Spencer Tunick is one of the world’s most celebrated and controversial photographers with no fewer than 75 large-scale nude photo shoots under his proverbial belt. The New York-based artist has amassed thousands of volunteers to pose nude in dozens of symbolic locations across the planet, from Brazil to Ireland and most recently in Israel. To […]
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Recent images of a dead, bloody wolf and broken flamingos that young Kuwaiti men killed for sport gave the oil-rich state a dark reputation. But a new video narrated so eloquently by Dalal Al-Abdulrazzak, a Kuwaiti Phd candidate studying Gulf marine ecology at the University of British Columbia, provides a glimpse into a less-celebrated segment […]
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Is Big Brother watching your sewage? Israeli polluters can no longer dump raw sewage, lest they get caught. Drivers often dump collected waste into open areas to save on fuel and avoid paying authorized landfills. One incident occurred in 2009 in which drivers dumped the contents of 50 trucks worth of sewage food waste near the […]
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Despite periodic volunteer clean up efforts, much of Israel’s beach front suffers from public littering Lawyer Amit Bracha, director of Israel’s Union for Environmental Defense, was a recent guest on Israel’s Channel 10 morning TV show, speaking on the official opening of beach season for 2012. Bracha told the program moderators that despite greater efforts […]
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Guests descend like locusts since I moved to Jordan. This time we decided to try something new. Mass transit is not an option outside Amman city limits. Navigating a rental car through craggy mountains and city roads would test Evel Knievel. My visitors speak no Arabic, further limiting free travel. And most are past their hitchhiking and […]
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Sustainable development in Demmer, Tunisia could be lost forever shows this new documentary film. You cannot be against development, progress, innovation and even education. We count on these things to solve our biggest problems, whether it’s the ecological crisis, malnourishment or peak oil. If you don’t believe in them, you’re a defeatist. But do they […]
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Dune bashing destroys nature. Here’s why Ajmal prefers dune walking over dune bashing in the region of Dubai, United Arab Emirates. I almost threw up the very first time I went dune bashing. It was in the Margham Desert area of Dubai sometime in 2002 and the driver of the 4×4, Yasser, me and a […]
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Most tourists who visit Oman’s Gulf coast are treated to pristine views and sparkling waters, but Ray Montoya, an American angler and art teacher living in Muskat, produces YouTube videos that show another side to the country. Using a small yellow kayak, the hapless eco-crusader travels along the nearly 1,000 miles of coast, frequently discovering […]
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An archaic Saudia Arabian practice of trapping parrot fish in the Red Sea has to stop. The Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden are a beautiful haven of marine and coastal biodiversity, created as a result of deep ocean rifting which began 70 million years ago and saw the separation of the Arabian plate […]
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Activists have launched an international campaign to boycott key Namibian industries ahead of its annual slaughter of 91,000 seals. Not long ago we wrote a story about Hatem Yavuz, the “King of Seal Killers,” and our readers were outraged. An Australian man with Turkish heritage, Yavuz is now responsible for 85% of the world’s seal […]
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There are 250 rescued animals living at the BETA animal shelter just outside Beirut; too many for fancy villa owners. It should come as no surprise, after seeing the video of the Ethiopian maid Alem Dechasa being beaten by her employer, that Lebanon also has a deplorable animal rights record. We recently featured the devastating […]
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Sa’ar Stream waterfall near the Banias: Israel’s natural beauty at its best Like other Middle Eastern countries, Israel continuously suffers from a chronic water shortage, which is most often seen in the water level in it’s historic water supplier, the Kinneret or Sea of Galilee. But due to above average rainfall this past winter (the […]
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Five men and four Bactrian camels travel 1500 km through India, but it doesn’t go quite the way it was planned. If there are two things we love (apart from the planet), it’s camels – because they are the desert dweller’s best friend – and adventure. Do the two go hand in hand? Absolutely. And […]
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Within 50 years, water trapped hundreds of thousands of years ago will be depleted by Saudi desert farms using pivot irrigation. Water is a non-renewable resource in the Saudi desert, which only receives one inch of rain a year, so it makes sense to use existing resources very, very carefully, right? For ancient desert dwellers, […]
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Dubai is considering biological control: camels to dine in Dubai’s Ras al Khor wildlife sanctuary overrun by mangrove trees Too many mangroves is not a good thing – at least not at the Ras Al Khor Wildlife Sanctuary in Dubai, where they were introduced in 1990. So an ecologist at Dubai’s Wildlife Protection office has […]
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