Our National Projects Director, Sagit Rogenstein, is featured in the Los Angeles Jewish Journal this week after her participation in the Tel Aviv-LA Environmental Exchange this March.

“Israel can’t think in the long run,” added Sagit Rogenstein, national project director of Israel’s leading environmental nonprofit, Zalul. “They see such an investment as an extravagance, an unnecessary investment. We need to change this way of thinking. The [Department of Water and Power] (DWP) calculated that they have saved more money than they put into this project.”

… Rogenstein arrived in Los Angeles on March 2 to address an awakening among American Jews to the environmental threats to Israel. The two were among a group of 18 academics, environmentalists and politicians participating in the Friends of Israel’s Environment exchange program.

The goal of the exchange, which is sponsored by the Tel Aviv-Los Angeles Partnership of The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles, is to share solutions for environmental problems that plague both cities, such as air pollution, wastewater treatment, recycling and planning green spaces.

For decades, environmental education and solutions were on the back burner of Israeli politics, but in the last few years, environmental projects have attracted some national attention in Israel. Recently, Israelis received monetary encouragement to recycle when trash fees were raised, and a clean air bill — something that passed in California 37 years ago — is now working its way through the Knesset.

You can read the full article here.

Once again, Israelis are being confronted full-on in the media about water issues. This time the news is even more bleak than usual - Israel is facing the worst water crisis in the last ten years.

Writes Haaretz Correspondent Zafrir Rinat:

The deficit in the water balance (amount of water pumped out compared to rainfall) will reach 410 million cubic meters by the end of the year, almost twice as much as last year’s deficit. Altogether, the past four years’ accumulated deficit is almost a billion cubic meters.

The Kinneret is 60 centimeters lower today than it was last year and more than three meters lower than four years ago. Last month - the last main winter month - the Hydraulic Service’s monitoring stations did not register a single significant rise in any of Israel’s streams.

Dropping water levels endanger the water quality, mainly in the coast and western mountain aquifers. The lower the fresh water level, the more sea water or salt water enters the aquifers from deep in the ground. The water being drilled along the coastal plain, from the Dan region to Hadera, has already been contaminated by salt. In some places, sea water has penetrated as far as a kilometer inland.

For Zalul, this is only a reminder of how precious our water resources are in Israel and how important it is to preserve and protect what little we have. You can bet we’ll be following this issue closely… and stay tuned for water saving tips!

It’s quite well known that a large amount of air pollution comes from construction sites and the tearing down of old buildings.  Less well known is that local authorities are allowing the waste from these sites to be dumped in open spaces all across the country rather than being disposed of properly.  Now the Ministry of the Environment is targeting them for their negligence:

The ministry categorically stated that it was the local authorities’ responsibility to ensure that waste from construction sites was disposed of properly. Instead, over 90 percent has been dumped in open spaces, and on the side of roads, the ministry charged.

Read the full article in the Jerusalem Post here.

Personally, we’d like to see the Ministry of the Environment introduce a whole new approach to construction - deconstruction.

Folks in Boston will be able to read about Zalul in print this week, but for those of you without a subscription to The Jewish Journal - Boston North feel free to read the article below. Read the rest of this entry »

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