Young filmmakers from 19 schools in Qatar will be competing in the first ever Junior Environmental Filmmaker Awards contest. Small teams of three and four kids from grades 7 to 9 will be making movies about water.
Will Qatari Kids Make Eco Films with Eyes Wide Open?
Happy Islamic New Hirji Year
Happy New Year to all our Muslim readers today. While not everyone agrees on the date, the Hijri New Year falls around now, and on November 3 and 4 this year for most Muslims.
AR Wear’s Anti Rape Underpants (VIDEO)
Rape and sexual assaults on women is just as much a problem in the Middle East as it is in the west, although the “flavor” of assault differs somewhat. Think of Lara Logan, the US journalist assaulted by numerous men while reporting from the streets of Cairo. But with AR Wear, new anti-cut, anti-rape undies, could sexual assaults and date rapes of the future be prevented?
Celebrating The Olive In The Galilee
Artisinal olive oil. It has an attractive ring, but think what “artisinal” means. You associate it with ancient traditions that living people continue to maintain – with the material products of those traditions.
But when you pick up a bottle of olive oil, you’re probably thinking of salad, not imagining the physical labor involved in making it. I learned about Israel’s olive crops and the mix of ancient and modern methods of producing olive oil, on a tour of the Galilee olive festival this week. Laurie Balbo reported on the olive tree’s historical origins in this fascinating post.
Every October and November, the the Ministry for the Development of the Negev and the Galilee, the Galilee Development Authority and the Olive Council sponsor the Olive Branch Festival celebrating the olive harvest. Enjoying the cool fall weather, visitors tour villages throughout the Galilee, the Golan and the valleys where olives and their oil are a culture unto themselves.
In the north of the country, it’s an opportunity to meet Druze villagers whose livelihood depends largely on olive oil production. We’ve reported on our Druze culinary experience in this post. And if you like olive oil, you can take advantage of the chance to buy it fresh – almost right off the tree.
This year’s olive festival was in full swing when Green Prophet visited Kibbutz Parod, where the Saba Habib olive oil manufacturer is housed. Saba Habib produces olives, oil, and soaps and other cosmetic products based on olive oil. We met Saba Habib, grandson of the farm’s original founder, and head of the business today. Our tour guide translated as Saba Habib explained in Arabic about the farm and its products.
Saba Habib showed us how to judge the quality of olive oil: if a drop held between thumb and forefinger holds its shape and doesn’t dribble away, the oil is pure olive and fresh.
I was taken not only by the fresh oil and olives, but by the hand-made soaps, some of which are based on camel milk. Just looking at those soaps, you know that only pure, skin-friendly ingredients are in it, unlike commercial personal hygiene products that are suspected of being carcinogenic.
The Israel Olive Board (website in Hebrew) has its offices nearby on the Hananyah Farm. Prof. Adi Naali, CEO, took us for a stroll in the orchards and gave a short talk about Israel’s olives and how the country has modernized production.
“Until two years ago, Israel couldn’t even keep up with the local demand,” says Naali. “The Galilee has 250 dunams of olive groves that survive on rainfall alone, mostly in Druze villages. The annual average of those trees is 50 kg of olive oil per dunam. The Ministry of Agriculture is encouraging farmers to grow more olive trees, introducing modern agricultural methods like drip irrigation.”
“Farmers were reluctant to irrigate at first,” he notes. “It went against tradition. But it soon became clear that irrigated trees produce four or five times as much oil as non-irrigated trees: an average of 200 kg. oil per dunam.
“We can’t compare our output with Europe’s massive olive oil production. On the other hand, Israel is too small to produce bad olive oil. Large olive farms can’t handle their huge quantities of ripe olives at once; some of their olives may ferment and lose quality while waiting for processing. We have enough labor and mills to process the harvest immediately. There’s a proverb in Arabic: olives should go ‘from the tree to the stone’ – the grinding stones of the mill. Israeli olive oil has earned prizes in international competitions. ”
“Olive trees are tough and resistant to diseases,” adds Naali. “If attacked by the olive fly, we use an organic spray to get rid of it. Olive trees are sustainable agriculture par excellence. They don’t need much water, fertilizer or pesticide. No part of the harvest goes to waste. We compost the pomace, or the mass left over from crushing the fruit. Even the vegetable water that separates from the oil during processing is spread out over the soil in the orchards as fertilizer.”
The Olive Board has recently issued certification of olive oil purity, to assure consumers that the product with the oil-drop logo on the packaging is the real, unadulterated thing. The wonderfully cheap olive oils that consumers were eagerly picking up in supermarkets a while ago turned out to be a fraud.
And olive trees can live for hundreds, even thousands of years. We enjoyed a jeep drive to serene olive groves where ancient trees said to be 2000 years old are still bearing good fruit.
The next sight to meet our eyes was the Druze grandmother winnowing the leaves out of just-picked olives (top photo). It looked like mild exercise that an elderly woman used to a lifetime of outdoor work might like. I reflected on how much human labor goes into artisanal olive oil.
We strolled on and watched the harvest itself. Traditionally, harvest was accomplished by beating the branches, which breaks many of them. These workers used an Italian-made rotating device that knocks the olives off the tree without harming the branches.
The Olive Branch Festival is winding down, with sites open on weekends until November 9th. If you can’t make it this year, be assured that next year it promises to be even richer in events and attractions for domestic and foreign tourists. However, all is not lost – all during Hanukkah week, there will be more tours, activities and workshops (November 28th – December 5th).
More on olives and olive on Green Prophet:
10 Weird and Wonderful Uses For Olive Oil
The World’s Oldest Living Olive Trees
Green Waste Processes For Boutique Olive Presses and Wineries
Preserving Olives The Green Prophet Way
Are your black olives safe to eat
Do you know these 17 olive varieties?
See Severe Animal Abuse at Israel’s Largest Kosher Poultry Slaughterhouse (VIDEO)
More massive-scale animal abuse found in Israel. This time the kosher status of the company is at stake: Following news that cattle and sheep are being severely mistreated at a large kosher slaughterhouse, Israel’s Kolbotek consumer watchdog program has again revealed large scale animal abuse at the country’s leading poultry processing plant, Soglowek.
Sex in the Saudi Means Flirting with Arrest
As we’ve learned from this great No Woman, No Cry video by Hisham Fageeh, Saudi Arabian rules ban women from driving. This must drive them and their love interests crazy because provocative eye contact and inter-gender chat between strangers is also taboo. The religious police will arrest anyone caught violating these laws: flirters be warned.
Turkish Girl “Pirate” Jailed in Russia’s Arctic Prison Over Oil
Twenty-eight Greenpeacers, mostly foreigners, and two journalists are held for six weeks now in a Russian prison: In a surprising but not unheard of move, Russia has jailed the Greenpeace activists or “pirates” aboard a Greenpeace International ship for scaling a Russian-owned Gazprom oil platform.
One of them is a young woman from Turkey.
Find secret green spots in Beirut
A group of activists in Beirut have teamed up with a local design agency to create the city’s first map of green spaces. Beirut Green Project and Wonder 8 launched the Beirut Green Guide at Tawlet earlier this week, but a few kinks still need to be worked out.
According to the Daily Star:
“The complaint, as common as a winter cold, is familiar: There are no green spaces in Beirut. The assertion, made in the shadow of concrete high-rises and within earshot of the ever-present aural strains of yet more rebar being lifted to the heavens, seems irrefutable. Yet some of Beirut’s must active public space campaigners have chosen to do something other than just gripe about the deficiency of public parks.”
Beirut Green Project has spent several years trying to draw attention to the appalling absence of green space in Lebanon’s capital.
Lack of public access to the Horsh Beirut urban park remains among the most noteworthy and ongoing issues, and activists have engaged city officials in a pitched debate over who has the right to enjoy the historic gardens, but now the group has focused time and resources on highlighting what the city does have rather than what it doesn’t.
By building an interactive web-based map that illustrates the parks and other green spaces that are tucked away among the numerous concrete high rises and raging highways, the group hopes to encourage residents to seek them out, a member of the group, Rana Boukarim, told The Daily Star.
And in order to get word out, an exhibition at the restaurant in Mar Mikhael depicting each space along with its various amenities will remain in place for a full month.
Albeit still in Beta, the green guide is a brilliant, user-friendly tool.
Clicking on any of a series of bright orange icons on the map will bring up a separate page that lists the properties of each destination, including useful information like how many benches are available, whether or not pets are welcome, and if WiFi is available.
Photos are also posted.
Handy “did you know” facts provide information about each spot’s history, though the English spelling is not always correct and there is no Arab translation yet (many of the street names are written in Arabic, however.)
For now, the group has collated information on 22 parks in the city, (not much for a population of more than two million) but they are encouraging users to submit any spots that they have overlooked. And in time, they hope to publish a print version of the guide.
Until the rooftop revolution is complete, and lush green gardens crown all of the city’s featureless buildings, these public parks are all Beirut’s got.
:: Daily Star
Photo above via Beirut Green Project. Credits: Karim Sakr
LED Lights Stickman Costume Shows Simple Is Sweet (and Green)
While the Middle East is not a usual haunt for Halloween there are some parents here and there who bring the custom from their native America or Canada. If you are looking for a last-minute costume, now for the fun – a DIY stick figure costume made from LED lights.
Israeli Electric Car Drivers Pay the Piper Today?
Today is D-Day for electric car drivers in condos and apartments in Israel and who use the Better Place charging systems. The Israel Electric Company announced last week that yesterday was the cutoff date.
Turkey Opens World’s Deepest Subsea Tunnel, the Marmaray, Connecting Asia to Europe
Turkey inaugurated the Marmaray undersea railway tunnel on Tuesday, linking Europe and Asia. It is the Marmaray, the world’s deepest immersed tube tunnel at 60.46 metres (198.4 ft).
Cricket Bike Alarm is Silent and Barely Bigger than a Bottle Cap
Israeli designers are working hard to curb bicycle theft. One group came up with the “fashionable” Foldylock and the Spine Bike breaks when stolen. But the Cricket uses bluetooth technology to keep sticky hands off urban wheels.
Polluting the Final Frontier With Space Junk
With space labs, astronaut gloves and even a toothbrush floating in space, is there no limits to where we’ve flung our junk?
Thirty-four years ago the charred remains of a spaceship fell to earth. The spaceship was named Skylab and it was the last orbiting remnant of NASA’s grandiose Apollo era when Saturn V moon rockets with twenty-five times the cargo capacity of the space shuttle lifted humans 240,000 miles to the moon, one thousand times higher than the orbit of the International Space Station (ISS).
Skylab was a recycled spaceship. It was made from an empty Saturn V fuel tank decorated with solar panels and furniture. One solar panel and a heat-shield fell off during launch, forcing astronauts to jury-rig a parasol based on $12.95 fishing poles and a parachute canopy.
Skylab was massive, at launch it was already nearly as big as the fully completed International Space Station. No one wanted this house-sized spaceship to crash. It was supposed to be boosted into a higher orbit by NASA’s newly invented space shuttle. But when the space shuttle was delayed, Skylab’s orbit gradually decayed until it crashed in 1979.
Russia entered the litterbug space race the previous year when its COSMOS 954 nuclear-powered spy satellite fell from the sky and spread highly radioactive uranium across hundreds of thousands of square miles of western Canada.
Space Junk Cost and Liability
Under international agreement, space-faring countries are liable for the damage caused by their junk and debris so Canada sent the bill for the $6 billion radioactive clean-up to the Soviets who eventually paid a fraction of that amount. NASA never paid the $500 littering fine imposed by the remote Australian shire where Skylab landed.
China enters the space junk race
China was a latecomer to the space junk race but it made up for lost time when it deliberately crashed a kill satellite into its Fengyun weather satellite in 2007. This collision created an estimated 150,000 fragments of hypersonic shrapnel which expanded to fill thousands of cubic miles. The satellite was in a particularly high orbit where its fragments will threaten space travel for centuries. Shards are already known to have passed near the International Space Station and one piece destroyed a Russian satellite in January 2013. When Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield photographed what looked like a bullet hole in one of the International Space Station’s solar panels he said it was caused by a small stone from space. But it’s far more likely to have been caused by man-made litter from earth.
Peeing in our water bowl
The pattern of human pollution is all too predictable. Our middens become mountains. Earth’s landscapes, lakes, rivers and oceans become our dumps. Like a mad dog we pee in our own bowl and only notice a problem when civilization’s belly begins to ache from the stench. Humans eventually polluted earth’s seven great continents, its atmosphere and its oceans. So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that we’re beginning to fill space with trash.
Space is big but…
Space is big, but the amount of space in useful earth orbits is relatively small. Astronauts typically orbit at altitudes between 150 and 300 miles above sea level, no more than the distance between Alexandria, Egypt and Paphos, Cyprus. Geosynchronous communications and weather satellites must all orbit the earth at the same altitude, 22236 miles above sea level. So unless we’re very careful, space will eventually be so full that each collision with orbiting debris will create more orbiting debris.
The resulting chain-reaction is known as Kessler’s syndrome and is a plot complication in the newly released film Gravity. The resulting ring of debris may be beautiful but it could make space travel too risky and set back the advances in space technology since 1959. Imagine a world without satellite TV, GPS navigation, satellite weather forecasts and the Internet.
What can be done to remove space junk?
There are strategies for reducing the dangers of space junk but the the first order of business is tracking it. America’s NORAD is one of the agencies tasked with this space traffic control.
People at NORAD keep track of thousands of orbiting objects including everything from rocket fuel tanks to an astronaut’s lost glove and toothbrush. The ESA, NASA and other space agencies have collaborated on strategies for space junk mitigation. Russia’s COSMOS 954 used one of these strategies. It was designed to eject its nuclear reactor core into a higher “graveyard” orbit, but that strategy failed. The Mir space station outlived the Soviet empire that launched it but a controlled de-orbit in the spring of 2001 burned up as much as possible and dropped the remainder into a remote part of the South Pacific.
We don’t yet have a solution for removing smaller items but engineers have suggested everything from sailing space robots to aerogels and lasers. It’s clearly an environmental problem we will have to deal with very soon.
Update 2020: orbital sustainability happening thanks to Astroscale.
Public domain images of Skylab, orbiting objects, and space debris in Saudi Arabia via NASA.
Zaha Hadid’s 2020 Olympic Stadium Thwarted by Japanese Peers
A consortium of Japanese architects got together to protest Zaha Hadid’s winning design for the main stadium of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, and despite all her fame and glory, the Japanese government listened.
Zaha Hadid has been in the news a lot recently. For many, she is an incredible, visionary designer whose work is unparalleled, and her projects are appearing all over the world – including Qatar.
But a group of Japanese architects banded together to protest the enormous scope and size of the 80,000 seat stadium in Tokyo, which will host both the opening and closing ceremonies, as well as the Games’ athletics, football and rugby events.
Fumihiko Maki, Toyo Ito, Sou Fujimoto and Kengo Kuma – all renowned for their own work – organized a meeting to convey how the stadium approved six months ago is poorly suited for the urban context in which it is slated to appear.
“We are NOT against Zaha,” said Fujimoto in a tweet. “We just think the basic requirement of the competition was too big for the surroundings.”
After listening to the Japanese consortium’s concerns about Hadid’s design, sports minister Hakubun Shimomura overruled the initial project approval – in part because the £1.8 billion construction budget is “too massive,” reports Dezeen.
“We need to rethink this to scale it down,” he said. “Urban planning must meet people’s needs.”
When they approved the project roughly six months ago, the design jury loved Hadid’s design. In addition to incorporating geothermal energy, recycled rainwater and grey water reuse, thereby upping the green ante in a first for the Iraqi architect, the stadium will serve multiple functions.
More than just a temporary stadium for the 2020 Olympics, the Tokyo National Olympic Stadium to be constructed in Tokyo’s Yoyogi Park will also host the 2019 Rugby World Cup.
But for now – thanks to a few outspoken Japanese designers who value their city, Hadid has been forced to revisit the drawing board to produce something that is a little less cumbersome for its already-dense setting.
:: Dezeen