Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?

by Alan Weisman

  The Jordan River is now a fetid ditch trickling from a lake whose very name evokes conflict, because it has three of them: Lake Kinneret to the Jews, Lake Tiberius to the Palestinians, the Sea of Galilee to Christians. Since it forms part of Israel’s international border with a country named for it, the Jordan’s riparian basin is a restricted military area, so Palestine has no access to it. Jordan gets a share, as does Syria, which controls some of its headwaters. (Others are in the Golan Heights, which Israel seized from Syria in 1967 and won’t give back. Israeli air attacks on Arab League projects to divert those waters helped spark the Six-Day War.)

  Today, all but 2 percent of the Jordan is already allotted by the time it leaves the lake. What dribbles to the Dead Sea is runoff from fields or fish farms, sour with pesticides, fertilizer, hormones, fish wastes, and untreated sewage. Pilgrims trying to bathe at the spot where tradition says Jesus was baptized and Joshua crossed into the Holy Land would contract a rash—or vomit, should they swallow some of the once-pure holy water.

  Over 90 percent of wastewater in the West Bank flows untreated into the environment. Until 2013, there was only one sanitary landfill, near Lake Kinneret-Tiberius; another finally opened for Bethlehem and Hebron. Most solid wastes, however, are burned or just left to blow into the desert. But it’s not just Palestinian waste.

  “Settlements discharge untreated wastewater freely onto Palestinian farmlands,” says Abeer. “Many have factories that don’t apply Israeli environmental laws.” Her field teams, traveling back roads after main routes were closed to Palestinians after the last intifada, try to track effluent from pesticide and fertilizer plants that moved to the West Bank after they were closed in Israel by court order.

  “All this flows into the aquifer that Israel drinks from, too. We argue that they’re poisoning themselves.” But Israel won’t issue the Palestinians permits to build more sewage treatment plants unless they agree to also treat sewage from Jewish settlements. “Which we won’t, because they’re illegal.” She fingers her pendant chain. “It’s a standoff.”

  It would also exhaust their beleaguered budget: a third of a million Jews now live in West Bank settlements. Then there’s the Gaza Strip—1.5 million people on a piece of land twenty-five miles long and four to seven miles deep, its population doubling every twelve to fifteen years. It’s suspected that Israel unilaterally withdrew in 2005 because its Coastal Aquifer is now so depleted that 90 percent of Gazan wells are pumping wastes from septic fields, or seawater. Although Israel’s National Water Carrier pipeline passes right by, delivering Lake Kinneret water to the southern Negev desert that it intends to develop next, the portion it sells to the Palestinians covers only 5 percent of Gaza’s needs.

  Two peoples, genetically nearly identical, by some accounts locked in enmity since Abraham-Ibrahim’s two jealous wives, Sarah and Hagar, bore, respectively, the Jews and the Arabs, fighting over a parched sliver of land—albeit one with an outsized influence on the world, historically, religiously, and politically.

  Yet by one more measure—ecologically—how much does their tiny sandbox on the edge of the sea, and their combined 12 million or so—barely 1/584th of humanity’s current population—mean in a world headed to 10 billion?

  Much more than that world realizes, believes Yossi Leshem. Unless, that is, you look up.

  iii. The Heavens

  The Third Question

  How much ecosystem is required to maintain human life? Or, what species or ecological processes are essential to our survival?

  Or, at what point does our overwhelming presence displace so many other species that eventually we push something off the planet that we didn’t realize our own existence depended on, until it’s too late? What can’t we absolutely live without?

  Yossi Leshem actually started by looking down, from a cliff in the Judean Mountains. He should have been in a Tel Aviv University ornithology lab, correlating the lengths of warbler bills to their diets for his master’s degree in biology. Instead, desperate to be out in nature, he had volunteered to help another scientist observe long-legged buzzards. The first time he rappelled his burly body down to their nest to band three buzzard chicks, he was hooked on raptors.

  He switched from warblers to studying Bonelli’s eagle, a large Afro-Asian–southern European bird of prey. In Israel, at least seventy pairs had been recorded, but by 1982, only sixteen remained. Leshem decided to find out why, and to see if anything could save them. It didn’t take long to find the cause.

  In the 1960s, Israel had released fifty thousand strychnine-laced chickens to quell a rabies outbreak blamed on a surge in the jackal population—due, it turned out, to a surge in the human population. The jackals were feasting on dead turkeys, hens, calves, and cows in burgeoning garbage dumps of farm wastes. The success of the chicken operation—which also killed countless wildlife, and probably caused the extinction of Galilee leopards—greatly reinforced officials’ belief in the merits of poison. As the numbers of people grew and agriculture intensified, planes spraying DDT and organophosphates increasingly filled Israeli skies. Bonelli’s eagles, feeding on poisoned chukars and pigeons, began dropping. Although DDT is now banned, Israel’s pesticide use per area under cultivation is still the highest in the developed world. In 2011, just eight eagle pairs remained.

  Leshem’s biggest discovery, however, came in the early 1980s while researching another endangered raptor for his doctorate: a powerful carrion eater named the lappet-faced vulture. For a better sense of their numbers, he hired a pilot to fly him over Israel’s southern Negev desert during autumn migration. Aloft, what he saw amazed him. Flocks of big birds, tiny birds, and everything in between. Millions of them.

  An encounter near Hebron with a honey buzzard, his pilot mentioned, had recently destroyed a five-million-dollar Israeli Air Force jet. Suddenly Yossi Leshem knew what he should be studying. He was soon at IAF headquarters, scouring records of bird strikes with military aircraft. On average, three serious collisions occurred every year. Between 1972 and 1982, he saw that more planes had been lost and more pilots killed in encounters with birds than with enemy sorties.

  “Different migrating birds come at different times, at different elevations,” Leshem, a veteran of four wars and a reserve officer, told the IAF. “Wouldn’t you like to know exactly when and where?”

  The air force provided him a motorized glider. Over the next two years he spent 272 days following swirling clouds of songbirds, V’s of geese, and flocks of cranes, storks, and pelicans soaring over Negev sands, Galilee farmlands, and JNF pine forests. He reported back to headquarters that this was no mere avian migration route: it was the route. Each year, a billion birds flew through Israeli airspace. Because there are no thermals to ride over open water, many birds that seasonally migrate between Africa and Europe or western Asia avoid the Mediterranean. Some cross at the Strait of Gibraltar or hop from Tunisia to Italy via Sicily, but the most—280 different species—come right over Israel and Palestine, the crossroads between three continents, where there’s always warm air rising off the land.

  Per area, Leshem wrote in his PhD thesis, Israel held the world record for migrating birds, and also for military planes aloft at any given moment. To avoid more fatal collisions required two things, he told the air force. The first was a radar station. Fortunately, at that time the dissolving Soviet Union was holding a garage sale of military hardware, and they found a weather tracking station from Moldova, valued at $1.6 million, selling for $20,000. And the Jewish former USSR general who ran it agreed to come along and adapt it for bird research.

  The other thing they needed was cooperation with Israel’s neighbors, so that bird-spotters in other countries could warn them when migrations were heading their direction. Leshem convinced the IAF to let him contact the Turkish and Jordanian air forces, and to get Palestinian and Jordanian ornithologists to share data with their Israeli counterparts. He already knew ornithologists in Lebanon, Egypt, and even Iran. Information from Syria
he could get indirectly, via a Birdlife International office in Amman.

  These relationships, and the camouflaged radar station they installed off the Jerusalem–Tel Aviv Highway, reduced collisions 76 percent and saved an estimated $750 million in lost or damaged aircraft, not to mention pilot lives—and the lives of birds. And perhaps much more. Should anything ever threaten the viability of this narrow air corridor, or the ecosystem below it that feeds and shelters migrating birds as they stop over, it will affect far more than Israel and Palestine. Birds aren’t merely colorful and musical; they’re pollinators, seed spreaders, and insect eaters. The ecosystems of much of Africa and Europe would be unimaginable, and possibly in collapse, without this bottleneck.

  Not only fighter jets threaten it. The lappet-faced vultures that Yossi Leshem studied have vanished from the Negev, as have the huge bearded vultures that used to nest above the Dead Sea at Masada. Before more species fall, he has mobilized a national campaign against pesticides, using birds themselves as the alternatives. Realizing that barn owls that once sheltered in wooden farm buildings have no decent roosts in modern metal structures, Leshem, his colleagues, and hundreds of Israeli, Palestinian, and Jordanian schoolchildren have placed nearly 2,000 nesting boxes in agricultural fields.

  “One pair of owls eat about five thousand rodents a year. Multiply that by two thousand,” says Leshem. “So farmers quit using heavy pesticides. Maybe we can’t stop them all, but of 826 pesticides used in Israel, we can reduce the worst ones.” He readjusts the knit yarmulke riding his bushy gray curls. “Our sperm counts are now down 40 percent. Our cancer rates are up that much. All from hormones and pesticides. In the Huleh Valley, they’ve used so many chemicals it’s affected cognitive ability. We know, because they’ve been testing children for twenty years. Now they’re now testing the grandchildren.”

  The Huleh Valley, just north of Lake Kinneret, is where common cranes winter. In the 1950s, the Huleh Swamp—the biologically richest spot in the Near East—was drained to convert the land for agriculture. Too late, Israel realized that the wetland had been the lake’s filter. Nitrogen and phosphorus nutrients it once absorbed now flowed unimpeded into Kinneret, along with so much exposed peat that Israel’s most important water source was in danger of turning into oxygen-poor green muck.

  Three thousand hectares of the Huleh had to be reflooded to save Lake Kinneret from dying. But that was less than one-tenth of the former wetland that once provided for migrating waterfowl. Farmers were threatening to poison all the cranes raiding their peanut fields, along with seventy thousand pelicans and one hundred thousand white storks plundering carp and tilapia farms, until Leshem and his colleagues found grants to spread thousands of pounds of corn and chickpeas for the cranes, and to raise mosquito fish in Huleh Lake for storks and pelicans.

  In what is now a daily winter tourist attraction, thirty thousand screeching cranes are led away from Huleh peanut fields by a tractor expelling corn kernels on the spongy ground, with the snowy Golan Heights as a backdrop. It’s a surreal spectacle in this arid corridor, where so few wet places are left for birds that fly a third of the way around the world to replenish themselves. Were Huleh to vanish entirely, a cascade of ecological disaster from Russia to South Africa could result.

  Cranes, Huleh Valley, Israel

  PHOTOGRAPH BY MAXMACS/SHUTTERSTOCK.COM

  From a rocky hillside banding station he established on the grounds of the Israeli Knesset, Yossi Leshem looks east across Jerusalem toward Jordan and imagines what the prophet Jeremiah must have seen here when he noted, “The stork in the heavens knows her appointed times; and the turtledove and the crane and the swallow observe the time of their coming.”1

  “He didn’t need radar. He was looking at a sky filled with at least three times the birds we see today. More.”

  Jerusalem’s population then was less than two thousand. The desert below would have been filled with sage, pink sorrel, and thistle flowers. A green overstory of oaks, pistacias, and olive trees buzzed with warblers, tits, chaffinches, bee-eaters, sparrows, and sunbirds. From the Judean Hills would come cheetahs, lions, wolves, and leopards to hunt red deer, gazelles, oryx, wild ass, and ibex. Today, some birds remain. Most of the others are gone.

  “Our nature reserves are mere fragments of that ancient ecosystem,” says Leshem. “We’re a country the size of New Jersey, our upper half totally overpopulated. We’re full of roads and security walls that cut gazelle and ibex herds into populations that can’t reach each other. A male gazelle needs to dominate a group of females. Suddenly there’s this wall and he can’t get to them. The same with mongoose and wolves—they roam seventy kilometers in one night to find prey. Birds can fly. But mammals and reptiles: they have a problem.”

  He gestures toward the Judean Hills at the city’s edge, where there’s a remnant herd of twenty gazelles. “Feral dogs chase after their calves. Their future is doubtful.”

  And people’s, too, he adds. “Palestinians are so fragmented. Like the wildlife.”

  iv. The Desert

  Deep in the Negev, in the sands of the Arava Rift Valley just above Israel’s southern tip, is a fenced nature preserve for its remaining mammals. Among them is the white oryx, which the Crusaders mistook for unicorns. Extinct save for a few zoo specimens on other continents, they have been bred here in hopes of reintroducing them to their native ecosystems. The Arabian leopards, caracals, wolves, and hyenas here are caged, but the oryx, ibex, and other ungulates roam along a five-kilometer loop that can be driven by tourists. There are even ostrich, though these are Somali stand-ins for the original local subspecies: the Arabian ostrich, last seen wild here in 1966.

  Ten minutes away is Ketura, the kibbutz home to the Arava Institute, a graduate environmental studies program for Arabs and Jews. Its faculty members, who teach renewable energy, transboundary water management, and sustainable agriculture, are Israeli and Palestinian; many students are also from Jordan, just a few kilometers to the east. Arava’s guiding creed is that the environment is a shared birthright and a shared crisis, one whose urgency trumps all political, cultural, and economic differences that divide people.

  The communal dining hall for students and kibbutzniks serves milk from their own dairy and abundant fresh cucumber, tomatoes, and greens. Eating salad three meals a day, a habit shared by Israelis and Palestinians, dates back to pioneer years when meat was a luxury, and may account for both peoples having among the world’s highest life expectancies—nearly eighty years—despite all the ambient pesticides. Some of those are used even here: Kibbutz Ketura’s income derives mainly from groves of nonnative date palms, a species vulnerable to a beetle whose female lays eggs inside date pits, producing offspring that attack the trees. The chemical vigilance to protect them is work that Israelis don’t want and that Palestinians, their mobility and work permits deeply checked by military occupation, couldn’t get even if they chose. As a result, the Holy Land’s population is further strained by thousands of Thai agricultural guest workers, including a contingent at Kibbutz Ketura to handle such toxic jobs.

  The low-wage Thai workers, hunters back home, supplement their diets in Israel with traps and slingshots to take gazelles, badgers, jackals, foxes, rabbits, wild boar—even cows and dogs. Using glue traps, they catch rodents, birds, frogs, salamanders, snakes, and lizards. Because kosher dietary laws permit only the slaughter of domestic animals, few Israelis hunt. But already scarce wildlife, as Arava Institute founder Alon Tal wrote in his book Pollution in a Promised Land, have been critically depleted by thirty thousand Thai trappers. In the Golan Heights alone, he estimates, they’ve exterminated 90 percent of the gazelle population.

  A trim man in his early fifties with a gray goatee, Tal is among the few Israeli environmentalists who has dared broach a loaded subject in a nation founded to rescue a culture targeted for annihilation. “Our land is full. Future historians may identify the present deadlock as one of Israel’s greatest tragedies.” The population issue bec
ame deadlocked, says Tal, deputy chair of Israel’s Green Party, by subsidies that reward ultra-Orthodox families for having more children. “An average Orthodox Jew who dies leaves a hundred progeny. Think of the diapers alone!”

  The pressures that those diapers embody become lethal not just to the environment, but to people, when Jews and Palestinians claim the same piece of real estate. The blessing of their mutual longevity further adds to their competing numbers. As an ecology professor at Ben-Gurion University, Tal has designed many environmental projects with Palestinian counterparts, especially for joint water management. “But population underlies everything. If we don’t deal with it soon, it will be too late. We’ll be ecologically barren and socially untenable. I’d drop everything else to get it on the table. But it’s very hard.”

  Alon Tal drives a half-hour south from Ketura to Israel’s southernmost city, Eilat. Across the border, at a Days Inn in Aqaba, Jordan, he’ll address a gathering of Arava Institute alumni: young Jordanians, Jews, and Palestinians, now working for government and nonprofit agencies as environmental planners and scientists. En route, he passes Israeli desalination plants on the Gulf of Aqaba, transmuting salt water into drinking water. A reason why people deny, or defy, the threat of overpopulation, says Tal, is his country’s technological optimism. Faith that Israel could make a desert bloom inspired donations from Jews worldwide, resulting in inventions like drip irrigation. When David Ben-Gurion realized that the Promised Land of milk and honey lacked a critical contemporary Middle Eastern ingredient—oil—his challenge to international Jewish physicists to harness his nation’s one plentiful resource, sunlight, produced the modern rooftop solar collector.