IF EARTH IS LIVING: THE WAYS OF ECOCIDE*
The Iran War 2026
*1
“On top of everything else, Israel and the US have unleashed an environmental disaster in Tehran,” said Assal Rad, a fellow at the Arab Center in Washington, DC. “How many ways can they show you they have no regard for human life?”2
There are 7594.6 nautical miles from Los Angeles to Tehran. I am beginning to write this on Monday March 9, 2026 at 4:06 pm as morning is dawning in Iran at 6:36 am.
In the yellow Daré / Council room behind me four women writers are working on their extraordinary manuscripts. It is a gift and an honor to be invited to assist these books, which will astound you when they are published, into the world. One is writing about the betrayal which permitted the Vietnam war to begin and torture the world for ten years, another describes the moment the Bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a third writes about the British induced potato famine in Ireland and the fourth on the effect of Colonization on the natural world. The core of what each one is writing now is being enacted in the Israeli and American war against Iran: War crimes; Armageddon; Famine and Ecocide — the Four Horses of the Apocalypse unleashed by the two mad kings.
In the wake of infernos unleashed across portions of Tehran the night before, the people of Iran’s capital woke up Sunday to the hideous sight of ominous gray clouds above, choking-levels of smoke, and black raindrops full of toxic oil falling across the city.
Critics described “scenes of Armageddon” and characterized the bombings and the destruction they triggered as the latest crimes committed by the US and Israel since they launched their unprovoked and illegal assault on the Middle East nation last week.
Somewhere in Tehran writers, witnesses, journalists, novelists and poets are at work wondering if they will survive along with what they are compelled to write, wondering if their words will travel through the medium of war to be heard wherever there may be - someday be - another side. They do not wonder, as we do from time to time, if writing is useful or important now to prevent or stop the violence. They bear witness from their significant knowing. It is what they must do.
I cannot help but think of the Palestinian poet, Refaat Alareer, whose poem, If I Must Die, ending with the words If I must die/ let it bring hope/ let it bring a tale, was tacked to the wall in his kitchen when he died the victim of an Israeli air strike in the house in Gaza City where he had taken refuge the night before.3
It is now 1:32 am in Tel Aviv and I wonder what my kin are thinking as they huddle in an air raid shelter knowing that one shelter may have been destroyed by an Iranian ballistic missile. “Some reports suggest the strike may have targeted a critical wartime shelter linked to top Israeli leadership.”4 It is unclear whether this has occurred or not, all notices, whether from MSN or YouTube, seem to be linked to a single video from One India and so is either suppressed news or fabricated, probably the latter.
Another Israeli missile destroyed a hotel in Beirut where many displaced families had sought shelter.5 I can’t imagine their state of mind in Israel as they know, as I do, that we have failed to stop our mad leaders from this war though we have devoted our lives to do so and now the consequences are ricocheting back upon ourselves. Even so, as I type, I see out the window our neighbor flock of finches sweeping toward the bird feeders through the prayer flags — yellow, white, blue, green, black, red — wafting our entreaties for peace to the spirits.
The birds, as is their nature, are the messengers. Their presence points to the absence. Where is safety for the Iranian Ground Jay, the only bird endemic to Iran and where are the air raid shelters for the birds, for the Cranes, Geese, Myna birds? Where are the Common Nightingales, the national bird of Iran, singing?
Can you hear their songs against the explosion of missiles and the raging fires and the buildings falling on the children huddled together against their deaths?
Can you hear the songs over the sound of the explosion of the bomb piercing the roof of the Comfort Hotel in Beirut, opened to the dispossessed who had no place to escape the bombardment, and exploding on the first floor where it kills the young receptionist, a Horsewoman, studying veterinary medicine after gaining a masters in math.
The birds, the animals, the fish, the lizards, the insects, these innocent ones, how shall they survive, how shall they protect themselves, their little ones, their communities?
Where shall this rare creature, the Asiatic Cheetah hide? It must know it is on the very, very brink of extinction, all its relatives gone, but those few in Iran. Animals have a deep sense of threat to their species as well as to their kin and themselves. The genetic impulse to survive and thrive is in their cells. It is insistent, intense and urgent.
In 2022, there were 12 Asiatic Cheetah alive in Iran, the only ones in the wild anywhere in the world. Where are they finding safety at this very moment as you read this?
Close your eyes. Meditate with me. Imagine yourself Earth. Imagine all life coming from you, even your own life emerging from Her as she seeds and feeds everything that exists. And now, the bombs are falling, we hear them crushing whatever is in their path, hear the screech of trees ripping apart, feel the Cheetah’s hide stripping from her bones, or the ways the small brown birds are mangled by the blast of sound and energy that plucks hundreds of broken feathers from the tiny bodies, their song beaks splitting into eternal silence.
We have to be acutely aware of this moment when the speeding bombs stab the surface of the earth, as if it is occurring to each of us, because it is. It is fracturing the soil. Exploding. And exploding again into Her body. Our bodies. And again. She writhes. We writhe. The air above Her, above us, is not breathable. A black rain of oil and toxins is falling. The water is poisoned and is undrinkable. There is fire everywhere, fire everywhere, fire everywhere.
There is no war that is not first and continuously and forever an unrelenting war against Earth, against the Mother.
October 2025, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), a union with over 1,400 member organizations including states, government agencies, civil society and Indigenous Peoples’ groups, hosted the World Conservation Congress in Abu Dhabi
The congress, themed “powering transformative conservation”, adopted close to 150 motions on themes spanning from biodiversity and climate to health and plastic pollution.
Among them, Motion 061: Recognising the crime of ecocide to protect nature was adopted, marking a huge milestone in the legal journey to protect nature.
Ecocide is the act of deliberately harming the environment. The adopted motion called on states to recognize ecocide as a serious crime in national and international law. It also recommended that states parties to the Rome Statute evaluate an amendment to make ecocide an explicit crime in peacetime and during armed conflict under the International Criminal Court (ICC.
Many quotations in this essay are from ‘Intentional Chemical Warfare’: Toxic Black Rain in Tehran After US-Israel Bomb Oil Facilities, Jon Queally https://www.commondreams.org/news/toxic-black-rain-iran
If I must die Refaat Alareer
If I must die,
you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings,
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze–
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh
not even to himself–
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing back love
If I must die
let it bring hope
let it be a tale
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This is the nightmare truth of war: It is always, first and foremost, an assault on Mother Earth, a ripping apart of what sustains all of life. No bomb shelters for the trees, the flowers, the winged ones, the fish. Soldiers die in war, but civilians and the land and the animals suffer the brunt of the violence. Cabals of men are [and have been] waging wars against everything sacred. Willis Jenkins wrote: "We sustain hope by nurturing the capacity of the future to forgive us." Maybe all that can be done is to protect the Earth from wherever we stand.
Thank you, dear Deena, for being a voice for the Asiatic cheetah, for the birds, for the poets lost in Gaza, for all the people in Tehran suffocating under a toxic cloud and those in Beirut who have nowhere to lay their heads tonight. Deeply ashamed of our nation, that we cannot stop this madness, this psychosis unleashed on the world.