Green Prophet would love to invite the Splash icon to Israel and other Middle Eastern countries. See the video below where Daryl Hannah, the foxy American actress-turned environmentalist, explores eco-tourism in Egypt.
Some tips to be learned from the vid. For more eco-tourism stops in Sinai-Egypt see our post on Eco-Tourism in Egypt.
This isn’t the forum for politics, but unfortunately so much of what decisions are made in the Middle East (ie funds allocated, prayers made) are determined by the conflict. Above, see a video of the consequences of the Israel-Lebanon war 2.5 years ago.
As an Israeli, I know that untold environmental damage happened south of Lebanon in Israel; thousands of trees burned, landscape devastated. But we know all too well, environmental issues are not confined by borders, and affect all of us on this planet.
Instead of choosing sides, would it be naive to ask people — especially those with limited understanding of what’s happening in the Middle East –– to fight for the environment instead?
(A map of Jordan and the surrounding region highlighting the Disi Aquifer and the proposed Red-Dead project.)
With worrying frost alerts in Jordan getting farmers anxious, Jordanians are also seeing a rainless season this year, increasing their fears that crops will collapse. Last week, officials had been calling on its citizens to pray for rain, a common practice done in Israel among religious Jews as part of their daily prayer ritual.
Since the report of a persistent drought, by the IRIN news, rain has come to the region. So we hope the farmers prayers, at least for this week, have been answered. But, we learn, the rainwater insufficiently filled up Jordan’s storage facilities.Â
By the end of December, almost no rain had fallen on Jordan, says IRIN, threatening crops of vegetables, wheat and barley. Farmers from Deir Ala, in the northern Jordan Valley, said that their government had stopped pumping water to their farms for irrigation in order to keep drinking water reserves stocked.
(Rapidly depleting water resources has forced residents of Sana’a to buy water from private sources. Water levels are dropping by 6 metres a year in the Yemeni capital. © David Swanson/IRIN)
If you think things seem pretty dicey in the Middle East right now with Israel and Hamas fighting, according to IRIN, expect tensions to become a whole lot worse, once global warming comes into play. Rising sea levels, they say, will have severe environmental, economic and political implications for the already water-stressed Middle East.
The report they site is called “Climate Change: A New Threat to Middle East Security,” written by Friends of the Earth Middle East (FOEME), who we’ve blogged about extensively.
(Does this guy look worried about the frost? A smokin’ vegetable vendor in a Petach Tikva market, Israel. Credit anyalogic)
While North Americans in the higher latitudes are sipping hot cocoa, and have Jack Frost nipping at their noses, farmers in the Middle East pray that the frost won’t come. Last year, sub-zero temperatures wiped out millions of dollars worth of crops in the region, causing basics like lemons to cost a fortune in the supermarket.
Farmers so far, reports The Jordan Times, are in the clear from frost. Although temperatures dipped to sub-zero this week night as a cold and dry air mass overwhelmed the region, Jordan’s Agriculture Ministry officials said no reports on crop damage were received.
The officials, however, renewed a call on farmers to take precautionary measures against frost formation to avoid vast crop damages similar to what happened early last year when over 15,000 dunums of vegetables were damaged in Jordan alone.
In this week’s segment from the Torah, Parshat Vayigash, Jacob and his family go down to Egypt to Joseph, who is now second, only to Pharaoh, in Egypt. On his way down the Bible explains that Jacob went via Beersheba.
The Midrash Bereshit Rabbah, a sixth century commentary on the bible, notices extra language used to describe that journey and explains further. It explains that Jacob, on the way down to Egypt, stopped and cut down the cedar-trees that his grandfather, Abraham, planted.
The Midrash continues that Jacob foresaw that his great-great grandchildren would need that wood, in the desert, to build the Tabernacle on their way back to Israel. This was built from the cedars of Lebanon.
The people of Israel, while in Egypt, kept the wood intact. They did not use it for anything else; their purpose was passed down from one generation to the next. If they had been used for idolatry, while in Egypt, they would not have been suitable to be used in building the Tabernacle. But the message was passed on, along with the wood, from one generation to the next. This message was one of hope that the wood would be needed, on their way out of slavery, back to the Promise Land.
This Midrash has a message of its own, a message of hope as well. Deuteronomy (20:19) likens man to a tree. In Judaism, this parallel is significant. The Midrash is telling us that Jacob passed the message that while in Egypt the Israelites need to remain a holy people; trees fit to worship God in the building of the Tabernacle.
while in the worst conditions, slaves in a society that stood for everything that they did not believe in, they remained a holy people, and the wood was usable in the building of the Tabernacle.
Today we are at a crossroad, similar to the one that Jacob was at. We are living during difficult times, and there may be more difficult times ahead. It is important now, more than ever, to pass the message of the tree onto our children, both actually, and metaphorically. We need to replenish our forests, and all that that signifies: a symbiotic relationship with our planet and a sense of responsibility and caring for the future.
We also need to replenish the forests in our souls: the message that no matter what the situation – markets crashing, war, poverty, global warming or terrorism – it does not justify actions that are in any way less than human. This is the message of Jacob and this is the message that we need to pass on to our children if we want our world to heal on a global level.
(Plastic bags on the trees in Vietnam)
With the bombing and chaos in Israel and Gaza right now, it’s a little hard to focus on positive green news from the Middle East. My passion for it, is a little clouded by all the politics and news of violence. See my latest post on TreeHugger “When the Green Side of Israel Gets Tainted Black.”
So instead of looking for green news from the Middle East region, where many people from both sides of the Green Line are looking to survive, we take you from our regularly scheduled programming, and re-visit Tania Guenter, a friend I met in Tel Aviv from New Zealand, as she eco-tours it around Vietnam. You can read her previous post on Where Things Come From in Vietnam.
Now, what’s new with Tania:
With so much negativity in the southern part of the country and the Negev right now, it is refreshing to learn about positive things going on in the region, such as the blossoming eco-village Kramim.
Founded recently by a group of visionary young Israelis and immigrant families, Kramim hopes to serve as a multicultural model of environmental sustainability in Israel. As the writers of the Eco-Village Kramim website describe themselves:
“Using sustainable design and ‘green’ architecture, combined with environmental technologies and services, Ecovillage Kramim is set to become a thriving hub of social and business entrepreneurship, multicultural partnerships, fair-trade, environmental initiatives, and a source for the protection of the environment and wildlife in the Negev.”
Two of the most basic terms in the ecological and sustainable design and architecture fields are Cradle to Grave and Cradle to Cradle. They relate to the product life cycle from the raw materials (Cradle) to disposal (Grave). If you are in design school or architecture college or are thinking about an MBA in a sustainable field, you should know the book Cradle to Cradle. It’s a primer for sustainabilists. Well, for anyone in the design or product business.
Cradle to Grave is a term used in life-cycle analysis to describe the entire life of a material or product up to the point of disposal. In other words, cradle-to-grave is a take, make, waste system. Making a plastic bottle by Coca Cola that has no intention of being recycled or which physically cannot be recycled or used is a product that goes from the cradle to the grave. Flip-flips that wash up onshore. Cradle to the grave. It gets more complex when we talk about cars, electronics, and large building projects. But architects today, especially in forward-thinking sustainable cities like Rotterdam are thinking about building materials that can see a new life after the current structure is demolished.
Cradle-to-cradle is the creation and qualification of a circular economy. It’s a way of designing and producing that honors all future generations by designing and manufacturing for next use, instead of end of life.
A model of industrial systems in which material flows cyclically in appropriate, continuous biological or technical nutrient cycles. All waste materials are productively re-incorporated into new production and use phases, such as “waste equals food,” according to William McDonough, the architect who conceived the concept.
The famous three Rs—reduce, reuse, recycle—are steadily gaining popularity in the home as well as the workplace. Reduction, reuse, and recycling slow down the rates of contamination and depletion but do not stop these processes.
Recycling is more expensive than it needs to be, partly because traditional recycling tries to force materials into more lifetimes than they were designed for. Very few objects were designed with recycling in mind. If the process is truly to save money and materials, products must be designed from the very beginning to be recycled or even “upcycled”—a term we use to describe the return to industrial systems of materials with improved, rather than degraded, quality.
The notion of Cradle to Cradle conveys a message of “Do good” instead of “Do less bad.”
Here’s an experiment. Choose any of your favorite blogs/websites and skim their latest articles. How many of them are all about how to do less so it will have less of an effect on the environment?
The environmental message that consumers take from all of this can be strident and depressing: stop being so bad, so materialistic, so greedy. Do whatever you can, no matter how inconvenient, to limit your consumption. Buy less, spend less, drive less, have fewer children — or none.
Aren’t the major environmental problems today — global warming, deforestation, pollution, waste — products of our decadent Western way of life? If you are going to help save the planet, you will have to make some sacrifices, share some resources, perhaps you can go without.
With a Cradle to Cradle mindset you don’t try to design a bottle from less plastic but rather design a bottle from materials that can fully enter a new life cycle either back to nature or back into the design process as a new product.
Biological nutrients will be designed to return to the organic cycle—to be literally consumed by microorganisms and other creatures in the soil. Products composed of materials that do not biodegrade should be designed as technical nutrients that continually circulate within closed-loop industrial cycles—the technical metabolism.
These yellow metal recycling cages can be seen along major arteries like Ben Yehuda and Dizengoff streets here in Tel Aviv. Some are strategically placed in front of supermarkets which make them user friendly and in turn gives more of an incentive to recycle.
When I first saw these cages the logistics of putting the bottles in was easier to grasp then getting the bottles out. My question was answered one day when I spotted a “super truck” operated by the L.D.S. Recycling Industries taking care of business. This truck is in fact a vacuum cleaner that is designed especially for the function of bottle removal.
The Christmas season in Europe is often silly season for the world’s media outlets, when they outdo each other to find the strangest, weirdest and oddball news story to give people an extra sparkle to their celebrations.
Strange shaped vegetables, or bagels that bleed are the sort of stories that crop up. Despite the crisis in the South of Israel, the BBC managed to find its own silly and strange story in the Holy Land, close to the Galil. Dung, from horses, donkeys and cattle, has for many centuries and across many countries and cultures, been used both as a fuel for heat and as a fertiliser for agriculture.
This is one of the most basic, and successful, forms of recycling that there is. Reusing animal waste, which is generally made up of green plant matter, is extremely green. So green that many herders collect it as an essential item, and might look at you strangely if you commented on it!
Menachem Goldberg, who runs a visitors centre at Kedem, has come up with the extra-ordinary idea of preserving pieces of donkey dung within a plastic cube, that is inscribed with holy writings from the Talmud. Mr Goldberg says that the idea came to him from the Talmudic phrase: (and I quote) “Let the Messiah come…may I be worthy to sit in the shadow of his donkey’s dung”. Make of this what you will!
Comments welcome, and any visitors to Kedem, please confirm this craziness for us.
Inspired by the Green Kindergarten initiative made by the Israeli government, I dug up this story I’d written earlier in the year on a unique environmental education center called The Greenhouse:
Magical kingdoms and secret gardens don’t necessarily have to stay in the realm of fairy tales any more, proves an Israeli initiative – The Greenhouse – which for over 30 years has been conducting a unique socio-environmental project.
Started by a disenfranchised artist, Avital Geva, in the late ’70s, Geva decided to try and solve society’s problems a different way, through a living greenhouse. Today hundreds of school-age children participate in one of any number of projects.
A special angle to the Greenhouse, or “Hamama” as it is known in Hebrew, is that it naturally involves kids from the Wadi Ara region – both Jewish and Arabs – in building coexistence projects, without them having to realize it.
Says Geva’s son Noam, a guide at the Greenhouse: “In The Greenhouse, we don’t speak about coexistence, but we are doing it. Arab and Jewish kids work together and through their mutual projects, they create something good.
“The children, who are young, don’t know about the conflict and they don’t care about it really,” he adds.
Noam Geva and the other four guides at The Greenhouse intuitively work with the kids, and also autistic youth, on helping them find “their inner greenhouse” muse.
A child could tell Noam Geva that she is interested in cameras. Geva said in this case, he might propose that she build an underwater movie project for filming the fish; the child would need to learn all aspects of realizing the project from developing blueprints to learning the technical aspects of underwater photography.
The guides also work with autistic youth in their early 20s, to give them basic gardening and life skills. They learn how to grow spices and paint flowerpots, and help sell some of their wares through Ein Shemer Kibbutz near Hadera, where The Greenhouse is located.
While the broad-brush lessons taught to the kids are never explicit, says Geva, the kids learn along the way, as a matter of course, about the environment, new technologies and co-existence.
“Everyone,” says Geva, “can find his level of research, thinking and doing. But doing is always the key.”
Today, the Greenhouse is a non-profit organization that runs on donations as well as a small amount of money from Israel’s Ministry of Education. So appealing was the concept that leaders from a school in San Diego have come to study the Greenhouse concept in order to implement some of its ideals in the alternative Californian education system, High Tech High.
“Their dream is to build a place like The Greenhouse,” says Geva modestly.
The Greenhouse attracts the brightest youngsters from the region. They come from about 13 different schools, and in some cases cooperate with scientists from agricultural and industrial research institutions in Israel.
Among the environmental practices learned, the students study sophisticated methods of recycling water and finding alternative substrates for soil. Projects that span various disciplines including agriculture, biotech and art, are encouraged.
Like a real-world Secret Garden, Geva admits that the Greenhouse is a magical place. The proof is in the results: amid fish ponds and lily pads, plant nurseries and scientific equipment – and art installations – young Israelis from all walks of like are feeding their souls and minds.
Through learning how to balance water, fauna and flora, relations between human beings can be better balanced, says The Greenhouse website. “Nothing similar can be found in Israel, or the world,” it adds.
In a special ceremony, held in Bar-Ilan University earlier this month, some 48 green kindergartens located in the Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, central and southern districts of Israel were certified “green.”
An additional 34 kindergartens were certified earlier in the month, on December 3 in Haifa, 8 of which came from the Arab sector, reports the Ministry of Environmental Protection website. This is good news to our ears.Â
In all, 82 Israeli green kindergartens were certified in 2008, compared to 32 in 2007. But what does it take to make Israeli tots green? Do the ganenets feed them organic food? Do they learn about recycling? Maybe they plant trees?Â
Collecting everything but the kitchen sink, and well, maybe even that, Israel gets its first municipal center for “recycling and rational resource use,” announces the Ministry of Environmental Protection last week on Christmas Day. (Do they mean “national” or “rational?” We’re a little confused. Maybe lost in translation?)
Moving on –– Located in Haifa, the center spans 1,000 square meters, and is intended to collect a wide range of waste and household products for reuse and recycling. Such products include: furniture, electrical appliances, food, toys, books, house and kitchen wares, carpets, lamps and mattresses.
Sounds a lot like the Salvation Army, Goodwill, or a gemach if you ask me.
Several Middle Eastern countries are competing to have their natural treasures listed on the new “Seven Wonders of the World” online competition. Some friendly competition for a change?
The Lebanese are lobbying that their majestic cave complex will make the list. The Jeita Grotto (pictured above), sits in a river valley near Beirut, and is currently ranked 24th out of 77 on the list of “New 7 Wonders of Nature”.
“The Jeita cave is considered one of the largest and most beautiful caves in the world, with an impressive diversity of rock shapes and colours,” said Nabil Haddad, the cave’s general manager in Newsx.com.
Other sites in the Middle East include Wadi Rum in Jordan, Israel’s Ein Gedi oasis, the Red Sea corals shared by Jordan, Israel and Egypt, the Dead Sea, and the vanishing Mesopotamian Marshes in Iraq.
According to Newsx, activists and visitors alike are eagerly waiting the results, which will be announced on New Year’s Day, according to the website. Twenty-one finalists will be announced next July 21.
“Voting will continue throughout 2010 and into 2011. During this time, the New7Wonders World Tour will visit each of the Finalists to allow them to present themselves to the voters across the globe,” the competition’s website says.
Your country doesn’t have to make the list to be considered a “Wonder,” but we like the initiative because it draws attention to sites worth saving.
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