Petromodernity and the New Normal

The wild fire that unites Iran and Southern California.

By Ciruce Movahedi-LankaraniJune 17, 2026

• Environment

• Politics

ON APRIL 28, 2026, The New York Times reported a small but dramatic increase in the number of critically endangered Asiatic cheetahs, going from 17 to 27. The cheetah is a beautiful and charismatic animal, and its image has come to serve as a symbol of Iran, appearing on the bodies of passenger planes and the jerseys of the national soccer team. Though they once roamed across the Middle East and South Asia, the cheetahs now survive only in remote regions of Iran. After years of poaching, habitat loss, and neglect threatened the cheetahs, news of their fragile revival offered a countercurrent of hope during a dark period of war and repression in Iran. For those of us living in the United States, watching from afar first as the Islamic Republic’s security services shot protesters in the streets and then as American and Israeli warplanes rained explosives on the survivors, the cheetahs’ budding recovery offered a tentative promise that sustainable futures might yet be built among the ruins. Yet between us and those hopeful horizons lie expanses of catastrophe—political violence, foreign war, and ecological collapse—and the question is not whether sustainable futures are possible but how to navigate the onrush of interconnected crises that stand in the way of their realization.

Iranians had been at war for nearly two months when the world learned of the cheetahs’ improved fortunes. By then, the conflict had generated environmental news of a different sort. On March 7, Israeli warplanes destroyed four fuel depots in Iran’s capital of Tehran, creating enormous columns of fire and smoke that towered above the city. Down below, streams of flaming oil coursed through the city’s drainage channels. For days, the raging petroleum fires blanketed the capital region with a thick plume of soot, ash, and noxious chemicals, pollutants that soon returned to earth in the form of black rain, showering nearly 15 million people and a thousand square miles with toxic, oily residue. Broadcast around the world, in the attack’s wake, apocalyptic images of ecological devastation were added to those showing shattered streetscapes and mangled people. Joined by a US president’s threats of civilizational destruction, the torrent of photographs and videos brought into view a modern, industrialized society teetering on the edge of a catastrophic dismantling.

Even before the war, Iranians were beset by multiple overlapping crises. Most acute was the government’s violent suppression of popular protests in late 2025 and early 2026. Though exact numbers remain contested, it is certain the state’s security services killed thousands of people and arrested tens of thousands more, many of whom have faced physical and psychological torture. A growing number have been put to death. The unrest’s most proximate cause was a rapid inflationary spiral, an economic crisis rooted in decades of US-led international sanctions on Iran, governmental mismanagement, and the state’s prioritization of geopolitical concerns over domestic welfare. The protests also channeled Iranians’ cresting rejection of the Islamic Republic’s draconian social controls—vividly illustrated in 2022 by the Jin, Jîyan, Azadî movement and many women’s refusal to cover their hair—and the country’s deteriorating environmental conditions. In Tehran, in the fall of 2025, a prolonged drying trend was intensified by the late arrival of winter rains. With reservoirs nearly depleted, officials warned that a total evacuation of the city might be necessary, a turn of events that would be nearly unthinkable if not for the already semiregular emergence of severe water shortages in the country.

The chronic overexploitation of Iran’s water resources has today pushed the country into a state of water bankruptcy. Though intensified by climate change and prolonged drought, it is also a consequence of decades of agricultural policies designed to foster autarkic self-sufficiency in staples (wheat, barley) and to promote the export of cash crops (pistachios, saffron) as a partial alternative to the country’s sanctioned petroleum industries. These policies, and the prioritization of short-term needs in the face of conflict with countries such as the United States, have led to hydrological mismanagement in the form of enormous and inefficient irrigation systems that are fed from diverted rivers and underground aquifers drained at unsustainable rates. Benefiting financially from these arrangements are the members of an unaccountable and corrupt elite, in large part the same group that has for many years pursued strategies of overt confrontation with world powers. Iran’s current crises are thus entangled and mutually reinforcing, a polycrisis that links political repression, environmental violence, and war.

It remains too early to know the full environmental consequences of the destruction of Tehran’s oil depots. What is clear is that the attack compounded the war’s threat to the life and health of Iranians. In the strike’s immediate aftermath, Tehran’s residents were urged to hunker indoors, with the World Health Organization warning that the black rain was highly acidic and could burn skin upon contact. For those forced to leave the relative refuge of their homes, burning eyes, throats, and lungs awaited. Many residents resurrected habits from the depths of the pandemic and put their trust in N95 masks, hoping to prevent labored breathing, dizziness, and nausea. Even more concerning are the potential long-term effects: when inhaled, microscopic particles of soot and ash can lodge deep in the lungs, permanently impairing pulmonary function, and if they enter the bloodstream, they could potentially lead to cancer and heart damage. Children, pregnant women, and those with compromised pulmonary function are especially vulnerable. When winter rains finally and mercifully washed the pollutants from the air, the threat of petroleum combustion’s toxic residues was likely lodged deeper into the ecosystem. Falling upon the ground, heavy metals and other pollutants leach into soil, poisoning large areas for many years. When they enter the food supply, as they often do when water tables and agricultural land are contaminated, people face elevated risks of metabolic disorders, cancer, premature birth, stroke, and cognitive decline.

This toxic legacy is not the only ecological peril let loose by the war. On May 8, an oil slick some 20 square miles in size came into view of satellites pointed at the northern Persian Gulf. Drifting off the coast of Iran’s Kharg Island, its origin is unclear, a product of either damaged oil infrastructure or intentional dumping by Iranian authorities who lack sufficient storage for the crude that they continue to extract. On May 19, a second slick from damaged oil facilities on Iran’s Lavan Island reached the shores of Shidvar, a beautiful nature reserve home to substantial coral reefs and threatened animal species. These slicks augur another potentially worrying development for the Persian Gulf. Most of the region is heavily reliant on desalinization for its drinking water, with Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait using it to meet more than 90 percent of their needs. Oil slicks imperil the functioning of that infrastructure, threatening the water supply of tens of millions.

Such disasters are built on much longer petro-histories. Iran today depends heavily on its petroleum resources, not only in the form of oil exports and their revenues but also as natural gas, the country’s primary source of energy. That gas has become Iran’s bedrock fuel is a result of decades of anti-colonial resource nationalism, a preoccupation with industrializing development, and mounting worries about declining air quality. In the 1960s and 1970s, as Iran’s prerevolutionary state adopted aggressive modernizing policies, many began to worry about industrialization’s smoggy effects on the country’s urban skies. Iran’s enormous gas reserves were positioned as an alternative that could provide the cheap energy Iranians demanded while mitigating air pollution. But natural gas energy failed to live up to the environmental hopes of its boosters, and cities like Tehran have continued to grapple with some of the worst air quality in the world. When Israeli munitions destroyed the capital’s oil depots in early March, the toxic plume and the black rain that fell upon Tehran’s residents were in many ways a continuation of the fossil-fuel combustion that marks modern petro-life in the city. In other words, the acute toxicity that the war has visited upon Iranians is a concentrated dose of what they long ago became accustomed to breathing, drinking, and touching every day. Airstrikes may have created new ecological crises in Iran, but they are disasters built upon the slow environmental violence of petromodernity itself.

That new, acute ecological disasters are often built on the chronic environmental violence of petromodernity should be a familiar lesson for Angelenos. In January 2025, the Palisades and Eaton fires erupted on the edges of the sprawling city. Fanned by abnormally strong Santa Ana winds, the flames raced through chaparral and neighborhood alike, killing dozens, forcing tens of thousands to evacuate, torching thousands of homes, and ultimately devastating nearly 60 square miles of land. As with Tehran’s bombed oil depots, the fires were catastrophes with long tails. Burning across wildlands and (sub)urban areas, the fires consumed the lithium batteries, household chemicals, electronics, and plastic everythings of contemporary American life, depositing potent carcinogens like asbestos, cobalt, and hexavalent chromium (of Erin Brockovich fame) in the region’s soil and water. For L.A. residents like myself, who awaited evacuation orders on the flanks of the fires, such toxic legacies persist long after the smoke has cleared. It will be many years until we truly know whether the danger has passed or whether our parks, community gardens, and water infrastructures have been turned into carriers of industrial poisons.

Both individually and together, the destruction wrought by fire in Los Angeles and by the black rain in Tehran have laid bare that petromodernity is brutality in slow motion—the tiny, innumerable moments of ecological violence that accumulate into vast drifts of environmental catastrophe. The oil slicks drifting through the Persian Gulf are not so different from the countless others of the age of petroleum. Some, like Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon, have recognizable names. The plume of pollutants from the destroyed oil depots is a catastrophically intensified form of what exits the tailpipes of our cars, devices that many of us would struggle to imagine life without. Environmental crises are the outcomes of gale force winds and dry vegetation and the targeting decisions of American and Israeli officers, yes, but also of the energy policies of governments and the expectations of everyday people for the comforts of industrialized life.

From Los Angeles to Tehran, the question becomes, How can we address chronically deteriorating ecological conditions amid a flood of acute crises? How do we decide which disasters require urgent action and which do not? If our aim is to build a future in which both human and nonhuman life can thrive, perhaps a better question is whether we should attempt to separate the two at all. For Iranians caught between a violently repressive state and the destructive onslaught of foreign powers, such questions push to the fore. Many both inside Iran and in diaspora, despairing at the idea that the Islamic Republic might never bend to their demands for dignity and human rights, chose to welcome war and the prospect of violent change through American and Israeli intervention. But as airstrikes expanded from regime installations to civilian infrastructures, and as the disasters of petroleum fires and oil spills unfolded, it has become clear that the United States and Israel have only added the peril of life in a war zone to the ongoing precarity of existence under authoritarian rule. With a cloud of environmental disaster overhead and the most hard-line aspects of their government empowered, ordinary Iranians are now worse off than before. This outcome underscores a danger that extends well beyond Iran: when catastrophe defines the limits of what we consider possible, we risk reaching for recognizable but ultimately terrifying solutions. We must find ways of confronting immediate crises that do not reinforce, or even exacerbate, slower-moving ones.

On the other side of the world, in Southern California, fire produces similar political tensions. As in Iran, beneath the immediate questions that dominate public debate—arson, the maintenance costs of electrical infrastructure, the best uses of firefighting resources—lie decades of deferred ecological reckoning: policies that suppressed fire rather than lived with it, Indigenous practices and knowledge disregarded, (sub)urban sprawl pushing into landscapes evolved to burn, and a changing climate that has turned deferral into a debt now coming due. This new normal, in which our existing ways of responding to crises have become less effective or even counterproductive, necessitates what Adriana Petryna has termed “horizon work,” the efforts that preserve our ability to find long-term adaptations even as we grapple with the overwhelming demands of crisis. For Petryna, a horizon is a tool, useful for separating what has become inevitable from what we are still actively choosing, orienting us toward longer-term practices of survival while uncertainty storms around us. Maintaining them helps us respond to current crises in ways that do not merely push their costs to future times when they can no longer be avoided. Preserving ourselves means doing the kinds of work that Iranian wildlife conservationists have done for the Asiatic cheetah, not making grand pronouncements of ecological concern or pouring vast resources into defending old arrangements, but pursuing persistent, on-the-ground efforts to understand challenges and devise new ways to meet them.

Beyond the diasporic links that tie Tehran and Los Angeles together, the two megacities are connected by long petro-legacies and climate change. Anything that disrupts the former and mitigates the latter can help water shortages in Iran’s capital and reduce the risk of extreme firestorms here. This is perhaps the war’s strangest consequence. Even considering the violence that has been unleashed across the Middle East and the world, the months-long curtailment of shipping traffic in the Strait of Hormuz has potentially, and paradoxically, turned the Trump administration and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps into de facto agents of environmental preservation on a planetary scale. As almost one-fifth of the world’s oil supply remains at risk of being blocked from the market, nations and consumers around the world are being forced to rethink their dependence on petroleum. In the immediate term, higher prices and mounting physical shortages have forced rationing. But if free passage through the strait remains uncertain for an extended period, something that appears likely even with the announced ceasefire between Iran and the US notwithstanding, the bell of catastrophic disruption cannot be unrung. The reliability of petroleum supplies is now uncertain. This systemic shock has triggered a global rush toward more resilient—and low-carbon—sources of energy. It is a fraught and perhaps a perverse hope, dependent as it is on widespread human suffering, particularly among those who have had the least influence on world affairs and are the most vulnerable to shortages of fuel, fertilizer, and food. But if the strait remains shut for an extended period, then demand may really disappear—a development that might finally upend our world’s relationship with petroleum even as it heaps disaster on the heads of many.

We live in an era built ever more overtly on hard power, populist jingoism, and ecological collapse. War and planetary climate change prompt us to see that our predicaments are connected, a polycrisis that threatens both our survival and our ability to imagine alternatives. The Asiatic cheetah’s budding revival is instructive. The confirmed existence of six new cubs isn’t a miracle; it’s the result of many years of sustained, detailed, laborious work by Iranian conservationists. Their efforts have created a fragile but real possibility of life for a species on the brink of extinction, achieved despite persistent environmental challenges as well as an Iranian state that frequently arrests, imprisons, and tortures activists of all types, including those focused on wildlife preservation. The perseverance of Iranian conservationists in the face of such overlapping crises—a long list that now includes war—offers a model of what horizon work looks like in practice. There is no longer a world before the disaster of climate change, no longer a world before the crisis of war in Iran, and no longer a world before the devastation of fire in Los Angeles. Those of us alive today are unlikely to see Asiatic cheetahs roam freely across their vast former range. But with help, they may yet survive in small pockets, a presence that offers hope of future restoration. It may not be much, but it is, for now, enough.

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Featured image: Khosro70000, Kharg Island - Nature and Industry - 10, November 26, 2015, is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.