A few weeks ago I posted that Israel’s water crisis is so bad that water might be rationed soon. I also mentioned that part of the problem Israel has had with addressing its growing water needs has been due to the insufficient handling of the Israel’s water plan by the government. Since my post, both stories have developed further.
Hurricanes are Earth’s most deadly storms, causing tremendous devastation and loss of life around the globe every year. There is some evidence that the number and intensity of hurricanes may also be changing as a result of global warming.
Until now hurricanes had been somewhat a mystery, due to them spending most of their lifetimes over the tropical oceans, where few people live, and few measurements are available to study these monstrous storms.
However, recent advances in global lightning detection systems have allowed scientists to remotely measure the electrical “pulse” of hurricanes from thousands of kilometers away.
In a paper to appear on 6 April in Nature Geoscience, Prof. Colin Price or Tel Aviv University, together with Prof. Yoav Yair and Dr. Mustafa Asfur of The Open University of Israel, have discovered a surprising connection between lightning activity and hurricane intensity. They’ve also, as we’ve reported earlier, been able to use the “flash” to predict the flood.
With the holiday season around, kids underfoot, family everywhere, now is actually the perfect time to do some greening. Collect the kids and do some projects to recycle throwaways. Also, with everyone around it’s a good time to discuss how to make your lifestyle more efficient and green.
‘The Age of Stupid’ is an ambitious new Independent British green documentary.
As a fellow filmmaker and activist, I salute director Franny Armstrong and her dynamic team for the passion and vision shown in creating this film, pulling together funding from diverse and various sources, creating the ‘Not Stupid’ brand and the big campaign that is promoting the film.
I’ve been following the film’s progress over the last few months as the team prepared for its launch (which was held in a portable solar cinema in London recently), got politicians and ‘green’ celebrities on board, launched YouTube teasers, a ‘Not Stupid’ campaign to advance the issues raised by the film, and enticed supporters with Franny’s frantic and funny emails from her film-related travels and hectic life. Finally I got to see it this week in Cambridge, UK, and a Q&A with campaign co-ordinator, Daniel Vockins, followed the screening.
The plot, or small plot around which the core of the film hangs, centres on the archivist (played by actor Pete Postlethwaite), who in the year 2055 has created a archive of humanity in a tower in the sea
Just a few hours after Jews of all stripes gathered at the Western Wall in Jerusalem to celebrate “Birkat haChama” – the blessing of the sun – Aria Penkava slid a tray of kosher-for-Passover cookies into a solar oven to slow-cook using focused heat energy from the sun.
“The sunrise was glorious this morning,” said Penkava, “but we wanted to not only bless the sun but actually use its energy to do something constructive and creative.”
Penkava, 20, is a recent graduate of Kibbutz Lotan’s 6-week “Green Apprenticeship” program, which combines coursework in permaculture design, organic farming and ecovillage design. To her, the timing of Birkat haChama coincided perfectly with the seder for the first night of Passover.
Along with several other Green Apprentices who are
As we’ve mentioned often here at Green Prophet, nature knows no boundaries. The environment, therefore, can provide a powerful incentive for collaboration amidst conflict.
Last week, in yet another example of cross-border environmental cooperation, the Council for a Beautiful Israel brought 25 Palestinian teachers and educators to their educational center in Tel Aviv for special training in environmental education.
The training was modeled after previous cooperation between the Council for a Beautiful Israel and the Towns Association for Environmental Quality, Agan Beit Natufa, a leading environmental organization among Israel’s minority Palestinian (Arab-Israeli) sector.
For those of us who live in the Middle East, those hot dry heat waves known as khamsini (in Arabic) or sharav (the Hebrew term) appear to be becoming more frequent, as well as more intense.
They also seem to be occurring during times of the year when they ordinarily are not supposed to – such as in what should be the winter rainy season.
A khamsini heat wave or dust storm as often occurs along with the heat wave, is usually characterized by intense dry heat, often accompanied by high winds. Temperatures can rise into the 40 degree celsius range and can be so intense that it can be actually dangerous to venture out of doors due to the intense heat and large amounts of dust the often come along with it.
A recent article in the Jordan Times mentioned that dust and sand storms caused by khamsini conditions were so bad that a number of roads were considered to be dangerous
With the regional water crisis weighing so heavily on everyone’s minds, it’s no wonder that the Palestine Academy for Science and Technology and the Palestinian Water Authoirty have teamed up to host the 2nd International Conference on Water: Values and Rights.
The conference, to be held in Ramallah from April 13-15, will bring together academics, scientists, decision-makers, and more from a variety of sectors, and will feature prominent speakers from the Palestinian Territories, the United States, and the United Kingdom.
The conference will also address a variety of themes related to water management, water rights, and other aspects of water politics, as well as special themes including:
For more information, visit the conference website: http://www.waterrightsconference.org.
More water and the Palestinian Authority:
Water Relationship Possibilities Between Israel and Gazans In Better Days
FoEME to Hold Conference on Shared Mountain Aquifer
A Green Prophet Finds West Bank In Water Crisis Too!
Israel has a new government, and this also means a new environment minister. The new one, Gilad Erdan actually sounds like he’s learned something about the environment before taking on the post. The hot news is that he has applied to Israel’s Acting Government Secretary to convene an emergency government session to discuss his demand for freezing plans for a coal fired power plant in Ashkelon, reports the Ministry.
In parallel, he’s called on the Minister of National Infrastructure to submit an updated plan for electricity production based on recent changes in the economy and on similar plans worldwide.
In his request, Minister Erdan notes that the plan for a coal-fired power station in Ashkelon calls for two new coal fired units,
On a sunny Saturday afternoon in mid-February, a small group of New Yorkers—beekeepers, environmentalists, and a handful of honey aficionados—huddled together in an empty SoHo office building for a local honey-tasting session.
If this had been Portland or San Francisco, it wouldn’t have been a notable event—just a harmless gathering of honey connoisseurs. But in New York, where they may be hydroponics, bees are classified under section 161.01 of the health code as “wild animals,” and are just as illegal to own in the city as lions, cougars, alligators, or polar bears. So a local honey-tasting event is, in many ways, an act of political defiance.
True, there aren’t squad cars going around inspecting buildings for beehives on any given day, but the law can be invoked by a frightened neighbor who calls “311” to report a neighbor keeping buzzing colonies on the roof.
Even so, the threat of a $2,000 fine certainly hasn’t deterred New York’s underground enclave of beekeepers.
At the SOHO tasting, some 30 people were huddled around a large table, holding tongue depressors to dip into an assortment of honey containers. While some of the honey had come from Europe and New Zealand, the true stars of the tasting were local keepers from the West Village, the Bronx, and Brooklyn.
Some of the big, established local beekeepers were at the center of the room, sharing years of wisdom—how to get hold of a swarm of one’s own, how to keep bees on rooftops—and relishing their minor celebrity. Local beekeeping, after all, has become a bold new frontier in the overlapping worlds of environmentalism and food activism.
In the United States, nearly one-third of the country’s crops depend on bees for pollination, yet nearly one-quarter of the country’s honeybees have vanished in recent years, due to Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) and other factors that are still unclear. The dearth of bees has quickly become alarming—according to a recent piece in the magazine Edible Manhattan, one urban farmer recently had to hand-pollinate his crops due to a lack of bees.
Saskia Cornes, an author who has written about New York City’s beekeepers, tells me that beekeeping has gained traction in recent years because of “a nice confluence of sorts between Colony Collapse Disorder and a renaissance of local foods.”
For one, New York City’s bees are mostly free of disease, which makes them invaluable in countering the outbreak of CCD. What’s more, beekeeping has become a popular way for New Yorkers to support local agriculture even if they don’t have much green space for a garden.
“Beekeeping suits New York because we don’t have yards,” Cornes explains. Recently, a variety of urban-beekeeping courses have sprouted up, like those offered by the The New York City Beekeepers Association. A beekeeping “meetup” group was launched in 2006 and according to the Gotham City Honey Coop, has been growing rapidly since.
The honey itself, meanwhile, is becoming wildly popular. Many beekeepers, honey advocates, and holistic healers believe eating local honey is the best remedy for allergies, since it provides a low-level (and delicious) exposure to local pollens. And there’s the fun of identifying local flavors: Honeybees usually travel two or three miles each day pollinating rooftop gardens and plants before returning home to make honey with the flavors of the flora they’ve visisted. A few honey tasters at the SoHo tasting swore they could detect the Bronx in the South Bronx honey, and one claimed to have tasted a hint of Tenth Street in a Manhattan variety.
All of this enthusiasm has spurred organizations such as Just Food, as well as other bee activists from various organizations, to work with city council member David Yassky to introduce legislation that would license residents as beekeepers, so that they could nurture and grow the local bee population, as well as assist nearby farms in dire need of pollinators. Back at the SoHo honey tasting, anticipation hung in the air as attendees discussed the future legalization of beekeeping.
Esther M., one of the SoHo honey-tasters, said the whole thing was like being “part of a secret society.” She insisted that she felt a strong connection to bees, and saw their vitality and health as the future to a healthy New York.
On the other hand, she added, she couldn’t help but think that the South Bronx variety “tasted like pollution—like buildings, concrete and dirt.” She preferred the honey from Fort Greene.
Countries in the Middle East should take notice that the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan is making great efforts to improve Jordan’s environment as well as that in the region.
One of the foremost environmental societies in the Kingdom is the Jordan Environmental Society, which was established in 1988, during the reign of King Ab dullah’s father, King Hussein.
Like the SPNI in neighboring Israel, the Society is a non-governmental and non-profit organization whose propose is to improve the environment and improve its basic elements.
These elements not only include ones like air, water, soil and animal life, but human beings too.
If those of us living in Israel think we have a problem with pollution and beach closures in the Mediterranean Sea, we should take a look on what’s happening north in Lebanon.
A recent article in Beirut’s English language newspaper, the Lebanese Star, noted that pollution caused by both the public and private sectors is reaching dire proportions.
According to the article, the problem seems largely ignored by much of the Lebanese public, and at least 200,000 cubic meters of untreated sewage water pours into the sea daily.
The situation is so bad, that Mr. Ali Darwhish Secretary of the Lebanese environmental organization, Greenline, said that “Lebanon is one of a few countries where nearly all sewage goes into the sea.”
Eco-Jews are busy now celebrating Passover, while Christians in the Holy Land and the world over ready themselves for Easter. Iranians, we learn had their own celebrations this time of the year, coinciding with the vernal equinox on March 21.
Iran’s political makeup and leadership may not be making many friends these days, but one of Iran’s annual festivals, one called Nowruz or Persian New Year festival is being celebrated in a number of countries, and by several different religions as well.
Nowruz or Nowrouz, which means “New Day” in Persian, officially marks the first day of Spring in the Persian calendar and corresponds to the Spring Equinox which is marked on Western calendars as March 21.
The holiday is not only celebrated by the Iranians, but also by countries in Central Asia, South Asia, Western China, The Crimea, and by a number of ethnic groups in Balkan countries such as Albania, Kosovo, and Macedonia. The holiday marks the period when the sun crosses the celestial equator and creates equal day and night.
The sun and fire are important elements in the ancient Persian religion of Zoroaster and the festival is observed by this ancient monotheistic faith.
“We call it pollution, they call it gourmet food,” so says algae-for-fuel missionary Isaac Berzin, who sent Green Prophet a new video, an advertisement touting the benefits of this alternative energy source for our planet.
Berzin, a Ben-Gurion University and MIT-trained chemical engineer, and Boston-based Greenfuel Technologies have developed a revolutionary technology to produce biofuels from algae that are bred on gases emitted by power plants.
Time Magazine included Berzin in its list of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2008, and Fortune Magazine also published a flattering article about the company, which has raised tens of millions of dollars in venture capital.
I am really not the right person to be reviewing “Nature’s Due” by Professor Brian Goodwin from Shumacher College in the UK. It is based on some quite complicated biology, a subject that I haven’t studied formally since I was 14. James sent me the book in September, and I’ve only just finished it now, after several tactful reminders from James. As you can infer from that, it’s been a bit of a struggle.
However, I’m really glad that James stayed on my case about this, because “Nature’s Due” is a fascinating and important book. It’s one of those books that can furnish you with a couple of serviceable building blocks for a worldview.
Goodwin’s guiding question is: what would it take for our culture to interact with the world in a mode of engaged, evolutionary participation rather than in a mode of dominance and control?
He lists the familiar litany of environmental failures engendered by the dominance and control model (GM crops, degraded food supply, ugly, dysfunctional cites etc.) and asserts that the root cause of this cultural attitude is dualism: our predilection for seeing nature as inert stuff to be acted on and transformed for our benefit through the agency of human will and subjectivity.
Sometime shortly after the Renaissance, claims Goodwin, we disenchanted the world. Consciousness, intelligence and freedom were arrogated to the human realm, while the physical world was conceived as a mere machine.
Have news to share? Renewable energy news, architectural, artificial intelligence, biotech, sustainable design ideas, eco-architecture, green travel?
Email us: [email protected]
Get important news delivered directly to your inbox and stay connected!
© 2007 to 2026 Green Prophet, All Rights Reserved