Middle East - Anthony Ham [214]
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ENVIRONMENT
With an area of nearly 28,000 sq km, Israel and the Palestinian Territories are geographically dominated by the Great Rift Valley (also known as the Syrian–African Rift), which stretches from Southern Turkey to Lake Kariba on the Zambia–Zimbabwe border.
Between the mountain-fringed rift and the Mediterranean Sea stretches the fertile, but sandy, coastal plain where the bulk of the population and agriculture is concentrated. The lightly populated Negev, the country’s southern wedge, is characterised by mountains, plains and wadis, and punctuated by military bases and irrigation schemes to transform the desert.
Due to its position at the junction of these three natural zones, Israel and the Palestinian Territories support an incredibly diverse wealth of plant and animal life. In the wet, mountainous Upper Galilee, otters dive in highland streams and golden eagles circle dense laurel forests; in the southern desert, ibex water at date palm–shaded wadis. Birdlife, too, is rich, since Israel is on countless species’ migratory paths: go to birds.org.il, www.birds-eilat.com or www.birdingisrael.com to find out more.
National parks throughout the country, comprising around 25% of Israel’s total area, have created sanctuaries safe from the unrelenting building work that has attacked so much of the region, and Israel is increasingly looking to ‘green’ concerns. Although the Palestinian Territories doesn’t benefit from the same parks system or ecologically-minded organisations, the West Bank is sparsely populated outside major cities. Many communities here still rely on goat-herding or agriculture for their livelihood, meaning that the area’s great open spaces, for now at least, remain so.
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ALL THINGS ECO
To get yourself acquainted with the Israeli (and Palestinian) eco-scene, dip into some of the following internet resources.
Arava Institute for Environmental Studies (arava.org) A research and teaching centre uniting Israelis, Palestinians and Jordanians.
Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research (http://bidr.bgu.ac.il/bidr/) Your first stop for information on desertification and sustainable desert living.
Eco-Tourism Israel (ecotourism-israel.com) A good guide to Israel’s ecotourism options.
Friends of the Earth Middle East (foeme.org) A regional branch of the global group with triparate Israeli/Jordanian/Palestinian partnership.
Galilee Society (gal-soc.org) Israel’s leading Arab-Israeli environmental activism group.
Israel Nature & National Parks Protection Authority (parks.org.il) The central authority managing Israel’s scores of national parks and archaeological sites.
Ministry of Environment (sviva.gov.il) Offers good, basic English-language information on the state of the region’s environment.
Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI; teva.org.il) An excellent source of information, the society also runs trips, treks and field schools countrywide.
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Environmental Issues
When Theodore Herzl suggested planting 10 million trees in Palestine, his colleagues thought he was crazy. But 100 years later the people of Israel proved that they could indeed ‘make the desert bloom’. Unfortunately, the Zionists’ zeal to populate the land has had a much greater environmental impact than the afforestation project. Demands on the land from increased urbanisation have resulted in the same problems found in many parts of the world – air and water pollution, overuse of natural resources and poor waste management. Recycling is in its infancy, gas-guzzling Hummers are de rigeur, and you only need to drive along Israel’s 197km of coastline to see the sorry effects of building right up to the shoreline. Things are even worse on the coast of Gaza, where the problem of pollution is overshadowed by civil strife.
Israel and the West Bank’s most publicised environmental threat, though, is the drying up of the Dead Sea, which has continued unabated