After six years of hard work, Friends of the Earth Middle East have opened an eco-park in Jordan dedicated to preserving biodiversity Last week, the Sharhabil Bin Hassneh EcoPark in Jordan was opened after six years of planning which saw the development of several thousand dunams of land in the Jordan Valley. As well as […]
“What is happening to sharks around the world is the most shameful and biggest commercial sellout that man has ever perpetuated against the natural world” – Marine Conservationist and Film-maker Jonathan Ali Khan Swapping fashion design for fish and wildlife, the film-maker Jonathan Ali Khan has been working on marine conservation in the United Arab […]
Sandstorms, like any kind of air pollution, know no borders. Last Wednesday a viscous sandstorm in Iran forced schools and government offices to close. The more extreme than usual storm grounded some flights, and sent a number of people to hospital as well. According to the AFP, the Iranian media is blaming countries west of […]
ResponsibleTravel.com customers on holiday in Egypt. Feluccas and Pharoahs, a popular trip. British ethical tourism pioneers ResponsibleTravel.com has celebrated its tenth birthday by announcing its biggest ten sellers over the last decade – and Middle Eastern destinations top the list. Responsible Travel offers hundreds of holidays across the world and its birthday announcement also included […]
As Egyptian struggles for human rights, animal rights activists speak for those who can’t. Egyptian animal welfare societies and activists are calling for a protest this Saturday outside the Cairo Zoo in Giza. According to animal rights activists Egypt has become a hub for international illegal trade in wildlife. We’ve reported earlier about the horses […]
Bahrain (A) will screen Japanese travelers (B) at airport if radiation levels rise. It goes without saying that radiation, like air and water pollution knows no borders. Countries close to Japan, and even those farther away like Israel and the United States have already measured radiation from Japan’s troubled nuclear reactors. Now Bahrain authorities, a […]
Could First Choice all-inclusive holidays spell the end for small businesses in Middle Eastern resorts? First Choice, one of Britain’s leading package holiday companies, announced this week that all holidays sold as of 2012 under its brand will be all-inclusive. This means that as well as flights and hotels, the price that tourists pay up-front […]
Rachel Jacobson shares the story behind protecting this beautiful view from “Big Oil.” Last year a small group of people accidentally discovered that Israel Energy Initiatives (IEI), backed by Rupert Murdoch, Dick Cheney and a powerful American oil conglomerate, intended to explore their land for oil shale – potentially a very destructive project. David de […]
Abandoned Fukushima “dead zone” dog: its face says it all! The radiation, sadly, lingers in its fur. With escalating rates of radiation, and an upgrade to 7 in terms of severity, it’s not only humans who have suffered from Japan’s 9 magnitude earthquake, tsunami and radiation leakage in northeastern Japan. Thousands of dogs, cats, and […]
As its grip on the Nile river slips away, Egypt reframes the tone of its negotiations. Egypt has announced a final effort to re-negotiate the terms of the Cooperative Framework Agreement which apportions water from the Nile River to various basin countries. Since 1929, Egypt has held a near-monopoly on the water, but last year […]
Israeli idealists plan to develop a land trust in the northern Galilee to encourage rural homesteading. Despite its emergence as a developed, industrial country, Israel has a bevy of close-to-the-earth learning experiences to choose from. Several kibbutzim throughout the country offer a variety of useful workshops in permaculture, off-grid living, sustainable building, and organic farming. […]
How can we stop shark finning in the United Arab Emirates?
Is a bird death “aflockalypse” being caused by ionospheric experimentation? Strange mass bird and fish kill-offs. Then 152 dolphins get “zapped” in the Straits of Hormuz and 200 cows die suddenly in the American State of Wisconsin. News reports some 7000 buffalo dying in Vietnam seem to indicate that something unnatural may be causing all […]
Saudi researchers develop a new model for predicting flash floods in the Middle East. They cripple cities like Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, and take lives each year in the Middle East: flash floods come without warning, and are hard to predict (check out our flash flood survival guide), but now Arab scientists at the King […]
The animals rights organisation ‘Animals Lebanon’ has called on the government to deal with stray dogs in a more humane manner The lack of animals rights in the Middle East is an issue we have discussed here at Green Prophet. We reported on the horses left to die during the revolution in Egypt, the poor […]
Professor Mohammed Kassas in his office at Cairo University, photographed by Louise Sarant If Hassan Fathy is the Middle East’s father of sustainable architecture, then Mohamed Kassas is the prophet of desertification. The spry ninety year old Egyptian Professor of Botany told Almasry Alyoum that his love of nature sprouted in a fishing village along the […]
What’s weirder that eating slimy fish eggs? Farming them in Abu Dhabi’s desert. Because we have had a multiple-decade infatuation with eating slimy fish eggs, not to mention our obsession with oil and resultant pollution of their habitat, more than three quarters of sturgeon species are critically endangered. As a result, the global supply of […]
New parks will give relief to Tel Aviv’s crowded beaches, and save the environment! Israel’s announcement that it will create a new network of land and sea parks in order to protect its coastal escarpment is a boon for beach-lovers too. A harbinger of what might happen should the Gaza artificial island project take root, […]
We speak to Ibrahim Al Zu’bi from the Emirates Divers Association about why the ban on shark finning in the UAE hasn’t worked and what ordinary people can do to stop the horrific trade In 2008, shark finning in the United Arab Emirates was banned. For many environmentalists and conservationists this was a time to […]
“Szzzzz, c’mon, honey; just take a little bitty bite of this delicious fruit” This question has been asked by much of Mankind ever since the dawn of the Creation: was the snake that enticed Eve and Adam to eat fruit from the Tree of Knowledge really environmentally unfriendly? And is it fair to blame the […]
Environmentalists condemn Israeli plans to build an artificial island off the coast of Gaza to house a port, an airport and to encourage tourism It seems that it is not only Dubai that harbours ridiculous dreams of artificial islands– Israel does too. Israeli minister for transport Yisreal Katz recently revealed that plans to construct an […]
At this time of ecological uncertainty, can we really justify $200,000 adrenalin hits for the rich? In 2010, according to the World Hunger Organization, 925 million of our fellow human beings went hungry. Meanwhile, untold millions (billions?) of US dollars are being spent to develop the Virgin Galactic Spaceship, of which the BBC has been […]
This art installation by Matthew Laws & Hall Watts is an accurate portrayal of what our 2030 water consumption will look like. Few places are as water stressed as the Middle East. The Gulf countries have to live with the reality that their very existence depends on desalination, the Levant is scarcely better off, and […]
Forty green tree pythons headed for the UAE were confiscated in Indonesia over the weekend. Despite Interpol’s tough stance against trafficking, traffickers have no trouble finding customers in the Middle East. Karl Amman talked to us earlier this year about private wildlife collections in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and other Middle Eastern countries and last year […]
Natural phenomena, HAARP experiments or an alien death ray? Some 152 dophins boiled alive with conspiracy theorists pointing to HAARP. You may think you have seen everything after Arwa’s article dealing with the slaughter of sharks in Persian Gulf waters off Dubai. Think twice, dear readers, because you haven’t! There’s something even more sinister and […]