After around two months of international phone calls, this Sunday and Monday Green Prophet hosted a whirlwind two-day (20-hour) seminar on environmental blogging in Madaba, Jordan.

Thanks to the good efforts of Volunteers for Peace and the Masar Center, nearly 20 Jordanian, Palestinian and Israeli writers and activists met for the first time and learned about each others’ projects and goals at home.

Hiba Hamzeh, 25, from Hebron, told the group about her hopes to start urban recycling in Palestine.

Murad Alkhufash, 39, aka the Green Thumb of Palestine, is planning a permaculture course in the village of Marda, near Salfit in the central West Bank.

Jordanians Sawsan Issa and Osama Suliman are working on a “thin-film” solar cell that can be sewn onto the roofs of greenhouses, where they will let the sunlight into the plants while providing energy for the farm.

And Zohar Yarom (right) is working on her own blog on Green Change to raise environmental awareness among Israelis at home, while GreenProphet writer Rachel Bergstein is researching Israeli water policy at Friends of the Earth Middle East.

After we learned about each others’ projects, we worked on our own blog posts and did some group editing.

It was difficult to cram into the short amount of time, but we learned a great deal from each other and even managed to fit in a night of spirited dancing to live Arabic music at the Bawabit Madaba restaurant.

The Israelis took full advantage of lax Jordanian smoking laws to puff away in stairwells and restaurants. We also each began our own blog posts about each other and ourselves as green activists in the Middle East. Look for posts in the coming days in this section of the GreenProphet.com.

Thank you very much to our sponsors, the United Religions Initiative – Middle East North Africa, who gave us a generous enough grant to cover all the participants’ transport and hotel. The Arava Institute of Environmental Studies sponsored our much-needed coffee breaks.

We hope to continue hosting this meeting of minds over the summer. If you would like to participate in the next GreenProphet Green Blogging conference, please be in touch. If you would like to help sponsor the next one, be in even more touch!

Green Regards,

Karin Kloosterman and Daniella Cheslow

Read more on our green workshop:
Multifaith Writers and Activists Unite in Jordan
Green Bloggers Page (with all updates)
Meet the green bloggers and activists from Jordan
Part I: Learn About Jordan
Instigating Environmental Awareness in Palestine

The post Green Bloggers Meet in Madaba, Jordan appeared first on Green Prophet.

As the fourth driest country in the world, Jordan is desperate for a water solution. This week, the Jordan Times anounced that Amman asked Thailand for help in cloud seeding to open the skies. It’s one of many Jordanian projects to get more water, such as the Red-Dead Canal and the Edama conservation campaign.

Thailand began experimenting with cloud seeding in 1969, led by King Bhumibol Adulyadej. It launched seeding on a wide scale during severe droughts in 2005. The technique, according to the Independent, is to spray silver iodide into warm and cold clouds at different altitudes. This year, a Jordanian technical team will visit Thailand during the April and May dry season to see how it’s done.

Thailand is not the only country to try better rain through chemicals. China is the world’s largest cloud seeder, and used the technology to disperse the smog over Beijing prior to the 2008 Olympics.

However, the technology is not without its detractors. The Chinese rain operation drew controversy in 2004 when one province claimed cloud seeding “stole” rain from them and gave it to another. Environmental concerns include the effect of tiny particles of silver iodide falling from the sky onto cities and waterways, yet according to this interview with Australian radio station EarthBeat, the iodide particles are small and dispersed and get locked in the soil once they come down.

The post Jordan Asks Thailand to be a Rainmaker appeared first on Green Prophet.

Lebanon: 2007 carbon emissions: 11.4 million metric tons.

Prime Minister Saad Hariri announced in November he would attend. Lebanon’s tiny coastal location makes it vulnerable to rising seas, and the already dry climate would be battered if the rivers dried up. Environmentalist Wael Hmaidan from the IndyACT green organization (which we covered here) told the Daily Star that even though Lebanon is small, the country must devise renewable energy solutions to reduce its carbon footprint. Further, he said Lebanon has to recycle more than its paltry 8 percent of waste. Regarding Lebanon’s other issues – namely, internal division, Hmaidan said, “If we don’t work on climate change there is no need to work on anything else.”

Lebanon also issued a plea to the rest of the world to get its act together before it’s too late, including reducing emissions by 40 percent in the next eleven years. In a meeting of the Lebanese Parliament and the United Nations Development Program, Lebanon demanded that industrial countries donate to the developing world to lower their carbon footprint, and called for a halt to all ad hoc subsidies of dirty fuels like coal.

Jordan: 2007 carbon emissions: 19.2 million metric tons.

Queen Rania has taken a strong stand on the need for solutions to global warming, and Jordan is sending Environmental Minister Khalid Irani to Copenhagen. The Jordan Times reports the possible consequences to the Hashemite Kingdom: “If climate change continues at its current pace, Jordan is expected to witness a 1-2°C increase in temperatures by 2030-2050, diminished aquifers and oases, reduced green cover and the transformation of semi-arid lands, some 80 per cent of the country’s total area, into arid deserts, according to environment experts.”

But the paper’s environmental writer Hana Namrouqa, while pointing out the catastrophic effects of the industrialized world, didn’t shy away from digging into Jordan’s problematic carbon profile. In November, Namrouqa reported that 74 percent of Jordan’s carbon emissions come from energy production, with most of the rest from waste disposal. Jordanian environmental officials want to jack up renewable energy to ten percent of the national budget by 2020.

Israel: 2007 carbon emissions: 65.9 million metric tons

For the first time, Israel is sending a government representative to a climate change conference (until now green NGOs represented Israel). Environmental Minister Gilad Erdan has decided to tackle Israel’s large per capita carbon footprint (Israel is ranked 30th per capita) by encouraging renewable energy at home and slamming the Ashkelon coal-fired power plant expansion. He also hired the international consulting company McKinsey & Co. to analyze Israel’s emissions; they found that with no further action, Israel’s carbon dioxide levels will double by 2030. Like its Arab neighbors, Israel can expect sparser and less predictable rainfall if temperatures rise. Yet Erdan has not issued any firm commitments on how much the country will shrink its carbon profile.

What the Minister has done, according to the Jerusalem Post, is try to get Israel out of its current “developing country” status – which carries no obligations – and into the industrialized category of Annex 1. This would make any agreements signed in Copenhagen binding for Israel.

Egypt: 2007 carbon emissions: 168.7 million metric tons.

According to a Pew research poll, which surveyed global attitudes toward global warming, Egypt’s population has gotten much more worried about climate change in the last few years: Last year, just 38 percent of Egyptians thought it was a major issue, and this year the figure stands at 54 percent.

Still the Hurriyet Daily News reports that Egypt’s controversial new project to green the desert has raised the hackles of both environmentalists and its upstream neighbors; at a time when global warming may decrease the surface water across Africa, Egypt’s move to divert the Nile to fields has been seen as short-sighted.

For more information, check out the Arab Forum for Environment and Development, which has issued joint pan-Arab statements on climate change here.

(Photo from International Land Coalition)

The post The Middle Eastern View of Copenhagen appeared first on Green Prophet.

GPL President Philippe Skaff (left) told the Star that focusing only on the immediate political crises inside Lebanon and the region is the wrong strategy:

“This is ignorance and shortsightedness because the repercussions of our long-term lack of focus on the degradation of our [environment], resources, and our cultural heritage … cannot be undone. There’s no winner and loser in this scenario – everybody loses forever.”

The GPL motto of “Earth Has No Sect” embodies that philosophy. The slick party Web site shows the reasons for the party’s rise. Only 1 percent of Lebanese homes have solar panels. Fifty-seven percent of the country’s sewage reaches the sea untreated.  Forest cover has plummeted from 35 percent of the state in 1960 to 13 percent today.

Skaff has long been involved in Lebanon’s sensitive forests, which took a serious hit in last year’s fire season. He and the Akhdar Dayem (Green Forever) organization collected money for equipment to rehabilitate the forest, and the GPL also formed a 20-year plan to recover 8 percent of the forest that was lost. He’s not the only one working on the issue; in September we reported on a new “Smokey the Bear” style campaign launched by the Lebanese Association for Forests, Development and Conservation.

To reach the tricky balance a green party must attain between maintaining ideas about sustainability without coming off as a vegetarian, organic-eating yuppie. The GPL is planning a 100-city tour in the coming months to spread the word beyond Beirut.

So far, the GPL has 900 members, according to the Star, half of whom are women. Students are also major supporters, and the American University of Beirut voted in several GPL candidates in the recent student government elections.

(Photo from The Daily Star)

The post A Green Party Grows in Lebanon appeared first on Green Prophet.

With the United Arab Emirates boasting one of the world’s highest obesity rates, expatriates working there complain that their adopted country is packing on their pounds. Abu Dhabi-based The National reports that nearly 40 percent of women and 25 percent of men in the UAE are obese.

Expats with growing waistlines told The National that their extra tire came from spending too much time in the car, as investment banker JD said:

“It is easy to put on weight here, especially since people have to drive to wherever they want to get to, and because there is a culture of big meals in the country.”

Another reason cited was the sedentary lifestyle, coupled with eating lots of take-out.

However, the UAE should take heart. Even though the World Health Organization ranked them 18th on the list of the world’s fattest countries, there are worse places to try to diet in the Middle East. According to GlobalPost, Egypt is the fifth-fattest country in the world, closely followed by Israel, number 8. In fact, this piece reminded me of a study we looked at earlier this year, in which Israeli kids are getting fatter and fatter, often due to suburban living.

As for the foreigners whining about getting chunky, local doctors don’t buy it, the National reports. Endocrinologist Bachar Afandi told the paper “it doesn’t matter what country you are in:

“I have too many patients with exercise machines at home and they don’t exercise, even in the best weather. They join all kinds of fitness clubs and still don’t exercise,” he said.

The post Expats claim UAE is diet-proof appeared first on Green Prophet.

Every year, a black cloud descends on Cairo and hangs in the air for two months. This year, its arrival coincides with the three-week FIFA under-20 World Cup.

Cairo’s smog is a toxic cocktail of vehicle emissions, urban factory pollutants and smoke from burned rice in the surrounding farms. The result – a suspended black cloud over the city – is a remarkable sign of the poor air quality. But even more remarkable is that the reporters struggled to find locals who thought Egypt’s pollution was more than rumors. Neither the teen football sensation Mohammad Talaat, nor the government’s air quality inspector Ahmad Abou Elseoud, and definitely not local vendors – believed the black cloud is a health or environmental hazard.

“Officials are hoping Cairo will take its fans breaths away. But that’s the problem, it very well might,” report Jon Jensen and Theodore May.

They cite World Bank figures that give Cairo, whose metropolitan population is 18 million, the title of worst city on the planet for suspended particulates. There was one interviewee who admitted the Bank is right, environment professor Salah El Haggar at the American University in Cairo:

“This is a disaster. Air pollution will affect the respiratory system, will affect the lungs, will affect the eyes, will affect cancer, will affect kidney failure, and will contribute to Hepatitis A, B and C.”

It’s not the first year the Egyptian capital has felt the throat-burning air pollution of the black cloud. As early as 2004, the English-language Al-Ahram paper cited government efforts to clean it up. And while Cairo has begun switching some vehicles to natural gas to cut down on hydrocarbons in the air, Jensen and May say it’s not enough to mitigate air so bad that when they tried to get an overhead shot of the city, the two had to give up because they couldn’t make out any buildings in the smog.

The post Smog in Cairo appeared first on Green Prophet.

Last Friday I was determined to find a sheep slaughter. It was Eid Al-Adha, the Muslim Feast of the Sacrifice. The story goes that Ibrahim was about to slaughter his son Ismail, when an angel came and redirected him to a lamb. In honor of that sacrifice, Muslims worldwide butcher sheep and goats on the holiday, and Jaffa, the Arab half of Tel Aviv, was no exception.

I got to Jaffa at 11 a.m. and began walking the streets looking for a family performing the ritual. Many families have stopped killing their own sheep in recent years; some don’t have the money, others don’t want the mess, some live in apartments without a yard, and others prefer celebrating the holiday in a vacation cabin in the north. At any rate, after calling about six families during the week, I still had no destination on Friday, and it was by chance that I saw a white sheep tied to the aluminum gate inside the Jaffaly family home in Shiveti Yisrael street in Jaffa. Two weeks earlier, Jaffar Jaffaly, 35, had paid 1,800 shekels (around $450) for it, and it was delivered the night before the holiday to his home.

The sheep seemed to know its fate. It nervously ate the potted plants in the courtyard. A few minutes after I got there, the butcher arrived: 65-year-old Mohammad, who has been slaughtering sheep since he was 15. His son-in-law (and my host) Jaffar held a blanket up while Mohammad sharpened his knives so the sheep wouldn’t get scared. It didn’t matter; it ran behind the house.

Once Mohammad was ready, he, Jaffar and two other men grabbed the sheep and wrestled it to the ground, next to a sewer whose cover they had removed. In a quick cut, Mohammad dispatched the sheep as about ten children watched. They were Jaffar’s kids, along with his nephews and neices.

Then the real work began. Mohammad and Jaffar took turns blowing air into a long plastic pipe wedged into the sheep’s leg; the animal blew up like a balloon as its skin separated from the muscle inside. Then they slid a butcher’s hook into a leg, and hoisted the sheep until the hook caught the doorframe. Now the sheep would make its transition from animal to dinner.

Mohammad expertly skinned the sheep in one piece, and slid it off the sheep like a sweater. He cut off the extremities, laying them in a plastic basin set on the ground. Jaffar threw the sheepskin in the dumpster across the street. Once, he said, his family would keep the skin and tan it with salt. But the process is labor intensive and stinks, and so they stopped.

The next step was removing the internal organs. As Mohammad pulled them out in one piece, Jaffar caught them in another plastic basin. The kids, who were still watching, asked Mohammad what each organ was. He blew up two glossy pink lungs and showed them the brown liver. Jaffar’s mother took the liver and heart to the kitchen and began making lunch.

Then Mohammad hacked the sheep into quarters, and worked each quarter down to manageable chunks. He did this all sitting at a miniscule picnic table in the front courtyard, and he handled his knife without much emotion. This was not a murder. It was a custom, as his father did before him. Mohammad preformed the whole operation with three knives, a pipe and a butcher’s hook, along with copious amounts of water.

I found it the most interesting to watch the kids’ responses. Before the slaughter, the women told their kids to say “Allahu Akbar” – God is Great – and explained that sheep don’t have souls like people do. Then the kids watched every part of the process, asking questions, poking the skin, touching the legs. Only one said he doesn’t eat red meat because of a previous slaughter. The rest had quietly learned through the years that meat comes from dead animals, and they ate it having made their peace.

The Slow Food movement defines Slow Meat. Sounds like this slaughter qualifies.

The post Eid Al-Adha: Getting close to your meat appeared first on Green Prophet.

Advertising itself as Israel’s first food-focused conference, “Mazon Le-Machshava” or food for thought, opens in the Tel Aviv port next Thursday, November 19.

In addition to a Top Chef-style cookdown to produce the tastiest meal with the lowest carbon footprint, the conference also promises conversations about farming, energy and water.

It taps into a growing trend – organic farming has a following not only in Israel, but also in the West Bank and Jordan.

The featured speaker is Ruth Ozeki, author of “My Year of Meats” (1998), about two women living in Japan and America and connecting over a TV cooking show.

Sponsors include the Heschel Center, the Arava Institute, the Israeli Ministry of Agriculture and Tel Aviv University.

The conference costs a recommended 80 shekels for Thursday, and extra for tours and workshops held on Friday, November 20th.

You can register and pay online, and it seems if you can’t pay the full freight, you can choose how much to contribute. For more info, go to foodforthought.org.il, or email kenes.mazon@gmail.com.

The post "Food for Thought" Conference in Tel Aviv appeared first on Green Prophet.

The Post reports that Israeli emissions, at 10.2 tons per person per year, are more than Western Europe’s but half of the United States’.  The lion’s share of those emissions come from electricity production. The coal power plant in Ashkelon – which we wrote about here (Israel’s Minister of the Environment Says to Shut Down Coal Plant) – will undoubtedly add to that figure.

But there is some hope, McKinsey says. If Israel ramps up solar, wind and natural gas power, implements the electric car, retrofits homes to be energy efficient, and generates power from garbage, then the amount of emissions forecasted for 2030 could drop by as much as 70 percent. That figure would slide even lower if Israelis become vegetarian and cut back on air conditioning and heating.

A central obstacle is that the Israeli government has set its emissions reduction targets too low, aiming to reduce them by 10 percent by 2020.  But Erdan has set his sights on significantly reducing Israel’s ecological footprint, Haaretz reports. Beyond discouraging the Israeli Electricity Company from opening the new coal-fired plant, Erdan has also spoken in favor of a consumption tax to reduce electricity, and in favor of importing cleaner-burning natural gas.  He plans to have half of Israeli trash recycled by 2015, via mandated sorting of wet from dry garbage, and organic from non-organic waste.

Although Israeli civil society has long been involved in the climate change discussion, the Israeli government has often lagged far behind. This may change on December 7, when Israel will attend the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. Copenhagen should be the new Kyoto Protocol, and according to this (Hebrew) Epoch Times article, Israel is currently preparing a plan for combating global warming through smarter development.

The post Are Israeli Emission Controls Hopeless? appeared first on Green Prophet.

Feb, 2020 update: This business is no longer viable. But we kept the story in our archives for you to enjoy. And perhaps make the next idea of this kind work. 

If you’ve been reading from the United States about the organic olive oils, vegetables and honey coming out of the Middle East, you’ll be excited to hear about a chance to buy into sustainable Israeli farming through Negev Nectars.

Run by Marvin Israelow and Green Prophet writer Jeff Yoskowitz (below), Negev Nectars launches this month. For $180 plus shipping, customers get three shipments a year including olive oil, honey, date syrup, preserves, and just about anything else that can be stuffed into a shipping container.

Producers include an olive oil grower, left, in Mitzpeh Ezuz (which also hosts WWOOF volunteers, which we wrote about), a spice grower at Sde Boker, and dried fruit from Kibbutz Neot Smadar.

To find out more about this international CSA, GreenProphet asked Jeff some questions:

Why the Negev, and why not all of Israel?

Many of our growers use brackish water, when possible, and are using the most innovative water saving techniques.  Thus, Negev Nectars is helping answer the age-old desert question, as well as providing an economic boost to growers in this one region.

Who is your target audience?

We are targeting anybody who is interested in high quality organic and sustainable products, and specifically those interested in buying quality Israeli products, who want to connect with and have a direct impact on Israel’s small farmers who we hope they will one day visit.

How many shares do you hope to sell this season?

We hope to sell 800 shares… Like a bio-dynamic farm whose growth depends solely on its cows and how much land they can effectively graze and fertilize, Negev Nectars’ growth is dependent on how much olive oil our one grower in Ezuz can produce.  Many of our other producers are small too, and as the business grows we plan to invest more in their land so we can grow–at a reasonable pace–in tandem.

I live in Israel. Can I visit the Negev Nectars farms? Can other CSA members visit farms when they come to Israel?

We have put information about our partner farms (which operate independent of Negev Nectars, as well) on our website, and are soon to be adding contact information and lodge information for visits.  Assuming that the dates work out with our partner farms, many would welcome a visit, and some, including Orlyya farm, have built ecologically sensitive Tzimmers in the desert that boast no flush toilets and other green innovations.  The visits to the farms will be a help to the farms and we encourage everyone, including Israelis and other CSA members, to be in touch and visit.

Have you thought about importing Palestinian organic goods?

Right now we’re focused specifically on the Negev region.  We are, however, looking into ways to support Bedouin communities and have met with the director of Bustan to discuss those possibilities.  We’re already planning for the second year of the CSA and considering Bedouin cosmetics and other potential products.  Right now, unfortunately, the few Bedouin producers are working on too small of a scale.  We’re looking into planning for the next year with them.

Some will say that while Negev Nectars is importing organics, the carbon footprint of trans-Atlantic shipping will negate any environmental benefits. Would you please share your thoughts on that issue?

It’s something we’ve thought a lot about.  The reality is that most of the products we are bringing over cannot be grown or produced in the Northeast, our main market.  Now similar products are  shipped from the Mediterranean, the Middle East and trucked over from California, and many are not organic and produce a huge carbon footprint.  While there is a demand for products such as olive oil in the US, as well as a demand for Israeli products, there will continue to be large-scale producers focused exclusively on the bottom-line. Our partner farms are small-scale and very ecologically focused — we thus see our work as a lessening of the carbon footprint.

Our other goal is to reduce the carbon footprint in Israel produced by industrial agriculture. The ultimate goal to come out of this venture is NOT to drown the US in a sea of Israeli olive oil and other products, but to provide yet one more market for Organic agriculture in Israel and a test ground for sustainable growing practices in the desert.  For example, Doron, our olive grower in Ezuz, is looking to grow more olive trees and will be empowered to do so because of Negev Nectars.  Soon you’ll see more of his oil in Israel too.  Our hope is that more farmers in Israel will see the benefit of going Organic and to have more dunams in Israel be growing without harmful chemicals.

What is your favorite Negev Nectars product?

I absolutely love the olive oil and appreciate its unique tastes with any meal.  I’m also really excited about Neot Smadar’s Sesame Date Spread and their Silan (date syrup), which they say is the best in all of Israel, a claim with which I would agree. I’m also looking forward to the herbs, specifically the za’atar of the first shipment and the Lemon Geranium of future shipments from Orlyya farm.

The post Negev Nectars Imports Israeli Organic Farm Food appeared first on Green Prophet.