You meet the most interesting people in the Jewish World offices. Two recent visitors were from the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies (AIES), which is located on Kibbutz Ketura, about 35 miles north of Eilat.
In addition to being a leading environmental and research program in the Middle East, the Arava Institute brings together Israelis, Palestinians and Jordanians in a spirit of international and interreligious cooperation.
David Lehrer, the Arava Institute director, visited the AJW offices, under the auspices of the Jewish National Fund (JNF), which funds Arava Institute projects. He was accompanied by Tareq Abu Hamed, Ph.D., director of Arava’s Center for Renewable Energy and Energy Conservation. Abu Hamed is an Arab Israeli from Sur Baher, an Arab neighborhood in East Jerusalem; he and his wife and their three children live on Kibbutz Ketura.
In case you missed that last sentence: Abu Hamed, a Muslim environmental scientist, lives among Jews on a kibbutz. Before taking his job at Arava, Abu Hamed studied for two years, from 2006-2008, at the University of Minnesota.
Sitting in on the interview were Sonya Jacobs, a JNF campaign executive based in the Chicago area; and Karen Cohen, a past president of JNF’s Women’s Division who lives in Cincinnati.
In addition to the Jewish and Israeli angles to a story about the Arava Institute, it is appropriate to reflect on the message from Arava in light of the holiday of Sukkot, which begins at sundown on Friday. The central tradition of Sukkot, dwelling in a sukka, reminds us of the journey of the Israelites in the wilderness; also, the sukka, a rude structure with a semi-thatched roof through which stars are visible, imparts a lesson on the transitory nature of life.
In these times when the world is bound together with an overwhelming amount of information flowing on digital streams, we know that the industrial onslaught has degraded the quality of life on the planet. In plain terms, there are too many people on the planet generating too much garbage. The present course of human society is not sustainable; we are entering a period of cataclysmic climate change, in which animal species are disappearing, and rising ocean waters will inundate many populated areas.
Asked about the reality of global climate change, David Lehrer mentioned that the Arava Institute has been doing research in desert regions, where the impact of global warming impact can be determined — even though these desert areas are hot most of the time.
“We’ve done some studies that show that the amount of rainfall in the Arava region, even though there was very little rainfall in the first place, has dropped in the past 40 years by 50 percent,” Lehrer points out, adding that “40 years is a long time to look at a weather system.”
In the United States, the global warming debate has been skewed by ideological currents; perhaps, some folks don’t like Al Gore and relish the chance to tarnish his reputation.
However, Lehrer commented, “I don’t think that there is any serious scientist today that doesn’t believe that global warming is a fact, it exists.” He allowed that the precise effects of industrial society on climate change may never be known with certainty; but we are making a “major” impact on the ecosystem, “in terms of carbon-loading into the atmosphere.”
At some point in our discussion, Tareq Abu Hamed, who has been involved in “all kinds of renewable energy” research at Arava, laconically remarked that the global warming problem “will solve itself,” because the world is running out of oil, coal and natural gas. Over the next century these nonrenewable energy resources will be gone. The world is “very, very, very late” in addressing future energy needs, he said.
Abu Hamed and Lehrer described a number of innovative projects underway in Israel to conserve energy — for example, new buildings that require no air conditioning, such as Arava’s new administration building, which is funded by JNF’s Sapphire Society — and to develop the next generation of renewable energy resources.
As mentioned before, the Arava Institute is doing this work while building bonds “across religious and national borders,” in Lehrer’s words. The 500 graduates of the Arava Institute’s academic programs reach around the globe and comprise a community of dedicated environmental activists.
If we are to survive on Spaceship Earth — and celebrate Sukkot over coming generations — we will have to quickly devise new ways to live that preserve our fragile environment. By many accounts, the recent Group of 20 (popularly known as the G-20) summit conference in Pittsburgh failed to take decisive action on the climate change crisis.
“Time is not just pressing. It has almost run out,” Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, told attendees at a meeting in Bangkok, Thailand, that was preparing for the Copenhagen summit in December, which will discuss a new international deal to supersede the Kyoto protocols on reducing greenhouse emissions.
— Mordecai Specktor / editor@ajwnews.com
