⚘
𖧧
★
In
Exile
We are Green Resht.
We were founded in the humid spring of 2023 in the northern provinces of Iran, in the green belt that stretches from Rasht toward the Caspian coast. At that time the air still carried the scent of wet earth and crushed leaves after rain, and the forests of the Hyrcanian region still held pockets of resistance against the slow advance of asphalt, concrete, and silence. We were a small circle of women—teachers, nurses, agricultural workers, students who had returned from the cities with their eyes opened, and older women who had never left the villages. We came together because we could no longer separate the violence done to our bodies from the violence done to the land.
The year 2023 was not a quiet year. The streets of the big cities still echoed with the aftershocks of earlier uprisings. The state had learned new methods of control: more cameras, more informants, more selective arrests designed to exhaust rather than simply crush. In the north the pressure took a different shape. Logging concessions expanded under the language of “development.” Wetlands were drained for industrial projects. Rivers that had once fed rice paddies turned cloudy with chemical runoff. Women who spoke about these things in village meetings or private messaging groups began to receive visits. Some were summoned for “conversations.” Some lost their jobs. Some found their names circulating in ways that made neighbors step back.
We refused the official separation between “women’s issues” and “environmental issues.” For us they were the same wound. When a hillside is stripped of trees, the first people who lose clean water, who walk farther for fuel, who watch their small plots erode, are women. When the state decides that certain voices are dangerous, the first voices silenced are often those of women who refuse to stay quiet about both their bodies and their land. We named ourselves Green Resht to claim both the color of the forests and the stubbornness of the city that sits among them. The leaf became our quiet symbol—something that could be drawn in notebooks, embroidered on the inside of a sleeve, or sent as a single image in an encrypted chat.
In the first year we worked carefully. We organized small seed exchanges of traditional rice and fruit varieties that commercial agriculture was erasing. We held literacy and legal-awareness circles in private homes, where women learned how inheritance laws and land registration often erased their claims. We documented illegal logging with phones and shared the files through layered encryption. We taught basic digital security because we already understood that information was both weapon and vulnerability. Everything was local, quiet, and rooted in relationships that predated the group. We did not seek headlines. We sought continuity.
By late 2023 and into 2024 the atmosphere thickened. Several of our members were detained for short periods. Others were warned that their activities were being monitored. Family members received phone calls. Travel bans appeared without explanation. The message was clear: the combination of feminist organizing and environmental defense had become visible enough to attract the attention of those who preferred both women and forests to remain manageable. We adapted. We moved more of our coordination online. We reduced physical meetings. We began preparing contingency plans that none of us wanted to use.
The final pressure came in waves. A series of coordinated summonses. The sudden freezing of small bank accounts used for seed purchases and mutual aid. The realization that some of the encrypted channels we trusted had been compromised. At a certain point the calculation changed. Remaining inside meant the probable dismantling of the network and the risk of long-term imprisonment for those most visible. Exile was not a romantic choice. It was a strategic retreat forced by the mathematics of survival.
The decision to leave was collective and painful. Some of us could not go—family obligations, lack of passports, the need to keep the underground work alive. Those of us who could left in small groups, by different routes, at different times. We carried what we could: hard drives, seed packets, lists of contacts written in ways that would mean nothing to an outsider, and the knowledge that many of our sisters were staying behind to continue the work under greater danger. Crossing into Armenia was not a single dramatic moment. It was a series of quiet arrivals, temporary rooms, and the strange relief of being able to speak without calculating every word.
We established ourselves in Yerevan. The city is not home, but it has given us a margin of safety that Iran no longer offered. From here we continue the work. We maintain encrypted networks that still reach grassroots leaders inside the northern provinces. We run remote programs—digital security trainings, documentation of environmental destruction, coordination of mutual aid for women facing both economic pressure and state attention. We speak, when it is safe, about the links between patriarchal control and ecological extraction. We insist that climate justice in Iran cannot be separated from the freedom of women to organize, to move, to inherit, to speak.
Yet exile has brought its own harsh political and material reality. The financial repercussions have been severe and constant. We must now pay rent for a small office space in Yerevan that serves as both workplace and secure meeting point. We must cover the basic living costs of several core members who arrived with almost nothing and who cannot yet access formal employment. At the same time we continue to send money back to those who remained inside Iran—women still organizing under surveillance, still documenting deforestation, still supporting families affected by environmental destruction and state pressure. These transfers are essential, but they are also expensive and risky. Every month the same limited funds are stretched across office rent, member support in Armenia, secure communication tools, and direct assistance to the network still operating under repression at home.
The result is a deepening financial crisis. We are now at the edge of closing down. Without a significant increase in support, we will no longer be able to maintain the office, keep the core team housed and functioning, or continue sending resources to the women who remain on the ground in Iran. The encrypted networks that protect our grassroots leaders would weaken. The remote programs that allow us to train and coordinate from exile would stop. The quiet continuity we have fought to preserve since 2023 would be broken.
We remain in Armenia not because we have abandoned the struggle, but because the struggle required a rear base that could not be easily dismantled. From here we protect the continuity of the network. We amplify the voices of those still inside. We refuse the narrative that exile is defeat. It is a repositioning under pressure. The forests continue to shrink. The laws that constrain women remain in force. The same logic that treats both women’s bodies and the land as resources to be managed continues to operate. Our answer is the same as it was in 2023: we organize, we document, we protect one another, and we keep the green leaf alive.
But the green leaf cannot survive on symbolism alone. Without resources, even the most determined resistance withers. We are still Green Resht. We are in exile. We are fighting to stay open. And we are running out of time.