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• NOW IN ENGLISH: The 36-page translation of the KKL-JNF report.
• The 34-page Hebrew-language KKL-JNF report.
• Letter from Dr. Orr Karassin of the Green Zionist Alliance to the Ministry of Energy and Water (in Hebrew).
• More resources on fracking in Israel.
• Help support the work of the Green Zionist Alliance.
  

Cross-posted from GreenZionism.org

Last year so many people jammed into the country’s de-facto national-park system, run by KKL-JNF, that parks were closed because they reached capacity. So, how many people was that, you ask? About one in every five Israelis — more than 1.5 million people — which is also about the same number of trees that have been planted in Israel since 2007 because of the work of the Green Zionist Alliance. That’s right, we’ve gotten a million-plus trees planted in the last five years.

Of course, as those who remember the recent Carmel fire know, it’s not just planting trees that matters, but the type and diversity of trees. That’s why one of the first things that we did after we first participated in our first World Zionist Congress was adding more trees to the planting mix. Thanks to our work, more varieties of trees are being planted today than the classic pine — and that includes trees suitable for semi-arid climates.

But when Israelis head outdoors today, it won’t just be the trees that they’ll be enjoying — many will be biking on some of the hundreds of miles of bike trails that have been built across the country because of the Green Zionist Alliance. That includes the Kinneret Circumference Trail, the Trans-Israel Bike Trail and many others — the list gets longer every year as our work gets more and more bike trails built and expanded.

Today Israelis also are enjoying both the nature reserve in Nes Tsiona, an open space in between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and the Samar sand dunes, near Eilat — both of which have been preserved because of the work of the Green Zionist Alliance.

This Yom Ha’atzmaut, give Israel an environmentally friendly birthday gift: Join the Green Zionist Alliance and help green Israel. Then go outside.

Cross-posted from GreenZionism.org

The photovoltaic solar-panel array at Kibbutz Ketura is the first and currently only of its kind in Israel.

(Photo by David Krantz)

KIBBUTZ KETURA, Israel — During the first ever Passover we left Egypt and slavery, celebrating our freedom in the wilderness. It’s easy to forget that back then this stretch of the Arava Valley, a half-hour up the road from the hotels of Eilat, wasn’t part of the biblical Promised Land. No, this part of southern Israel was wilderness — our ancestors wandered through here after the Exodus. It was here, in the desert, where we gained our freedom from slavery to Pharaoh. But that was more than 3,400 years ago. Today, this part of the wilderness is a global center for solar-energy research. And today, it is here in the desert where we are gaining our freedom from slavery to fossil fuels.

Solar companies from all around the world send prototypes of new solar panels to be tested here, home to the highest levels of solar radiation on the planet. Think of it as a photovoltaic Big Apple: If solar panels can make it here, they can make it anywhere.

A few steps away from Methuselah — the tree germinated from a 2,000-year-old Masada date pit by Arava Institute researcher Dr. Elaine Soloway — the future of clean, renewable energy is getting a test run. Dr. Tareq Abu Hamed of the Arava Institute and William Weisinger of Israel’s AORA Solar are testing solar panels with new self-cleaning electrodynamic screens (EDS), designed to help keep dust off the panels. Dust can sap five percent of a solar panel’s efficiency, but EDS essentially uses an invisible electric broom to sweep off the dust, brushing away dust particles with an electric field that moves across the panel.

Another solar panel being tested here at Ketura is the bifacial solar cell, developed by Israel’s bSolar Ltd. Basically a double-sided solar panel, the bifacial system takes advantage of the sunlight that strikes the ground and bounces back toward the sky, allowing bifacial cells to capture about a quarter more energy than conventional photovoltaic cells.

Just south of here and adjacent to the kibbutz is Israel’s first and only photovoltaic solar-energy farm, operated by the Arava Power Company and producing five megawatts of electricity. But that’s not enough. Less than one percent of Israel’s electric grid is powered by clean, renewable energy such as solar. Fortunately, the country is getting ready to increase that amount as it prepares to reach its goal of 10 percent of its grid energy coming from renewables by the year 2020.

Ketura is going to have some company: Last month the government issued 19 licenses for photovoltaic farms that will generate a total of 27 megawatts. Not to be outdone, last week the Arava Power Company announced plans to build a new solar field here with a capacity of 40 megawatts.

As a basis of comparison, Eilat consumes about 120 megawatts of electricity.

The government also has approved a 60-megawatt thermal-solar facility outside Kibbutz Mashabei Sadeh and a 120-megawatt thermal-solar farm by Kibbutz Zeelim. Whereas photovoltaic-solar panels directly convert sunlight into electric energy, thermal-solar panels concentrate the sunlight on a central source, heating water into steam in order to turn a turbine. The process is similar to conventional fossil-fuel energy production, except because the raw material is sunlight and not coal — the largest source of Israel’s electricity — thermal-solar energy is pollution free.

Theordor Herzl dreamed of an Israel powered by clean, renewable energy and, specifically, not coal. Instead Israel’s powered by coal, the dirtiest of fossil fuels, and a large contributor to poor air quality in Israel’s largest cities. The effect? More people die from air pollution in the Tel Aviv metropolitan area alone than die from terrorism and wars combined, according to the World Health Organization.

When the world frees itself from dependence on fossil fuels, it will be using solar technologies developed here at Ketura. And this Passover, Israel’s taking a step closer to freedom from the polluting tyranny of fossil fuels. This year, there’s more solar power planned for Eilat. Next year in Jerusalem.

Cross-posted from GreenZionism.org

SAMAR SAND DUNES, Israel — A barbed-wire fence runs along the edge of the dunes here, but it's not to protect them — it's to keep people from accidentally walking across the country's border with Jordan. Not that Samar hasn't needed the protection — the government was poised to raze the dunes and turn them into concrete for hotels and sidewalks. But barbed wire would not have been strong enough to hold back bulldozers. No, the bulldozers were stopped by something far more powerful: You.

Thanks to the efforts of the Green Zionist Alliance, our partners in Israel and all of our supporters — you and all of the people who enable us as organizations to exist, everyone who made phone calls, wrote letters, made donations, protested at the dunes — everyone who both figuratively and literally stood in front of bulldozers' shovels — the Samar sand dunes have been saved from destruction. They will be preserved as a nature and recreational reserve.

You may know about Samar's endangered species and its rare ecosystem, but what, viscerally, makes the dunes so special? On a recent day here, I walked across the dunes photographing them so you too could see how extraordinary they are.

Check out the full slide show at GreenZionism.org: http://www.greenzionism.org/greenisrael/samar/235

Thank you again for helping to save Samar!

On a recent day here the Samar sand dunes were tranquil and serene. The scorched earth where the dunes were mined sits flat and lifeless, like an unpaved parking lot, with the tread of bulldozers imprinted across it — a marked contrast to the rolling dunes nearby, covered in bushes and graced with the tracks of birds, hyenas, foxes, wolves, rabbits, gerbils, snakes and geckos. An industrial scale for weighing sand sits unused, its office covered in protest posters from Israeli environmental organizations. The number of dump trucks has slowed significantly. On this day, there wasn’t a bulldozer or a truck in sight. All was quiet except for the songs of warblers, finches and larks.

After the Green Zionist Alliance — in partnership with many Israeli environmental organizations, including the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel, Green Course and GZA sister organizations Green Movement and the Israel Union for Environmental Defense — waged both public and backdoor campaigns to save Samar, the government has committed to saving two-thirds of the dunes. Most of the remaining third has been destroyed already, after mining began on Dec. 28, despite on-site protests at which activists threw themselves in front of bulldozers and police arrested nine. But the Beer Sheva District Court has ruled that Yossi Harel — the subcontractor razing the dunes after the government awarded Elyakim Ben-Ari Ltd. with Samar mining rights — may only cart away one million tons of sand, or about one-third of the dunes, and no more.

Gilad Erdan, Israel’s minister of the environment, has offered to reimburse Harel for the million-shekel deposit that was paid to the state, but Harel has rejected the offer, even though he had been indicating that all it would take for him to give up mining Samar would be the return of his deposit.

With Harel intent on mining every last dune he can, the only open question is whether or not the legal threshold has been met or exceeded yet. It’s anticipated that the court will rule this week on whether some limited mining can continue or if Harel must stop.

In the meantime, while we mourn what has been destroyed needlessly — we also should celebrate what we saved. It’s possible that not every species native to Samar will survive in what is now an even smaller habitat, but those that do will live because of our collective effort. Together we have created a stronger voice for Israel’s environment — a voice loud enough to make Israeli politicians think twice before designating another jewel of nature for destruction. Together we have shown what we can do when we put action behind words. Together we have saved Samar.

Cross-posted from GreenZionism.org

UPDATE: Late tonight (1 a.m. Thursday Israel time Dec. 29), the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel, Green Course, Arava residents and the public will meet at the Samar sand dunes! Free buses leave from Tel Aviv's Central Train Station at 1 a.m. (early morning Thursday Israel time Dec. 29), next to Sixt Rental Car. Buses are scheduled to return to Tel Aviv tomorrow, Thursday, Dec. 29 at 3 p.m.

Israel's Samar sand dunes — and the unique animal species that live there — may be destroyed, unless we act now.

(Photo courtesy of Taal Goldman of the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies)

UPDATE: Late tonight (1 a.m. Thursday Israel time Dec. 29), the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel, Green Course, Arava residents and the public will meet at the Samar sand dunes! Free buses leave from Tel Aviv's Central Train Station at 1 a.m. (early morning Thursday Israel time Dec. 29), next to Sixt Rental Car. Buses are scheduled to return to Tel Aviv tomorrow, Thursday, Dec. 29 at 3 p.m.

NEW YORK (Dec. 28, 2011) — Today or tomorrow, the government's contractor plans to begin destroying the Samar sand dunes. But as long as the dunes stand, we have a chance to stop the bulldozers! The dunes were slated to be razed in October — the only reason that they're still here is because we rose up and made our voices heard. To save the dunes, we must raise our voices again. Louder. Now.

The dunes destruction wouldn't just be the end of an ecosystem; it would be the extinction of the endangered species that call the dunes home.

If you are in Israel, please go to the dunes! An impromptu demonstration may buy us more time to get the dunes preserved. Plus, it will help show the government that people care about Samar! You also can call the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at (02) 670-5555. And/or, you can call Netanyahu's political party, Likud, during business hours at (02) 675-3539, and/or fax (02) 649-6578.

If you're outside of Israel, please call the Israeli embassy and give diplomats and politicians the message: The Samar sand dunes should be preserved by the Israeli government as part of the inheritance of Israelis and Jews worldwide.

If you live in the United States, you can call (202) 364-5500, and/or fax (202) 364-5423.

In Canada, you can call (613) 567-6450, and/or fax (613) 567-9878.

In the United Kingdom, you can call (020) 7957-9500, and/or fax (020) 7957-9555.

If you live in another country, then you can find your local embassy through Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

We can win this, but we have to stand up and fight now — please call the embassy and please spread the word!

Cross-posted from GreenZionism.org

On Chanukah we recall the victory of the few over the many and the weak over the powerful. We celebrate the miracle of the oil and of the reassertion of control over our historic homeland, the present-day land of Israel.

But, as history repeats itself, this Chanukah, the role of the Greek Assyrians and local Hellenized is being played by telecommunications-giant IDT Corporation, a multinational New York Stock Exchange-listed company that aims to frack for oil across Judea through its subsidiary Genie Energy, which owns Israel Energy Initiatives. Mega-philanthropist Michael Steinhardt chairs the board of Israel Energy Initiatives and news-magnate Rupert Murdoch, former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney and Rothschild family-heir Lord Jacob Rothschild sit on Genie Energy's advisory board as major investors.

The few standing in their way of poisoning Israel’s water, land and air through hydrofracking across the state are the Green Zionist Alliance, fellow grassroots organization Save Adullam, GZA sister-organization Israel Union for Environmental Defense, Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel and umbrella-organization Life and Environment. But all of our collective budgets look like pocket change to the tycoons behind Israel Energy Initiatives.

While fracking in America is for natural gas, in Israel the coveted fossil fuel is oil. If you’re unclear about how harmful hydrofracking could be for Israel — and why it’s even worse environmentally than the kind of fracking happening in the United States — you should read the GZA’s extensive report published in May. Or, better yet, read the GZA’s 34-page report published in Hebrew in August. We plan to have the report translated into English by the end of next month.

In 2010 our Israeli partners in the fight against fracking challenged Israel Energy Initiatives in Israel’s supreme court, asserting that the company would need permission from the ministry of the environment to frack because the 1952 Oil Act only should apply to oil that’s naturally recoverable — crude oil. The oil that Israel Energy Initiatives is after, though, is shale oil in the form of kerogen — rock saturated in oil like a sponge saturated in water. Consequently, instead of just drilling for oil, like rigs in Alaska, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia do, recovering shale oil requires both fracking and in-situ retorting — heating the ground to about 600º F.

That process, of course, takes an immense amount of energy. And in Israel that energy comes from burning coal. So fracking in Israel is, economically speaking, trading coal for oil. If you look at it in a vacuum, the transaction may make sense, since oil has a higher market value than coal. But once you look at the whole picture, fracking becomes nonsense because it involves burning both coal and oil. Environmentally speaking, fracking for oil is a disastrous idea, one that would lead to massive increases in the country’s carbon footprint.

In 2009 Israel agreed at the Copenhagen climate-change talks to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by 20 percent and to increase renewable-energy production to 10 percent of the electric grid, up from the roughly 1 percent it is today. If Israel proceeds with fracking for oil, in all likelihood it will miss its climate-change targets by wide margins.

And, like in the United States, fracking may poison the water supply. But in Israel, water is even more precious than in America. Already, Israelis and Palestinians together use 20 percent more water annually than is naturally replenished. Over-reliance on the Sea of Galilee and the region’s aquifers is already threatening their usability as fresh-water resources. Fracking could damage an already fragile water system.

“The company's and the government's approach toward the safety of our drinking water is cause for deep concern,” said Rachel Jacobson, a leader of Save Adullam. “This level of risk to the aquifer is completely unacceptable.”

Israel Energy Initiatives argues that it only needs permission from the infrastructure ministry, which it has secured. In Israel’s sometimes slow-moving judicial system, the case has not yet been heard, and may not appear before the court until Pesach. But it may be irrelevant now: This month the infrastructure ministry said in the Knesset that it would have the ministry of the interior interpret an old law in a way to permit fracking to move forward without need for regulation of any kind, making the legal challenges moot. An official announcement is pending.

The fracking fight in Israel is far from over, but this Chanukah, we may have to make the miracle ourselves. Support the Green Zionist Alliance as we work to protect Israel’s environment by helping prevent hydrofracking in Israel. The GZA is only able to green Israel with your support. Please make your tax-deductible donation to the Green Zionist Alliance and help green Israel today!

Cross-posted from GreenZionism.org

This month marks the end of the 10th anniversary of the Green Zionist Alliance. Back before Israel’s Tent Cities and Occupy Wall Street, the Green Zionist Alliance began 2011 by becoming part of a successful effort to change the equation of what percentage of natural-resource profits goes to companies and what percentage goes to the Israeli public, who collectively own the resources. Fighting against some of the largest oil and gas companies in the world, the Green Zionist Alliance and its allies pushed a new law through Knesset that will put billions of dollars into education, healthcare and environmental protection — money that, without our intervention, simply would have gone to multinational corporations.

We followed that up with another David-versus-Goliath fight: Stopping hydrofracking in the Elah Valley, the historical battlefield of the original David and Goliath. We convened a Keren Kayemet L’Yisrael / Jewish National Fund (KKL-JNF) committee to investigate the potential impact of hydrofracking in Israel. The committee’s 34-page report, which has since become the official policy of KKL-JNF, called for a dozen research questions to be answered through laboratory work before fracking should be allowed in Israel. In the meantime, the issue of fracking is on the docket of the Israeli Supreme Court and it’s anticipated that the GZA’s KKL-JNF report will weigh heavily on the court.

We also helped launch a new grassroots network, Jews Against Hydrofracking, so that we could fight fracking in America as well as in Israel.

Just a few weeks ago, the Green Zionist Alliance’s representatives on the board of KKL-JNF intervened in KKL-JNF’s eviction proceedings of a Palestinian family from their Jerusalem home. We were successful in getting a delay of the eviction; we’ll keep working on protecting them and other disenfranchised voices. This follows our efforts to prevent a Bedouin village from being razed so a forest could be planted in its stead. If you read the minutes of the KKL-JNF board meeting that discussed the Bedouin, as published in Haaretz, you’ll see that the GZA representatives — Dr. Alon Tal and Dr. Orr Karassin — are the board’s only voices of reason on this issue.

And in May we launched a campaign to save the Samar sand dunes from destruction. A unique ecosystem of endangered species located in Israel’s Arava Valley, the remaining dunes of Samar were scheduled to be razed in October. Thanks to the efforts of the Green Zionist Alliance and our partner organizations in Israel, the dunes have been granted a temporary reprieve and they are still standing today.

Over the past 11 years, the Green Zionist Alliance has passed a multitude of laws at the World Zionist Congress, mandating the development of community gardens at immigrant-housing centers; support for sustainable, organic and local agriculture; and installation of photovoltaic solar panels and rainwater-savings systems. We also quadrupled funding for afforestation in Israel, developed environmental programs for Rwandan villages and declared new nature reserves in Israel. The Trans-Israel Bike Trail and the Kinneret Circumference Trail were built because of our work, and every year new bike trails are built and expanded in Israel because of the Green Zionist Alliance. At the same time, we’ve held educational programs and conferences coast to coast across North America.

But the GZA is only able to green Israel with your support.

Think of the Green Zionist Alliance as your way of changing Israeli environmental policy. As individuals, none of us may be able to have much impact; but joining together as an alliance, we become a force of nature. And the more support that you can provide, the stronger our collective force will become.

We have accomplished a lot in our first decade, but we still have a lot more to do. Please make your tax-deductible donation to the Green Zionist Alliance and help green Israel today.

Cross-posted from GreenZionism.org

Israel's Samar sand dunes — and the unique animal species that live there — may be destroyed, unless we act now.

(Photo courtesy of Taal Goldman of the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies)

NEW YORK (Nov. 14, 2011) — We are being heard: The Samar sand dunes have been granted a temporary reprieve from destruction! Although the bulldozers were scheduled to start mining the dunes weeks ago, work has been indefinitely postponed in the wake of our efforts and the protests conducted by our partner environmental organizations in Israel. Environment Minister Gilad Erdan arranged for the delay in conversations with the developer. Collectively, our message is getting through to the government.

It's a great victory, but we can't rest — we need to make the reprieve permanent; we need to make sure that Samar is saved and preserved for now and forever.

Have you called yet to save the dunes? If not, please call the Israeli embassy and give diplomats and politicians the message: The Samar sand dunes should be preserved by the Israeli government as part of the inheritance of Israelis and Jews worldwide.

If you live in the United States, you can call (202) 364-5500, and/or fax (202) 364-5423.

In Canada, you can call (613) 567-6450, and/or fax (613) 567-9878.

In the United Kingdom, you can call (020) 7957-9500, and/or fax (020) 7957-9555.

And in Israel, you can call the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at (02) 670-5555. And/or, you can call Netanyahu's political party, Likud, during business hours at (02) 675-3539, and/or fax (02) 649-6578.

If you live in another country, then you can find your local embassy through Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

We're winning this battle, but we can't ease up on the pressure until the dunes are guaranteed preservation. Please call the embassy and please spread the word!

Other articles in this series:

• Almost Out of Time: Act Now to Save Samar (Oct. 12, 2011)
• Saving Samar: Together We Can Protect the Last of Israel's Sahara (May 26, 2011)

Cross-posted from GreenZionism.org

Israel's Samar sand dunes — and the unique animal species that live there — may be destroyed, unless we act now.

(Photo courtesy of Taal Goldman of the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies)

NEW YORK (Oct. 12, 2011) — The bulldozers and dump trucks are getting ready. Without intervention, they will begin carting away one of Israel’s unique ecosystems, the Samar sand dunes, home to species that live nowhere else on the planet. And soon, at the government’s initiation, the sands of Samar in Israel’s Arava Valley will be turned into concrete.

Eilat needs sand for concrete, but the sand doesn’t need to come from Samar — existing sand mines in less environmentally sensitive places such as Timna and Dimona could yield more sand at about the same fiscal cost. Samar is only about one-square mile in size, but mining the dunes for their sand likely will lead to the extinction of species that are found only in Samar.

Back in May, the Green Zionist Alliance teamed with its Israeli sister organization, the Green Movement, in launching a campaign to buy the rights to the dunes from the concrete manufacturer so that Samar could be preserved as a national park. That campaign wasn’t enough and we’re running out of time. The dunes may be destroyed in the next few weeks, but it’s not too late to act.

Do you want to save the dunes? Please call the Israeli embassy and give diplomats and politicians the message: The Samar sand dunes should be preserved by the Israeli government as part of the inheritance of Israelis and Jews worldwide.

If you live in the United States, you can call (202) 364-5500, and/or fax (202) 364-5423.

In Canada, you can call (613) 567-6450, and/or fax (613) 567-9878.

In the United Kingdom, you can call (020) 7957-9500, and/or fax (020) 7957-9555.

And in Israel, you can call the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at (02) 670-5555. And/or, you can call Netanyahu's political party, Likud, during business hours at (02) 675-3539, and/or fax (02) 649-6578. And better yet, attend the protest on Oct. 17 at the dunes.

If you live in another country, then you can find your local embassy through Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

On Sukkot, when we remember our historic journey through the desert, you can help save a small piece of beautiful desert in Israel: The time to act is now.

Cross-posted from GreenZionism.org

The report and its recommendations, which were drafted and approved unanimously by a KKL-JNF committee convened and chaired by Green Zionist Alliance representative Dr. Orr Karassin, constitutes the official policy of KKL-JNF according to the organization’s bylaws. The committee was formed by Karassin following a Green Zionist Alliance report in early May on hydraulic fracturing — AKA hydrofracking, fracking or frac'ing — and in-situ retorting of oil shale in Israel’s Elah Valley, where David fought Goliath.

“It’s one of the most important open spaces left in all of Israel,” said Karassin.

The Green Zionist Alliance report in May found that both fracking and in-situ retorting posed significant potential dangers to Israel’s residents and environment.

KKL-JNF, the single largest non-government landholder in Israel, has now joined the GZA, the Mateh Yehuda Regional Council and four organizations that have challenged oil-shale extraction in Israel’s Supreme Court — GZA sister-organization Israel Union for Environmental Defense, the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel, the environmental-organization umbrella Life and Environment, and the grassroots Citizens' Committee to Save Adullam — in officially opposing extraction of oil shale in Israel. The court’s decision is still pending.

Before the oil-shale extraction pilot project begins, KKL-JNF insists that the oil companies wishing to exploit the land first answer a dozen research questions through laboratory work conducted by an independent committee.

“You can’t learn on the ground because then it will be too late,” with damage already done to the environment, Karassin said, citing the precautionary principle. “Answer these questions in a lab.”

The report lists the following research questions among those that need to be answered by the committee before fracking and in-situ retorting should be allowed to proceed in Israel:

• Will cracking soil layers pollute fresh-water aquifers?
• How much water will be used as part of the process to produce a single barrel of shale oil?
• What will happen if either the fracking or in-situ retorting lead to spontaneous combustion of oil or natural gas?
• What is the expected growth in the carbon footprint of Israel due to oil-shale production?
• What effect will oil-shale extraction have on Israel’s ability to fulfill its international commitments to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions?
• Will heating the earth and removing oil from the shale potentially cause land to collapse?
• What will be the effect of oil-shale extraction on local agriculture?
• How will oil-shale extraction affect the area’s environment and landscape?

KKL-JNF says that the independent committee should be funded by the oil companies and should include scientists and representatives of KKL-JNF, environmental groups and Israel’s Ministry of the Environment.

A full copy of the 34-page KKL-JNF report in Hebrew can be read here. An English translation will be available soon.

The Green Zionist Alliance is working to prevent fracking in America as well, joining with other green organizations and environmentalists to form a new network — Jews Against Hydrofracking. The network’s first publication, “Living Waters: Jewish Sources on the Natural World for Reflection and Study During the High Holidays,” can be downloaded here.

Cross-posted from GreenZionism.org

For the past month, Israelis camped out in Israel’s cities have been protesting a breakdown in the social contract — rapidly rising expenses as wealth is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands — that marks a distancing from the Herzlian dream. Ten families control about 30 percent of Israel’s economy, leading to what’s become an oligopolic state. Yet 22 percent of Israelis are classified as food insecure — unable to access the amount of healthy food needed on a regular basis. A quarter of Israelis live in poverty. And housing prices can jump as much as 20 percent in a single year. These problems plague everyone — Jew and Arab, Orthodox and secular, Israeli-born sabra and new immigrant. Only the rich are immune. Israel has among the highest gaps between the rich and the poor of any developed country in the world.

“Among the objects of the protesters’ fury are the soaring cost of living — for housing, gasoline, food and a decent education — and the widely shared sense that Israel’s go-go economy has enriched a new class of elites and oligarchs while leaving middle-class families in the dust,” opined the Washington Post’s editorial board. “What does it matter if the country is spawning high-tech start-ups and posh restaurants, say the mostly young protesters, if hundreds of thousands of well-educated people with jobs can barely afford to pay rents that climb by five or 10 percent each year? Who cares whether unemployment is among the lowest of any rich nation if the distribution of income and wealth is among the most inequitable?”

The current system of wealth distribution didn’t evolve naturally. Rather, it’s the product of the privatization of government assets — such as Bezeq, the Bank of Israel and Israel Chemicals Ltd. — in the 1980s and 1990s under the supervision of finance ministers mostly from Likud, the party of current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who also served as prime minister in the 1990s. The trend continues today as the Netanyahu-led government prepares to privatize more state-owned corporations, including Israel Railways, Israel Aircraft Industries and Israel Military Industries.

“It was basically selling assets to cronies,” said Israel Center for Social and Economic Progress Director Daniel Doron, describing Israel’s privatization to The New York Times. “Today, the whole Israeli economy is built on rapacious elites fleecing consumers.”

And what about the state powered by clean, renewable energy that Herzl envisioned in his 1902 book AltNeuLand? More than 60 years after Israel’s founding, less than one percent of Israel’s electricity is produced by renewable energy. Instead, Israel is powered by coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel of all, releasing 200 pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere per one million BTU of heat generation. And in a few years, Israel will be powered by the relatively less-polluting natural gas, which emits 117 pounds of carbon per million BTU. The effect is disastrous: According to the World Health Organization, every year more people die due to air pollution in the Tel Aviv metropolitan area alone than from wars and terrorism in the entire state combined.

While Israel’s security situation is certainly an important issue, environmental degradation is far more deadly. Air pollution is an even bigger killer than accidents in oil-burning cars and trucks that, ironically, are major contributors to poor air quality.

To those who think that this month’s launch in Israel of the world’s first nationwide electric-car network is the solution, consider this: The cars may not be burning oil, but they run on batteries charged from the electric grid. And where does the electric grid get its energy? By burning fossil fuels.

An electric-car network is part of the answer, but it's not the solution. We need to transition Israel’s grid to renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind. And we need to wean people off cars with better-planned cities, more bike paths and more public-transportation projects. Jerusalem recently took a step in the right direction with the opening this past Friday of a new light-rail system under the stewardship of Deputy Mayor Naomi Tsur, a Green Zionist Alliance advisory-board member. Tel Aviv needs to follow suit.

The Trouble with Boycotts

The Israeli Knesset members who this summer approved the “Boycott Law” have hurt Israel far more than any boycotter could. The law, which punishes those who call for boycotting Israel or products from the territories, tramples on the right to free speech and only serves to strengthen the arguments of those who wish to delegitimize Israel.

Just as Israel shouldn’t boycott the boycotters, those who seek to promote a method of BDS — boycott, divestment and sanctions — against Israel in order to convince the country to take more active steps leading to a Palestinian state are also being counterproductive. Israel’s Boycott Law proves that the current Israeli administration responds to BDS pressures simply by digging in its heels harder. The leaders of the ruling parties already feel as if Israel is isolated — boycotting the country doesn’t make them reconsider their decisions, but rather makes them feel that their actions are even more justified. Simultaneously, BDS undermines the many Israelis who are fighting politically and socially for change by delegitimizing them and their struggle in the eyes of the world. BDS isn’t the path to change — it’s the path to more of the same.

Additionally, Israel remains a vibrant democracy based on the Western model of free elections, an independent judicial system and freedoms of speech, religion and assembly. Singling out Israel as a subject for boycott instead of the dozens of countries in the world that deny their people these freedoms is simply unfair. Make no mistake: Israel needs policy change very badly — the security situation is the single-largest excuse and distraction preventing policymakers from seriously addressing the issues of environmental degradation and the society’s gaping socio-economic divide. But pushing BDS is both an unfair and an ineffective method of pursuing change.

Similarly, stripping the Jewish National Fund of its nonprofit status, as demanded by some in both the United States and the United Kingdom, is ill advised. Certainly, the Green Zionist Alliance has taken issue with some of JNF’s activities — such as the unsustainably planned Blueprint Negev project and its impact on both the desert ecosystem and the Bedouins — but JNF is a valuable institution that needs repair, not destruction. Like both Israel and America, JNF does far more good than bad, and the GZA will continue working to further green both JNF and Israel.

Tackling Problems Head On

It is folly to think that the issues with how the Israeli government treats both its own citizens and Palestinians will go away if we just ignore them long enough.

The situation with the Palestinians isn’t likely to get better until there’s a mutually agreed-upon final agreement that ensures a peaceful future. Air pollution, energy production, overconsumption of water and badly planned land use will persist as problems until policy remedies are enacted. And although the protesters in Israel’s streets may eventually leave their tent cities, unless their concerns are addressed and the social contract is repaired, the root problems behind the protests will remain.

Implementing solutions may be difficult, but the cost of inaction is far greater.

To address the Palestinian situation, both parties must negotiate and be willing to make painful compromises that lead to a Palestinian state peacefully living alongside a continued Jewish democratic state of Israel.

To address environmental degradation, we need a transition to renewable-energy production coupled with new efforts at reducing water usage, increasing land conservation (such as saving the endangered Samar sand dunes in the Arava Valley), supporting sustainable agricultural methods that use less water and energy while reducing pollution, and developing communities that encourage alternatives to cars.

And to address the social unrest, Israel must restore the social contract and reprioritize people. Following the lead of governments that break up large anti-competitive corporations, the oligopoly that controls nearly a third of Israel’s wealth may need to be broken up as well. Laws already limit the amount of foreign ownership for companies in certain industries; new laws may be needed to limit the concentration of familial ownership as well. Israel needs to reinvest in education, healthcare and the environment. Capitalism needn’t be scrapped, but laws can be passed that create minimum and maximum standards of living. As Rabbi Michael Melchior asks, how many cars can one person drive anyway?

The high cost of housing has been another major factor in the protests. But the problem isn’t that there aren’t enough apartments — rather, it’s how those apartments are allocated. About a third of luxury apartments in Israel are second or third homes that are unused for most of the year, but nonetheless push up real-estate prices across all income classes. Netanyahu’s plan in response to the protests — to build 10,000 dorm rooms while stripping property-tax exemptions from 140,000 vacant apartments — is a good start, but it’s not enough to alleviate Israel’s housing crunch. Wealthy Americans who keep apartments just outside the Old City for the holidays may not want to hear this, but Israel should resurrect a plan from last year that would heavily tax vacant apartments, essentially incentivizing the rental of vacant second and third homes like those that dominate Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Such a move not only would go much further to increase the rental supply, but it also could revitalize city centers now filled with vacant homes.

While such a move would help address Israel’s housing crunch, it doesn’t fully address all of the socio-economic problems that have led to this summer’s protests. What’s needed is a green New Deal. Fortunately, this past week the Green Movement — the GZA’s sister organization in Israel co-chaired by GZA co-founder Dr. Alon Tal — published just such a plan. “The Economics of Tomorrow” outlines ways to economically incentivize activities that help society, such as building affordable housing using environmentally sustainable construction methods — and ways to disincentivize activities that hurt society, such as pollution. If the Green Movement wins representation in the next Knesset elections, the Economics of Tomorrow could become a reality.

It’s clear that we still have a lot of work to do if we’re going to fulfill Herzl’s dream of a model state. The Zionist project has accomplished a lot so far, but our work is far from complete.

Cross-posted from GreenZionism.org

For example, here in Sefwi Wiawso, a small town in southwestern Ghana near the country’s border with Ivory Coast, the synagogue — the only one in Ghana — is lit at night by compact-fluorescent lighting, which uses only a quarter of the power of conventional incandescent bulbs. Mindful of the brownouts and blackouts that can occur when electric demand exceeds electric supply, the Jewish homes here, like most homes in Ghana that have electricity, are similarly lit by compact-fluorescent bulbs. And almost all power outlets here, like all across Ghana, have power switches built into the outlet, allowing people to save energy, without unplugging, by killing the power to vampire appliances — electronic devices that continue to drain power even when turned off — at the flick of a switch.

And in the village of Bonsaiso, outside Ghana’s second-largest city, Kumasi, the village’s new computer center, complete with dozens of laptops, is powered entirely by solar panels on the center’s rooftop. The new health center in the neighboring village of Tontokrom is likewise powered by rooftop energy-generating solar panels. All of these solar-powered facilities are part of the Millennium Villages Project, run by the U.N. Development Programme, Millennium Promise, and the Earth Institute at Columbia University. In Ghana, like any country where nonprofits proliferate, the government and NGOs are implementing programs because there’s an understanding that the free-market system, while good for many, may not be helping those most in need of assistance — and it may not necessarily lead to results that are best for the society at large without intervention.

With electric supply in Israel struggling to meet demand — a new dual-fueled natural gas and coal power plant is planned for Ashkelon to supplement an energy grid that is mainly powered through the burning of coal, the dirtiest of fossil fuels — Israel would be wise to follow Ghana’s energy-saving examples and implement more policies that encourage consuming less energy. Even as Israel’s grid switches in future years from coal domination to relatively less-dirty natural-gas consumption, the country will remain dependent on burning fossil fuels. Clean, renewable energy, such as solar power, today only makes up less than one percent of Israel’s energy-grid production, so while we need more investment in solar-energy production, we also need to lower per-capita energy usage if energy production in Israel is going to keep pace with demand.

Supporting Local Agriculture

Ghana holds other lessons for Israel as well. For example, Joseph Armah, one of the leaders of Sefwi Wiawso’s Jewish community, is a photographer by trade, but he also grows his own fruits and vegetables — such as palm fruit, cassava, corn and plantain. He uses the palm fruit to make his own palm oil, one of the most common cooking oils in Ghana, and the cassava and plantain to make fufu, which is sort of like the Ghanaian version of the matzah ball, and also served in soup.

Armah’s farming plot isn’t unique among the Jews of Sefwi Wiawso — it’s actually rather common for people of all religions all across Ghana to grow their own food. More than half of all Ghanaians farm. By comparison, only about three percent of Israelis are farmers. Given that Israel has a far more-developed economy than Ghana, the low farming percentage makes sense. In the United States, less than one percent of the population farms as a vocation — but an estimated 13 percent of the American public grows fruits and vegetables in anything from windowsill pots to backyard garden plots and community gardens. With 22 percent of Israelis classified as food insecure — unable to access the amount of healthy food needed on a regular basis — widespread promotion and incentivization of fruit-and-vegetables plots, like what’s commonplace in Ghana, could help Israel’s poor meet their nutritional needs.

Increased local-food production also reduces energy consumption as less fuel is burned to transport food shorter distances. In central Accra, the government-run Ghana School Feeding Programme, in conjunction with a host of NGOs, including the U.N. World Food Programme, is implementing a nationwide school-lunch system that supports local agriculture across Ghana. The goal isn’t only to provide nutrition to the poor and reduce energy consumption, but also to support regional economies. The program aims to have at least 80 percent of the food served in school lunches to be grown by farmers who live in the same areas as the schools. The program requires local procurement unless the food isn’t available locally, according to Ghana School Feeding Programme official Kingsley Young Opare.

More Efficient Land Use

Ghana is more than 11 times larger than Israel, with only about three times Israel’s population, but in some ways land is more efficiently used in Ghana than in Israel even though Israel is more densely populated. Often, odd lots that would be dirt in Israel are used for farming in Ghana. For example, in both Accra and Kumasi, odd-shaped lots and sometimes even the spaces between the road and a house’s fence are used to grow corn and other vegetables. And in Accra's Dzorwulu neighborhood, the wasteland between an electrical substation and a drainage canal — land on which Ghanaian law prohibits construction — a local farmers’ association of 31 farmers and 17 assistants grows lettuce, cucumber and other fruits and vegetables, utilizing crop rotation to help soil quality. They also receive support from the International Water Management Institute in collaboration with the Resource Centres on Urban Agriculture and Food Security.

In 1981, Bukari Fuseini started as an assistant farmer on someone else’s plot and in 1990 he started farming his own plot. Today he’s the head of the area’s farmers’ association, but he’s still growing vegetables, which he uses to feed himself, his wife and three children, with plenty left over to sell at market.

“It makes me feel great,” Fuseini said. “I learn a lot farming here.”

Israel would be wise to follow Ghana’s lead in supporting local agricultural production and consumption. The main challenge for Israel would be how it can do so without increasing the country’s agricultural water demands. But the solution is rather simple: Construct small-scale rainwater-savings systems and grey-water reuse systems, and limit agricultural exports.

Rainwater-savings systems would help capture fresh water that, along Israel’s heavily populated coastal region, would otherwise run off into the sea and become salinated. With a change in the types of soaps used, grey-water reuse systems would allow for household wastewater to be reused to irrigate backyard gardens. And agricultural exports would need to be limited because shipping Israeli fruits and vegetables out of the country is, essentially, also exporting water, a resource too rare in Israel to be sent abroad. The country needs to find the right balance by supporting local agriculture — to help people grow enough food to meet the population’s needs — while discouraging overproduction. Today, with the proliferation of imported fresh fruits and vegetables across Israel, as well as an active fresh-food export business, the balance is off-kilter, leading to inefficient uses of three of the things Israel has in shortest supply in relation to its population’s size: water, energy and land.

Biking Infrastructure

Although transportation across Ghana, by Western standards, is relatively inefficient, there is one city here that provides a good example of smart transportation policy, worthy of emulation in Israel. Tamale, Ghana’s third-largest city, has wide, easy-to-navigate bike lanes, often separated by concrete barriers, on all of its major roads. The result? Rather than riding in exhaust-spewing vehicles, many Tamale residents get around town on pollution-free bicycles. It’s very common for men, women, young, old, white- and blue-collar workers alike to traverse Tamale by bike. Wouldn’t it be nice if one day we could say the same thing about Tel Aviv? The Green Zionist Alliance has made building and expanding bike trails, such as the Kinneret Circumference Trail, a permanent budgetary item of Keren Kayemet L'Yisrael (KKL-JNF), and Jerusalem Deputy Mayor Naomi Tsur, a Green Zionist Alliance advisory-board member, is developing a circuit of bike paths across the capital, but much more work needs to be done within Israel’s cities to make biking an easier and safer way to travel.

The upcoming launch of Israel’s electric-car network will be a good start to reducing Israel’s transportation-energy footprint, but right now running cars off of the energy grid instead of gasoline just means burning coal — and in the future natural gas — instead of oil. Increasing biking in Israel — along with improving public transportation, raising fuel-efficiency standards and planning better-designed communities — is key to reducing energy consumption and all of the ensuing air pollution released through the continued burning of fossil fuels.

An African Model

Life in Ghana is far from perfect — and, for certain, there remains a lot more that Ghana can learn from more developed nations — but Ghana also represents a functioning example of some policies that Israel would be smart to adopt. If they look at Ghana, Israeli policymakers could find that the seeds for a greener Israel may have been planted in Africa.

Support for this research project was provided in part by ROI and NYU’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.

Cross-posted from GreenZionism.org

At last week’s Jewcology personal-narrative leadership training, as part of the Teva Seminar, we explored the story of us — our own personal stories, and how those stories are connected to the lives and passions of those around us. By telling our personal stories, we can help people connect not just with us, but with our organizations and with our causes. The story of us exists in a place we all can share, in a place with which we all can identify.

“It’s not about ‘Come do my thing,’ ” one of our facilitators explained. “It’s about ‘Come do our thing.’ ”

We can transform the listening experience from being about the speaker to being about the community.

“The power of stories is so strong that it can move whole organizations,” one participant said. “Stories are alive. We can relate to them even after this workshop. They are part of our lives.”

Everyone has a story, but not everyone knows the best way to tell it. That’s where the Jewcology personal-narrative leadership training comes in, helping leaders to better communicate and tell powerful stories.

We all may be working toward the same goals, but we also all have different stories. What is your story of us?

Israel's Samar sand dunes — and the unique animal species that live there — may be destroyed.

(Photos courtesy of Taal Goldman of the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies)

NEW YORK (May 26, 2011) — Picture a desert and you'll probably envision rolling hills of sand like those traversed by the nomadic caravans of the Sahara. Yet, even though the majority of Israel is desert, almost none of it is like the Sahara except for a small section near the southern tip of Israel in the Arava Valley: the Samar sand dunes.

Originally about five square miles in size, today less than one square mile of the Samar sand dunes remains, in part because of agricultural use, and mostly due to the carting away of the dunes' sand to make concrete. Now most of the last remaining dunes — and the unique species that live in them — are threatened with destruction. But with your help we can save the last remaining dunes of Israel's Sahara.

The governmental agency that controls the sand dunes has licensed the rights to the sand to a developer who intends on turning the dunes into concrete for construction in nearby Eilat. The developer already has paid the government a one-million-shekel ($287,000) deposit, and he plans to start mining the sand soon. However, thanks to pressure from the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel and three Green Zionist Alliance sister organizations in Israel — the Green Movement, the Israel Union for Environmental Defense and the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies — the developer is reconsidering whether or not to mine the dunes. If we can show the developer and the government that thousands of Jews around the world care about Israel's environment, and are willing to back up that care with action, we may be able to buy back the mining rights to the dunes — or convince the government to cancel the mining contract — and preserve Samar as a national park. So, beginning today, that's exactly what we're doing.

Together with the Green Movement, we are going to show the Israeli government that the dunes are worth saving. Please sign the pledge to save the dunes and commit any amount — large or small — to help save the dunes. If together we're willing to commit one million shekels, we may save Samar. (Hebrew-language speakers can sign the pledge by clicking here.) The pledge is simply a commitment to donate later, when necessary. No money will be collected until the government agrees to let us buy Samar's development rights, but if you want to donate now, you can do so through the Green Zionist Alliance by designating your donation to the "GZA Samar Campaign."

"There is really no reason to mine these dunes now, especially in light of their ecological significance," said Dr. Alon Tal, a co-founder of the Green Zionist Alliance and chairman of the Green Movement.

And their ecological significance is great. Although the dunes are similar to those of the central Sahara, the Samar dunes possess one key element missing from the Sahara's dunes: Life. Plants and animals both live on Samar's dunes. At least two unique species of spider can't be found anywhere else in the world. The Lesser Gerbil (pictured) thrives in Samar's shifting dunes. Hyenas, foxes, wolves, rabbits, warblers, snakes and geckos also call the Samar home.

And these animals seem to have genetic variations that make them different from the same animals in other regions, David Lehrer, director of the Arava Institute, told The Jerusalem Post. Lehrer said that the dunes' isolated location, surrounded by different terrain, has caused the species to evolve differently.

"This is an area that is certainly unique with endemic species that are specific to this area," Lehrer told The Post. "The animals that live on these sand dunes are like on an island."

If we don't intervene, that island will be turned into concrete. The demand for sand is fueled by Eilat's growth, but mining the Samar sands isn't the answer. While the dunes would provide easily accessible sand, the mining of Samar would only represent a one-percent cost savings compared to alternative sand sources, according to the Green Movement. And since the total excavatable sand in Samar's dunes — estimated at between 500,000 and 1.8 million tons — only adds up to about one percent or less of Eilat's annual sand consumption of 150 million tons, Samar is literally a drop in Eilat's sand bucket.

A better alternative would be to return to the areas of Samar's dunes that have been quarried already — and dig deeper. According to Tal, already developed sand mines in the Samar area could yield an additional 10 million tons of sand — far more than could be retrieved from Samar's remaining dunes.

Eilat's further construction should not come at the cost of Samar's destruction. If we don't save Samar the dunes will be lost, becoming a memory in the sands of time. Please pledge to save Samar today — because together we can make a difference. And together we can save Samar.

Cross-posted from GreenZionism.org

"Israel could attain energy independence," Dr. Yuval Bartov, chief technology officer and chief geologist at Israel Energy Initiatives — one of the companies pursuing oil in Israel — recently told The Jerusalem Report.

But the potential oil rush is a mixed blessing for Israel: Although the country stands to reap tremendous financial awards — per capita, it could catapult itself into the top tier of the wealthiest nations in the world, joining the likes of oil-rich Qatar and tax-haven Luxembourg — Israel also may further damage its ecosystem, its landscape, its water supply and its air quality for all of its citizens. That's because the oil isn't crude; it's shale oil.

While Saudi Arabia has about 260 billion barrels of proven crude-oil reserves, it's estimated that Israel could have about 250 billion barrels of shale oil. That would give Israel the third-largest shale-oil resources in the world, behind the United States (an estimated 3 trillion barrels) and China (an estimated 355 billion barrels). Worldwide, there are an estimated 4.8 trillion barrels of shale oil dispersed among 38 countries.

On Friday, oil closed at about $114 a barrel, meaning that potentially there's $28.5 trillion of oil in Israel — or about $3.8 million for every Israeli — at today's present values. Of course, if all of that oil were extracted and those profits realized, most of the money would go to the corporations that extracted and sold the oil. The public would stand to benefit, though, through the royalties collected by the government on oil proceeds. Monetarily, shale-oil extraction in Israel may have an even larger economic impact — and potential social benefit — than the $300 billion in natural-gas finds.

Oil-Shale Fracking

Shale oil comes from oil shale — rock saturated with kerogen, an organic pre-oil substance that can be converted into shale oil through heating, basically speeding up the natural oil-formation process by millions of years. Because kerogen isn't in gas form, the only way of extracting it has been conventional surface retorting — digging up all the rock, bringing it to the surface and heating it to about 900º F. This process is different from how natural gas is extracted from shale. Through a process known as hydraulic fracturing — AKA hydrofracking, frac'ing, or just plain fracking — a well is dug and water, sand, chemicals and even diesel fuel are used to blast cracks in rock, thereby releasing the gas.

Large oil-shale deposits have been known for years — indeed, people have been burning oil shale since prehistoric times — but conventional retorting is so expensive that developing oil-shale fields has been cost prohibitive since the end of World War II. The game changer for oil shale is that, after successful test runs in Colorado, North Dakota and Texas, companies have learned how to successfully use in-situ retorting — converting the oil shale into shale oil while it's all in situ, in place, underground.

The first in-situ retorting was conducted by the Germans during World War II — and in 1940 the Swedes conducted in-situ retorting with electricity — but feasible methods haven't been developed until now: Drilling a well to gain greater access to the oil shale and heating the rock underground to about 600º F, thereby converting the kerogen into shale oil though pyrolysis, a form of decomposition without oxygen. In contrast to conventional surface retorting, today's in-situ retorting methods heat the shale for longer periods of time — months, or even years — at lower temperatures.

Because the technology is new, the best method of in-situ retorting hasn't been determined yet. Sometimes companies start in-situ retorting with hydraulic fracturing in order to open up cracks in the rock and then heat the rock to create more cracks and convert the kerogen. Other times, companies substitute explosives or high-pressure carbon dioxide for hydraulic fracturing. And other times they bypass the hydraulic fracturing step altogether and just heat the shale in the well. In the latter case, it's the heat and not the water-chemical mixture that fractures the rock — think of it as hydraulic fracturing without the water as part of the fracturing process. With any method of in-situ retorting, water is still used, though, in the clean-up process to steam the wells after extraction is complete to help remove oil residue. Water also can be used in the creation of a freeze wall — a perimeter barrier around the site of pumped-in refrigerated liquids designed to contain oil and gas within the designated site and to freeze groundwater before it can enter the extraction area. Additionally, water is used in the final step of refining the shale oil and in separating natural gas from the shale oil.

The process for heating the rock varies, but it's always energy intensive. In some cases, radio waves or microwaves are sent into the earth to heat it; in others, an inert gas is heated and circulated through the shale; and yet in others, water is superheated and circulated through the shale to heat the rock. A fourth method is to insert electric heaters into the ground, an approach favored by Israel Energy Initiatives, which likely will use natural gas to power electric heaters. That means that they will be trading natural gas for oil. Because oil sells for so much more money than natural gas, the trade makes economic sense. But because oil burns less efficiently than natural gas — creating more pollution and releasing more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere — the trade makes poor environmental sense. Either way, in the end both will be burned, which is problematic from an environmental perspective.

Essentially, the newly discovered feasibility of in-situ retorting makes oil-shale extraction nearly as easy and affordable — and potentially dangerous — as the now-common gas-shale extraction that has caused earthquakes in Arkansas and Texas, as well as water and air pollution in Pennsylvania, Texas and across the United States. In the last few years, Brazil, China and Estonia have restarted oil-shale exploitation. The last time companies were majorly investing in developing U.S. oil shale was during the 1970s and early '80s oil crises, but with high gas prices and new technology in hand, companies are looking to start oil-shale fracking in America too. Australia, Canada, France, Germany, India, Kazakhstan, Mongolia and Thailand — and, with an oil-shale agreement signed last year, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Syria and Turkey — are all set to follow.

The "Black Globe"

The potential environmental threat is so severe that Life and Environment, the Israeli green-nonprofit umbrella organization, gave its "Black Globe" award for environmental harm to Israel Energy Initiatives.

Representatives of Israel Energy Initiatives dismiss concerns about fracking in Israel leading to the gas-shale fracking problems plaguing America by comparing Israel’s geography to the largest oil-shale deposits in the United States and the world, the Green River Formation, a geologic formation underneath northeastern Utah, southwestern Wyoming and northwestern Colorado.

"In Colorado, the aquifer flows through the same layer as the oil shale, while in Israel, it flows far below," Bartov told The Jerusalem Report. "That means that the water is completely separate from the oil shale."

The Israel Energy Initiatives pilot project — in Aderet, about 15 miles southwest of Jerusalem — includes a 270-day heating phase. If the pilot goes well, full-scale production is scheduled for 2015.

The length of time that the earth will be heated also concerns Israeli environmentalists, who say that unplanned surface cracks could develop, allowing for poisonous and combustible gases to escape and possibly ignite. Industry executives say that such unintended consequences aren't possible, but recent history proves otherwise: In November, a fire broke out at a mining operation in the Negev when oil shale combusted in the ground, leading to a plume of smoke over the largely immigrant community of Dimona. The Israeli Ministry of Environment said that cracks in the ground were to blame for the fire.

The oil-shale operation outside of Dimona was used to fuel a six-megawatt oil-shale plant that powered an Israel Chemicals fertilizer factory. The oil-shale power plant started out in 1982 as a government-funded test facility that escaped public attention because of its scope: Its original output was a mere tenth of one megawatt, and most of the resulting ash has been processed and exported to Europe as cat litter. In 1990 it was upgraded to a production capacity of one megawatt. This past March, Israel Chemicals announced that it would be closing its oil-shale plant and replacing it with a new natural-gas power plant.

Also in March, Givot Olam Oil Exploration announced that it was producing 785 barrels of crude oil a day though hydraulic fracturing near Rosh HaAyin, just to the east of Petah Tikva. But that's not from oil shale, so the amount of oil present at the site is likely limited in nature. In August the company speculated that there were 1.5 billion barrels of crude oil at the site, but that only 10 to 20 percent would be recoverable. Investors don't have much confidence in the project, which plans to begin commercial production soon; the company's shares closed Thursday at six and a half agorot on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange.

These developments lead many to question the feasibility of oil-shale extraction, but the current oil-shale projects being explored in Israel are the first major attempts to extract oil shale that may have the technology to succeed.

Many other companies, such as Ratio Oil Exploration, are working on oil extraction in Israel, and most of them are also working on natural-gas extraction, including the Delek Group (and its subsidiary, Delek Energy, and sub-subsidiaries, Delek Drilling and Avner Oil Exploration), Isramco Oil and Gas, Lapidoth Heletz, Jerusalem Oil Exploration (and its subsidiary, formerly government-owned Naphtha Israel Petroleum Corporation), and Zion Oil & Gas. The world's largest oil companies — Exxon Mobil, BP, Royal Dutch Shell and their ilk — remain on the sidelines for now, possibly out of fears of angering oil-rich Arab states. In the meantime, Israel Energy Initiatives — a subsidiary of Genie Energy, which in turn is owned by telecommunications-giant IDT Corporation — is commanding the most attention at the moment, mostly because of its superstar cast: Mega-philanthropist Michael Steinhardt chairs the board of Israel Energy Initiatives and news-magnate Rupert Murdoch, former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney and Rothschild family-heir Lord Jacob Rothschild sit on Genie Energy's advisory board as major investors.

Israel Energy Initiatives also has the potential to become the biggest of the bunch: Its license from the Israeli government allows it to search for oil shale over 92 square miles of the Shefla Basin, underneath the Judean Hills. The company estimates that each well dug only heats the rock in a 50-meter perimeter, so to fully exploit the oil shale through in-situ retorting will involve lots and lots of wells across the Judean Hills.

The Great Green Hope

Fortunately, Israeli oil-shale fracking isn't going unopposed. Grassroots organization Citizens' Committee to Save Adullam has formed with the explicit purpose of stopping fracking in Aderet — near Adullam Grove Nature Reserve and the Elah Valley, where David fought Goliath — and the Judean Hills. Although Elah Valley is zoned by the government in its master plan as green space, the 1952 Oil Act creates an exemption for energy-resource exploration. Israeli Minister of Environmental Protection Gilad Erdan is trying to change the law to include environmental considerations. In the meantime, Save Adullam has a petition (which you can sign here) and the group has been very successful so far in putting the issue of oil shale on the Israeli public agenda. In December, the group teamed with the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI) and the Mateh Yehuda Regional Council for a 1,000-person protest.

"In Israel, it's such a small country, the scale is so small, that everything that we do affects its surrounding much more immediately," Save Adullam representative Rachel Jacobson told Israeli television network IBA English News. Instead of investing in new oil technologies, Jacobsen advocated investing in renewable-energy technologies. "We need to find long-term sustainable solutions for energy."

Many of the world's largest solar-energy projects, from California to Spain, are being built by Israeli companies, many of which are worldwide leaders in solar-technology development. Israel is blessed with plenty of sun, yet its solar technology has mostly been an export. Today, less than one percent of Israel's grid is powered by solar. But it's possible for Israel to source its power 90 percent from renewables, according to a new report to be published soon by the National Solar Energy Center at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. So, when we're trying to wean ourselves off of oil — with Israeli scientists close to making algae jet fuel a reality, Israeli technology making solar-energy production economically feasible, and with Israel poised to launch the first-ever nationwide electric-car network — why go back to the well?

"If Israel envisions weaning itself from hydrocarbon fuels as part of its strategy, oil shale might be problematic," Dr. Jeremy Boak, director of the Center for Oil Shale Technology and Research at the Colorado School of Mines, told environmental blog Green Prophet. But, he said, oil-shale extraction may become a moot point. "In the grand scheme of energy consumption, the world is likely to need to address carbon emissions on a large scale long before oil shale becomes a major contributor to emissions."

Last summer Life and Environment joined forces with Green Zionist Alliance sister-organization Israel Union for Environmental Defense, SPNI and Save Adullam to challenge Israel Energy Initiatives's oil-shale extraction process in Israel's Supreme Court, which meets in a building paid for by Jacob Rothschild's distant cousin, Dorothy de Rothschild. The green groups are arguing that oil-shale drilling projects should provide the government with full plans that include an environmental-impact assessment, and that the company should be required to receive permission from the Ministry of Environment as well and not just the Ministry of National Infrastructures, which issued the existing permits. Israel Energy Initiatives and the Ministry of National Infrastructures have countered that because the company's plan is at its pilot stage, it should be allowed to move forward as an experiment to see what it finds.

Dr. Orit Skutelsky, an ecologist with Save Adullam and a former instructor at the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, says that who is conducting the pilot project makes a difference.

"It's not an academic experiment … it's a site of technology development for a company that has financial interests," Skutelsky told IBA English News. "The pilot site itself is not planned to check the environmental implications and impacts."

In Israel's independent but sometimes slow-moving judicial system, a decision is pending.

A Green 2011?

This year stands to be a green one for Israel: In March the Knesset approved doubling the government’s share of profits from natural-gas sales; Jerusalem’s light-rail system is due to go online for partial operation any day now; and Better Place anticipates that it will begin selling electric cars to the Israeli public in August. If the Israeli green NGOs win in court, then 2011 also may become the year that unregulated oil-shale exploitation was stopped. If the court rules in favor of the oil-shale industry, Israel may be facing a fiscally richer but environmentally poorer future.

Cross-posted from GreenZionism.org

It gets worse: In order to plant the new grove of trees, KKL-JNF also bulldozed about 850 olive trees owned by the villagers of al-Araqib.

And the bulldozing has not been bloodless: Village residents and protesters have been greeted by police with rubber and paint bullets that sent some of them to the hospital. When most people buy trees through KKL-JNF, they don't think they're financing the bulldozing of a village and the injuring of protesting civilians — neither of which are roles with which KKL-JNF was charged when it was founded at the fifth World Zionist Congress in 1901. Theodor Herzl, like Ben-Gurion, would be ashamed.

KKL-JNF was first proposed in the early 1880s by the Hovevei Zion (Lovers of Zion) movement and by Prof. Hermann Schapira as an organization for acquiring land for a Jewish national state, encouraging every farmer to work his/her own land, supporting collective farming and building large communities. In his 1896 book Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) and his 1902 book AltNeuLand, Herzl proposed a Jewish people-funded “National Association for Trees” that would be tasked with afforestation. The leading Zionist thinkers behind the founding of KKL-JNF endorsed Jewish settlement and afforestation of the land; none of them endorsed the destruction of existing villages. Herzl, in fact, called for the creation of a model state, a state where all of its citizens would be treated fairly.

As beneficial as planting trees is, and as much as afforestation is needed and valued, new saplings should not come at the cost of displacing people from their homes, regardless of their religion, ethnicity or land-owning status. Because today is the fast of Esther, and Sunday is Purim, it's all the more important for us to remember the dangers of being a minority. Our collective history should spur empathy for minority groups such as the Bedouin.

Since Blueprint Negev was announced in 2005 by KKL-JNF's sister organization JNF-USA, the Green Zionist Alliance has challenged the project's virtues. The GZA also has channeled its carbon-offset efforts through the Good Energy Initiative, where one of the organization's carbon-mitigating efforts is replacing diesel power generators with solar power in off-the-grid Bedouin villages such as al-Araqib.

The Green Zionist Alliance representatives on the KKL-JNF board of directors — Dr. Alon Tal and Dr. Orr Karassin — have been working to stop KKL-JNF and JNF-USA from bulldozing al-Araqib and other Bedouin villages again. Tal has been meeting with Bedouin representatives and he and Karassin are urging the rest of the KKL-JNF board to put a stop to the evacuation and displacement of Bedouin in the Negev.

Part of the problem stems from questions of land ownership. More than 100,000 Bedouin live in villages like al-Araqib, unrecognized by the Israeli government. Although many of the villages predate the founding of the modern state, Israel declared state ownership over unrecognized villages after the War of Independence, leading, most significantly, to limited animal-grazing rights and to villages' exclusion from access to the energy grid, water and sewer lines, and paved roads. Still, the bulldozing of Bedouin villages en masse only began in earnest with the implementation of Blueprint Negev.

The state has given KKL-JNF the land to many unrecognized villages, including al-Araqib, to develop and forest because, under Israeli law, the land is owned by the state. But that arrangement may be coming to an end soon. The Israeli government is in negotiations with the Bedouin over disputed lands, with the latest Israeli offer likely to be a state handover of half of the Bedouin-claimed lands and billions of shekels in state compensation for the other half.

In the meantime, the Green Zionist Alliance position is clear: KKL-JNF should not be involved in the displacement or evacuation of people, regardless of whether or not they can be considered legally as trespassers. And KKL-JNF should not plant trees on lands whose ownership is being disputed through the country's judicial system.

Fortunately, the Green Zionist Alliance is not alone in this fight. Rabbis for Human Rights North America and the Jewish Alliance for Change have teamed up for the Bedouin-Jewish Justice in Israel Campaign to raise public awareness about the issue and gather signatures on petitions to KKL-JNF and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And Bustan and the Negev Coexistence Forum have long sought environmental justice for the Bedouin.

Planting forests shouldn't mean destroying villages, and it's time that KKL-JNF ends that equation for the Israeli Bedouin. It's time for a greener, more just KKL-JNF for all Israelis.

Cross-posted from GreenZionism.org

GZA members enjoyed their tour of the Topsy Turvy Bus at the Green Israel Summit this past October.

NEW YORK (Feb. 11, 2011) — Long past December, this year’s Chanukah miracle is that the oil is still burning. Fueled by cooking oil first used during the Green Zionist Alliance’s Chanukah party at Greenpoint Shul, the Topsy Turvy Bus begins its third Jewish environmental tour today in Raleigh, N.C.

The GZA’s Chanukah oil alone, though, may not have gotten the bus past Delaware, and the miracle would have stopped there. But scores of people and about a dozen co-sponsoring organizations have donated to help make this bus tour, run by the Teva Learning Center, a reality.

“The whole idea is that the way that we perceive our actions and our treatment of the environment is all topsy turvy,” Teva educator Diane Litwin said from the road this morning. “We’re running workshops for a sustainable way to live tin the world.”

That includes building solar ovens out of used pizza boxes and teaching about waste through an on-bus worm-composting bin and the bus’s used cooking-oil fuel-processing unit. And, of course, Judaism plays a big role in their lessons.

“We’re using the Bereshit story as a platform to show that since the world was created, everything has its place and nothing is wasted,” said fellow busmate Elizabeth Cossin. “In the forest, it might look like all these trees have fallen to the ground — it might look like garbage — but you don’t see a garbage truck come and take away the trees. There’s a system built into the forest where the trees decompose.”

Do you want to learn more in person? Meet up with the Teva crew on their East Coast tour. Or, better yet, you can bring Litwin, Cossin, the four other amazing Teva educators, and the eye-catching Topsy Turvy Bus to your community by contacting Teva.

The first two Jewish environmental bus tours, under the auspices of the Jewish Climate Change Campaign, were in 2009 and 2010, but the Topsy Turvy Bus actually has a long history of social activism. Designed by Stefan Sagmeister and assembled by a Massachusetts company at the behest of Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry’s, the Topsy Turvy Bus originally wasn’t topsy turvy, but it still stood out. A yellow double-decker school bus, in June 2002 it began its first cross-country mission in Vermont in the service of TrueMajority, the liberal-advocacy nonprofit Cohen founded in the beginning of his post-ice cream years. The double-decker bus called for the doubling of federal education spending. As part of a contingent of funny-looking vehicles in the TrueMajority fleet, though, the bus was overshadowed by its pink piggy bank-shaped cousins in its first cross-country adventure.

In 2007, the late California art-car maker Tom Kennedy and a team of Bay Area-based Burning Man artists, commissioned by Cohen and inspired by Sagmeister, combined the bus with another school bus to create its current topsy-turvy form, representing the topsy-turvy nature of the U.S. military budget and U.S. spending on education, health care and the environment. The idea was that their respective spending ratios should be flipped. Helmed by Kennedy and his wife, political performance-artist Haideen Anderson, the bus returned to the road alone, pigless, as the star of a pre-election cross-country trip from California back to Vermont.

As the presidential political primaries got rolling, the Topsy Turvy Bus hit the campaign trail, joined once again by the pig cars as well as a carnival car, an OreoMobile, and a car that carried large pie charts of the federal budget. The bus traveled cross country under the flag of Priorities Campaign, a project of the Cohen-led Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities, which in turn has since become part of the Center for American Progress.

The next year, food-justice activists Daniel Bowman Simon and Casey Gustowarow acquired the bus and drove it cross country for TheWhoFarm (The White House Organic Farm Project), advocating that an organic garden should be planted at the White House. After their successful campaign, they donated the bus to the Teva Learning Center, which has been using it as a mobile Jewish environmental-education classroom ever since.

After all these years, the Topsy Turvy Bus is needed now more than ever: Why is that collectively we have no problem spending trillions of dollars on entertainment, but the idea of a carbon tax gives us fits? Why is it that the big solar-energy facilities in places as far-flung as California and Spain are being built by Israeli companies but that Israel itself continues to be powered by coal? And why do we continue destroying our environment when we depend upon it for our very existence? It’s a topsy-turvy world indeed. Thankfully, Teva’s Topsy Turvy crew is back on the streets, doing what it can to turn this world back right side up.

Cross-posted from GreenZionism.org

NEW YORK (Feb. 4, 2011) — This month, the Knesset will make one of the most important votes in its history. After all, it’s not every day that a country has the opportunity to revolutionize life for its people. Of course, it’s not every day that a country discovers more than $300 billion in the ground. But after finding some of the largest natural-gas deposits in the world just off of its coast, that’s the situation in which Israel finds itself. The Tamar and Leviathan gas fields can change life for every Israeli.

Currently, Israeli law requires that only 30 to 33 percent of the profits from selling natural resources goes to the state. But tax incentives often lower that amount. For example, 6.7-billion-NIS firm Delek Energy Systems, one of the primary companies primed to exploit Israel’s natural-gas fields in the Mediterranean, didn’t pay any taxes in 2009.

Most countries in the world take larger percentages of profits from their natural resources than Israel does. The United States takes 41 to 49 percent; Brazil collects 57 to 62 percent; Russia takes about 70 percent; and Norway collects at least 75 percent. Worldwide, governments take an average of 53 percent.

Today, Israel's rate is the second-lowest in the world — only Ireland’s is lower. But that’s going to change: In the next two years Israel’s percentage is scheduled to decline another one percent, becoming the smallest government take of any country in the world. Now that Israel has discovered enough natural gas to not just meet its own needs but to become an exporter, it’s time to rethink the percentages.

Investors are salivating over the billions in potential profits. Noble Energy, Delek’s American partner with a 40 percent stake in the fields, is worth about $15 billion — and as chaos erupted in Egypt, its stock jumped by about $8 a share as investors speculated that a new Egyptian government would cut off Israel's largest current source of natural gas, which would enable Noble to charge higher prices, making the offshore natural-gas fields all that much more valuable.

“Money should be invested to make Israel the kind of place that we want it to be,” Rabbi Michael Melchior said recently in New York. “We can’t afford to give it away.”

A former Knesset minister, Melchior is leading the Israel Civic Action Forum, a grassroots Israeli organization dedicated to pressuring the government to mandate that 80 percent of natural-gas profits go to the state. Critics say that forcing companies to limit their profit margins to 20 percent will leave Israel without companies willing to develop the natural-gas fields. But Melchior dismisses those concerns as over-protective of industry.

“No one is going to run away from that type of profit,” said Melchior. “No one is going to run anywhere, and if they are, then someone else will fill that spot.”

Melchior and the Israel Civic Action Forum want Israel’s natural-gas profits to fund a permanent endowment for the state. That fund, in turn, would support environmental protection, education, healthcare, public transportation and care for the elderly, among other issues that would improve the quality of life for Israelis.

Thanks to the efforts of the Israel Civic Action Forum, the Israel Union for Environmental Defense (Adam Teva V'din) and other environmental organizations in Israel, the publicity surrounding the state’s percentage led the government to establish a committee to investigate the best course of action. Chaired by Eytan Sheshinski, a professor of public finance at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, what became known as the Sheshinski Committee suggested raising the government take to 50 to 62 percent, a proposal endorsed by the Bank of Israel, the International Monetary Fund and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that the money should be used to fund security and public education. That’s not as far reaching as Melchior envisioned, but it’s certainly much better than the status quo.

Last week the Israeli cabinet voted 21-5 to approve the Sheshinski Committee recommendations, with the five “no” votes all coming from the free-market, ultra-nationalist, Avigdor Lieberman-led party Yisrael Beiteinu, which blames the paradoxically named “socialist elite” for bringing the whole issue to the public’s attention.

Predictably, Delek, Noble and other energy companies with stakes in the fields have lobbied strongly against any raising of the government take. Others are so bothered by the thought of the Israeli people getting a larger piece of the pie that they have threatened to kill Sheshinski.

The important thing to keep in mind is that the natural gas doesn’t belong to the companies — it belongs to the Israeli people. And the question is whether or not Israel will seize the opportunity to ensure better lives for all of its citizens, or if it will let that opportunity pass by. The Knesset will decide sometime this month.

Cross-posted from GreenZionism.org

We can only aspire to help the environment as much as trees do. So perhaps one of the most important things we can do is to assist the trees in doing their amazing work.

Plant them, protect them, and remember God's environmentalists as you enjoy their fruits on this Tu B'Shvat, and every day. You can even try embracing them. You don't need to like granola to hug a tree — everyone can be a treehugger.

Last month's fire in Israel, the largest in the history of the modern state, burned more than five million trees. While it will take years before the trees' seeds repopulate Israel's northern forests, you can help speed the process by planting new trees through organizations such as KKL/JNF, and by supporting the efforts of organizations that work to protect trees in their environment in Israel, such as the Green Zionist Alliance and the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel.

You also can help protect some of the most important forests in the world — rainforests — through the Rainforest Action Network. In the United States, you can plant trees through American Forests, one of the nation's oldest tree-conservation organizations. Or, better yet, plant one in your own backyard. Plant two. Heck, plant a grove around your house. Trees are natural air conditioners, and their shade on a home's windows and walls can help cut summer cooling bills by up to 50 percent.

Today, on Tu B'Shvat, keep in mind all that trees do for us — and all we need to do for them. This holiday isn't just the birthday for trees — it's a celebration of God's ultimate environmentalists.

Cross-posted from GreenZionism.org

In Israel, that means that we need to work with Christians and Muslims, both within Israel and in Israel’s neighboring lands as well, because nature knows no borders. The Green Zionist Alliance, for example, is a North America-based Jewish environmental organization that has embraced diversity: Its volunteers, speakers and interns have included Christians, Muslims and Hindus. At the Green Zionist Alliance, anyone who wants to help green Israel and the Middle East is welcome.

Two Green Zionist Alliance sister organizations also aim to green the region through peaceful cooperation between peoples of different backgrounds and faiths. The Arava Institute for Environmental Studies is perhaps the best place in the world to learn about the environment alongside Israelis, Jordanians and Palestinians. The accredited school offers master’s degrees as well as the opportunity to study for a semester or a year as an undergraduate or graduate student.

And EcoPeace / Friends of the Earth — Middle East brings together Jews, Christians and Muslims in the region to work toward protecting the region’s shared environment and, in particular, its shared watersheds.

Here in North America, GreenFaith helps communities of all religions work both independently and together to better serve as stewards of the environment that we collectively believe God has placed in our care.

All four organizations have found that the way to a greener, more peaceful future is through cooperation with the greater community.

So what can you do to engage the world community? You can support the efforts of the Green Zionist Alliance, Arava Institute, Friends of the Earth and GreenFaith. And you also can follow the example of the Greenpoint Shul — Congregation Ahavas Israel, an Orthodox synagogue in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

With help from leaders of the Green Zionist Alliance, this past summer the Greenpoint Shul transformed its dilapidated, weed-thicketed backyard into a thriving, interfaith, organic community garden, tended to by volunteers from the synagogue, the local mosque and a local church. All of the garden’s harvest is donated to the neighborhood soup kitchen, run by the church. And from the thaw in spring until the first frost, Jews, Muslims and Christians grow food for the hungry, getting together in the synagogue’s backyard to work in the garden. It’s a beautiful thing.

And it’s a model that could be replicated in every Jewish community across the country. Greenpoint Shul is putting the green in Greenpoint — you can put the green in your town. By working together with others, we can achieve a greener future.

Cross-posted from GreenZionism.org

The Maccabees did it with a miracle; we can do it through small changes.

The Green Zionist Alliance is working to conserve Israel’s energy through transitioning buildings to energy-efficient lighting and agency fleets to fuel-efficient vehicles while installing energy-generating solar panels on rooftops and constructing bike trails. You can do some of these things too — and you needn’t stop there. Carpool, bike, walk or take public transit instead of driving alone. Throw on a sweater instead of turning up the heat. Turn off the lights when you’re not in the room. Buy locally grown food instead of food shipped in from across the country or around the world. Unplug appliances when you’re not using them. Turn off the TV altogether and read a book instead. These are all small, doable changes that can add up to one big change.

On the first Chanukah, the Maccabees cut their energy usage by nearly 90%. This Chanukah, can you meet the Maccabees’ challenge?

Cross-posted from GreenZionism.org

Organizers of the conferences didn’t provide recycling or composting containers. Instead, the two meetings produced a massive amount of non-biodegradable plastic trash.

Every single meal was served on plastic with individually wrapped plastic flatware. Boxed lunches came with plastic water bottles. The community-service component of the GA had us cleaning up the refuse that’s still hanging around from Katrina’s wrath five years ago, but in the process we also created a whole mess of trash for New Orleans’ landfills.

The past World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem wasn’t any better. But at least that’s going to change: Thanks to resolutions passed by the Green Zionist Alliance, the next Congress will be carbon neutral, with both the carbon generated from the Congress itself as well as from delegate transportation to it offset through carbon-mitigating projects in Israel. Waste will be reduced, recycled and composted. Delegates will travel within the city using sustainable modes of transport. At least half of the food served at the Congress will come from organic, local farms that pay their employees fair wages. And the amount of meat served at the Congress will be reduced, with any meat that is consumed coming from animals raised and slaughtered according to both kosher as well as humane and ethical standards.

The good news for the ILOJC and General Assembly is that there are lots of opportunities for improvement. And with the Green Zionist Alliance resolutions in hand, we already have the blueprint for moving forward. As I told those who attended the only environmental session at the ILOJC, next year’s ILOJC and GA in Denver can and should follow sustainable environmental practices. We need to make the “G” in GA stand for “Green.” I and my fellow speakers on the ILOJC environmental panel are ready to help make that a reality. Together, we will be doing our best to ensure that next year’s GA in Denver will be the first Green Assembly.

Cross-posted from GreenZionism.org