologically destructive practices. The content differs – revolutionary resistance in one case, "energy dominance" in the other – but the structure is identical: a story about protecting the nation that ends up consuming it. Jacob warns that the "inevitable transition" narrative, with its faith in technological momentum, has distracted us from the political work required to actually displace fossil fuels. The same could be said of the self-sufficiency narrative in Iran: it has distracted from the patient, difficult work of building a diversified economy that could generate real wealth, real jobs, and real security – not the hollow security of slogans, but the tangible security of breathable air and drinkable water.

What Iran reveals is where this road ends. Not in security, but in its opposite: a territory rendered uninhabitable in the name of securing it. A state that cannot provide water to drink, air to breathe, or land to stand on does not inspire loyalty – it inspires protest. As The Conversation recently reported, maps of unrest in 92 Iranian cities show a clear pattern: protests increasingly erupt in areas of groundwater collapse, land subsidence, and water rationing. When the ecological foundations of life fail all at once, citizens stop debating ideology. They question the state's right to rule at all.

The lesson for those of us watching from elsewhere is not that Iran is uniquely misguided. It is that ideologies of national sovereignty, when untethered from ecological reality, become blueprints for mutual destruction. Whether dressed in the language of revolutionary resistance or ‘energy dominance,’ the logic is the same: we will secure ourselves by consuming everything. And we will call it freedom, even as the ground gives way beneath our feet.

The recent war has only made these questions more urgent. Under conditions of armed conflict, environmental costs are easily deferred in the name of immediate survival. Yet wars eventually end, while depleted aquifers, polluted air, and subsiding land remain for decades. If there is a way out, it begins with abandoning that romance. Not abandoning sovereignty, but reimagining it, not as the capacity to extract without limit, but as the capacity to sustain. To import what cannot be grown without killing the land. To build industries that do not poison their workers. To measure power not by what a state can take from its territory, but by what it can leave for the generations who will inherit the sinking ground, the choked air, the slow violence written into the earth.