The New York Times has an excellent report on the state of the world’s oceans and the horrible affect human activity has on the coral reefs.   Israel may only be a very small piece of this planet, but here at Zalul this sort of news is greeted with calls for action-we can make a difference!

Follow these links for the coverage:

Article: Coral Reefs and What Ruins Them

Slideshow: Before They Vanish

Article: Human Shadows on the Sea

Interactive: Mapping the Other 70 Percent

This just in from the New York Times: World’s Largest Marine Reserve Declared.

The tiny Pacific islands nation of Kiribati declared the world’s largest marine protected area Thursday — a California-sized ocean wilderness that includes pristine reefs and eight coral atolls teeming with fish and birds.

The Phoenix Islands Protected Area, or PIPA, lies about halfway between Hawaii and Fiji and also includes undersea mountains. It will conserve one of the Earth’s last intact oceanic coral archipelago ecosystems.

It is a great example of long-term thinking. In the short-term, the Kiribati goverment will lose some revenue from foreign commercial fishing licenses, but in the long-term they will most likely increase their revenue overall with the increase in tourism.

”Kiribati has taken an inspirational step in increasing the size of PIPA well beyond the original eight atolls and globally important seabird, fish and coral reef communities,” Greg Stone, New England Aquarium vice president of global marine programs, said in a statement.

We agree. When can we go visit?

Visit their website: www.phoenixislands.org

Photo taken from the National Geographic feature on the Phoenix Islands.

Sounds better than having them in the sea. Check out this article on Treehugger (written by Karin of Green Prophet) and watch the video below.

Plastic Bag Nightmare by Zainub

Today the big environmental news was China’s decision to ban free plastic bags.

We’ve spoken out against plastic bags before.  And now we’re going to do it again.  Plastic bags do terrible damage to our environment and have an enormous impact on sea life in particular.  In November 2007, Israel’s Ministry of the Environment published a report under their program “Clean Beaches” stating that 80% of all beach garbage is made up of plastics. 

Now Zalul and other leading Israeli environmental NGOs are petitioning for an end to free plastic bags. 

Do your part and sign the petition today (warning, it’s in Hebrew).

From Globes Magazine:

Kahn’s environmental campaigns began at the end of the 1990s. His son, Benjamin, who was recently named by “Time” magazine as one of its “Heroes of the Environment,” along with Nobel peace prize laureate, former US Vice President Al Gore, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Prince Charles, returned to Israel after spending 15 years building underwater observatories along the coral reefs off the coasts of Australia and Hawaii. Sometime after his return, he went diving in Eilat, and told his father what he saw afterward. “Do you remember the wonderful reef?” he asked him. “It’s almost gone.”

Kahn, who some years earlier built the underwater observatory in Eilat, got on the phone to then Ministry of the Environment director general Nehama Ronen. After this conversation he decided to set up Zalul, a non-profit organization that would fight to remove pollutants from the Red Sea. Chief among the perpetrators were by the fish cages operated by Dagsuf and Ardag Red Sea Mariculture Ltd., both companies that belonging to kibbutzim in the Arava region. Later the Kahn family joined forces with the Society for the Protection of Nature, and the other environmental groups. The fish farming companies hit back with intensive political lobbying, and tried to paint Kahn as someone whose actions were driven by his real estate business interests.

The saga, as is known, came to an end recently with a ruling by the relevant government authorities and the courts that the fish cages must be cleared from the Red Sea by mid-2008. After a campaign lasting 15 years, this is a rare victory for green organizations in Israel.