The Greening of Israel
Environmentalism and Judaism go hand in hand. In Beresheit, we are commanded to till and tend, to serve and preserve creation. Our holidays are agriculturally based, our calendar is tied to the seasons, and our covenant with God is the promise of living in our land, eretz Yisrael. Nature is to be protected, even in wartime.
But today it is the land itself that needs our protection.
During 2,000 years of exile Jews never stopped looking eastward and longing to return home. The early pioneers who left eastern Europe for Palestine understood the Jewish people’s connection to the land. On kibbutzim and farms, they began to coax crops out of earth that had long been neglected and abused. But the need to provide safe haven for the displaced Jews of Europe and the Middle East took precedence over environmental concerns. Houses and roads and industry had to be built, agriculture had to feed hundreds of thousands of people streaming in. Israel’s founders understood this necessity. In 1944, David Ben-Gurion said, “The task that lies ahead will require pioneering efforts the likes of which we have never known, for we must fructify the waste places. Unless we conquer both the sea and the desert…we cannot succeed in the tasks of immigration and resettlement that we must shoulder after the war.”
Sixty years later, Israel, as one of the most densely populated and highly developed countries in the world, faces serious environmental issues. More than two thirds of its population is concentrated along the coastal strip in urban industrialized areas. Urban sprawl is eating away at forests, leaving fewer and fewer open spaces. Loss of habitat has caused the extinction or near extinction of many of the region’s plants and animals.
More than 1,000 people die from complications caused by air pollution in the Tel Aviv/Ashdod area each year, according to Noam Dolgin, an environmental educator and one of the founders of the Green Zionist Alliance. Israel discards more than 95 percent of what it produces. Although recycling is on the national agenda, it is still small scale. Most of the waste goes into landfills. Only seven landfills are still open, though; the rest are full.
Water quantity and quality are major problems. Israel’s water comes from coastal aquifers and is piped south from the Kinneret. Unfortunately, the water from the aquifers has been overused and no longer meets international water standards. Rivers, polluted with toxic industrial waste, cannot be used for drinking or recreation. Thanks to a severe drought, the Kinneret’s water level is shrinking and less water is flowing into the Dead Sea, which is drying up and affecting the surrounding areas. Though Israel already desalinates five to six percent of its water, this is not enough.
Israel generates electricity by burning imported coal, fuel oil, diesel oil, or natural gas, which all are highly polluting. Solar energy is used primarily to heat water and for passive space heating. While more sophisticated technology is being developed, largescale solar energy projects are not being implemented. Israel must develop sustainable energy to become energy independent.
Thankfully, the outlook is not entirely bleak. Around the country environmentalism is gaining ground, both in the government and on the grassroots level. For instance, the Heschel Center, founded in 1998 and named after Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, is dedicated to building a sustainable future for Israeli society through leadership development and education. The center fosters community-based environmental projects throughout Israel.
The Good Energy Initiative, one of the center’s projects, is working to replace inefficient lighting in homes and businesses with compact fluorescent lights, replace diesel power with renewable solar energy, use biodiesel fuel in school buses, form garbageseparating squads, and plant 1,000,000 trees in the Tel Aviv metropolitan area. The center also partners with the Karev Educational Initiative to grow a network of schools that embrace sustainability as part of their educational vision.
In 1998, 120 representatives of 25 nongovernment organizations convened in Jerusalem to share their experiences and expectations about the capital’s quality of life and its future. There was no comprehensive master plan for Jerusalem’s development. Its green spaces were being used for expansion. Most of the city’s middle class had moved to surrounding suburbs, leaving the city center to the poor. The environment became the unifying topic for a very divided city. As a result of the conference, the Sustainable Jerusalem Coalition was formed, with Naomi Tsur, director of the Jerusalem branch of the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel, as its driving force. “We had one common goal,” Ms. Tsur said. “We wanted to improve the condition of urban living in Jerusalem.”
The coalition, which has grown to 60 members, decided early on to be proactive rather than negative, according to Ms. Tsur. One of its biggest successes was saving the Gazelle Valley, a green area surrounded by development in which a herd of gazelles was trapped. Through the coalition’s efforts, the valley, which was slated for development, will become a nature preserve instead. The coalition was instrumental in getting plastic recycling bins put onto Jerusalem’s streets and is working on a green map that will show the city’s parks, ecological gardens, and green businesses.
Green Course, founded in 1996 under the auspices of the SPNI, is a student organization active on 26 campuses that focuses on raising environmental awareness, participating in national and local campaigns, greening college and university campuses, and promoting environmental education. Its first cause was the trans-Israel highway. The highway was built despite protests, but public awareness forced the government to restore the surrounding native vegetation.
“It is easy to shout about something but it is difficult to make people live a sustainable way of life,” Dr. Michal Gross of the Oranim Academic College of Education said. Green Course’s agenda is catching on with the public, according to Dr. Gross, who said that even President Shimon Perez is making his home green. Oranim College is committed to training teachers to educate about the environment.
In the southern Arava region of the Negev, environmentalism and sustainability are being lived and taught every day on Kibbutz Lotan, which made the commitment to go green about 10 years ago. Lotan, founded by young Americans in 1983, began to use natural predators to control pests and to compost in order to grow organic produce.
The kibbutz started the region’s first recycling program, with the help of the Ministry for the Environment. Committed to the three Rs – reduce, reuse, recycle – kibbutz members reduced their use of consumable materials and reused objects that most people think of as waste. After a few years, the kibbutz managed to reduce, reuse, or recycle 70 percent of its garbage. The sign on the entrance to the recycling center reads: “Giving our garbage a second chance.”
Lotan’s original concrete buildings were inefficient to cool and heat. The buildings are being refitted to use less energy and the kibbutz plans on using solar energy and windmills to get itself off the electrical grid, according to Mark Millstone Naveh, the head of the educational program for the kibbutz’s Center for Creative Ecology. The center’s many educational programs include the Green Apprenticeship, which is partnered with Gaia Education, a program of the Global Ecovillage Network. The Green Apprenticeship is an intense 10-week program where participants consider how to design, build and live in a sustainable community. The students bring back to their home communities practical ideas on how to implement sustainability and environmental ethics.
Because it is a Masai program of the Jewish Agency, Green Apprenticeship students receive credit from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.
Ben-Gurion University itself is committed to environmental issues with a program of solar energy research at its Sede Boqer campus and the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies at Kibbutz Ketura, a regional center for environmental leadership. Israelis, Jordanians, Palestinians, and North Americans study together to promote sustainable development on a regional and global scale.
The Conservative movement’s Marom will initiate the Program in Sustainable Development and Environmental Justice at Ben-Gurion next fall. The first of two independent semesters will be in the central Negev town of Yerucham and the second at the Arava Institute.
The state of their natural environment is becoming more and more important to Israelis, but Jews everywhere should be concerned. The Green Zionist Alliance, which partnered with Mercaz, the Zionist organization of the Conservative movement, in the last WZO election, is mobilizing a diaspora voice for Israel’s environment through its support of Israel’s environmental movements. Two GZA leaders now sit on the Jewish National Fund’s international board. And through this alliance with the Green Zionists, JNF now has become the environmental agency responsible for the stewardship of the land of Israel in perpetuity. All of us need to do our part to save God’s most precious gift to us, the land of Israel.
In February, Bonnie Riva Ras went to Israel on Tech and Teva, an environmental study trip under the auspices of SAJES, the Suffolk [County, New York] Association of Jewish Educational Services, and Oranim Academic College.
