“In the midst of uncertain time, renewable energy remains consistent and steadfast in its expansion,” said Francesco La Camera, IRENA’s Director-General. “A more decentralised energy system, with a growing share of renewables and more market players, is structurally more resilient.”
Health insurance is a regulated financial product. Insurers operate under binding contracts, overseen by state insurance commissioners, that legally obligate them to pay claims meeting policy terms. Policyholders who believe a covered claim was wrongfully denied have legal recourse through state regulatory channels.
The New Zealand Merino Company, now rebranded as Zentera, has quietly removed the phrase “world’s leading ethical wool brand” from its website, a notable change that comes after a disturbing investigation by PETA Asia-Pacific into the company’s ZQ-certified wool supply chain, PETA reports to Green Prophet.
Somehow vegetables with short seasons excite the imagination and appetite more sharply than produce that’s available all year around. Good Middle Eastern cooks have many recipes for delicate fava beans, and this turmeric-fragrant soup is one.
“In the midst of uncertain time, renewable energy remains consistent and steadfast in its expansion,” said Francesco La Camera, IRENA’s Director-General. “A more decentralised energy system, with a growing share of renewables and more market players, is structurally more resilient.”
Health insurance is a regulated financial product. Insurers operate under binding contracts, overseen by state insurance commissioners, that legally obligate them to pay claims meeting policy terms. Policyholders who believe a covered claim was wrongfully denied have legal recourse through state regulatory channels.
The New Zealand Merino Company, now rebranded as Zentera, has quietly removed the phrase “world’s leading ethical wool brand” from its website, a notable change that comes after a disturbing investigation by PETA Asia-Pacific into the company’s ZQ-certified wool supply chain, PETA reports to Green Prophet.
Somehow vegetables with short seasons excite the imagination and appetite more sharply than produce that’s available all year around. Good Middle Eastern cooks have many recipes for delicate fava beans, and this turmeric-fragrant soup is one.
“In the midst of uncertain time, renewable energy remains consistent and steadfast in its expansion,” said Francesco La Camera, IRENA’s Director-General. “A more decentralised energy system, with a growing share of renewables and more market players, is structurally more resilient.”
Health insurance is a regulated financial product. Insurers operate under binding contracts, overseen by state insurance commissioners, that legally obligate them to pay claims meeting policy terms. Policyholders who believe a covered claim was wrongfully denied have legal recourse through state regulatory channels.
The New Zealand Merino Company, now rebranded as Zentera, has quietly removed the phrase “world’s leading ethical wool brand” from its website, a notable change that comes after a disturbing investigation by PETA Asia-Pacific into the company’s ZQ-certified wool supply chain, PETA reports to Green Prophet.
Somehow vegetables with short seasons excite the imagination and appetite more sharply than produce that’s available all year around. Good Middle Eastern cooks have many recipes for delicate fava beans, and this turmeric-fragrant soup is one.
“In the midst of uncertain time, renewable energy remains consistent and steadfast in its expansion,” said Francesco La Camera, IRENA’s Director-General. “A more decentralised energy system, with a growing share of renewables and more market players, is structurally more resilient.”
Health insurance is a regulated financial product. Insurers operate under binding contracts, overseen by state insurance commissioners, that legally obligate them to pay claims meeting policy terms. Policyholders who believe a covered claim was wrongfully denied have legal recourse through state regulatory channels.
The New Zealand Merino Company, now rebranded as Zentera, has quietly removed the phrase “world’s leading ethical wool brand” from its website, a notable change that comes after a disturbing investigation by PETA Asia-Pacific into the company’s ZQ-certified wool supply chain, PETA reports to Green Prophet.
Somehow vegetables with short seasons excite the imagination and appetite more sharply than produce that’s available all year around. Good Middle Eastern cooks have many recipes for delicate fava beans, and this turmeric-fragrant soup is one.
“In the midst of uncertain time, renewable energy remains consistent and steadfast in its expansion,” said Francesco La Camera, IRENA’s Director-General. “A more decentralised energy system, with a growing share of renewables and more market players, is structurally more resilient.”
Health insurance is a regulated financial product. Insurers operate under binding contracts, overseen by state insurance commissioners, that legally obligate them to pay claims meeting policy terms. Policyholders who believe a covered claim was wrongfully denied have legal recourse through state regulatory channels.
The New Zealand Merino Company, now rebranded as Zentera, has quietly removed the phrase “world’s leading ethical wool brand” from its website, a notable change that comes after a disturbing investigation by PETA Asia-Pacific into the company’s ZQ-certified wool supply chain, PETA reports to Green Prophet.
Somehow vegetables with short seasons excite the imagination and appetite more sharply than produce that’s available all year around. Good Middle Eastern cooks have many recipes for delicate fava beans, and this turmeric-fragrant soup is one.
“In the midst of uncertain time, renewable energy remains consistent and steadfast in its expansion,” said Francesco La Camera, IRENA’s Director-General. “A more decentralised energy system, with a growing share of renewables and more market players, is structurally more resilient.”
Health insurance is a regulated financial product. Insurers operate under binding contracts, overseen by state insurance commissioners, that legally obligate them to pay claims meeting policy terms. Policyholders who believe a covered claim was wrongfully denied have legal recourse through state regulatory channels.
The New Zealand Merino Company, now rebranded as Zentera, has quietly removed the phrase “world’s leading ethical wool brand” from its website, a notable change that comes after a disturbing investigation by PETA Asia-Pacific into the company’s ZQ-certified wool supply chain, PETA reports to Green Prophet.
Somehow vegetables with short seasons excite the imagination and appetite more sharply than produce that’s available all year around. Good Middle Eastern cooks have many recipes for delicate fava beans, and this turmeric-fragrant soup is one.
“In the midst of uncertain time, renewable energy remains consistent and steadfast in its expansion,” said Francesco La Camera, IRENA’s Director-General. “A more decentralised energy system, with a growing share of renewables and more market players, is structurally more resilient.”
Health insurance is a regulated financial product. Insurers operate under binding contracts, overseen by state insurance commissioners, that legally obligate them to pay claims meeting policy terms. Policyholders who believe a covered claim was wrongfully denied have legal recourse through state regulatory channels.
The New Zealand Merino Company, now rebranded as Zentera, has quietly removed the phrase “world’s leading ethical wool brand” from its website, a notable change that comes after a disturbing investigation by PETA Asia-Pacific into the company’s ZQ-certified wool supply chain, PETA reports to Green Prophet.
Somehow vegetables with short seasons excite the imagination and appetite more sharply than produce that’s available all year around. Good Middle Eastern cooks have many recipes for delicate fava beans, and this turmeric-fragrant soup is one.
“In the midst of uncertain time, renewable energy remains consistent and steadfast in its expansion,” said Francesco La Camera, IRENA’s Director-General. “A more decentralised energy system, with a growing share of renewables and more market players, is structurally more resilient.”
Health insurance is a regulated financial product. Insurers operate under binding contracts, overseen by state insurance commissioners, that legally obligate them to pay claims meeting policy terms. Policyholders who believe a covered claim was wrongfully denied have legal recourse through state regulatory channels.
The New Zealand Merino Company, now rebranded as Zentera, has quietly removed the phrase “world’s leading ethical wool brand” from its website, a notable change that comes after a disturbing investigation by PETA Asia-Pacific into the company’s ZQ-certified wool supply chain, PETA reports to Green Prophet.
Somehow vegetables with short seasons excite the imagination and appetite more sharply than produce that’s available all year around. Good Middle Eastern cooks have many recipes for delicate fava beans, and this turmeric-fragrant soup is one.
Green Prophet readers, as we know, are not only dreamers, they are doers. For all those that want to play your part, a job in clean technology might be up your alley. Today we interview Sam Newell from Renewable Energy Jobs, on trends and renewable energy jobs up for grabs in the Middle East.
Green Prophet: Tell us a little bit about your background and why you founded Renewable Energy Jobs
Sam Newell: I’m a career recruiter, and have been in recruitment for about 12 years. I ran technology recruitment businesses as well as focusing on financial services. I have also held roles such as Head of Recruitment & Resourcing for a global consulting business and Leadership Recruitment Manager for a FTSE listed financial services firm.
I started my own executive search firm in 2006 specialising in the early stage cleantech market and I noticed that there was very few quality advertising opportunities within the renewable energy recruitment sector.
In my opinion many of the existing sites where too broad in their scope for what I needed. There were quality ‘green’ or ‘environmental’ sites but little specifically for renewables.
Those that were renewables focused often appeared badly designed or were overpriced in my opinion. I was a technology recruiter during the internet boom of the 90’s, I also had a go at building my first online business at that point which wasn’t a huge success, it did teach me a few things though and so I have a few more tools to use when assessing websites than many recruiters I guess.
Charging hundreds of dollars or pounds to advertise on a site with little traffic is pointless.
Tonight begins Israel’s Independence Day, and a lot of recent articles on Green Prophet have been about the regional water crisis, and what must be done to alleviate it.
Both agronomists and hydrologists in our region have tried to find ways to deal with the increasing lack of water resources, including recycling of sewage and other wastewaters, building of reservoirs to collect winter rains and runoffs from winter snow falls in mountain areas, and most of all, desalination plants to change salty sea water into potable fresh water (after all, the earth’s surface is 70% water).
The recent water article by Professor Hillel Shuval, Director of Environmental Health Services at the Hadassah Academic College in Jerusalem probably summed it up by his opinions as what is the real cause of the current water problems in Israel.
The real cause, according to Prof. Shuval, has been government policies concerning water use and conservation for the past 20-25 years. There is a lot of truth in what he says, and it doesn’t take an expert in this area to conclude that he is right.
Green Prophet is honored to present this opinion piece written by one of Israel’s foremost experts in environmental science and policy. Professor Hillel Shuval was the director of the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at the Hadassah Academic College in Jerusalem. Prof. Shuval describes the harmful consequences that stem from agricultural overuse of Israel’s scarce water resources, and calls for a change in the water management policy to preserve natural areas and green spaces.
This country is facing one of its most severe water crises, triggered by the harsh droughts of 2006-2009.
However the crisis is no less the result of the long-term chronic problem of overutilization of its limited natural water resources. This resulted mainly from demands for more and more water from the agricultural sector, even after the country’s natural water resources were fully developed to their limit in the 1980s. To meet these growing demands, the agricultural and water authorities embarked on a conscious program of dangerous overpumping of ground and surface water resources, the precursor of the water crisis.
Why was this done? We must examine the question of the relationship between water management problems and the role of the country’s deep historic and cultural commitments to agriculture and a romantic vision of a pastoral Israel which still influences water policy.
“It is illogical and immoral to dry up the urban parks, gardens and green areas, while exporting flowers grown with subsidized drinking water to Europe.”
Since water resources are limited, we need to reevaluate the division of water allocations between the sectors resulting from rapidly growing domestic and urban demand associated with the growing population and the continued demands of agriculture for water.
Agriculture has, up to now, used some 50 percent of good quality drinking water, despite the fact that it represents only 2%-3% of the country’s GDP and 3%-4% of the population. To understand this deep commitment to agriculture, an overcommitment as far as allocation of water resources is concerned, it is necessary to understand the historic evolution of the role of agriculture in our society and culture.
The first period, which established the roots of Israel as an agricultural nation, goes back to biblical times when the Jewish people lived in its own land.
During the 2,000 or so years of the Diaspora, the image of Israel as an agricultural nation was continually reinforced in the collective memory by religious rituals and Jewish holidays mainly based on the agricultural seasons in Eretz Yisrael. However, we only began to reestablish our national roots in the land with the establishment of the first settlements in the First Aliya of 1880-1905.
This was followed by a more ideologically motivated period of settlement of the land of the Second Aliya led by such thinkers as A.D. Gordon, who in 1910-20 preached the religion of labor and the mystic need for the nation to reestablish its roots by working the soil in its native land. In the prestate period, the ideology, dream and vision of a pastoral agricultural nation was promoted in the popular culture – poems, press, books, youth movements, popular songs and children’s stories. Every child worked in agriculture in school.
The issue of the limitations of land and water became a serious existential political threat to the Yishuv when attempts by the British to cancel the Balfour Declaration where made by the Hope-Simpson White Paper in 1930 to end Jewish immigration to Palestine due to “lack of economic absorptive capacity… specifically lack of water and land.”
This led to a massive national drive to establish agricultural settlements – “dunam after dunam” – by the Jewish Agency. The national commitment to urgent agriculture development deepened.
Thus, with the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 the drive to establish hundreds of new settlements – moshavim and kibbutzim – became top priority, both to settle the land and assure the borders of the new state as well as to provide jobs for newly arrived immigrants and to provide food security.
Over the years some 700 new agricultural settlements were valiantly established. However, in the view of Meyer Ben-Meir, former water commissioner, we overdid it and could never have met their water needs.
Simultaneously, major efforts were made to develop the nation’s water resources, regardless of costs and economic implications, including the National Water Carrier and more than 1,000 new wells.
As a result of the very high cost of water produced by these heroic national projects, which was greater than most farmers could afford, the subsidy of water for agriculture became a basic part of national policy. While agriculture became highly efficient in water utilization, the heavy subsidy has resulted in farmers growing many crops that would otherwise not be economically feasible and using more water than economically justified.
When natural water resources development reached its limit in about 1980, the country faced a dilemma – not enough water to meet both the growing urban needs and maintain the same level of allocations for agriculture. The agriculture-dominated water establishment developed a new strategy of “temporary” overpumping and “one-time draw-down” of aquifers to justify maintaining the high levels water of allocations for agriculture.
The State Controller’s Report points out that “as a result of overpumping and overutilization, underground water levels were lowered to dangerous levels below the red line, water reserves held for emergency use in case of droughts have dwindled and seawater pollution has intruded to contaminate ground water.”
The water planners naively even promised that eventually these dangerous overdrafts would be repaid with cheap desalinated water, which never came. Thus, based on the deep overcommitment to agriculture, the seeds of the water crisis were planted, which has resulted in the near collapse of rational water management.
This short article cannot go into details, but some of the solutions to this crisis include a reevaluation of the role of agriculture, painful as that may be.
This country can survive only as a hi-tech society and will have to reallocate water from agriculture to the domestic/urban/industrial sectors. We must end wasteful water subsidies to agriculture. It is illogical and immoral to dry up the urban parks, gardens and green areas, while exporting flowers grown with subsidized drinking water to Europe. New ways must be found to maintain as many of the agricultural communities as much possible by subsidizing green areas as the Swiss do, but not by subsidizing water.
We must make major efforts to speed up the construction of seawater desalination plants and the building of treatment plants to increase wastewater recycling and reuse which can assure agriculture a growing source of water to replace fresh water. We will need to increase the allocations of fresh and recycled water to nature, gardens, parks and the environment to keep the country green so as to provide the green lungs required for the health and welfare of those who live in such a crowded urban society.
A solution to our water crisis is possible, but requires giving up many deeply imbedded dreams and visions of the past.
Professor Hillel Shuval has been active for over 50 years in protecting environment and health, founding the National Program for Environmental Protection, and led the development of reclaimed sewage water as a resource. As part of the 60 year Independence celebrations, he was presented last year with a lifetime achievement award. Prof. Shuval is a professor emeritus at Hebrew University’s Environmental Studies Program and is currently the director of the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at the Hadassah Academic College in Jerusalem (where our contributor Daniel Pedersen teaches).
What is the best way to visit Israel? By plane, by bus, or maybe by car? Derech Hateva believes the best way to see this small but fascinating country is by foot.
Registration is now open for Derech Hateva’s annual Israel Trail Teen Adventure (ITTA), a month-long outdoor program for Jewish teens from North America and Israel.
Covering parts of the Israel National Trail by foot (as well as mountain biking and rock climbing thrown in), combining environmental education, leadership and Torah-learning along the way.
“Derech Hateva teaches our kids how to be independent, strong mensches who are caring members of a community,” says Elena, an alumni parent.
This summer’s adventure dates are June 28th to July 27th for girls, and June 29th to July 27th for boys (ages 14 to 19).
There has been a lot of hype around Zenith Solar lately in Israel, where they’ve publicly launched their new solar power technology in Kibbutz Yavne, not far from Tel Aviv. Some residents of the kibbutz are against the industrialization in their kibbutz, others see it as an important environmental contribution. See the video above.
I am told that Zenith Solar might be the most efficient Israeli solar energy technology out there (developed by Ben Gurion University’s Prof. David Faiman), but there are infrastructure barriers this company will have to overcome in order to be relevant.
The Jerusalem Post website is reporting that six Israeli companies made it into the water consultancy firm, The Artemis Project’s first Top 50 Water Companies Competition last week.
The site, quoting promotional materials, states that the award, “distinguishes advanced water and water-related technology companies as leaders in their trade for helping to build water into one of the great high-growth industries of the 21st Century. The companies were selected by a panel of experts based on an integrated matrix of four criteria: technology, intellectual property and know-how, team and market potential.”
Two of the companies, Emefcy and AquaPure were listed in the top 10, at four and seven respectively.
(Melting like crazy: compare image of arctic ice cap from 1979 to that from 2003. Something seem off to you?)
Last year he was in Israel encouraging Israel cleantech companies that they could be part of the solution. But according to latest research and images of glaciers receding, Al Gore’s call to arms in the war against global warming might not come fast enough.
Former U.S. Vice President and Nobel Prize winner Al Gore was again in the environmental limelight when he warned the U.S. Congress concerning the urgency of addressing the issues of climate change recently.
Speaking during a hearing over a new bill that would require a substantial reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from both industry and private sources by the middle of the 21st century, Gore called the new bill one of the most important pieces of legislation ever introduced before Congress.
“We, along with the rest of humanity, are facing a most dire threat in relation to climate change,” he said.
Following the latest incident in which a Tel Aviv University student, Idan Shadmi, was seriously when falling into a Dead Sea sinkhole, a Tel Aviv University physics professor, claims to have created a seismic warning system that will be able to give an indication when one of these holes, mostly located on the western shore, is about to open up.
Idan was hiking in the area with his girlfriend when the ground suddenly opened up below them. Shadami was able to help push his friend out the opening gap but not before he was swallowed up – resulting in him receiving serious injuries.
The continuing receding of the water in the Dead Sea has resulted in instability of the ground on the seashore, when brine deposits are dissolved by fresh surface water, resulting in a cavity or sink hole forming.
In recent years, literally thousands of sink holds have formed, most of them on Israel’s western side. They can be very dangerous, and threaten roads, hotels and peoples’ lives.
EcoVentures is a company – an emissions reduction specialist – which help companies in the Middle East take control of their carbon footprints.
According to a Gulf News story, the UAE companies aim to reduce their carbon footprint in their manufacturing operation and induce their employees to become more aware of the environment in which they live.
Eighty-two companies in the UAE were sent a 22 question survey dealing with what they can do to help reduce emissions caused by them.
Some companies preferred to remain anonymous, out of a fear of losing business from non-complying firms; and are instructing their employees to take measures such as conservation of the natural resources they are using to not only conserve them but protect the environment as well.
We couldn’t miss this one for the world: last night about 20 professional cyclists put the pedal to the metal and powered the Balkan Beat Box free concert at Rabin Square. Thousands of people (and dogs) of all ages took part in seeing the show.
The show to celebrate Earth Day couldn’t run on people power alone, so to keep the wattage flowing, the concert producers tapped into biodiesel made from used falafel oil.
Green Prophet and our entourage danced our way through the crowd, rushing to the center stage of the power production. The cyclists themselves.
See this amateur video of how pedal power of the Earth Day concert in Israel looks.
Israel celebrated the annual event a day after most others in the world, out of respect for Holocaust survivors who are memorialized the day before Earth Day. (It’s not considered respectful to party and celebrated as we mourn).
As we covered earlier in It’s The Water That Binds Us, in this video Alexandra Cousteau continues her mission Expedition: Blue Planet and interviews a local man from Jordan, Othman Mizra, whose father built a livelihood around a water oasis – Azraq – in Jordan. Now the water from the oasis is pumped to Amman instead and the Azraq oasis has run dry.
See the story of the tragedy in the above video.
According to Wikipedia, Azraq (Arabic: الأزرق) is a small town with a population of approximately 5,000 people (1990) in central-eastern Jordan, 100km east of Amman.
Azraq has long been an important settlement in a remote and now-arid desert area of Jordan. The strategic value of the town and its castle (Qasr Azraq where Lawrence of Arabia once stayed) is that it lies in the middle of the Azraq oasis, the only permanent source of fresh water in approximately 12,000 square kilometres of desert.
Alexandra Cousteau (who I spoke to while on her Expedition: Blue Planet in Israel) interviews an Arava Institute alum from the Palestinian Authority to get her take on how the security barrier affects water allocation in the West Bank. Cousteau manages to get a moderate and fair point of view from Muna Dujani, the young alum interviewed in Ramallah.
To read more about Cousteau’s amazing water education mission to Israel and the region, read It’s The Water That Binds Us.
To learn more about water allocations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, read Green Prophet’s take on the latest World Bank report here.
Now she’s giving back. Alexandra Cousteau was recently in Israel where she was interviewing and filming for Expedition: Blue Planet. She’s working to raise awareness about protecting one of the the world’s most valuable resources, by talking with people, every day people, who are living with and seeing the changes in the allocation and quality of water around the world.
I spoke with Cousteau when she was in Israel, and here’s her story:
From the Ganges River, the spiritual heart of India, to the Mississippi River in America, legendary marine scientist and explorer Jacques Cousteau’s granddaughter is collecting stories about water. She’s not reporting on new technologies that promise to save the world, or on politics, or the regular environmental doom and gloom.
Thirty-two-year old Alexandra Cousteau, whose grandfather taught her to scuba dive at age seven — connecting her to water forever — seeks to re-connect all people throughout the world to water, our life support system.
At the end of last month, as part of her 100-day, five-continent journey ‘Expedition: Blue Planet’, she landed in Israel. “We started in India looking at water, faith and spirituality,” she says. In Israel, she and her crew are investigating how water scarcity “can lead to diplomacy and not necessarily conflict.”
Alexandra Cousteau at the Dead Sea in Israel
In Israel, she collected stories from housewives and farmers to spread to the global community through her blog and video news feeds. As part of her trip, she also met with Jordanians and Palestinians from the West Bank.
In total she interviewed about 10 different people from the region, “collecting archetypal stories that represent water stories facing the global community,” Cousteau, a dedicated environmentalist told Green Prophet. The stories and videos are now posted on her website.
Time to put water under the bridge
Water is the one thing that connects every individual on this planet of seven billion people, explains Cousteau, since the impacts of climate change will be felt most seriously on this essential natural resource. “Everyone will need to be involved in implementing solutions,” she says.
Filming on the road, and uploading videos and news feeds to her site, Cousteau expects the material will be visited by a wide audience, including journalists and young change makers.
Among the collection, are the stories of people — normal, every day people — that she met in Israel. As part of her trip, she visited and surveyed the Dead Sea, the Sea of Galilee, the Hula valley wetlands, and the Jordan River; in Jerusalem she met Israeli water officials and toured the Old City. Not far away in the Palestinian Authority’s West Bank, Cousteau met with officials there to discuss water allocations under the Oslo Accords.
Her visit in Israel and the region, adds to the hopeful things she’s seen in other parts of the planet, says Cousteau by telephone. “It’s been hopeful to talk with people from around the world about water issues. Water is life, and wherever I go, all of the people all say the same three words.
“Water is life,” she repeats. Whether it’s spiritual leader in Africa, housewives and farmers in Israel, Jordan and the Palestine Authority, Saudis, or activists in Turkey. All people say the same thing, “And that’s been amazing,” she says.
For Israel specifically, “water is a means for peace,” she says.
Israel, or other Middle Eastern countries, needn’t politicise the water issue, she believes. Water is a basic human right that everybody needs to survive: “We are not here to talk politics with people,” she explains.
Hosted by a green Israeli peace-making school
When asked about specific regional environmental concerns, Cousteau didn’t delve into specifics. These are issues that people know about anyway, like the problems with the shrinking Dead Sea, she says. Her mission rather, was as a story collector, to speak with average people in Israel about what water means to their lives. “We didn’t get too deep,” Cousteau says humbly.
In Israel, the Arava Institute, an environmental education group, helped Cousteau and her crew identify which people to interview. Finding the organization through a journalist friend of hers, the Arava Institute kept the team focused, she says.
After arriving from South Africa, she enters a fresh entry in her blog: “The reason we’re at Kibbutz Ketura is to visit the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, a remarkable non-profit organization who makes its home here,” she writes.
Palestinians, Jordanians and Israelis Learn Together
“Arava brings Israelis, Palestinians, and Jordanians together with students from around the world to study environmental issues. However, their not-so-subtle agenda is not just a sustainable future for natural resources, but also cooperation between the peoples of this conflict-ridden region.
“As such, they compliment rigorous academic coursework with a special one-year mandatory class on peace and leadership skills, in which they confront issues such as religion, stereotypes, and the historical narratives of each group head-on. Their motto is: “Nature knows no borders.” We are curious to explore their model for how water scarcity can serve not as a necessary cause of conflict, but rather as a vehicle for peace,” she writes.
In awe over the dropping water levels in the Dead Sea, and the small size of the Sea of Galilee, Cousteau was impressed that neighbouring Jordan has a national water day. “All these things are contributing to creating wonderful stories,” she says. “There are lessons here that people should know about.”
The stories collected will be useful for “young people who want to work across political and cultural divides. It’s powerful stuff,” she adds.
While her legendary marine explorer grandfather started his career at the Red Sea, which is bordered by Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern and African countries, she has no specific recollection of him traveling to or having ties with Israel. “He was working in a different time,” it was about “exploration and discovery” and later in the end, she says, he started to get into marine conservation.
“This generation that I am part of has to move past awareness, and has to be proactive and be part of the solution,” urges Cousteau. “Now that we know [water’s] there, we have to protect it and prevent it from disappearing.”
Happy Earth Day! (Though technically yesterday, most of Israel is celebrating today.) Celebrations require desserts, we’re quite convinced, and since the citrus season is winding down we thought we’d talk about our absolute favourite thing to do with a lemon. Not lemonade (though we’re fans of that too) but lemon curd: smooth, custardy, tangy, riding that fine, perfect line between sweet and tart.
Lemon curd can get spread over scones, smoothed over a cookie crust for lemon bars, dolloped on pancakes, or licked straight off a spoon when you’re feeling especially indulgent. It tastes, quite simply, like concentrated sunshine.
