Creators who want to influence people for good should also think carefully about tone. Environmental storytelling does not need to lecture or shame audiences. It can invite curiosity instead.
The company's Next Generation Process (NGP) Pilot Plant in London, Ontario, has officially moved into initial operating campaigns, generating the kind of structured, repeatable data that separates laboratory promise from commercial viability.
In the modern nutrition universe, that level of commitment deserves an applause. But for those who don’t live in a Nordic fishing village, the nutrition company Zinzino has built its omega-3 research and formulations around these principles, combining biomarker testing, antioxidant protection and traceable sourcing across both sustainably harvested small-fish oils and a vegan marine-microalgae alternative.
Dubai Municipality has set up 12 AI-powered "Ehsan Stations" to safely and officially feed strays. The city also officially supports Trap-Neuter-Return (TNR) programs.
Creators who want to influence people for good should also think carefully about tone. Environmental storytelling does not need to lecture or shame audiences. It can invite curiosity instead.
The company's Next Generation Process (NGP) Pilot Plant in London, Ontario, has officially moved into initial operating campaigns, generating the kind of structured, repeatable data that separates laboratory promise from commercial viability.
In the modern nutrition universe, that level of commitment deserves an applause. But for those who don’t live in a Nordic fishing village, the nutrition company Zinzino has built its omega-3 research and formulations around these principles, combining biomarker testing, antioxidant protection and traceable sourcing across both sustainably harvested small-fish oils and a vegan marine-microalgae alternative.
Dubai Municipality has set up 12 AI-powered "Ehsan Stations" to safely and officially feed strays. The city also officially supports Trap-Neuter-Return (TNR) programs.
Creators who want to influence people for good should also think carefully about tone. Environmental storytelling does not need to lecture or shame audiences. It can invite curiosity instead.
The company's Next Generation Process (NGP) Pilot Plant in London, Ontario, has officially moved into initial operating campaigns, generating the kind of structured, repeatable data that separates laboratory promise from commercial viability.
In the modern nutrition universe, that level of commitment deserves an applause. But for those who don’t live in a Nordic fishing village, the nutrition company Zinzino has built its omega-3 research and formulations around these principles, combining biomarker testing, antioxidant protection and traceable sourcing across both sustainably harvested small-fish oils and a vegan marine-microalgae alternative.
Dubai Municipality has set up 12 AI-powered "Ehsan Stations" to safely and officially feed strays. The city also officially supports Trap-Neuter-Return (TNR) programs.
Creators who want to influence people for good should also think carefully about tone. Environmental storytelling does not need to lecture or shame audiences. It can invite curiosity instead.
The company's Next Generation Process (NGP) Pilot Plant in London, Ontario, has officially moved into initial operating campaigns, generating the kind of structured, repeatable data that separates laboratory promise from commercial viability.
In the modern nutrition universe, that level of commitment deserves an applause. But for those who don’t live in a Nordic fishing village, the nutrition company Zinzino has built its omega-3 research and formulations around these principles, combining biomarker testing, antioxidant protection and traceable sourcing across both sustainably harvested small-fish oils and a vegan marine-microalgae alternative.
Dubai Municipality has set up 12 AI-powered "Ehsan Stations" to safely and officially feed strays. The city also officially supports Trap-Neuter-Return (TNR) programs.
Creators who want to influence people for good should also think carefully about tone. Environmental storytelling does not need to lecture or shame audiences. It can invite curiosity instead.
The company's Next Generation Process (NGP) Pilot Plant in London, Ontario, has officially moved into initial operating campaigns, generating the kind of structured, repeatable data that separates laboratory promise from commercial viability.
In the modern nutrition universe, that level of commitment deserves an applause. But for those who don’t live in a Nordic fishing village, the nutrition company Zinzino has built its omega-3 research and formulations around these principles, combining biomarker testing, antioxidant protection and traceable sourcing across both sustainably harvested small-fish oils and a vegan marine-microalgae alternative.
Dubai Municipality has set up 12 AI-powered "Ehsan Stations" to safely and officially feed strays. The city also officially supports Trap-Neuter-Return (TNR) programs.
Creators who want to influence people for good should also think carefully about tone. Environmental storytelling does not need to lecture or shame audiences. It can invite curiosity instead.
The company's Next Generation Process (NGP) Pilot Plant in London, Ontario, has officially moved into initial operating campaigns, generating the kind of structured, repeatable data that separates laboratory promise from commercial viability.
In the modern nutrition universe, that level of commitment deserves an applause. But for those who don’t live in a Nordic fishing village, the nutrition company Zinzino has built its omega-3 research and formulations around these principles, combining biomarker testing, antioxidant protection and traceable sourcing across both sustainably harvested small-fish oils and a vegan marine-microalgae alternative.
Dubai Municipality has set up 12 AI-powered "Ehsan Stations" to safely and officially feed strays. The city also officially supports Trap-Neuter-Return (TNR) programs.
Creators who want to influence people for good should also think carefully about tone. Environmental storytelling does not need to lecture or shame audiences. It can invite curiosity instead.
The company's Next Generation Process (NGP) Pilot Plant in London, Ontario, has officially moved into initial operating campaigns, generating the kind of structured, repeatable data that separates laboratory promise from commercial viability.
In the modern nutrition universe, that level of commitment deserves an applause. But for those who don’t live in a Nordic fishing village, the nutrition company Zinzino has built its omega-3 research and formulations around these principles, combining biomarker testing, antioxidant protection and traceable sourcing across both sustainably harvested small-fish oils and a vegan marine-microalgae alternative.
Dubai Municipality has set up 12 AI-powered "Ehsan Stations" to safely and officially feed strays. The city also officially supports Trap-Neuter-Return (TNR) programs.
Creators who want to influence people for good should also think carefully about tone. Environmental storytelling does not need to lecture or shame audiences. It can invite curiosity instead.
The company's Next Generation Process (NGP) Pilot Plant in London, Ontario, has officially moved into initial operating campaigns, generating the kind of structured, repeatable data that separates laboratory promise from commercial viability.
In the modern nutrition universe, that level of commitment deserves an applause. But for those who don’t live in a Nordic fishing village, the nutrition company Zinzino has built its omega-3 research and formulations around these principles, combining biomarker testing, antioxidant protection and traceable sourcing across both sustainably harvested small-fish oils and a vegan marine-microalgae alternative.
Dubai Municipality has set up 12 AI-powered "Ehsan Stations" to safely and officially feed strays. The city also officially supports Trap-Neuter-Return (TNR) programs.
Founded in 2003, Seambiotic develops and produces marine microalgae for the nutraceuticals and biofuel industries by using flue gas from electric power plants.
Seambiotic’s success in utilizing an organic substance that is found in abundance in the world’s oceans and in fresh water sources as well, may one day solve much of the world’s energy needs as well as provide food products for the earth’s continuing increasing population.
Every year, a black cloud descends on Cairo and hangs in the air for two months. This year, its arrival coincides with the three-week FIFA under-20 World Cup.
Cairo’s smog is a toxic cocktail of vehicle emissions, urban factory pollutants and smoke from burned rice in the surrounding farms. The result – a suspended black cloud over the city – is a remarkable sign of the poor air quality. But even more remarkable is that the reporters struggled to find locals who thought Egypt’s pollution was more than rumors. Neither the teen football sensation Mohammad Talaat, nor the government’s air quality inspector Ahmad Abou Elseoud, and definitely not local vendors – believed the black cloud is a health or environmental hazard.
Smog in Cairo
“Officials are hoping Cairo will take its fans breaths away. But that’s the problem, it very well might,” report Jon Jensen and Theodore May.
They cite World Bank figures that give Cairo, whose metropolitan population is 18 million, the title of worst city on the planet for suspended particulates. There was one interviewee who admitted the Bank is right, environment professor Salah El Haggar at the American University in Cairo:
“This is a disaster. Air pollution will affect the respiratory system, will affect the lungs, will affect the eyes, will affect cancer, will affect kidney failure, and will contribute to Hepatitis A, B and C.”
It’s not the first year the Egyptian capital has felt the throat-burning air pollution of the black cloud. As early as 2004, the English-language Al-Ahram paper cited government efforts to clean it up. And while Cairo has begun switching some vehicles to natural gas to cut down on hydrocarbons in the air, Jensen and May say it’s not enough to mitigate air so bad that when they tried to get an overhead shot of the city, the two had to give up because they couldn’t make out any buildings in the smog.
We reported earlier in the year that a Beirut-based property developer has designs to build a Dubai “World”-like set of islands in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Lebanon. Modelled after Dubai’s The World and Palm Islands, developers in Lebanon report that its $8 billion development project will not sink.
Oil rich Saudi is not the only country getting slack for greenhouse gas emissions. This Canadian writer points the finger at Canada, where tar sands are yet to be an issue at climate change talks.
Climate activist groups have been attacking Saudi Arabia, saying the Middle East country is playing an obstructionist role at climate change talks. According to Derek Armstrong, from Persona Corp, Canada and their tar sands projects, should be the one taking a beating at this month’s climate change talks at Copenhagen. Armstrong has written a report on Canada’s failure to safeguard nature and people from the effects of the tar sands, not to mention the climate impact. Read on for the whole story:
“You can’t go for a walk in the forest without having an impact, because you left a footprint. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go for a walk in the forest,” Brian Ferguson, CEO, Cenovus Energy Inc., a company that owns interests in the Alberta tar sands development.
In these pre-Copenhagen days, Canada has become a bit of a whipping boy over its environmental record, especially regarding the Alberta tar sands, that vast (149,000 square kilometers) bleak area where forests have been clear-cut and the earth dug up to get at the black, oil-rich dirt.
Foreign journalists, politicians and environmentalists have attacked Canada for obstructing progress in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and for putting profit before care of the environment. George Monbiot of the Guardian wrote: “The immediate threat to the global effort to sustain a peaceful and stable world comes not from Saudi Arabia or Iran or China. It comes from Canada. How could that be true?”
Green Prophet’s Daniella witnesses the Muslim holiday ritual slaughtering of a sheep, in Jaffa.
Last Friday I was determined to find a sheep slaughter. It was Eid Al-Adha, the Muslim Feast of the Sacrifice. The story goes that Ibrahim was about to slaughter his son Ismail, when an angel came and redirected him to a lamb. In honor of that sacrifice, Muslims worldwide butcher sheep and goats on the holiday, and Jaffa, the Arab half of Tel Aviv, was no exception.
I got to Jaffa at 11 a.m. and began walking the streets looking for a family performing the ritual. Many families have stopped killing their own sheep in recent years; some don’t have the money, others don’t want the mess, some live in apartments without a yard, and others prefer celebrating the holiday in a vacation cabin in the north. At any rate, after calling about six families during the week, I still had no destination on Friday, and it was by chance that I saw a white sheep tied to the aluminum gate inside the Jaffaly family home in Shiveti Yisrael street in Jaffa. Two weeks earlier, Jaffar Jaffaly, 35, had paid 1,800 shekels (around $450) for it, and it was delivered the night before the holiday to his home.
In a pretty radical move, Lebanon’s IndyACT organizes protest against what it calls Saudi obstructionism in climate change talks. Watch this vertigo-inducing video of their silent protest at Barcelona, a pre-Copenhagen climate meeting last month.
The group based in Beirut, Lebanon, urged members to not to be drawn behind the obstructive oil-rich Arab states in the negotiation process. In response to obstructives measures by Arab states, the group also launched the campaign and website: You Can’t Drink Oil.
IndyACT also called on Arab states to take their moral responsibilities to insure the safety of the Arab world and the planet from a tragic fate. This is the message they will be taking to next week’s climate meeting COP15 at Copenhagen, Denmark. Lebanon will be sending their PM, and acknowledges that is has emissions disproportionate to Lebanon’s population size.
TAU’s nanosized “forest of peptides” can be used as the basis for self-cleaning windows and more efficient batteries.
It’s cleaning up space junk, and is giving us lab-on-chip biofilters for detecting contamination. Now nanotechnology has produced a coating for windows or solar panels that repels grime and dirt. Expanded battery storage capacities for the next electric car could be within reach too.
New Tel Aviv University research, just published in Nature Nanotechnology, details a breakthrough in assembling peptides at the nano-scale level that could make these futuristic visions come true in just a few years.
Operating in the range of 100 nanometers (roughly one-billionth of a meter) and even smaller, graduate student Lihi Adler-Abramovich and a team working under Prof. Ehud Gazit in TAU’s Department of Molecular Microbiology and Biotechnology have found a novel way to control the atoms and molecules of peptides so that they “grow” to resemble small forests of grass.
These “peptide forests” repel dust and water — a perfect self-cleaning coating for windows or solar panels which, when dirty, become far less efficient.
[youtube width=”560″ height=”410″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkmDZpNKnms&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]Cairo is a city with 18 million people. Most do not have a way to remove their trash. Garbage Dreams, a new film (see above), explores Zabbaleen and how they recycle garbage in Cairo. A buy-out of two waste-management firms could make the waste management business run more effectively, but impact the trade done on the streets by Zabbaleen.
It’s good to see some clean technology news being generated by other Middle East North Africa (MENA) region countries other than Israel. According to the Emirates Business newspaper, Cairo-based Citadel Capital, a leading private equity firm in the Mena region, announced that it has acquired a controlling stake in two Egypt companies dealing with solid waste management.
The two companies are the Egyptian Company for Solid Waste Recycling (Ecaru), which started in 1999 for solid waste sorting and recycling, and the Engineering Tasks Group (Entrag). As part of Citadel the two companies will be grouped as a single holding company: Entag Holding. Combined, the two companies have more than 1,500 employees.
Dancing on water and the black water of “oil” Trout looks at a society’s transformation.
Inbal Pinto and Avshalom Pollak’s latest dance piece, Trout, which will be performed at the Suzanne Dellal Centre in Tel Aviv for one week only (December 5 – 12) reveals yet another aspect of the creative pair’s ongoing relationship to nature: intense, direct, yet neither naïve nor simplistic.
Created during an artistic residence in Stavanger, Norway with music created (and performed live) by the Norwegian group The Kitchen Orchestra, it would be misleading to describe Trout merely as a work that is performed in water.
Trout evolved through the process of working in a particular environment, and the effect of that environment – human, natural, industrial and creative – can be seen in the work itself.
How much more exploitation can the Dead Sea take? Next up: drilling for oil.
It’s hard to say what’s worse from an environmental standpoint; Jordan and Israel’s continued mining of potash and other minerals at the Dead Sea, or drilling for oil.
The potash industry has been going on for years there, including a unique method of extracting the mineral from Dead Sea water, interest in drilling for both oil and natural gas has also been happening, with some measure of success.
Following the discovery of natural gas back in the 1960s in Israel, a sufficient quantity of oil was brought up from a well drilled by the Naphtha Israel Petroleum Company during some 20 years later.
The Dead Sea, or Salt Sea (Yam Hamelach) as it is known in Israel, is the lowest dryland point in the world, and has been steadily receding since most of the flow of the Jordan River (the lake’s main water source) was diverted into Israel’s national water carrier.
As a result, only a trickle of Jordan River water reaches the Dead Sea – filled with West Bank sludge – and environmentalists fear the lake will be gone entirely by the year 2050.
Israel’s been dragging its feet over the proposed drought tax.
It’s been a pretty tumultuous month for water politics in Israel. After more than five years of abnormally low rainfall, as well as decades of unsustainable water consumption (at least according to Prof. Hillel Shuval) Israel faces an increasingly dire water crisis. Back in July, the Knesset (Parliament) enacted a tax on water, dubbed the “drought tax,” to help curb household water consumption.
Much of the Israeli public views the tax unfavorably, and over the past months protest has mounted.
The organic market is growing at an exponential rate in the United Arab Emirates, and a new Middle East Natural & Organic Products Expo 2009 (MENOPE) is about to take place in Dubai to showcase new goods, reports GreenPlanet blog.
Taking place next week the same dates when the COP15 climate event starts, the 7-9 December event will showcase certified organic and natural products markets under single roof.
This “Noah’s Ark” sculpture above is part of an environmental community project run by Haggit Rich of SafsaPesel in Israel.
In her workshops, groups make usable sculptures for kindergartens, schools and parks. Once Rich and the children decide on a project, they collect materials such old bottles, tires and newspapers. These discarded items form the foundation. It’s a nice way to get kids creative and learning about environmental concepts. Read on for more pictures.
Noam Dolgin: Jewish religious values can help green The Holy Land.
Noam Dolgin is a Jewish environmental educator and the executive director of the Green Zionist Alliance (GZA). Based in Vancouver, Canada, he travels regularly around North America teaching about Jewish
environmental values and Israel’s environment.
Green Prophet sits down with Noam to learn a little more about the Green Zionist Alliance and what it does.
What are your organization’s core activities, when was it founded, why?
The GZA was founded in 2001 to be the first environmental party at the World Zionist Congress. Our original goals where to green the Zionist movement and its constituent agencies, such as Keren Kayemet L’Yisrael (Jewish National Fund), through our involvement with the Congress. In 2006, when we became a 501(c)3 nonprofit, we expanded our scope to include educational programming and become the full-time Diaspora voice for Israel’s environment
Why green Zionism? What’s the connection?
Zionism is green at its core because the Land of Israel has always been central to the Zionist philosophy. When the Uganda option was debated, it became clear that there could be no Zionism without Zion. To that end, many early Zionist pioneers came to Israel to work the land the way our ancestors did.
I believe that protecting the land continues to be a central value of Zionism. Without an intact ecosystem, access to drinking water, agricultural land and clean air, both Israeli citizens and their economy are threatened. Moreover, solving these environmental challenges is essential to creating a lasting peace in the Middle East.
What is the role of the Jewish Diaspora in this organization?
We are a Diaspora-based organization. While we have members in Israel, and we do work in Israel, the majority of our members are in the Diaspora and one of our main missions is to connect Diaspora Jews to Israel’s environment.
What role do you see for religion in general (Islam, Judaism, Christianity) for helping improve environmental awareness in the Middle East?
Jewish ethics have much to offer when it comes to building a modern environmental ethic. Values such as ‘Bal Taschit’, (not wasting) ‘Tzaar Baalei Chayim‘ (animal welfare) and a general care for creation are as relevant today as they have ever been.
Since the Land of Israel is core to Jewish values and it is important in Islam and Christianity as well, it is our collective moral and religious obligation to protect the Holy Land.
Tell us about one of your organization’s biggest successes.
Through appointing leading Israeli environmentalists, such as Alon Tal, to the KKL board of directors, we have had a direct impact on Israel’s environment, including making sustainable afforestation the top KKL priority, declaring new nature preserves, and implementing the Trans-Israel Bike Trail and the Kinneret Circumference Trail.
Faith-based groups from all religions are getting more involved in using their religion as means to educate about the environment. To learn more about the Green Zionist Alliance visit their website.
Proposed vertical farms like this one in Dubai may be the only way for supplying food to Middle East countries.
Dickson D. Despommier is a professor of public health at Columbia University in New York, and if he gets his way, the future will be full of “vertical farms’ (a farm on every floor) in cities across the world, including major players in the Middle East.
In a recent oped column in the New York Times, Despommier looked into his crystal ball and came up with these insights as to why.
A Seambiotic algae farm grows biofuel
Dancing on water and the black water of “oil” Trout looks at a society’s transformation.
How much more exploitation can the Dead Sea take? Next up: drilling for oil.
Proposed vertical farms like this one in Dubai may be the only way for supplying food to Middle East countries.