“One percent of Iran’s forests are destroyed each year,” according to the head of Iran’s Environmental Protection Agency. His voice, so far, has been mostly ignored. Lavizan’s natural trees are cut off to build highways and a portion of the Saravan Forest has been turned into a garbage dump. A road has even been built through the Golestan National Park, but no one seems to be bothered by the destruction of the country’s natural resources.

Iran is covered by more than 1,420 million acres of forests, comprising 8.7 percent of the country’s natural area. Nearly 1,110 million acres of those forests are protected, 300 of them in Northern Iran. Iran ranks 45 in the world in per capita forest area, which gives each Iranian only 20 acres of forest area, compared to the 80-acre world average. Iran is thus a poor country in terms of forest area to begin with; and the fact that Iran ranks 132 among 146 countries in environmental protection does not help either.

The situation, in fact, is much more critical than that. According to the studies performed by various environmental NGO’s, “If the current trend of rapid forest destruction and deforestation is not stopped, nothing will remain of Iran’s forests within 60 years.”

The Golestan National Park is one of the better known endangered cites in Iran. Just last year, twenty thousand acres of the park were destroyed by a wildfire. Delays in fighting the fire led to the destruction of 40 percent of the park’s land, which is the habitat of a third of the country’s bird species. One year before the fire a major flood had already destroyed some other parts of the park.

And now the government is speeding up the park’s destruction. It is cutting off some of Golestan’s most precious trees in order to rebuild a road that passes through the park, despite heavy criticism by many environmental NGO’s. Every year, heavy floods that are common to the area damage the road. Nevertheless, the government insists on rebuilding the road, ignoring opinions of engineering experts who believe that the project is unfeasible and very costly.

Similar dangers also threaten the Lavizan National Park. Eight thousand trees have been cut off in a joined effort by Tehran’s municipality and the Ministry of Jahad Sazandegi (“Ministry of Construction”) to build a freeway through the park. In the words of the head of the Forest, Range and Watershed Management Organization of Iran, “Based on initial estimates, 12,000 trees need to be cut off in order to build this freeway. Nearly 70 percent of those trees (about 8,400) have been cut off already.” In the end, 1.5 percent of Iran’s forests are destroyed each year. Is this not a crime?