Field Study: Interdisciplinary Course
This account of one Interdisciplinary course field study trip is by Dr. Eric Pallant.
Dr. Eric Pallant was selected by USIEF as the recipient of a 2001/2002 Fulbright faculty grant to spend 1/ 2 a year at the Arava Institute. Eric Pallant has been a professor of Environmental Science at Allegheny College since 1987 and was Chair of the department from 1989 to1998. During that time the department expanded rapidly: today nearly 15% of Allegheny students major in Environmental Studies or Environmental Science and approximately 40% of all students take at least one environmental science course. Pallant has been instrumental in creating a department whose success is based on excellent teaching and inventive approaches to hands-on education. His research, in collaboration with other college faculty, involves the prerequisites and techniques necessary to promote sustainability in the French Creek watershed. Hence Pallant's research site and the department's field station is 1,200 square miles and includes 250,000 people and their ecosystem. Allegheny students are integral to this effort to research, study, and promote sustainability. He has published several articles on educational innovation, has served as a consultant to the President's Council on Sustainable Development, and has assisted colleges and universities establishing new environmental programs. He has been the Director of the Center for Economic and Environmental Development since its inception in 1997.
Coastal Trip – Day one
March 3, 2002
We walked from our house across the kibbutz to the student housing to meet the bus at 5:00 A.M. We smelled fish frying in the houses used by Thai field workers. Young men from Thailand do most of the agricultural work in Israel. Kibbutz Ketura is no exception. It is less expensive to hire guest workers than to labor in the fields themselves. Thais live by themselves and eat by themselves. We’ve seen them returning from the fields in a trailer pulled by a tractor at 6:00 P.M. Now we know they are eating breakfast by 5:00 A.M. in order to begin their workday by sunrise.
Our goal was to arrive at the Nir Am Water Museum by 8:00 A.M., the first stop on a tour of water use in the southern half of Israel. The museum is one mile east of the Gaza strip and four miles from Gaza City. It is located inside a cement water cistern that once held 1000 cubic meters of water. There is a small window on the ceiling for looking down on the water inside. Around the walls of the cylinder are historical photographs of the first Jewish settlements in the Negev desert, including kibbutz Nir Am. There are also several repaired holes in the ceiling. Egyptian forces sent thousands of bombs in 1948 in its attempt to countermand Israel’s declaration of independence and about six of them hit the cistern. The real museum, however, was not the container but Mr. Nissan Tzuri.
Mr. Tzuri immigrated to Israel in January, 1943. He helped settle Kibbutz Nir Am and defended the birth of the country during the war for Independence. At 86 he is a living history exhibit. For an hour he held us spellbound describing the challenges of settling a land with no water in territory that was not a country but a British mandate. The Negev is a very harsh physical environment with blazing summer heat in excess of 115 degrees. Moreover, the British occupiers of Palestine during the 1940s worked very hard to make it legally inhospitable for Jewish settlers, too. The British were allied with the Arabs against the Germans during World War II and they knew too well that Jews were trying to settle within the British pretectorate.
As a Zionist Mr. Tzuri had to learn to farm, how to drill for water, to construct pipelines, and to build houses. Part of the Zionist dream has always been to demonstrate that Jews could farm and that Jews are capable of performing demanding physical work. After centuries of enforced ghettoization and Euro-Russian prohibitions on land ownership by Jews, Zionists wanted a new Jewish persona. A tough Jew. An athletic Jew. A farmer. A landowner. And after World War II, a fighter.
Mr. Tzuri told us what happened after he and his kibbutz friends finally succeeded in supplementing their meager supply of groundwater with water from the coastal aquifer in the north. In a single night Palestinian Jews (Israel was not created yet) produced eleven kibbutzim in the Negev. There was nothing the British could do. In 24 hours, 1,100 people were suddenly living and farming in the desert, occupying territory the British were trying to keep for their Arab allies. Bursting with pride, Mr. Tzuri, a revolutionary war soldier, cried out, “We brought carrots from the Negev to Tel Aviv!â€
After an hour in the cistern we walked over to a small, polyethylene-lined reservoir of treated sewage water. Israel has long been proud of its ability to recycle and reuse more than 70 percent of its water. Nearly every drop that comes from a faucet to wash a pair of hands also nourishes a vegetable somewhere else in the country. This pond was no exception. Waterfowl dabbled on its surface, but we could just about hear the water evaporating above the black plastic liner and beneath the Negev sun. This water was destined for neighboring wheat fields, but evaporation was going to make it saltier before it got there.
Our third stop was the Nitzanim sand dunes between Ashqelon (Israel’s first large city on the Mediterranean north of Gaza) and Ashdod (one of Israel’s fastest growing metropolises.) There are still sand dunes here because they are situated between the two municipalities. Battles over development rights have prevented either side from removing them for construction and now the area is protected by the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI) and the Jewish National Fund (JNF). The sand dune habitat used to cover most of Israel’s Mediterranean coast. Nitzanim Park is heavily used by school groups, four wheel drive trucks, bulldozers mining sand for cement, and by flocks of goats. There are thick groves of eucalyptus trees introduced by the British; they have spread like a bad cold creating dense woody thickets that have displaced native plants.
Everywhere the students from the Arava Institute get off a bus they begin picking up trash. They carry plastic garbage bags, filling one with empty plastic bottles (mostly bottled water and juices) for recycling (which just started this year in Israel) and the rest they fill with candy wrappers, food packaging, bottle lids, newspapers, metal cans, glass jars, apple cores, grapefruit peels, and rags. No one touches the bountiful supply of toilet paper and tissues. In the desert most things mummify instead of decompose. In Israel, it’s only the depth of trash that varies. Sometimes it’s a scattering. Usually during an hour’s walk we can fill six trash bags and still the contribution to the environment is more moral than it is visual. Nitzanim was no exception and the surest marker of the quantity of trash was the population of brown headed crows hop-skipping across the dunes in pairs. Crows are scavengers on humanity. According to our guide the population of crows inside the park is 400% above the normal carrying capacity.
On the brighter side the white broom was in full bloom. The largest broom bushes in the country are growing in Nitzanim. Large meadows were smothered with the sweetly scented white blossoms. Beekeepers had brought their hives to the park and the sound of honey being made was everywhere.
Beneath Nitzanim’s sands lie Israel’s coastal aquifer. It extends 130 kilometers from Mt. Carmel in the north into Gaza and down in to Sinai. About one-third of Israel’s population, two million people, and a major portion of its industry and agriculture lives above the aquifer. A million people in Gaza city is surviving on six gallons of water per person per day drawn from the aquifer, three-fourths of what the World Health Organization (WHO) sets as its minimum per capita consumption standard. WHO also says only 7% of Gaza’s water is of acceptable quality for human use.
Having all those people living on top of abolished sand dunes means every industrial, agricultural, or domestic spill can reach the aquifer from the surface with little or no hindrance. The sand is completely porous. In different spots the coastal aquifer contains microbial pollutants, salts, nitrates, heavy metals, fuels, and toxic organic compounds. In other locations over-pumping has allowed the Mediterranean Sea to rush into the aquifer through the sands beneath the cities and farms. Water distributed to wheat, citrus, fruits, nuts, and vegetables can never be applied with 100% efficiency, even by Israelis. Some water inevitably evaporates under the Israeli sun. The rest returns to the aquifer, but its concentration of chlorides has increased, because salts cannot evaporate, but remain dissolved in the percolating water. In the last 20 years, chloride concentrations in the coastal aquifer have increased fifty percent. In ten more years one-fifth of the coastal wells could be too salty to use for irrigation. Another one-fifth of Israel’s coastal wells are threatened with closure by industrial and agricultural contaminants.
We had lunch under tall eucalypts at the Nitzanim sand dunes and then traveled north to Shafdan, Israel’s largest sewage treatment facility. Domestic water for two million Israelis is pumped into the plants multiple treatment tanks. In just 15 hours the water is mostly clean. For many years the treated water was released into the substrate over the coastal aquifer. The sand filtered the water which arrived at the groundwater table clean enough to be reused for irrigation, where unfortunately it increases in salinity before percolating into the aquifer a second time. As Israel’s metropolitan population has increased and more towns and cities have been added to the network of pipes arriving at Shafdan the water recharge rate has exceeded the percolation rate. Pores in the sand have clogged with algae. Consequently six million cubic meters a year of treated sewage water from the plant is dumped into the Mediterranean. Israelis call it a waste of usable water. Also dumped into the Mediterranean, several miles offshore, is all of Shafdan’s sludge, the dead bacteria used to decompose the sewage waste. Because the dead bacteria acts as fertilizer in the sea, and because Israel has signed an international agreement to discontinue at-sea dumping, Israel must find a new location for millions of tons, thousands of truckloads, of sludge each year.
At 5:00 P.M. we dropped our bags at Kibbutz Har El, located in the foothills below Jerusalem and above the coastal plain. There’s one major road from Tel Aviv up to Jerusalem. In 1948 the Arabs laid siege to Jerusalem and swarmed down on Israeli trucks struggling up the road to supply the city. Truck carcasses are still littering the highway today as a memorial to the battle to liberate the city. Jerusalemites were on the verge of starvation until a successful battle to circumvent the Arab ambushes was won by Israelis at Har El.
At 6:00 P.M. we were at Newe Shalom where all of the contradictions that are modern day Israel seemed to coalesce. The full name of the settlement is Newe Shalom/Wahat Al-Salam, meaning Oasis of Peace in Hebrew and Arabic. It may be the only place in the world where Jews, Arab Christians, and Palestinian Muslims live side by side.
The most remarkable thing about the village is not its bilingual (Hebrew, Arabic), binational (Palestinian, Israeli) elementary school, nor its internationally recognized School for Peace. The most remarkable thing is that there’s nothing remarkable about the community. We spent an hour and a half before dinner with a woman who creates and facilitates interfaith programming for the School for Peace, and an hour and a half after dinner with a Palestinian schoolteacher. When they complained it was not about not religious conflict, but about not having enough time in their lives. The newcomers felt the old-timers didn’t show enough willingness to try new social events. The parents of older kids were too busy with their jobs and attending night school to get advanced degrees to be concerned with the intifada. Parents of young kids felt like they spent all their free time taking their kids to play dates. They had to be prodded with questions from us before they mentioned whether the playmates were co-religionists or foreigners. Their kids chose friends and dates on the basis of who was in their grade, not on the basis of religion. The Palestinians said she didn’t get to see her parents enough because she lived too far away.
The culmination of our day occurred during our introduction to Newe Shalom. We were led to the Building of Peace along the Path of Silence. It’s a gravel path down a short hill to a promontory overlooking a 100-year-old Trappist Monastery and Israel’s museum of tank warfare. Midway along the path are three tall cedars, perhaps representing the three great monotheistic religions. The middle tree is growing in the center of the path requiring pedestrians to pass between two of them. We had started today’s touring inside a cement cylinder that defined Israel’s past. A water container with a window on top and holes blown into it by Egyptian bombs. We finished the day in complete silence inside a cement hemisphere used for silent prayer. People of all religions or no religion are invited to contemplate peace. There were large rectangular windows all about us to let in light and to guide our view toward the forested hillside.
After a bit we wandered outside where it was not quite dark and yet neither was it daytime any longer. Jupiter and Orion were just beginning to burn in the grey-blue sky. Dogs barked in the houses. Owls hooted in the forest. Beyond the valley Israelis rushed home from work, their red taillights streaming toward Tel Aviv, their headlamps cutting through the growing darkness of the valley on their way up to Jerusalem. The rumble of trucks and whining of autos provided counterpoint to the soprano songs of frogs calling from vernal pools in the forest. As we sat in complete silence outside the House of Peace used by Muslims, Jews, and Christians at Newe Shalom, the worst violence in Israel’s current war was crackling around the country. In response to Israel’s invasions of Balata and Jenin a suicide bomber was counterattacking a Bar Mitzvah in Jerusalem. In a separate incident an unseen sniper killed ten Israeli soldiers with a single-shot rifle left over from the 1948 war. Twenty-one Israelis died that night. The Pliedes constellation appeared over the Newe Shalom’s hemisphere of Peace. The darkness of night was enveloping Israel’s future.
Coastal Trip – Day two, Yarqon River
March 4, 2002
We left Har El at 6:00 A.M. and drove down to the banks of the Yarqon River where we rented bicycles. The Yarqon was once Israel’s second largest river, only the Jordan is larger. The flow in the Yarqon used to be 220 million cubic meters per year, enough to fill 25 cisterns, like the one we sat in at Kibbutz Nir Am, every hour. And that is more or less what has happened. The headwaters of the Yarqon were the Rosh Ha’Ayin Springs (Main Springs in Hebrew). The springs flowed out of a geologic fault underlying the Judean and Samarian mountains. After the river boiled to the surface from 2,000 separate springs, it tumbled into the plains east of Tel Aviv and then took its time meandering west toward the Mediterranean. The Yarqon was once alive with coots, ospreys and kingfishers. A fish called the Yarqon bleak swam in its waters. In the marshier areas on the coastal plain there were wetland reeds, raspberries, spiked loosestrife, Egyptian cowpea, yellow water lilies and blue water lilies. Israelis have pumped the Yarqon dry.
Today so much groundwater has been extracted for farmers and city dwellers that the water table is now 20 feet below the base of the dried up Rosh Ha’Ayin springs. Only one percent of the Yarqon’s original flow trickles by at the bottom of the streambed, and all of that water is treated sewage effluent from two Tel Aviv suburbs. The Yarqon is an open sewer conduit.
Peddling downstream from the agricultural outskirts of Tel Aviv toward the city we traveled past rows and rows of factory backsides, then behind shopping malls and across Route 4, one of Tel Aviv’s major arteries. We rode past citrus groves where Palestinian laborers were hoping to find a day’s salary in exchange for picking grapefruits. Everywhere the river is invisible to the urbanites that live near it and travel over it. Trash in the stream and along both shores was deep and the quality of the bicycles made hauling loaded plastic bags impractical. The track we rode along was deeply rutted by four-wheel drive enthusiasts who must have been getting their money’s worth grinding up the banks above the stream. The river was first green and silty and then as we approached the city it was just turbid.
We emerged into the city where the river crosses between two large stadiums used to host the Israeli Maccabbee games. More than 50 years ago Israel began sponsoring the games to show the world, and themselves, that Jews were out of the ghetto. Jews could be competitive athletes. By the late 1990s the Maccabbee games were second in size to the Olympics. During the competitions, one huge stadium north of the Yarqon holds the athletes. Another, south of the river, holds the spectators. During the opening ceremonies as each country is introduced, their contingent parades over a small footbridge spanning the river. Bright uniforms shine in the Tel Aviv sunshine. Colorful flags fly in the wind.
In July 1997 the Australian team (first to be introduced) mounted the bridge, beginning the procession of teams toward the expectant spectators. The bridge collapsed beneath them and they fell into the Yarqon. The river isn’t deep enough to drown in, nor wide enough to prevent a non-swimmer from struggling to its shores. Still, four athletes died after swallowing and aspirating some of the Yarqon’s water. A toxic syrup of industrial effluents and exceedingly virile bacteria destroyed their lungs and infected their brains. An Australian 14-year-old, an internationally ranked tennis player, survived to finish high school, but only after 40 cranial operations. We leaned against our bicycles for a moment of silence in front of an improvised memorial to the Australian athletes.
The last two and a half miles of the river spans a tidal estuary. Unlike the rest of the river, it is full to the banks. There’s also some flushing action performed by the Mediterranean making this stretch of the river cleaner, so the city of Tel Aviv has built a beautiful park using the river as its centerpiece. There are paved trails for biking, strolling, and roller blading. It was a perfect location to sprawl beneath tall shady trees and watch Israelis jog, walk their dogs, and push strollers through the greenery. We munched on dried fruit and peanuts while we listened to David Pergament, Director of the Yarqon River Association (YRA).
The YRA is a coalition of government agencies (13 municipalities) and several national ministries charged with rehabilitating the river. It’s going to be a while. David Pergament is optimistic that he’ll be able to increase the quality and quantity of sewage flowing through the old channel. He knows it is an uphill battle to get all those mayors, city managers, and farmers to let him have more sewage effluent put in at the top of the river, rather than sell it directly for irrigation water. He’ll only succeed by promising to extract all the water again ten miles downstream so he can pump it all back upstream to be used on farms outside the city. It will cost a lot of money, but maybe someday there will be frogs in the Yarqon again. In the meanwhile the Israeli economy is in dire straights and so is the river.
After lunch we returned our bicycles, took our bus to the southern part of downtown Tel Aviv and met with Shimon Tal, Israel’s water commissioner. Still dressed for mountain biking we picked our way across the downtown street traffic and took the elevator to the fourth floor of his steel and glass office building. We cleaned out his offering of coffee and cookies and then piled around his burnished oblong table that ran the full length of his meeting room.
Here’s how he opened. “Israel is in a very, very deep crisis, the most severe crisis Israel has ever known.†Then he proceeded to make it clear that it isn’t the Palestinian Intifada. There are three main sources of water in Israel. There is the coastal aquifer we visited yesterday, so overdrawn the Mediterranean is filling it in. There is the mountain aquifer that used to fill the Yarqon and there is the Sea of Galilee. Both the Galilee and the mountain aquifer, according to Tal, are below the red line. They have been overdrawn to the point of creating irreversible damage, but no one knows how much. Already this year water for agriculture has been cut 50% and Tal told us he was returning to the Knesset next week to ask for further cuts. Israel’s promises to deliver water to the Palestinians and Jordan may not be possible either.
In order to refill Israel’s aquifers to 60% of capacity, Israel must return two billion cubic meters of water per year to its underground reserves. To do it the country is planning to construct between five and ten enormous desalination plants on the Mediterranean. Desalination plants are very expensive to build and require huge inputs of energy to turn sea water or used, salty irrigation water into exploitable water. It requires nearly a quart of fuel to manufacture one cubic meter of water, making a desalination plant a modern day alchemy factory. Crude oil comes in one side and drinking water leaves the other. All the brine removed from the water will be dumped back into the Mediterranean by pipeline.
When Tal was pressured by the students about profligate water consumption practices of Israelis, he conceded. “You are right,†he said despairingly. “Israelis do use water like New Zealanders. We’re not doing as much as we need to. But there is enough pressure from other things,†he said nodding toward the streets. And everyone knew what he was referring to.
We were bused to the north of Tel Aviv through mid afternoon traffic. On the side of the road a Jumbotron television screen kept us entertained. Beneath the first world images of Coke and IBM computers, plastic trash bags piled up along the curb. We toured a trade show of water saving gizmos for farmers and businesses, but a trade show is a trade show in any language and we didn’t spend much time indoors. The best part was the booth where Isaac and Leah purchased freshly cooked, Frisbee-sized crepes coated with nutella chocolate spread.
Then we crossed town heading south to the old city of Jaffa, the oldest port in the world. Before dinner we climbed a bluff over the Mediterranean. Two of the Arava Institute students led us all in a meditation session. Sea breezes were blowing onshore. Muzzeins called Arabs from their old stone houses to evening prayers. We stretched toward the sky. We creaked and our joints cracked. We even closed our eyes and said “Om!†with Hebrew accents. Trash swirled around us in the wind. Piles of tires and steel intercepted the blowing bags, toilet paper, and empty bottles until we closed our eyes and made it all disappear. When we opened them it was dark.
The class went off to fish dinner by the sea and a Tel Aviv pub (the kind that should be avoided for security reasons) for some nightlife. We joined our friends Mira and Mordechai for dinner and tea in Gan Yavne. We met up at Har El late in the evening.
Coastal Trip – Day 3, The Dead Sea and the Dying
Tuesday, March 5, 2002
I am still having difficulty reconciling the tranquility of the last two days with the tide of violence rising around us. While we were biking we watched coots, red shanks, Syrian woodpeckers, and parrots dabbling and flying by the edge of the Yarqon River. The aroma of orange blossoms permeated the atmosphere and the sun was neither too strong, nor too hot as it filtered through the trees. And yet while we played on our bicycles, Israeli soldiers killed an unarmed boy at a checkpoint. His mother screamed at reporters in perfect un-accented Hebrew, “What did you do? He’s just a boy! What did he ever do to you?†The soldiers know they are targets, symbols to the Palestinians of an exceptional system of lockdown. The soldiers at the checkpoints are scared. They are boys themselves, many of them.
And in the evening while the students danced in one Tel Aviv pub after their dinner in Jaffa, a suicide bomber was blowing up another one across town. By the end of yesterday more than twenty from each side were waiting to be buried. Israelis we are traveling with seem unable to listen to the devastating news reported live on TV and radio and at the same time incapable of turning it off. Their jaws are perpetually clenched.
For the second day in a row we departed Har El at 6:00 A.M., this time to cross through Jerusalem before rush hour. We traveled to Ein Gedi south of Palestinian controlled Jericho. We were taken inside the fenced-off area posted in English and Hebrew, “Danger: Pot Holes!†The Dead Sea is dropping one meter per year because too much water is being withdrawn from the Jordan River and mountain aquifer that feeds it and for Israeli and Jordanian industries. As the level of the Dead Sea has dropped, so too has the level of ground water.
Ground water immediately around the sea used to be so salty that excess salts precipitated within the soil cementing together particles in the earth. When it rains these days fresh water percolates down from the surface dissolving the salts that used to hold the soil together. No one seems able to predict where or when, but without warning, a cylinder the diameter of a tractor-trailer and 10-20 feet deep can open in the ground. The temptation to walk to the edge to see the bottom was huge, but our guide did not relish fishing us out without any ability to bring in a car or heavy lifting devices for fear the ground could not support them. We walked past a dozen holes, but our guide remained very strict about keeping us back from the rims.
We passed an hour in front of the Ein Gedi water bottling company. The company insisted it was not harming the environment by taking water from the Ein Gedi oasis. The students were equally adamant that they were damaging one of the most pristine springs in the desert. The same arguments could probably be made about the environmental impact of any water bottling factory.
The bus traveled south to the Dead Sea Works. By company policy the Dead Sea Works does not admit kids under 18 for any reason, and I’d already seen the show in January (see “Letter from Israel†January 28, 2002, The Dead Sea), so Sue went with the students of the Arava Institute while Leah, Isaac, and I stayed at the Ein Bokek bus stop/public beach and went for a swim. The water is crystal clear since only a few specialized bacteria can survive in its waters and there is no sand to be stirred up from the bottom. Walking into the water we could see solution currents created by our knees. The Dead Sea is a large, super-saturated chemical solution. The bottom is composed of large deposits of crystallized salts, the color of faded chino jeans. It looks like mud or porridge that has boiled on an immense stove and then frozen in time.
Swimming in the Dead Sea is not pleasant. It burns mightily eyes, nose, ears, and mouth, but these are easy enough to keep above the water. It also set fire to some unthinkable body parts hidden beneath our bathing suits. After growing accustomed to the discomfort, we discovered that in the Dead Sea we could walk in from the shore and keep on walking even after the water was over our heads. We remained suspended upright by the solution with the water only lapping at our chests. On our backs we could read a book and keep it dry. On our stomachs our legs were so buoyant it was impossible to sink them in the water to return to a stand. We had to roll to our backs first. Isaac even figured out how to float like a genie out of a bottle with his legs crossed and his arms folded on his chest and above the water line.
While we were resting on our backs in the Dead Sea five Israeli fighter jets screamed north toward the West Bank. With the recent news fresh in our minds it was easy enough to picture where they were headed and what their intentions were. After a bit we were joined by a busload of elderly Russians who obviously were incapable of swimming in real water. They splashed and paddled awkwardly on the surface and mostly stayed in the shallows. When we were done we took fresh water, open air showers on the beach. Together with the Russian grandparents we put our hands into our bathing suits to remove the last of the salt.
The discussion between the PR representatives at the Dead Sea Works and the Arava Institute students took longer than expected, so it wasn’t until 4:00 P.M that they returned and we took. a short hike up wadi Ein Bokek. In the canyon we encountered what must have been an entire junior high school, several hundred exuberant school kids scrambling down the rocks, through the water, and over top of each other.
The delay in returning from the Dead Sea Works meant we didn’t have lunch until 6:00 P.M. As the sun was setting across the sea, we spread salads and sandwiches on picnic benches by the shore. Isaac joined a bunch of students for his second float of the day. He swam in his clothes because his swimsuit was locked on the bus. When he emerged from the sea, his nylon pants were transparent. He was a big hit among the university women. We got home at 8:00 P.M. and checked the Internet for recent news. The international media called the previous three days the worst Palestinian-Israeli violence since the War of Independence in 1948. We called it a interesting view of Israel.
Dr. Eric Pallant was selected by USIEF as the recipient of a 2001/2002 Fulbright faculty grant to spend 1/ 2 a year at the Arava Institute. Eric Pallant has been a professor of Environmental Science at Allegheny College since 1987 and was Chair of the department from 1989 to1998. During that time the department expanded rapidly: today nearly 15% of Allegheny students major in Environmental Studies or Environmental Science and approximately 40% of all students take at least one environmental science course. Pallant has been instrumental in creating a department whose success is based on excellent teaching and inventive approaches to hands-on education. His research, in collaboration with other college faculty, involves the prerequisites and techniques necessary to promote sustainability in the French Creek watershed. Hence Pallant's research site and the department's field station is 1,200 square miles and includes 250,000 people and their ecosystem. Allegheny students are integral to this effort to research, study, and promote sustainability. He has published several articles on educational innovation, has served as a consultant to the President's Council on Sustainable Development, and has assisted colleges and universities establishing new environmental programs. He has been the Director of the Center for Economic and Environmental Development since its inception in 1997.
Coastal Trip – Day one
March 3, 2002
We walked from our house across the kibbutz to the student housing to meet the bus at 5:00 A.M. We smelled fish frying in the houses used by Thai field workers. Young men from Thailand do most of the agricultural work in Israel. Kibbutz Ketura is no exception. It is less expensive to hire guest workers than to labor in the fields themselves. Thais live by themselves and eat by themselves. We’ve seen them returning from the fields in a trailer pulled by a tractor at 6:00 P.M. Now we know they are eating breakfast by 5:00 A.M. in order to begin their workday by sunrise.
Our goal was to arrive at the Nir Am Water Museum by 8:00 A.M., the first stop on a tour of water use in the southern half of Israel. The museum is one mile east of the Gaza strip and four miles from Gaza City. It is located inside a cement water cistern that once held 1000 cubic meters of water. There is a small window on the ceiling for looking down on the water inside. Around the walls of the cylinder are historical photographs of the first Jewish settlements in the Negev desert, including kibbutz Nir Am. There are also several repaired holes in the ceiling. Egyptian forces sent thousands of bombs in 1948 in its attempt to countermand Israel’s declaration of independence and about six of them hit the cistern. The real museum, however, was not the container but Mr. Nissan Tzuri.
Mr. Tzuri immigrated to Israel in January, 1943. He helped settle Kibbutz Nir Am and defended the birth of the country during the war for Independence. At 86 he is a living history exhibit. For an hour he held us spellbound describing the challenges of settling a land with no water in territory that was not a country but a British mandate. The Negev is a very harsh physical environment with blazing summer heat in excess of 115 degrees. Moreover, the British occupiers of Palestine during the 1940s worked very hard to make it legally inhospitable for Jewish settlers, too. The British were allied with the Arabs against the Germans during World War II and they knew too well that Jews were trying to settle within the British pretectorate.
As a Zionist Mr. Tzuri had to learn to farm, how to drill for water, to construct pipelines, and to build houses. Part of the Zionist dream has always been to demonstrate that Jews could farm and that Jews are capable of performing demanding physical work. After centuries of enforced ghettoization and Euro-Russian prohibitions on land ownership by Jews, Zionists wanted a new Jewish persona. A tough Jew. An athletic Jew. A farmer. A landowner. And after World War II, a fighter.
Mr. Tzuri told us what happened after he and his kibbutz friends finally succeeded in supplementing their meager supply of groundwater with water from the coastal aquifer in the north. In a single night Palestinian Jews (Israel was not created yet) produced eleven kibbutzim in the Negev. There was nothing the British could do. In 24 hours, 1,100 people were suddenly living and farming in the desert, occupying territory the British were trying to keep for their Arab allies. Bursting with pride, Mr. Tzuri, a revolutionary war soldier, cried out, “We brought carrots from the Negev to Tel Aviv!â€
After an hour in the cistern we walked over to a small, polyethylene-lined reservoir of treated sewage water. Israel has long been proud of its ability to recycle and reuse more than 70 percent of its water. Nearly every drop that comes from a faucet to wash a pair of hands also nourishes a vegetable somewhere else in the country. This pond was no exception. Waterfowl dabbled on its surface, but we could just about hear the water evaporating above the black plastic liner and beneath the Negev sun. This water was destined for neighboring wheat fields, but evaporation was going to make it saltier before it got there.
Our third stop was the Nitzanim sand dunes between Ashqelon (Israel’s first large city on the Mediterranean north of Gaza) and Ashdod (one of Israel’s fastest growing metropolises.) There are still sand dunes here because they are situated between the two municipalities. Battles over development rights have prevented either side from removing them for construction and now the area is protected by the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI) and the Jewish National Fund (JNF). The sand dune habitat used to cover most of Israel’s Mediterranean coast. Nitzanim Park is heavily used by school groups, four wheel drive trucks, bulldozers mining sand for cement, and by flocks of goats. There are thick groves of eucalyptus trees introduced by the British; they have spread like a bad cold creating dense woody thickets that have displaced native plants.
Everywhere the students from the Arava Institute get off a bus they begin picking up trash. They carry plastic garbage bags, filling one with empty plastic bottles (mostly bottled water and juices) for recycling (which just started this year in Israel) and the rest they fill with candy wrappers, food packaging, bottle lids, newspapers, metal cans, glass jars, apple cores, grapefruit peels, and rags. No one touches the bountiful supply of toilet paper and tissues. In the desert most things mummify instead of decompose. In Israel, it’s only the depth of trash that varies. Sometimes it’s a scattering. Usually during an hour’s walk we can fill six trash bags and still the contribution to the environment is more moral than it is visual. Nitzanim was no exception and the surest marker of the quantity of trash was the population of brown headed crows hop-skipping across the dunes in pairs. Crows are scavengers on humanity. According to our guide the population of crows inside the park is 400% above the normal carrying capacity.
On the brighter side the white broom was in full bloom. The largest broom bushes in the country are growing in Nitzanim. Large meadows were smothered with the sweetly scented white blossoms. Beekeepers had brought their hives to the park and the sound of honey being made was everywhere.
Beneath Nitzanim’s sands lie Israel’s coastal aquifer. It extends 130 kilometers from Mt. Carmel in the north into Gaza and down in to Sinai. About one-third of Israel’s population, two million people, and a major portion of its industry and agriculture lives above the aquifer. A million people in Gaza city is surviving on six gallons of water per person per day drawn from the aquifer, three-fourths of what the World Health Organization (WHO) sets as its minimum per capita consumption standard. WHO also says only 7% of Gaza’s water is of acceptable quality for human use.
Having all those people living on top of abolished sand dunes means every industrial, agricultural, or domestic spill can reach the aquifer from the surface with little or no hindrance. The sand is completely porous. In different spots the coastal aquifer contains microbial pollutants, salts, nitrates, heavy metals, fuels, and toxic organic compounds. In other locations over-pumping has allowed the Mediterranean Sea to rush into the aquifer through the sands beneath the cities and farms. Water distributed to wheat, citrus, fruits, nuts, and vegetables can never be applied with 100% efficiency, even by Israelis. Some water inevitably evaporates under the Israeli sun. The rest returns to the aquifer, but its concentration of chlorides has increased, because salts cannot evaporate, but remain dissolved in the percolating water. In the last 20 years, chloride concentrations in the coastal aquifer have increased fifty percent. In ten more years one-fifth of the coastal wells could be too salty to use for irrigation. Another one-fifth of Israel’s coastal wells are threatened with closure by industrial and agricultural contaminants.
We had lunch under tall eucalypts at the Nitzanim sand dunes and then traveled north to Shafdan, Israel’s largest sewage treatment facility. Domestic water for two million Israelis is pumped into the plants multiple treatment tanks. In just 15 hours the water is mostly clean. For many years the treated water was released into the substrate over the coastal aquifer. The sand filtered the water which arrived at the groundwater table clean enough to be reused for irrigation, where unfortunately it increases in salinity before percolating into the aquifer a second time. As Israel’s metropolitan population has increased and more towns and cities have been added to the network of pipes arriving at Shafdan the water recharge rate has exceeded the percolation rate. Pores in the sand have clogged with algae. Consequently six million cubic meters a year of treated sewage water from the plant is dumped into the Mediterranean. Israelis call it a waste of usable water. Also dumped into the Mediterranean, several miles offshore, is all of Shafdan’s sludge, the dead bacteria used to decompose the sewage waste. Because the dead bacteria acts as fertilizer in the sea, and because Israel has signed an international agreement to discontinue at-sea dumping, Israel must find a new location for millions of tons, thousands of truckloads, of sludge each year.
At 5:00 P.M. we dropped our bags at Kibbutz Har El, located in the foothills below Jerusalem and above the coastal plain. There’s one major road from Tel Aviv up to Jerusalem. In 1948 the Arabs laid siege to Jerusalem and swarmed down on Israeli trucks struggling up the road to supply the city. Truck carcasses are still littering the highway today as a memorial to the battle to liberate the city. Jerusalemites were on the verge of starvation until a successful battle to circumvent the Arab ambushes was won by Israelis at Har El.
At 6:00 P.M. we were at Newe Shalom where all of the contradictions that are modern day Israel seemed to coalesce. The full name of the settlement is Newe Shalom/Wahat Al-Salam, meaning Oasis of Peace in Hebrew and Arabic. It may be the only place in the world where Jews, Arab Christians, and Palestinian Muslims live side by side.
The most remarkable thing about the village is not its bilingual (Hebrew, Arabic), binational (Palestinian, Israeli) elementary school, nor its internationally recognized School for Peace. The most remarkable thing is that there’s nothing remarkable about the community. We spent an hour and a half before dinner with a woman who creates and facilitates interfaith programming for the School for Peace, and an hour and a half after dinner with a Palestinian schoolteacher. When they complained it was not about not religious conflict, but about not having enough time in their lives. The newcomers felt the old-timers didn’t show enough willingness to try new social events. The parents of older kids were too busy with their jobs and attending night school to get advanced degrees to be concerned with the intifada. Parents of young kids felt like they spent all their free time taking their kids to play dates. They had to be prodded with questions from us before they mentioned whether the playmates were co-religionists or foreigners. Their kids chose friends and dates on the basis of who was in their grade, not on the basis of religion. The Palestinians said she didn’t get to see her parents enough because she lived too far away.
The culmination of our day occurred during our introduction to Newe Shalom. We were led to the Building of Peace along the Path of Silence. It’s a gravel path down a short hill to a promontory overlooking a 100-year-old Trappist Monastery and Israel’s museum of tank warfare. Midway along the path are three tall cedars, perhaps representing the three great monotheistic religions. The middle tree is growing in the center of the path requiring pedestrians to pass between two of them. We had started today’s touring inside a cement cylinder that defined Israel’s past. A water container with a window on top and holes blown into it by Egyptian bombs. We finished the day in complete silence inside a cement hemisphere used for silent prayer. People of all religions or no religion are invited to contemplate peace. There were large rectangular windows all about us to let in light and to guide our view toward the forested hillside.
After a bit we wandered outside where it was not quite dark and yet neither was it daytime any longer. Jupiter and Orion were just beginning to burn in the grey-blue sky. Dogs barked in the houses. Owls hooted in the forest. Beyond the valley Israelis rushed home from work, their red taillights streaming toward Tel Aviv, their headlamps cutting through the growing darkness of the valley on their way up to Jerusalem. The rumble of trucks and whining of autos provided counterpoint to the soprano songs of frogs calling from vernal pools in the forest. As we sat in complete silence outside the House of Peace used by Muslims, Jews, and Christians at Newe Shalom, the worst violence in Israel’s current war was crackling around the country. In response to Israel’s invasions of Balata and Jenin a suicide bomber was counterattacking a Bar Mitzvah in Jerusalem. In a separate incident an unseen sniper killed ten Israeli soldiers with a single-shot rifle left over from the 1948 war. Twenty-one Israelis died that night. The Pliedes constellation appeared over the Newe Shalom’s hemisphere of Peace. The darkness of night was enveloping Israel’s future.
Coastal Trip – Day two, Yarqon River
March 4, 2002
We left Har El at 6:00 A.M. and drove down to the banks of the Yarqon River where we rented bicycles. The Yarqon was once Israel’s second largest river, only the Jordan is larger. The flow in the Yarqon used to be 220 million cubic meters per year, enough to fill 25 cisterns, like the one we sat in at Kibbutz Nir Am, every hour. And that is more or less what has happened. The headwaters of the Yarqon were the Rosh Ha’Ayin Springs (Main Springs in Hebrew). The springs flowed out of a geologic fault underlying the Judean and Samarian mountains. After the river boiled to the surface from 2,000 separate springs, it tumbled into the plains east of Tel Aviv and then took its time meandering west toward the Mediterranean. The Yarqon was once alive with coots, ospreys and kingfishers. A fish called the Yarqon bleak swam in its waters. In the marshier areas on the coastal plain there were wetland reeds, raspberries, spiked loosestrife, Egyptian cowpea, yellow water lilies and blue water lilies. Israelis have pumped the Yarqon dry.
Today so much groundwater has been extracted for farmers and city dwellers that the water table is now 20 feet below the base of the dried up Rosh Ha’Ayin springs. Only one percent of the Yarqon’s original flow trickles by at the bottom of the streambed, and all of that water is treated sewage effluent from two Tel Aviv suburbs. The Yarqon is an open sewer conduit.
Peddling downstream from the agricultural outskirts of Tel Aviv toward the city we traveled past rows and rows of factory backsides, then behind shopping malls and across Route 4, one of Tel Aviv’s major arteries. We rode past citrus groves where Palestinian laborers were hoping to find a day’s salary in exchange for picking grapefruits. Everywhere the river is invisible to the urbanites that live near it and travel over it. Trash in the stream and along both shores was deep and the quality of the bicycles made hauling loaded plastic bags impractical. The track we rode along was deeply rutted by four-wheel drive enthusiasts who must have been getting their money’s worth grinding up the banks above the stream. The river was first green and silty and then as we approached the city it was just turbid.
We emerged into the city where the river crosses between two large stadiums used to host the Israeli Maccabbee games. More than 50 years ago Israel began sponsoring the games to show the world, and themselves, that Jews were out of the ghetto. Jews could be competitive athletes. By the late 1990s the Maccabbee games were second in size to the Olympics. During the competitions, one huge stadium north of the Yarqon holds the athletes. Another, south of the river, holds the spectators. During the opening ceremonies as each country is introduced, their contingent parades over a small footbridge spanning the river. Bright uniforms shine in the Tel Aviv sunshine. Colorful flags fly in the wind.
In July 1997 the Australian team (first to be introduced) mounted the bridge, beginning the procession of teams toward the expectant spectators. The bridge collapsed beneath them and they fell into the Yarqon. The river isn’t deep enough to drown in, nor wide enough to prevent a non-swimmer from struggling to its shores. Still, four athletes died after swallowing and aspirating some of the Yarqon’s water. A toxic syrup of industrial effluents and exceedingly virile bacteria destroyed their lungs and infected their brains. An Australian 14-year-old, an internationally ranked tennis player, survived to finish high school, but only after 40 cranial operations. We leaned against our bicycles for a moment of silence in front of an improvised memorial to the Australian athletes.
The last two and a half miles of the river spans a tidal estuary. Unlike the rest of the river, it is full to the banks. There’s also some flushing action performed by the Mediterranean making this stretch of the river cleaner, so the city of Tel Aviv has built a beautiful park using the river as its centerpiece. There are paved trails for biking, strolling, and roller blading. It was a perfect location to sprawl beneath tall shady trees and watch Israelis jog, walk their dogs, and push strollers through the greenery. We munched on dried fruit and peanuts while we listened to David Pergament, Director of the Yarqon River Association (YRA).
The YRA is a coalition of government agencies (13 municipalities) and several national ministries charged with rehabilitating the river. It’s going to be a while. David Pergament is optimistic that he’ll be able to increase the quality and quantity of sewage flowing through the old channel. He knows it is an uphill battle to get all those mayors, city managers, and farmers to let him have more sewage effluent put in at the top of the river, rather than sell it directly for irrigation water. He’ll only succeed by promising to extract all the water again ten miles downstream so he can pump it all back upstream to be used on farms outside the city. It will cost a lot of money, but maybe someday there will be frogs in the Yarqon again. In the meanwhile the Israeli economy is in dire straights and so is the river.
After lunch we returned our bicycles, took our bus to the southern part of downtown Tel Aviv and met with Shimon Tal, Israel’s water commissioner. Still dressed for mountain biking we picked our way across the downtown street traffic and took the elevator to the fourth floor of his steel and glass office building. We cleaned out his offering of coffee and cookies and then piled around his burnished oblong table that ran the full length of his meeting room.
Here’s how he opened. “Israel is in a very, very deep crisis, the most severe crisis Israel has ever known.†Then he proceeded to make it clear that it isn’t the Palestinian Intifada. There are three main sources of water in Israel. There is the coastal aquifer we visited yesterday, so overdrawn the Mediterranean is filling it in. There is the mountain aquifer that used to fill the Yarqon and there is the Sea of Galilee. Both the Galilee and the mountain aquifer, according to Tal, are below the red line. They have been overdrawn to the point of creating irreversible damage, but no one knows how much. Already this year water for agriculture has been cut 50% and Tal told us he was returning to the Knesset next week to ask for further cuts. Israel’s promises to deliver water to the Palestinians and Jordan may not be possible either.
In order to refill Israel’s aquifers to 60% of capacity, Israel must return two billion cubic meters of water per year to its underground reserves. To do it the country is planning to construct between five and ten enormous desalination plants on the Mediterranean. Desalination plants are very expensive to build and require huge inputs of energy to turn sea water or used, salty irrigation water into exploitable water. It requires nearly a quart of fuel to manufacture one cubic meter of water, making a desalination plant a modern day alchemy factory. Crude oil comes in one side and drinking water leaves the other. All the brine removed from the water will be dumped back into the Mediterranean by pipeline.
When Tal was pressured by the students about profligate water consumption practices of Israelis, he conceded. “You are right,†he said despairingly. “Israelis do use water like New Zealanders. We’re not doing as much as we need to. But there is enough pressure from other things,†he said nodding toward the streets. And everyone knew what he was referring to.
We were bused to the north of Tel Aviv through mid afternoon traffic. On the side of the road a Jumbotron television screen kept us entertained. Beneath the first world images of Coke and IBM computers, plastic trash bags piled up along the curb. We toured a trade show of water saving gizmos for farmers and businesses, but a trade show is a trade show in any language and we didn’t spend much time indoors. The best part was the booth where Isaac and Leah purchased freshly cooked, Frisbee-sized crepes coated with nutella chocolate spread.
Then we crossed town heading south to the old city of Jaffa, the oldest port in the world. Before dinner we climbed a bluff over the Mediterranean. Two of the Arava Institute students led us all in a meditation session. Sea breezes were blowing onshore. Muzzeins called Arabs from their old stone houses to evening prayers. We stretched toward the sky. We creaked and our joints cracked. We even closed our eyes and said “Om!†with Hebrew accents. Trash swirled around us in the wind. Piles of tires and steel intercepted the blowing bags, toilet paper, and empty bottles until we closed our eyes and made it all disappear. When we opened them it was dark.
The class went off to fish dinner by the sea and a Tel Aviv pub (the kind that should be avoided for security reasons) for some nightlife. We joined our friends Mira and Mordechai for dinner and tea in Gan Yavne. We met up at Har El late in the evening.
Coastal Trip – Day 3, The Dead Sea and the Dying
Tuesday, March 5, 2002
I am still having difficulty reconciling the tranquility of the last two days with the tide of violence rising around us. While we were biking we watched coots, red shanks, Syrian woodpeckers, and parrots dabbling and flying by the edge of the Yarqon River. The aroma of orange blossoms permeated the atmosphere and the sun was neither too strong, nor too hot as it filtered through the trees. And yet while we played on our bicycles, Israeli soldiers killed an unarmed boy at a checkpoint. His mother screamed at reporters in perfect un-accented Hebrew, “What did you do? He’s just a boy! What did he ever do to you?†The soldiers know they are targets, symbols to the Palestinians of an exceptional system of lockdown. The soldiers at the checkpoints are scared. They are boys themselves, many of them.
And in the evening while the students danced in one Tel Aviv pub after their dinner in Jaffa, a suicide bomber was blowing up another one across town. By the end of yesterday more than twenty from each side were waiting to be buried. Israelis we are traveling with seem unable to listen to the devastating news reported live on TV and radio and at the same time incapable of turning it off. Their jaws are perpetually clenched.
For the second day in a row we departed Har El at 6:00 A.M., this time to cross through Jerusalem before rush hour. We traveled to Ein Gedi south of Palestinian controlled Jericho. We were taken inside the fenced-off area posted in English and Hebrew, “Danger: Pot Holes!†The Dead Sea is dropping one meter per year because too much water is being withdrawn from the Jordan River and mountain aquifer that feeds it and for Israeli and Jordanian industries. As the level of the Dead Sea has dropped, so too has the level of ground water.
Ground water immediately around the sea used to be so salty that excess salts precipitated within the soil cementing together particles in the earth. When it rains these days fresh water percolates down from the surface dissolving the salts that used to hold the soil together. No one seems able to predict where or when, but without warning, a cylinder the diameter of a tractor-trailer and 10-20 feet deep can open in the ground. The temptation to walk to the edge to see the bottom was huge, but our guide did not relish fishing us out without any ability to bring in a car or heavy lifting devices for fear the ground could not support them. We walked past a dozen holes, but our guide remained very strict about keeping us back from the rims.
We passed an hour in front of the Ein Gedi water bottling company. The company insisted it was not harming the environment by taking water from the Ein Gedi oasis. The students were equally adamant that they were damaging one of the most pristine springs in the desert. The same arguments could probably be made about the environmental impact of any water bottling factory.
The bus traveled south to the Dead Sea Works. By company policy the Dead Sea Works does not admit kids under 18 for any reason, and I’d already seen the show in January (see “Letter from Israel†January 28, 2002, The Dead Sea), so Sue went with the students of the Arava Institute while Leah, Isaac, and I stayed at the Ein Bokek bus stop/public beach and went for a swim. The water is crystal clear since only a few specialized bacteria can survive in its waters and there is no sand to be stirred up from the bottom. Walking into the water we could see solution currents created by our knees. The Dead Sea is a large, super-saturated chemical solution. The bottom is composed of large deposits of crystallized salts, the color of faded chino jeans. It looks like mud or porridge that has boiled on an immense stove and then frozen in time.
Swimming in the Dead Sea is not pleasant. It burns mightily eyes, nose, ears, and mouth, but these are easy enough to keep above the water. It also set fire to some unthinkable body parts hidden beneath our bathing suits. After growing accustomed to the discomfort, we discovered that in the Dead Sea we could walk in from the shore and keep on walking even after the water was over our heads. We remained suspended upright by the solution with the water only lapping at our chests. On our backs we could read a book and keep it dry. On our stomachs our legs were so buoyant it was impossible to sink them in the water to return to a stand. We had to roll to our backs first. Isaac even figured out how to float like a genie out of a bottle with his legs crossed and his arms folded on his chest and above the water line.
While we were resting on our backs in the Dead Sea five Israeli fighter jets screamed north toward the West Bank. With the recent news fresh in our minds it was easy enough to picture where they were headed and what their intentions were. After a bit we were joined by a busload of elderly Russians who obviously were incapable of swimming in real water. They splashed and paddled awkwardly on the surface and mostly stayed in the shallows. When we were done we took fresh water, open air showers on the beach. Together with the Russian grandparents we put our hands into our bathing suits to remove the last of the salt.
The discussion between the PR representatives at the Dead Sea Works and the Arava Institute students took longer than expected, so it wasn’t until 4:00 P.M that they returned and we took. a short hike up wadi Ein Bokek. In the canyon we encountered what must have been an entire junior high school, several hundred exuberant school kids scrambling down the rocks, through the water, and over top of each other.
The delay in returning from the Dead Sea Works meant we didn’t have lunch until 6:00 P.M. As the sun was setting across the sea, we spread salads and sandwiches on picnic benches by the shore. Isaac joined a bunch of students for his second float of the day. He swam in his clothes because his swimsuit was locked on the bus. When he emerged from the sea, his nylon pants were transparent. He was a big hit among the university women. We got home at 8:00 P.M. and checked the Internet for recent news. The international media called the previous three days the worst Palestinian-Israeli violence since the War of Independence in 1948. We called it a interesting view of Israel.