A New Green Arabia

Most analysis points to economic failure, unemployment and corruption as the lead causes of the uprisings in the Arab world. Certainly, the frozen and oppressive political cultures have not delivered what people need, neither materially nor, equally importantly, psychologically in tems of dignity, autonomy and other key needs. 

However, there is mounting evidence that changes in the Arab world are also the result of a larger global process: climate change and the poor human response to the changes we are creacting on the planet. The Center for American Progress, the Stimson Centre, and the Center for Climate and Security have produced a collection of essays that demonstrate how climate change has disrupted the Arab world.

Climate change is causing fluctuations in food supplies and prices across the world, but the top nine wheat importers in the world are in the Middle East, and seven had political protests and violence in 2011. Furthermore, the Middle East is already one of the driest regions of the world, with considerable water security problems.  In terms of political culture and structure, the Arab world was and continues to be ineffectively set up to react to these very significant challenges. Indeed, the whole planet and all countries will have to manage and adapt to these human-created shifts. The Arab world may simply be the weak link in the chain in terms of both resources and political resilience and the ability to react successfully to these global challenges.

We have discussed before how our ¨old mind¨, with its simple and dramatic perceptions and built-in greeds, cannot perceive slower change or see the larger picture (Old World New Mind), such as how our behaviour affects the climate. We are all somehow victims of the world we ourselves have created, and the Arab world may simply be the worst victim of all.

Despair need not be the response to this realistic diagnosis. The report discussed here and others suggest constructive ways forward, including "greening" Arab economies (underway to some degree in some countries), adopting innovative technologies and aligning government policies with these critical steps. However, as we see every day, Arab politics, especially post-revolutions, are immersed in ideological or ethnic battles that suck up all the society´s resources in a massive distraction scheme from the necessary work of responding to these very real life challenges.

The Arab world and the Middle East can respond successfully to the water, food and resources needs of its populations and the inevitable pressures of climate change. This will demand, however, new kinds of thinking and paradigms: regional perspectives, cooperative rather than zero-sum game approaches, including between private and public sectors, and a considerable shift of understanding about human behaviour. One of the key paradigms that needs to be inculcated in this process of evolution is that human behaviour cannot be changed until it is better understood (see Human Givens and our posts on The Missing Piece).

If these steps are taken and greater awareness does occur, there is no reason why the future could not see a new "Green Arabia".

Al-Azraq Oasis

A unique and little known community that flies below the radar of most tourist itineraries can be found east of Amman, along Jordan’s desert highway to Baghdad. There’s not much on the surface to distinguish the oasis town of al-Azraq from the many other pit stops frequented by the region’s truckers. Some may even call the place uninspiring, or even ugly. But a few elements make the community stand out.

For thousands of years al-Azraq (meaning "the blue one") has been known for its large abundance of water. That rare Middle Eastern commodity, which long ago bubbled to the surface to form large pools, not only magnetized migratory birds travelling between Asia and Africa, but also whole communities of foreigners. Both Chechens from the Caucasus of Russia and Druze peoples from present-day Syria and Lebanon flocked to Azraq in the early 20th century to escape persecution and start new lives. They are communities that endure in al-Azraq to this day.

In recent decades, large-scale extraction of that water by the Jordanian government has unfortunately depleted those marshes. But the downsized pools, along with the water buffalo brought by the Chechens, can still be seen there. 

A few kilometers away there is a wildlife reserve housing exotic animals (including the Arabian Oryx). And an ancient stone castle whose foundations date back to Roman times, and which was used as a temporary base by T.E. Lawrence in his guerilla campaign against the Ottomans during World War One, is also open to the public. 

In all directions surrounding al-Azraq is a wide expanse of desert imbued with history, characters and points of interest that beckon the curious. 

You can read more here about Al-Azraq Oasis and Jordan’s seldom visited Eastern Desert.  

Wadi Tannourine

A few hours drive north of Beirut lies a collection rugged of valleys and gorges running down from Lebanon’s high alpine range. This spectacular region, known as Wadi Tannourine, is one of the many self-contained natural jewels buried deep within Lebanon’s fissured and labyrinthine mountain interior. Historical villages, pine and cedar forests, archaeological sites and wild animals all hold sway here. 

For those accustomed to the frenetic bustle and consumerist mode of life in Lebanon’s cities, Wadi Tannourine constitutes a kind of slap of face. Here a sweet Mediterranean calm swept by clean scented breezes routs the cacophony of horn-honking and the agenda-fueled activities of the urban areas further south. It’s also a place where intimations of the Middle East’s past and, perhaps, its distant restorative future also overlap.

The Blood of Adonis

Legend has it that a young man grew up in the city of Byblos, and became so handsome and prominent that he was called "Adon" (or "lord" in Canaanite) - an appellation the Greeks later hellenized into "Adonis".

Adonis was so loved by two goddesses that another god grew jealous, transformed himself into a wild boar, and gored the beloved young man to death. A river near Byblos was named Adonis after the legend (today it is called the Ibrahim River, see photo below). Its annual spring run-off is reddish which was interpreted as the very blood of Adonis coursing into the sea.

On February 15th of this year, another Lebanese river ran red into the sea - but the source was no legend or metaphor. The Lebanese Ministry of Environment found that a nearby factory had dumped a red dye into the Beirut River causing the frightening scene. That sad river was already deprived of its natural beauty by having its banks paved with concrete, and it has now suffered a second humiliation.

This event is a powerful and stark emblem of how badly things have gone wrong in Lebanon's environment. The flow of red dye may be a singular phenomenon, but Beirut's daily air pollution is three times the norms considered acceptable by the World Health Organization. The seashore cities, such as Sidon, Tyre and Tripoli, pour endless currents of raw sewage into the sea close to shore. The mountains around Beirut are paved with uncontrolled development that can only be described as a kind of urban cancer, and of civilization gone terribly wrong.

Lebanon is infamous for its civil war and troubled politics. In fact, the real threat to the country may be from environmental degradation - air, noise, water, sea, and ground pollution that is slowly but surely destroying the bodies and souls of its citizens. The red river of Beirut may be a dramatic warning, but who will heed it?

Behind these troubles is a more mysterious tale, and the legend of Adonis can enlighten us again. The boar that gored the young man is a symbol of the wild creature within us that thinks of naught but itself. It has uncontrolled appetites and is known variously as the ego, the beast within, or the "Commanding Self" - that knot of motivations created by a lifetime of greed and vanity. In the legend of Adonis, the wild self destroys the beauty that is within each human.

The factory that dumped the dye into the Beirut River, the developers who build randomly in the hills and the corrupt government officials who pocket money intended for building sewage plants suffer from the same uncontrolled appetites as the wild boar that destroys out of jealousy and self-interest. To be sure, some of this is due to the failure of the state in Lebanon, but even that is due to the rapacious motivations of its leaders and politicians.

The story of Adonis goes on to tell us that one of the goddesses who loved him begged the masters of the Underworld to let him "resurrect". And so he did, and was afterward permitted to live in the hills above Byblos (where this entry was written) in summer and spring, and to descend back to the Underworld for the other six months of the year. His drops of blood are also believed to have been transformed into the red anemone flower that carpets Lebanon's fields every spring.

For Lebanon to gain any such recovery, someone, if not many, will have to demonstrate some sincere love for their country, and for the welfare of their children, and rise beyond the narrow self-interest: the wild boar within.

Time is short. The Lebanese would do well to hear the clarion call of the red river.

The Ancient Olive Trees of Bechealeh

Lebanon is famous for its biblical cedars. But there are also ancient olive trees in the country that rival the cedars in age and beauty. They may or may not be as old as the Ministry of Tourism claims (4,000 B.C.), but nature's craftsmanship and the twists and turns of the wood over centuries is a metaphor for time itself.

This miniature grove of half a dozen trees is tucked away on a small road on the way to Douma in the northern Lebanese mountains. From there, one can climb to the valley of Tannourine, and further up towards the great cedars themselves. Unlike those emblematic trees, however, it's very easy to just drive by and miss the ancient olive grove of Bechealeh.

Mujib Nature Reserve

Overshadowed by the heavily trafficked tourist sites of Petra and Wadi Rum, is one of Jordan’s least known treasures. Ninety kilometers south of the capital Amman, off a main highway is Wadi Mujib – a massive riverine gash in the mountains running in an east-west direction to the Dead Sea.

Comprising numerous tributaries and located within the Mujib Nature Reserve, Wadi Mujib begins inland at around 900 metres and drops to more than 400 metres below sea level to reach the Dead Sea. The main wadi is fed by several seasonal and permanent streams and is a major source of H2O replenishing the ever-receding shores of the world’s lowest body of water.

Like its iconic cousins to the south, Wadi Rum and Petra, The Mujib Nature Reserve is breathtakingly beautiful, and exudes the same Biblical profundity and rock-hewn drama as the other sites. But there is an added feature here that the other venues lack: water and few people.

The area’s stark disposition (marked by canyons as narrow and as steep as the famous rock cleft that leads to the Treasury at Petra) is brilliantly juxtaposed by the life-giving rivers that run through it, creating an impression of a kind of secret paradise flowing with milk and honey. It is a safe-haven resonating with an almost sacred quality.

But it's not so much the wadi itself that is Mujib's real worth. Instead, it is what’s contained within it. The area’s relative remoteness and inaccessibility to humans has allowed a large biodiversity to thrive here – including both rare and endangered animals.

Mujib is an important home and way station for around 200 species of birds, many of them migratory. They include birds with such colorful names as the Black Stork, the Honey Buzzard, the Levant Sparrow Hawk, the Short-Toed Eagle and the Barbary Falcon.

Three hundred different species of plants grace the wadi’s walls and floors. Walking through the shallow, clear waters of its streams, one is surprised to find small schools of fish and even frogs.

And although they are not easily seen, Mujib is also home to jackals, wolves, mongoose, hyenas, Nubian ibex, and caracals (a medium sized cat with black and white ear tufts that can catch birds in mid-air). The animals’ continued survival here is owed, in part, to the special care given to the site.

The 212 square kilometer Mujib Nature Reserve was created in 1987 by Jordan’s Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature (RSCN). There are three main trails for hiking and canyoning and no more than 25 people are allowed on each trail per day. The dry trails are open year round. The wet ones, where you can sometimes wade up to your chest in fast-moving torrents of water, are open between 1 April and 31 October.

(These photos were taken on the Malaqi Trail, which follows part of the Mujib and Hidan Rivers).

Hasankeyf

Situated on the Tigris River in southeastern Turkey, the village of Hasankeyf may be the oldest continually settled town on earth. It is a painfully picturesque place embodying 10,000 years of history and clinging dramatically to limestone cliffs peppered with medieval Islamic monuments.

Anyone who visits Hasankeyf can’t help but be smitten by its ageless disposition – one that inspires an unconscious nostalgia for that pivotal moment when pre-history gave way to the earliest refinements of civilized life. If there’s any place where our ancestors decided to give up the countless millennia of wandering begun in Africa, in favor of something slightly more palatable, it is likely here.

Neither the area’s harsh climate nor the vicissitudes of empire (including the brutal 13th century onslaughts of the Mongol hordes), could dislodge this honey-toned Silk Route station, and its people, from the banks of the slow moving Tigris. Which is why it’s ironic that in an era of relative calm for the area, and after weathering all that Time could throw its way, Hasankeyf now finds itself a village waiting to die.

If all goes according to the plans of Turkish developers, Hasankeyf, and other towns like it will soon be underwater. Turkey’s long-running Ilisu Hydro-Electric Project, designed to dam the Tigris and which is now slated to be completed in 2013, will create a 300 square kilometer reservoir along the river’s basin running north from the dam.

That man-made reservoir will submerge Hasankeyf and drive away its Kurdish inhabitants - many of whom were once semi-nomadic, and who, until recently were eking out a modest but happy living from the region’s limestone caves (before being resettled by the government to newly built homes).

The Ilisu dam project has been in the works since the 1950s, but because of periodic political, economic and military upheavals, has continually gone into abeyance. Since the project's inception, Hasankeyf has been living on borrowed time, its imminent demise declared each time the project seemed to be near completion.

Proponents of the dam say it will give a new lease on life to a region which is moribund and poor. Power-generation, irrigation, jobs and aquatic tourism are just a few of the perks being cited by Turkey’s doyens of progress.

Others, who are just as married to their convictions say the dam will destroy Hasankeyf - an archaeological, cultural and human loss too valuable to calculate. They, the heritage activists, say that the town should instead be managed by archaeologists and historians whose work there, they claim, has hardly begun.

Caught in the middle of this tug of war are Hasankeyf’s inhabitants who are fed up from having to live in a kind of in-between zone, where the present is constantly being overshadowed by a future too imprecise to properly fathom. They say that living that uncertainty is much worse than having to face the town’s eventual fate – whether a flood of Biblical proportions, or years of archaeological excavations that will mean further relocations and the picking apart of a village already fragile and in some places, falling apart.

In the meantime, Hasankeyf’s inhabitants continue with their daily struggles, without a firm knowledge of when those changes will finally come, nor an idea of why others cannot accept the town, and their area, for what it simply is – and no more.

The Land Between The Rivers

For millenia, humans settled the land between the two rivers, the Euphrates and the Tigris, to grow their crops, raise their families, and build great cities. Indeed, the earliest human civilization came about there because of these grand rivers.

Today, due to a number of factors - mostly human - that water flow is in danger and the green Mesopotamian plain is threatened with becoming a desert. The European Water Association warns that the waters of these rivers could disappear by 2040. The amount of water in the Euphrates has already fallen by 75% over the past decade.

The waters of the Tigris and Euphrates originate in Turkey, and, to a lesser extent, Syria. Damming and increased water storage upstream are diminishing the water flow into Iraq. Other factors including drought due to climate change, population growth in Iraq, the absence of economic water pricing and a lack of erosion control in Iraq, are heavily exacerbating the situation.

The result is desertification, a reduction of land for grazing, and more severe sandstorms in Iraq as the earth is loosened, gathered up by the winds, and scattered.

Steps are being taken by the Iraqi government to address the matter. However, like many challenges in the Middle East and elsewhere, moving rapidly and with great efficacy is imperative if one of the cradles of civilization is not to exhaust itself.

A recent article in the New York Times describes this critical situation in more detail.

'Black Cloud' Over Cairo

The UN released a report earlier this week stating that a large number of urban areas in Asia and Africa today are blanketed by a toxic cloud of pollution caused by automobile and industrial emissions, slash-and-burn agriculture, coal burning and cooking fires.

The cloud, which varies in its intensity and area of coverage, has blotted-out the sun in certain places, altered weather patterns and negatively impacted the health of millions of people.

This is no news to Cairenes who, in addition to having to bear some of the worst air pollution in the world, have had to suffer the dreaded "black cloud" which for over ten years has descended upon the city for a number of weeks, every autumn.

This so-called "black cloud", a discernible spike in pollution, is attributed to Egyptian farmers in the Nile Delta region who practice the burning of rice straw after the harvest. Anyone who has travelled through the Delta at this time of year can attest to the large pillars of smoke that can be seen pluming upwards across the horizon from all directions. The smoke collects and then drifts towards the capital where meteorological conditions in autumn trap the pollution in the lower atmosphere.

Despite the undeniable contribution that rice straw burning makes to Cairo's severe pollution, the black cloud is much more than just a perennial agricultural phenomenon. Smog from traffic, industrial pollution, and the burning of garbage - another widespread practice in Egypt - make up the lion's share of that black cloud. It is a year-round condition, which only becomes more discernible and intolerable as autumn rolls around.

The good news is that some progress has been made in convincing farmers to stop burning rice straw. Delta farmers have begun selling their rice straw to factories that can turn it into animal feed or biofuels. As a result, the "black cloud days" - a seasonal tally of the worst daily spikes in pollution - have dropped in number over the last few years.

The not so encouraging news is that this effort, as laudable as it is, is only a tiny step in what has to be a more willful and comprehensive effort to reverse Cairo's air pollution.

Unless Egypt can get its worst polluting vehicles off the streets, clean up its industries, better manage its population, and instill a new awareness of the environment, the dreaded black cloud will never go away. Instead it will only thicken and expand, impacting the lives of countless millions of people for whom a breath of clean air has become an unimaginable luxury.

All text in this post copyright John Zada and John Bell 2008

Cedars

The Cedars of Lebanon stand solitary on a mountain top. What little remains of these majestic trees is a silent testament to the health, or lack of it, of Lebanon and the rest of the Middle East.

The Cedars are the most powerful symbol of Lebanon, with the Lebanese flag sporting an image of one of the remaining trees. They have lasted millennia. They stand witness to the dozens of armies that marched up and down the coast of Lebanon, to and from battle, and to the tenacity of Phoenicians, Canaanites and Maronites that conquered the mountains to harvest the Cedar wood.

They stand in the lore of the Middle East: in the wood of the Solar Boat buried beside the Great Pyramid of Giza, in the cedar chest that Osiris was sealed in to die, and in the boats that plied the Mediterranean in search of trade, plunder and treasure. Yet, what stands now is a small grove, some dozens of trees, where once there were mountainsides. The disappearance of the Cedars of Lebanon is due to deforestation and soil erosion - a classic tale of humans blindly using up their resources for short-term interest.

Some of the trees in the Cedar grove above the village of Bsharre are now also ill. They have a disease that requires their pruning and a diminishing of their majesty and longevity. The Cedars are a symbol of where the Middle East has come to: a state of disregard for nature, its resources, and above all for humans' place in the great play. The mountains above Beirut are now paved with concrete.

That city, despite flashes of architectural beauty, suffers from rampant grey construction, the fumes of diesel and automotive congestion, and a seaside littered with garbage. Cairo, Damascus, Alexandria all suffer the same fate. Demographics are a key driver of this unfortunate circumstance. Large populations blindly living out technological and industrial habits will mean pollution and concrete - a new kind of deforestation.

There are activists who are attempting to reclaim the Lebanese mountains. Their efforts are commendable and indeed one can see the dark saplings on the slopes of Jaj or the Chouf in the Lebanese mountains. However, their efforts must expand in scope and kind - it is not enough to replant hundreds of trees. Hundred of thousands must be sown, and this effort must also be reflected in the clean-up state of cities and politics.

The Cedars are today a symbol of past glory, but they are also a symbol of deadwood, reflecting the essential need for renewal. The road ahead for the Middle East, like any society, can only be in renewal. This can take place in projects of reforestation, or a clean-up of the environment, or in urban renewal - not just through words, but also through activities requiring human planning, devotion of time, money and in resources which are currently allocated to less productive activities: political infighting and corruption, ideological wishes, or a comforting sense of victimization.

The latter produce barren mountains and the bare remnants of a forest - an ailing grove whose majesty is fading fast. The former is an act that reflects the imperatives of nature: renew or die. Admission of this state of affairs may be harsh, and a sting to pride, but it is a rule of nature to renew for the sake of one's children - for survival.

This rule applies to people's relationship to their environment, as well as to their religion, politics and their relation with their neighbour. This rule stands not only for Arab societies but for the Arab-Israeli conflict as well. The most famous appointment of the woods of the Cedars of Lebanon was with Solomon's Temple.

The hard and scented cedar beams were the basis of that spiritual monument. The memory of that place, the Temple Mount, is now the symbol of the toughest conflict between peoples on this planet.

The wood of the Temple building has rotted away, but the spirit behind it - a relationship with the divine that means inclusion and not intolerance - must be now renewed, and renewed again - or the region will perish as the old wood has.

All text and photos in this post copyright 2008 John Zada and John Bell