Ancient farmers used indigenous knowledge to sustain communities at Avdat in the central Negev as many as seven thousand years ago. That wisom may hold the key to the future according to specialists. I visited Avdat this August on one of the…
The NATO Science for Peace Program and the Middle East Desalination Research Center (MEDRC) recently awarded grants to researchers at Ben Gurion University of the Negev to continue working on a novel desalination method. In a region where potable water…
As a geography Master’s student at Beer Sheva’s Ben-Gurion University, this semester I took a class in environmental law and policy with Alon Tal (we profiled him here). Our final project was to work on a green plan for Rahat,…
While in the center of the country, the concern is to improve food quality, public transportation and vehicle efficiency, in the periphery Israel’s decision-makers worry about building a satisfying enough environment to attract and keep young people who otherwise flee…
(ZenithSolar’s Jetson-style sunshine-collecting DPV – concentrating photovoltaic – dishes in the Negev Desert) As the old saying goes: necessity is the mother of invention. And nothing appears to be truer than in the field of alternative forms of energy, especially solar…
For those of you familiar with the typical American college student spring break, you know that it generally entails transporting an Animal House environment to exotic locations such as Cancun, Fort Lauderdale, the Bahamas, or the Carribean. However there has…
Israeli Researcher Finds Earth Cracks May Contribute to Global Warming “Fractures breathe, and this process has direct relevance to the question of global warming,” says Dr. Noam Weisbrod –– With the ever increasing shortage in the world’s water resources and dire…
With everything going on over the past month, many of our thoughts have been turned towards the southern area of Israel and the Negev. At more than 60% of the country’s land mass, however, the Negev desert should really be…
As a Green Prophet studying at Ben Gurion University, for the last two weeks I have been out of school due to rockets on Beer Sheva. Earlier this week I took advantage of BGU’s location in the desert to hike…
Events and frenetic discussion, both academic and activist in nature, have continued apace here at the 2nd Drylands and Desertification Conference here in Sde Boker, and I’ve taken an afternoon off to process the previous days proceedings. (You can see…