“Nature is a language – can’t you read? Nature is a language – can’t anybody read?”

We here at Green Prophet don’t often blow our own green shofar, but it’s always good to get praise from others, particularly when it’s in the national media. We were delighted last week to be described in a Ha’aretz books supplement book review as: “the useful (and, yes, hip) Israeli environmental blog in English.”

Thanks to the writer Daniel Orenstein, a postdoctoral fellow at the Technion and a faculty member of the Arava Institute, for that. Orenstein’s kind words came in the middle of a powerful review that blossomed into an overview of the burgeoning green revolution here in Israel: what the situation is, and what we as Individuals can do, as well as the politicians (see MK Dr. Dov Khenin’s plans for greening Tel Aviv sustainably here).

He ends his review, titled ‘What do we do now?’ with a punchy call for action from all of us, and emphasises the need for us to apply pressure to those with political clout:

“Greening should be a project we can all engage in. For this to be the case, we need legislation that will place the proper incentives on environmentally sound decisions, help people pay for the high up-front costs of energy efficiency, and make polluters pay for environmentally damaging activities. And for that, we need an abundance of genuine environmental advocates sitting in [the] Knesset whose concerns are for the long-term well-being of the land and people of Israel.”

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