An Israeli company makes a mini-sewage plant to help small wineries, olive oil and cheese-makers deal with the pollutants from their industries.
Waste from small olive presses, cheese factories and wineries is not good for the water or soil. Organic farming and the 100-Mile Diet have influenced new college graduates to establish farms instead of seeking jobs in finance. The last decade has seen an explosion of cottage industries in everything from cheese- to wine-making.
Shuk Bites – for $26 you can eat your way through Jerusalem’s famous food market
There are plenty of self-guided tours in Jerusalem, and even a few culinary tours. But combining the two approaches, “Shuk Bites” is the first self-guided culinary tour. [“Shuk” is the Middle Eastern word for market place, seen commonly throughout the region. It often suggests an outdoor presence. – ed.] A cross between a treasure hunt, a scavenger hunt and a walking tour, “Shuk Bites” offers stops and tastings at ten different shops within the Machane Yehuda market, central Jerusalem’s “shuk.”
A novel way to turn cow poop into profits. Would you wear this molded fibre on your wall?
The quest for construction materials with low environmental impact is leading product developers to new pastures. Literally, in the case of Noble Environmental Technologies Corporation, whose ECORE line of bio-based panels are made from cow poop. American farms produce an estimated 2 trillion pounds of manure each year (comparable stats for Middle East ranchers not readily available).
The smartest way to turn a buck is to convert a problem into a solution that gets you paid both coming and going: get paid to collect a waste (or buy it at deep discount over alternative raw material), and then convert that waste into a resale product.
A handful of new lakes popping up in the vast and formidable Arabian desert are creating whole new ecosystems and attracting rare bird species that breed among the dunes. And, technically, it’s not a naturally-occurring phenomenon.
NPR traveled to the United Arab Emirates to witness firsthand one such lake that rose 35 feet in the last year alone. It was populated by cormorants, herons and even Ferruginous ducks, as well as fish and other species that couldn’t normally survive the harsh desert environment.
Even as some solar projects are just taking flight in Israel, underlining a new wave of optimism about the technology’s ability to succeed in the country, other solar giants are taking their leave of Israel. International energy and infrastructure giant, Siemens, announced last Monday that it was closing down its Siemens-Solel plant in Beit Shemesh, Israel. In the process, 70 of the concentrated solar power (CSP) plant’s employees were laid off.
Amateur slaughterers are often injured on the job. Should slaughtering be left to the professionals?
The annual Hajj pilgrimage, on which we wrote about efforts to make it more green, has also become an event in which animals are being slaughtered inhumanely for the accompanying Ein al-Adha or the Muslim Feast of the Sacrifice holiday. This form of ritual slaughtering is also becoming an issue by animal rights activists. An attempt at slaughtering a cow went wrong this year as a Gazan animal took revenge by killing the man about to slaughter it.
Satellite view of Deepwater Horizen oil spill slick, April 30, 2010: Photo by US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
Noble Energy, the Houston based energy company, has been working with both Israel and Cyprus to find commercial quantities of natural gas under the eastern Mediterranean seabed . Noble Energy’s Mediterranean undersea energy exploration has included the Leviathan and Tamar gas fields, together with energy tycoons like Delek Energy’s Yitzhak Tshuva. The natural gas finds so far are estimated to be able to provide Israel with enough natural gas to satisfy energy needs for 150 years – if handled wisely.
Further exploration by Noble and other energy companies are now revealing that oil deposits, located under some of the gas fields, may also be worth going after; even though this would involve very deep and environmentally risky drilling processes. These gas fields include the Leviathan field, off Israel’s coastal city of Haifa; and the Aphrodite gas field off the southern coast of Cyprus.
Seed money up to $1 million to protect your local birds. Apply today.
Sick of reading about Cyprus songbirds killed and pickled for snacks? Weary of wild killing sprees like Egypt’s sanctioned bird hunt ? Or maybe the downed flamingos in Kuwait ruffled your feathers?
BirdLife International has created a fund to underwrite environmental preservation projects in one of the world’s top biodiversity hotspots: the Mediterranean Basin. Check out their new website to learn more about the group and their work. Especially nice is a link where you can enter your country and see which species are at risk and find resources to get involved locally. A search on Jordan, as example, leads to The Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature, BirdLife’s partner in Jordan, which in turn will advise on in-kingdom conservation.
The 19-month conflict in Syria goes from bad to worse – and there are environmental impacts for the region too
“The situation is bad and getting worse,” U.N.-Arab League peace envoy Lakhdar Brahimi said today, lamenting the collapse of the truce he helped broker over the Eid al-Adha holiday. A car bomb which exploded near a Damascus mosque shattered the fragile ceasefire which had done little to stem violence across the country. And so, the 19-month conflict rages on with costs to the Syrian people and the region. In a previous post, I covered how poor water policies may have aggravated the conflict in Syria but Jordan – which has taken in over 200,000 Syrians- is now struggling with its own water supplies for refugees.
We’ve all been trying to imagine: just how skinny is Etgar Keret’s Ermitage house in Warsaw, Poland? Literally wedged between two buildings, the studio is one of the most talked about tiny homes on the web. Designed by Jakub Szczensy of Centrala as a tribute to Keret’s family who died during the WWII Holocaust, the project also has a humorous side. Step in for photos and a bonus cartoon at the end which briefly outlines the origin of this crazy idea.
The house is so skinny you can hardly see it squeezed between these two larger buildings.
The image on the left of Etgar Keret was taken by Bartek Warzecha and came from the writer’s official Facebook page.
This is the westward side of the home. Notice the grid panel that allows natural light and ventilation to penetrate the interior.
The door almost seems wider than the house, which will be used as a studio for invited guests – young creators and intellectualists from all over the world, according to a statement from the design team.
“The residential program, conducted in the heart of Wola, is supposed to produce creative work conditions and become a significant platform for world intellectual exchange.”
Images via Etgar Keret; Wikicommons; two lower photos via EK News
Known as the ‘Queen of Mean’ because of her tyrannical behavior towards just about everyone who crossed her path, Leona M. Helmsley was also a convicted felon who set up a $12 million trust for her Maltese Trouble. That amount was reduced to a more reasonable $2 million to ensure lifelong care for the dog, while the remaining $10 million was passed on to two grandchildren that Helmsley had disavowed in her will.
Famous for saying “We don’t pay taxes. Only little people pay taxes,” Helmsley left $4 billion for the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust that is now valued at roughly $5-8 billion. And $15 million of that, the trust recently announced, will be used to fund a dynamic joint program between the Weizmann Institute of Science and Technion-Israel Institute of Technology to accelerate renewable energy research.
Execute some alchemy and turn random junk and recyclables into a smart toy for your toddler.
This takes so little time and attracts such rave reviews you’ll be tempted to make a batch for future gift-giving, school projects, and maybe replace birthday “goody bags” with a toy that will get real use. An Amman school is making them by the boxful to donate to Jordan orphanages. It’s based on a pricey educational toy that’s been around for decades: someone gifted my-then toddler daughter with a “Find It“, and a dozen years on, she’ll still pull it off a shelf and play with it (OK, so maybe just when the internet’s down).
Here’s how to make your own “discovery bottle”.
This time of year marks one of Islam’s most sacred holidays, Eid al-Adha. The four-day holiday corresponds with the height of the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia, which draws two million Muslim pilgrims a year.
Eid began Friday and will end Monday, the last day of the Hajj. When traveling in Palestinian cities, I have always marveled at the street art communities make to welcome pilgrims home.
Eid al-Adha is also known as the Holiday of Sacrifice, the Feast of the Sacrifice, the Major Festival, the Greater Eid and Bakrid.
Fires, ritual animal slaughter (and sharing that meat with the poor), and feasts are among the cherished celebratory customs.
There has been much debate about the role of meat in the celebration. In 2011, Jordanian Princess Alia spoke about the importance of humane animal slaughter when celebrating Eid al-Adha.
Animals Lebanon rescued two striped hyenas that had been captured as pups in the wild and they are now safe in their new home in southern France. Five year old Rita was living in the Ansar Zoo, which was bombed in 2006 and left to ruin. Sara, just two, spent her entire life in a cage the same size as her in a private garden. Her brother, who lived in a cage below her, died not long after he was captured. His bones and skin were left in the cage.
For one year, the animal conservation group worked with the Agricultural and Environmental Ministries to emigrate the two animals, which are badly stigmatized in the Middle East. Some critics said they should have been released back into the wild, but there aren’t sufficient resources in Lebanon to rehabilitate the animals and they almost certainly would not have survived.
Camel milk and dates are now bona fide links in the international gourmet food chain. And while this bodes well for Middle East economics, is the associated environmental news happy too? I questioned this last summer in Malahide, a tiny Irish seaside village where I used to live. I was staying with friends and their child offered me some camel-milk chocolate (“It’s just lovely”, she said). I went to wash my hands, and noticed all of their bathroom soaps contained Dead Sea minerals.
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