While the Impossible Burger is taking on the world of beef Whoppers by storm and sorts of vegetable or insect-derived solutions are cropping up to give vegans and our future selves an alternative to meat, an Israeli company has just secured $12 million to grow real beef in the lab. Like Evogene which is growing tiny plants to hybridize them faster, Aleph is still only growing steaks big enough for Lilliputians but with the right R&D the company hopes to scale.

It’s been about five years since we heard about the first lab-grown hamburger. Since researchers have been able to dramatically improve upon the process of growing meat. What they haven’t been able to do well is to copy the texture and structure of the specific cuts you’d find at a butcher, like a steak.

This is what Aleph claims to have done. The company managed this using a bio-engineering platform from theTechnion – Israel Institute of Technology. The steak in the video below took a few weeks to grow and it cost about $50.

Aleph Farms is co-founded by The Kitchen Hub. Among the investors in a new $12 million round is VisVires New Protein (VVNP), Singapore; with Cargill, USA; and M-Industry – the industrial group of Migros, Switzerland, as new investors. Existing investors also joining this round include Strauss Group, Israel; Peregrine Ventures, Israel; CPT Capital, UK; Jesselson investments, Israel; New Crop Capital, USA and Technion Investment Opportunity Fund, Israel.

Aleph Farms’ unique non-GMO technology, co-developed with Professor Shulamit Levenberg of the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, relies on a natural process occurring in cows to regenerate and build muscle tissues.

The company discovered a way to isolate the cells responsible for that process and grow them outside of the animal to form the same muscle tissue typical to steaks. Consumers are not willing to compromise on taste, which is the driving force behind this startup’s goal to create, juicy, delicious steaks without harm to animals or the environment.

The injection of capital will allow Aleph Farms to accelerate product development of its slaughter-free meat and to transform Aleph’s prototype (released last December) into a commercial product. Its cultured meat will grow in large, clean bio-farm facilities similar to a dairy facility.

“This round has been highly successful and includes diverse food companies and VCs from multiple regions around the world,” says Matthieu Vermersch, Founder and Managing Partner of VisVires New Protein. “This is a vote of confidence in Aleph Farms’ leading 3D technology and its capabilities for growing real beef steaks. Strategic partners from the food industry are important because we need to build a sustainable ecosystem for cultured meat.”

Key concerns of the meat industry and regulators include sustainability of meat production, antibiotics resistance, and food-borne illnesses. Aleph Farms and other cell-based meat startups are providing new tools to address those challenges and to feed the growing world population without harming any animals.

Read more here about meat without murder. 

“We will be part of the long-term solution,” declares Didier Toubia, Co-Founder and CEO of Aleph Farms. “We intend to lead an open dialog with farmers and food and feed producers. In addition, we continue to work closely with the regulators to ensure our products will be completely safe, healthy and properly labelled. We welcome the collaboration with the USDA and FDA as an opportunity to promote transparency and build trust with all stakeholders.”

Die-hard environmentalists may not be for this solution and will suggest we just cut back on our appetite for meat. That if we want to eat healthfully and heartily (and biodynamically!) we should raise our own meat from farm to table, eat all parts, or be brave like my girlfriends Kari and Raven; and friends Randy and Dave in Northern, Ontario and just hunt for our own food. Simply to stay away from anything engineered in any way, including complicated vegan cheeses and what have you.

According to Jewish Law hunting is not permitted so kosher meat, might need to evolve into the lab. Who knows.

I feel growing meat in a lab is much like growing food using hydroponics. It’s a good solution for the interim (as we flail and people starve in some parts of the world) but where we are going is to regenerative, biodynamic agriculture where are parts feed into the whole.

The post Aleph Farms engineers lab-grown steaks from cattle cells, secures $12 million appeared first on Green Prophet.

‘Everything in moderation’ is good advice, especially when it comes to sunshine. Humans know this, especially in the Middle East, mastering all means of shading devices, and protective clothing. But what if you are an organism without access to sunscreen? Two scientists at Israel’s oldest university have discovered how bacteria protect themselves from overexposure.

Professor Noam Adir of the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology recently published a study that describes how bacteria protect their photosynthetic system from too much sunlight.

Photosynthesisis is a natural process of converting light energy into chemical energy that can later be released to fuel an organisms’ activities. It is essential to the animal kingdom but not only for organisms that perform photosynthesis themselves; even animals that don’t perform photosynthesis consume the its primary product, which is glucose.

Think back before digital cameras, remember those sensitive rolls of Kodachrome? Just as film could be overexposed, natural photosynthetic systems are also liable to be damaged by too much light, leading to organism death. Scientists have generally accepted that some organisms developed mechanisms to protect from sunlight overexposure. Adir’s study now reveals the specific strategy used by cyanobacteria (commonly known as “blue green algae”). He calls it cyanobacteria’s “automatic sunshade”.

The main player in this process is the protein OCP which modifies its structure and color in response to intense light, blocking the flow of energy that reaches the center of the photosynthetic reaction. This is traced to a reaction between the active species of OCP and phycobilisome (PBS), the protein complex that functions as a light harvesting antenna in the cyanobacteria.

“In this study we discovered how the OCP blocks the energy,” explained Adir, “In effect, the protein acts as a biological switch. In response to strong light, part of the protein penetrates the PBS, and changes the PBS structure, thereby diverting the flow of energy to the reaction centers. According to experiments done by the Kirilovsky lab, this defense mechanism blocks more than 90% of the sun’s radiation. As soon as the radiation diminishes, the protein returns to its normal state and the flow of energy resumes.”

You can read the full findings, (link to the article here).  Research was conducted by Professor Noam Adir and doctoral student Dvir Harris , in collaboration with Dr. Diana Kirilovsky and her laboratory at I2BC-CEA, in France. The article was published in the scientific journal PNAS.

Technion is a public research university in Haifa, Israel, established in 1912. 

The post Scientists discover bacteria’s natural sunscreen appeared first on Green Prophet.

Israel is a world leader in wastewater reuse for agriculture, and in developing water- and energy-saving technologies locally and abroad. But Israel has new challenges to confront: a growing build-up of pharmaceuticals in its waterways, plus poorly processed wastewater from the Palestinian Authority-administered territories mixed into its water table.

These issues are being addressed in a new cooperative project between Israeli and Palestinian researchers. The French drug company Sanofi is sponsoring the research and will supply the source material, while the Peres Center for Peace will manage the logistics.

Scientists and graduate students from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology are being matched with Arab peers at Al Quds University in East Jerusalem to study the effect of pharmaceutical residues in water and how compounds from Sanofi might help. Their insights could be applied to local and global water problems.

The heart of the problem is that all the drugs we take end up down the toilet some way or another. And residues from birth control pills, estrogen and water pills, anti-depression medications, even ibuprofen, can remain after the water is treated. When all that water goes back to the farmland to grow tomatoes, or seeps into the water table, it can compound and concentrate — causing considerable biological damage to humans and ecosystems.

Beyond the meat they eat

Hormone-treated beef is recognized as a source of certain health problems in the United States. But though Israelis are not large consumers of red meat, health authorities are seeing a surprising increase in testicular cancer among Israeli men and a decreased age of first menstruation in girls.

Could the problem be in the water?

Researchers worldwide agree that pharmaceutical residues in the water can have striking effects on fish, causing some species to change their gender. Their effects on humans are not as well known.

The new Israel-Palestinian project aims to study samples of local water and find the best ways to filter out or deactivate classes of drugs like these so they do not go back to nature, or us. Some of the pharmaceuticals under study are diazepam, aldactone (a diuretic), ibuprofen, ketoprofen and iopromide.

Israelis do have a leg up on potential new technologies for treating drugs in water, such as advanced filtration membranes. In their approach, Al Quds University scientists are going to apply activated carbon, or a novel clay-based micelle technology, to see how effective these can be in removing pre-defined chemical compounds from water. The project is to begin this summer.

If the researchers are successful, Sanofi may develop the technologies into a commercial project, says Hannah Bardin, a soil and water expert working for the Peres Center for Peace. She is managing this two-year project from the Jaffa-based center named after Israel’s President Shimon Peres, an avid environmentalist.

The center has experience and an interest in development type projects and how engineering can be used to address social change and underprivileged communities,” she tells ISRAEL21c.

In a past joint research project between the two communities, senior scientists looked at salinity in water, while this one will feature the younger generation of master’s level students, Bardin says, likening the study to a peace project.

“We are trying to create a community of water researchers working together and visiting each other’s facilities. In this framework, we will have on-campus visits and annual meetings where they will present results,” Bardin says.

She anticipates that the labs at the Technion and Al Quds will use different techniques. “The idea is that there is very little monitoring. We want to find out how to treat and remove all these materials that end up in the drinking water.”

Meanwhile, in an unrelated project, Ben-Gurion University’s Prof. Alon Tal will be working with Israelis and Palestinians to determine what kind of compounds are found in the region’s water and waterways from a bottom-up approach, funded with a half a million dollars from USAID’s Middle East Regional Cooperation (MERC) Program.

This report is republished from ISRAEL21c – www.israel21c.org

The post Arabs and Jews Cooperate in Israel to Get Drugs Out of the Water appeared first on Green Prophet.

 The ten acre campus has been designed to maximize the benefits of solar energy and will include 500,000 square feet of green space that will be open to the public.

The first building, which the team hopes will achieve LEED Platinum status, will comprise Cornell and Technion’s core learning space. And it’s going to be the greenest building the east coast has seen since the first wave of pilgrims arrived on the Mayflower in 1620!

Not only will it be built using recycled materials, but the solar-powered facility will maximize daylight through passive design and benefit from a digitally-operable ventilation system.

All other buildings, including housing for staff and students, a public atria and corporate space, will strive for a minimum of LEED Silver.

The four acre geothermal field will have 400 wells that will harvest the earth’s internal thermal power to heat and cool buildings and the solar array will generate a whopping 1.8 MW per day at peek!

An electrical power fuel cell will also contribute to the project’s grid independence.

In addition to plans to treat and recycle storm water, a bevy of green walls, green roofs, rain gardens and even an urban forest are in the pipeline.

Basically, Cornell and Technion are aiming for nothing short of the most amazing net-zero energy facility in all of America, and the biggest public green space in New York City.

Now… how about we bring more of this great green action to the Middle East?

All images copyright Cornell University

:: Arch Daily

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Whereas Colombian planner Oscar Diaz (who we interviewed here) was practical and sited specific planning examples at the anniversary conference at the Technion-Israel’s Institute of Technology,  England’s planner Mr. Robert Upton’s speech was more philosophical.  This seasoned response from the fourth Royal Town Planning Institute Secretary-General (and the only one to make it out alive, Upton jokes), asked of Israel’s planning audience to think reflectively about the challenges of their profession.

He began by recalling the history of England’s Royal Town Planning Institute,  a relatively brief history that began in 1914.  But he said that early on the profession became “cluttered” with “no shortage of bodies who claim to be specialists.”  And the public was skeptical.

In a personal interview with Green Prophet he was careful to clarify that in the context of WWII, there was a tremendous need for England to rebuild itself and planners such as Thomas Sharp took on the challenge.  Sharp later became “disillusioned” according to Upton, as the public became increasingly dissatisfied.

The profession also suffers from a sort of existential dilemma.  It is never clear whether planners are designers or technical, whether the field falls under the parlay of social science, or if it is a hybrid.

Israelis such as architect Amos Brandeis and government planner Shamay Asif, who provided commentary after Upton’s presentation, also identified with this dilemma.

Another shared conflict in England and Israel is that between architects and planners.  What role should design play in the planning process?

Architects believe that they should play an important role in the planning process, but planners think they are redundant. Upton says that it is important that planners “dont’ take the design out of the plan – design creates understanding.”

However, he also quoted English author Samuel Johnson, who said approximately that it isn’t necessary to know how to make a good chair in order to be able to recognize one.  The fire rages on.

Upton summarized his discussion with the question “how do we want to live?”  This is the question that all planning institutes should answer, for which Upton agreed with me that there is no blanket answer.  The answer depends on the following variables: “what are our options? Our values?  What are the facts?  What are the rules? The power of relations?  Who benefits, and who is not represented?”  The answers will be different in every community.

Alexandra Frackelton from The Arava Institute raised the question of public participation.  It was agreed that public participation in Israel is neglected, and that the process of encouraging it needs to be streamlined.

As a legal problem, it is currently being addressed.  Meanwhile, going forward, Upton believes it is important to find a “shared ethic.”

While Mr. Upton’s presentation raised more questions than provided answers, John Simone believed that framing the right questions is the key to wisdom.  Israeli planners are faced with a rapidly growing population, diminishing natural resources, and imminent climate change:  their greatest challenge will be to find questions that will produce the best solutions for the greatest number of people.

More on Planning from The Middle East:

Jordanian Sustainable Building Conference
Ecoweek
Rawabi, the First Planned Palestinian City

The post Robert Upton’s Philosophy of Planning and the Middle East appeared first on Green Prophet.

Mr. Oscar Diaz Inspires Israeli Planners to Build For People, Not Cars.

We promised to bring more news from the Technion-Israel’s Institute of Technology, where the Center for Urban and Regional Studies’ 40th anniversary conference was held yesterday, 3rd June 2010.  After brief greetings from representatives of The Center for Urban & Regional Studies, the Urban and Regional Planning Program, and the Municipality of Haifa.  And after the Technion’s President and the Dean of the Faculty of Architecture also gave brief introductions, the keynote lecturer Professor Dani Shefer introduced Oscar Edmundo Diaz.

Partner of the consulting firm GSD+ and formerly Senior Program Director at the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy and Senior Advisor to the City Mayor of Bogota, Diaz addressed the Israeli Planning audience about successful methods for planning a sustainable city.

Children Come First in Sustainable Cities

Though as a shout out to the concentration of Israel’s urban planning experts he acknowledges his background is in Finance and International Affairs this does not diminish his experience.  Mr. Diaz helped Bogota’s mayor transform the city from a crime ridden city full of illegal slums, to a city with less crime, less congestion and pollution, and more public spaces.  He tells us how.

Diaz showed pictures of some of Bogota’s filthy, hilly slums with raw sewage running through the streets.  Among other things, these images depict that even the most destitute neighborhoods reserve space for children to play.  This is important, according to Diaz, because children are important.  In fact, he would argue that children are the most important members of any society.  As a result, the government of Bogota built 51 new schools in and around the poorest neighborhoods.  They built swimming pools and community centers, as well as libraries, all to emphasize that learning, rather than shopping, should receive preferential treatment.

Cars come last in sustainable cities

Another key to urban planning, he says, is to prioritize people, rather than cars.  Most cities are built for cars: cars parked on sidewalks that often lead to nowhere and putting pedestrians at risk, and parking lots usurping what should be vibrant public space.  And it doesn’t help to keep building roads, he says, since a surplus of roads will encourage more cars. 

To illustrate his point, he showed images of construction projects in Tel Aviv that cause traffic bottlenecks.  “Traffic actually helps us,” says Diaz  to a crowd of chuckling motorists, because when getting to work by car is slow and tedious, then commuters will be encouraged to park their cars and use public transport instead.

City planners make the change

In a personal interview, we discussed the necessity of shifting public perception away from cars and towards public transportation and bicycles. Diaz suggested that the impetus lies with planners to create that shift.   He also explained that if a city treats its citizens roughly, then they will act in kind.  Everybody knows that Israeli bus drivers can be unfriendly and rough.  If they’re rough, because their schedules are tight and their conditions are unpleasant, then that attitude will ripple among the people.

On the other hand, if the people are treated respectfully, and the system is bike and bus friendly, then the people will gladly keep pace.  I asked him if it would be impossible to shift the Israeli mentality.  Diaz replied that “everybody says that,” but it’s not true: given the right infrastructure, any city can embrace a better quality of life with less cars.

Biking Is Best for Sustainable Cities

Diaz spoke at great length about making cities more bicycle friendly.  He noted that 33% of Copenhagen’s population commutes by bicycle, though officials aim for 50%, and it doesn’t matter what the weather is like.  Diaz showed images of committed cyclists riding to work in the snow.

Although only 5% of Bogota’s residents commute by bike, that amounts to 350,000 citizens who forsake their cars to enjoy 350km of bicycle path.  And yes, Mr. Diaz rides to work every day.

After his lively presentation, which drew plenty of applause, Diaz was given a professional tour of the Technion’s visitor center, and met with Ricardo, Karen, and Michael, all students from Colombia.  They shared their personal histories and academic ambitions with Mr. Diaz, whose commitment to a quality and sustainable life for everybody makes him a role model for all students.

More on Sustainable Urban Planning:

Jordanian Sustainable Building Conference Encourages Everyone to Think Green
Calling all Young Architects and Grad Students to Join ECOWEEK 2010
Construction Underway on Rawabi, First Planned Palestinian City

The post Oscar Diaz and Colombia’s sustainable cities appeared first on Green Prophet.

Oscar Edmundo Diaz and Robert Upton Are Expected to Share Urban Planning Pearls With Israel [image via Technion-Israel Institute of Technology]

Before globalization,  ideas and technology ambled across the oceans and progress piddled along.  Now cooperation happens in seconds.  Microseconds even.  And though not all ideas are equally useful,  there’s no question that when great minds meet there ensues the following net result: opportunity.  Whether sharing technology with other nations or floating to draw awareness to environmental issues, sharing ideas allows us to circumvent mistakes made before us.  Tomorrow, when Oscar Edmundo Diaz and Robert Upton join some of Israel’s best Urban Planners at the Center for Urban and Regional Studies’ 40th anniversary conference, Israel will have the opportunity to incorporate lessons learned in Colombia and the United Kingdom.

The conference at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa begins at 9.30am and finishes after the evening’s last cocktail.  Oscar Diaz, the Senior Advisor to former City Mayor of Bogota and Senior Program Director at the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, will give his keynote presentation in the morning.

Titled “Planning the Sustainable City – lessons from Bogota,” Diaz’s  presentation will give locals insight into the process behind that city’s effort to become sustainable.  After a tour of the Technion’s renowned visitor center and a kosher Druze lunch, Mr. Diaz and I will meet to discuss which of those lessons are especially pertinent to Israel.

In the afternoon, after several, parallel presentations from our own intelligentsia, Mr. Robert Upton will take the stage.  The former Secretary General of the Royal Town Planning Institute and current Deputy Chair and Commissioner of the UK Infrastructure Planning Commission, his presentation will address challenges that are specific to the planning profession.  We too will meet.

If the combined heat from so much brain power doesn’t cause an explosion, we will bring you more detailed news from some of the most effective urban planners in the world.   Stay tuned.

More Urban News:

Jordanian Sustainable Building Conference Encourages Everyone to Think Green

Calling all Young Architects and Grad Students to Join ECOWEEK 2010

Construction Underway on Rawabi, First Planned Palestinian City

The post The Center For Urban & Regional Studies 40th Anniversary Conference appeared first on Green Prophet.

 No stone is left unturned in our desperate search for energy sources to wean us from our dependence on fossil fuels.  Sources of primary renewable energy, like solar, wind, and geothermal are the primary focus, but some overlooked sources are also getting attention, because every little bit counts.

We’ve seen reports on generating electricity from stationary workout bikes, dance club floors and Japanese subway stations.  Now we cover the Israeli company of Innowattech, which developed a technology to harvest mechanical energy from roadways, railroads and runways and convert it into electricity.

The vibrations caused by the vehicles are transformed into an electric current by piezoelectric generators (IPEG), solid state crystals that convert mechanical stress into current or voltage.  The IPEG are connected to electrical storage or and electric grid and can be used for lighting, or eventually for charging electric vehicles.

An additional benefit is to use the piezoelectric network to record the weight, frequency and speed of the vehicles, providing information for “smart roads” that can be optimized for traffic flow, to reduce congestion and reduce pollution further.

While this clever solution does not create its own energy, it can still provide commercial amounts, an estimated 500 kW per kilometer for busy highways.  The company presents a cost table comparing various power technologies, although the numbers they present are different from the ones I’m familiar with (for example, as far as I know, solar power is on the order of 30 cents per kWh, and the payback times mentioned for the subsidized photovoltaic systems in Israel is about 10 years). 

Assuming, however, that the benefits are greater than the costs, this development could be a welcome addition to the sustainable energy arsenal.

Come see it in action and judge for yourself:  the public is invited to attend a demonstration of the technology on December 30, 2008 at the Technion in Haifa.  Details on the company website.

Links:
Photo: Flickr.com, Atwater Village Newbie
Innowattech’s website explains the technology
Inhabitat reports on the roads
Technology Comparison on Innowattech site

Graphics credit: Innowattech

The post Israel's Innowattech Harvests Wasted Energy from Trains, Planes and Automobiles appeared first on Green Prophet.

Her interest in the environment was placed on the back burner two years ago, in light of what happened to her husband Ehud, of course.  But in dealing with the tragedy of Ehud’s abduction and publicly lobbying for his release, something happened.  Karnit became a well known figure who had earned the respect and admiration of the Israeli public.

Now, after Ehud’s body was returned to Israel on July 16th, Karnit has decided to return to her environmental interests and use her celebrity status for the greater good.  She will be hosting a television segment about environmental issues on an educational program.

Starting this November, she will be hosting an environmental segment on the show “Osim Seder”, which airs at 17:30 from Sunday through Wednesday on Channel 2.  Her segment will appear on Sundays.  Then in the beginning of 2009 Karnit will start hosting her own television program which will be entirely devoted to environmental issues.

Karnit considers this work to be part of how she thanks the Israeli public for their ongoing support over the past two years.  Karnit said that “I consider this issue to be a type of mission, or activism, for the general public.  And now, after the Israeli public supported us and moved us so much with their response – I will be happy to try to do my part in this important field.”

Here at Green Prophet we applaud her for bravely turning her celebrity status, which was associated with a tragedy so personally and nationally painful, into beautiful activism concerned with the greater good.

The post Karnit Goldwasser Turns her Celebrity Status into Something Positive (and Green) appeared first on Green Prophet.

“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.”

Orenstein reviewed 3 so-called ‘self-help greening books’: ‘Wake up and smell the planet’ from Grist.com: ‘Ready, Set, Green’ by Treehugger.org founder Graham Hill and contributing writer Meghan O’Neill; and ‘Living Like Ed’, by Ed Begley. The three books give eco-tips and advice, backed up by the respective author’s experience.

“The Grist and Treehugger books reflect the ethos of an environmental movement that has undergone profound changes since its inception in the 1970s. Their authors take the cause seriously – as if the future of our lives on the planet depended on them – but they’ve swapped self-righteousness for self-mockery, and radicalism for professionalism. “Let’s face it,” as one author puts it, “tree-spiking and roadblocks are so 1987.”

Grist’s “Wake Up and Smell the Planet” is so thick with jokes, pop-references, sarcasm and puns, that it’s difficult to dig out the advice. Whereas the parent Web site is full of in-depth analysis of environmental dilemmas, the book generally lacks explanation for why we should follow its advice. But it is very, very funny and – somewhere between the puns – it does contain a lot of advice.

“So, this book is best read by the already environmentally converted who want to cut straight to what they should be doing. It features a consumption centerfold, advice on what to do with animal poop (Israelis should first remove it from the sidewalk, and then consider the other options), and an answer to whether a slice of lime in your beer bottle threatens its recyclability (it doesn’t). Overall, Grist’s focus gives the impression that, to paraphrase the Grateful Dead, we may be going to hell in a bucket, but at least we can enjoy the ride.”

He is charmed by Ed Begley’s book, describing him as:

“a man who walks the walk. Or if he doesn’t walk, he rides a bike.”

It is Begley’s book that shows the reviewer that in living green, we must live by example, and examine every aspect of our lifestyle. Orenstein uses his analysis of ‘Living like Ed’ to jump into an exploration of the Israeli psyche, and to highlight areas in which we could improve both the urban environment, as well as that of the whole. Composting, of which we at Green Prophet are also big advocates of, is one of his key suggestions for reducing our “garbage glut” and improving the land itself. Using the information, knowledge, experience and humour gleaned from these books, whether aimed at a Israeli market or not, can inspire us to make some great green changes in our lives, and in our communities. May the inspiration to act continue.

Read the Ha’aretz article here. Our thanks to Daniel Orenstein & book supplement editor David B. Green.

More in our Green Prophet ‘summer eco-reads festival’ coming soon. If you want more recommendations of green books to inspire and stimulate action, read these reviews:

‘Food Not Lawns’ by H.C Flores

‘Earth Shattering’ Eco-poems

‘Animate Earth’ by Stephan Harding

‘Field Notes from a Catastrophe’ by Elizabeth kolbert

The post Green Books Roundup Review on Grist, TreeHugger, Ed Begley's New Reads appeared first on Green Prophet.