Sewage Quiz and nowhere to go “…with clear waters and action packed beaches, each one of Tel Aviv’s 16 beaches has its own style and attracts certain personalities.” Israeli Ministry of Tourism website “But you cannot have clean water if people are still defecating in the river.” The visionary […]
Yearly Archives: 2018
52 posts
Last updated 10.15.2018 Toxic Streams and disappearing groundwater “…and Elijah brought them down to the brook Kishon, and slew them there.” Kings 18. Kishon: If Elijah was around today he might just tell the Israelites to kill the 450 Ba’al prophets by tossing them into the Kishon. Visualize a waterway […]
Last updated 10.18.2018 “It was not as if there was a Palestinian people in Palestine and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.” Former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. ““The mountainsides were cut in terraces, many of them but a […]
Recognition 9: The ‘Toxic Tsunami’ and Other Disasters Petroleum contamination: Chronic leaks and spills in Israel “… we discovered a layer of gasoline near a gas station in the Tel Aviv area that was four meters (13 feet) deep in the ground water.” Barach Weber, Tel Aviv District Director, Environmental […]
Behind a curtain of wine, war, and industrial tourism, Israel is losing a pyrrhic population race with the more fertile Arabs. “We say to the Jews, to our brothers and sisters, Israel is your home and that of every Jew. Israel is waiting for you with open arms.” Benjamin Netanyahu, […]
Last updated 10.17.2018 Holy Water: Old West meets Middle East “Thou shall inherit the holy earth as a faithful steward, conserving its resources and productivity from generation to generation. Thou shall safeguard the fields from soil erosion, thy living waters from drying up, thy forests from desolation.” American ‘Father of […]
Recognition 12: Israel is a cautionary tale Last updated October 31, 2018 “There are no unsacred places; There are only sacred places and desecrated places .” Wendell Berry, from his poem, ‘How to be a poet (to remind myself).’ Israel is a fine example of what trouble humans can get […]
First thing: Where are you going to put it? A pile of rounds and chunks that you’ll be splitting later always takes longer to knock down than you think it will. It’s convenient to drop the wood as close as possible to where you’ll eventually stack it but it’s more […]
Between the mid-1980s and 2012 it was my avocation, and good fortune, to spend ten days to two weeks in early winter watching marine mammals from shore. For most of those years it was just me with enough field equipment to max out the series of progressively larger float planes […]
On my way down the hall to shave the wife asked if I was going to shave. To maintain balance of power in the castle, shaving at that point was out of the question, so I said, “Well honey, I think I might just grow out the beard and be […]
Deep last winter just as it was getting dark, with the woodstove keeping the place at seventy degrees and supper nearly ready, the doorbell rang. On the porch was a rugged fiftyish man who said, “I see you burn wood. I’m selling cords of wood and wonder if you’d be […]
November 19th is World Toilet Day and toilets are on the move. The World Toilet Summit is in Melbourne, Australia this year but from Rwanda inmates to billionaire Bill Gates, humanity everywhere is opening a more enlightened dialog about what happens after we take a dump. When the United Nations […]