Last year fellow Green Prophet James gave us a recap of the annual Eco Cinema festival in Jerusalem, and sure enough the organizers of the festival are at it again this year for the sixth year in a row. Beginning this Tuesday the 19th until Saturday the 23rd, the Jerusalem Cinematheque and other cinematheques around […]
Writing the Green Prophet story on ecomigration got me thinking about a cheesy made for TV movie The Fire Next Time made 15 years ago. (Plus Earth Day is coming up next week, giving us extra reasons to think about our blue planet.) The movie gives a chilling preview of what the world might be […]
How do changemakers form bold ideas, and turn them into a massive project like a major documentary film? Today we talk with Courtney Nichols, producer of the new film Blood For Water, on how she came from the world of business to take on the global problem of water politics head on. She’s planning on turning […]
If being more environmentally friendly is one of your New Year’s resolutions, you might consider going to one of the great “green” events hosted by the Porter School of Environmental Studies at Tel Aviv University this week. First up is a screening of Urban Legend – an environmental documentary by Nitzan Horovitz that was presented […]
The battle for the Jerusalem Municipality may be over (secular candidate Nir Barkat victorious over haredi rival Meir Porush or, in my view at least, a choice between dumb and dumber), but the struggle for the city’s environment is just beginning. Last week Green Prophet told you that Naomi Tsur, former head of Society of […]
You probably wouldn’t have oil-rich emirate, Abu Dhabi, pegged for environmental awareness. The United Arab Emirates are notorious for their abundance of fossil fuels and thus, sadly, do their fair share to contribute to carbon dioxide emissions. This week, though, the state-owned Abu Dhabi Media Company announced that it would collaborate with National Geographic on […]
Sometimes it is necessary to confront our decision-makers with what has been called “the threat of a good example” – to bring them face to face with evidence that, despite their insistence to the contrary, it is possible to do things differently. That, in a nutshell, was the idea behind an event held last week […]
It’s not every day that you can party with a group of farmers in the middle of a city. Even rarer, it’s not every day that you can party with urban Israeli farmers on the rooftop of a historic building in the center of Tel Aviv and learn about some green goodness to boot. Which […]
My partner and I watched this movie with increasing incredulity and frustration. She is a former science journalist, and she won’t mind me telling you, gave up on ‘Sizzle’ after 15 minutes. I sat through it all, and felt deflated after 85 minutes of this eco-baloney – filmmaker Randy Olson sets out to pick up […]
Last month, hundreds of Tel Aviv residents spent their Friday afternoon marching up Rothschild Boulevard in support of the Clean Air Act, stuck in the Knesset for the past three years. Knesset lawmakers must have been paying attention – last week the act passed its first reading. Video by Daniel Cherrin and Jesse Fox.
If you love the moving image as much as us here at Green Prophet, and believe in its power as an agent of change as well as information and entertainment, here’s advance notice of the 5th ‘Eco-Cinema Festival’, which opens tomorrow night at Jerusalem’s Cinemateque on Hebron Road. Opening with Israeli director Uri Rosenwaks new […]
This is some advance publicity for a film I haven’t yet seen, but it comes from a highly talented Israeli director Uri Rosenwaks, who made ‘The Film Class’ (2006) about the black Bedouin tribes of Rahat two years ago, which I highly reccommend as an illuminating portrait of a fascinating and little-known part of society, […]
Mongolia, nestled between twin superpowers China and Russia, is home to the world’s last truly nomadic population of herders, living seasonally across the vast Gobi Desert. I’m a passionate scholar of all things Mongolian, having lived there for nearly a year some years back, and this gave birth to my fascination with Indigenous peoples and […]
Next time you find yourself wandering through the Wilderness of Zin, Trekking in Timna or lost in Lahav Forest, spare a thought for young Christopher Johnson McCandless, whose dreams of tramping to Alaska foundered in 2003 when he died trapped in an abandoned bus on his way there. He was trapped in the sense that […]
It wasn’t that long ago when wild beasts roamed the earth. Lions, tigers, woolly haired mammoths and even elephants traipsed over the changing ecology of the Middle East up to the start of the early 15th century. Lions remain as the roaring yet watchful emblem of Jerusalem. Now humans are the wild beasts that dominate, […]