Would innovative waste disposal devices make for tidier Jordanians? Year Two in the Hashemite Kingdom, and my honeymoon with Amman is kaput. It’s impossible to keep the romance alive when your beloved is so totally…trashy. At work, shopping for trash receptacles for a new airport terminal, I stumbled across some wacky waste bins that might’ve saved […]
The logistical headaches of keeping daylight savings year-round in Jordan. Last week in Amman, the Jordanian Cabinet reversed a decision to switch to wintertime, sticking with daylight saving time for the entire year. Our extended daylight hours are good for the environment (and coveted by many Israeli neighbors), but the late decision is causing logistical […]
The Qatar climate conference this year could very well mark the end of the Kyoto protocol. Qatar has one of the highest per capita CO2 emission rates in the world, but it will host The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)’s climate change conference this year – shortly before the Kyoto protocol’s first emission […]
Pungent and bittersweet, garlic is no stranger to Muslim cuisine. Check out what makes it eco-holy and why a clove a day is a needed health top-up.
False advertising. It’ll take a minute and thirty-seven seconds to watch this tapestry of images tracing the cosmic origins of mankind. Not enough time to get fidgety, barely enough time to dent your cup of coffee, but maybe just long enough to remind you why you check in to Green Prophet. Come on, admit it. […]
Movie stars shone on Abu Dhabi red carpets, where the curtain rose on a pair of green films connected to the Middle East. This year’s Abu Dhabi film festival featured two green-themed films aimed at raising awareness of a decidedly un-Hollywood subject: global waste management. Both movies, Trashed and Polluting Paradise, were sponsored by sustainable […]
Tires, plastics, and other types of solid waste will soon be converted into energy and other products at a new Israel mega recycling plant. Photo: Haaretz/Michal Fattal Israel’s garbage dumps and landfills are often referred to as large, unsightly “garbage mountains” such as the Hiriya garbage mound near Tel Aviv. With the Hiriya site now […]
Pollen and ash in Nile river delta sediment provides evidence of ancient climactic events including mega-droughts and wildfires which wiped out pyramid-building civilizations, says a study published in the recent July 2012 edition of Geology. They waited seventy days for her to reappear. Finally she came. For a moment just before sunrise, the bright star […]
A community project in Qatar explores local folktales and what they can teach us about nature in the Middle East
Investors still have faith in the Israeli-led Better Place electric car company. After the board fired its visionary founder and CEO Shai Agassi, and laying off half its staff in Israel last month the company has secured a $100 million investment. The company aims to reduce range anxiety of the use of electric cars by providing […]
Israel’s Negev Desert, Jordan’s Mount Nebo, Medaba and Wadi Rum are a few dark sky destinations for stargazing. Paris is known as the city of lights. So is Medina Saudi Arabia, Be’er Sheva Israel and Las Vegas, Nevada. We shouldn’t overlook Baltimore Maryland, Varanasi India, Quanzhou China and Milford Pennsylvania. Each of these cities is also […]
Abu Dhabi’s key attractions received a special makeover over the Eid holidays thanks to an army of extra workers equipped with special cleaning gear. Public places and picnic spots received focused attention by 3,000 waste workers on duty across the Emirates for the holiday: waste generation skyrockets during Eid. Eid al-Adha, also called Big Eid, […]
Imagine it’s 2020, what do you see? Poverty or abundance, environmental destruction or nature flourishing? War or Peace? Polly Higgins, voted one of the World’s Top 10 Visionary Thinkers by the Ecologist and named the Overall Champion of the 2012 People and Environment Awards, has a very bright outlook for the future. For Polly, 2020 is a future […]
An investigation is underway to determine the deaths of dozens of sea turtles that washed up on Egypt’s Mediterranean shore last week. Initial forays prompted suspicion that the turtles had eaten deliberately poisoned fish in Lake Bardawil, but conclusive results have not yet been published. Minister of State for Environmental Affairs Mostafa Hussein Kamel established […]
ProGen, a Turkish seed developer and supplier, has specialized in crop varieties that can withstand the hot Mediterranean climate. As climate conditions in European countries increasingly resemble those of their southern neighbors, European farmers are seeking new strains of staple crops that can adjust to the new climate. A pan-European research project, EASTBRED, brought European […]