I often say that life in the 21st century is better, is most measurable ways, than it has ever been — at least for the kind of people who have regular access to the internet and are likely to read a blog. We live longer, healthier lives, have begun to understand and unpack our various human and social foibles, have easier access to good coffee. For the most part, people who hark back to the good old days weren’t paying enough attention in history class.
But as with all maxims, the foregoing has its limits. “Most measurable ways,” sure — but not all. The state of the very planet on which we conduct our lives being perhaps the prime exception to the rule.
We now know that while the human race has been getting steadily healthier, the Earth has been getting steadily sicker. As we have taken leaps and bounds toward new frontiers, we have left (are leaving) a dizzying swath of destruction that we have only just begun to understand. And in our destruction, nothing has been sacred.
Which brings us to the Jordan River, a stretch of water sacred to millions upon millions of people, and central to the story of humanity, whatever your faith or creed — a river which was once (as the hymn has it) mighty, deep, and wide, but which has not been so for some time.
In fact, the Jordan’s flow has been reduced by more than 90% in the past six decades, and about half of what is left is run-off from farms, re-directed saline water, and raw sewage — shit, in other words. As my friend Gidon Bromberg points out, if you were to get baptized in the stretch of river traditionally considered the spot where the Spirit of the Lord descended on Jesus as he rose from the waters under John the Baptist’s hands — “you’re likely to come out with a rash on your head.”
Gidon is the Israel director of the tri-national (Palestinian, Jordanian, and Israeli) non-profit Friends of the Earth- Middle East, which has as its organizing principle the notion that, hey, look at that, if we all live this close to each other — our environment is shared! Only they put it much more eloquently than that: “Our primary objective is the promotion of cooperative efforts to protect our shared environmental heritage. In so doing, we seek to advance both sustainable regional development and the creation of necessary conditions for lasting peace in our region.” They are a fantastic organization, doing what I believe to be God’s own work — trying to not only save us from ourselves, but to save the very land so many claim to love more than life itself, and yet don’t seem to value for its own sake.
I’ve written several times about the devastation of the lower Jordan River and Jordan River Valley (and even got the chance to address the topic once at the Chicago Humanities Festival), so I’m going to indulge myself here, and quote one of my own articles: “The reasons for the precipitous deterioration of the river’s health are myriad and interconnected, and are inevitably shaped by the continuing Arab-Israeli conflict. Israel diverts some 60 percent of the fresh water heading downriver from the Sea of Galilee for its farms and kitchens. Jordan maintains a major canal that diverts water from the Yarmouk, upstream from which Syria has built more than 40 dams. Jordanian septic tanks allow untreated sewage to seep into the water basin, while Israeli municipalities and kibbutzim release their own sewage directly into the river. On both banks, most of the valley is a closed military zone, its misery hidden from view because of Israel’s and Jordan’s military demands.”
One of the results of this inexcuseable state of affairs is that the Dead Sea, which forms the terminus of the Jordan River, is shrinking — at the almost-visible-to-the-naked-eye rate of about three feet a year – and close to 2,000 sinkholes have opened up (some quite suddenly) around the sea, where once there was water and now there is none. The damage to the Dead Sea might in fact be irreversible at this point, with the only hope being to contain it. (In a mind-boggling act of Missing the Point, the Israeli government has apparently been registering the land that has emerged on the northern edge of the sea, located on the West Bank, as “state land,” in order to keep Palestinians from snapping it up).
And, as might be surmised from all of the above, people are simply running out of water. Israel, for the most part, manages to supply its own needs — but does so in part by denying Palestinians free access. NPR recently ran two excellent pieces on these issues, and I highly recommend that you give both a listen, or read the transcripts.
As much as I fear for the future of the Israeli and Palestinian people, I confess, I fear even more for the land on which they live — as goes the Jordan River, so go the lands that border it. In our efforts to shove each other out of our homes, we’ve managed to entirely ignore the land’s own needs, and are, in a word, destroying it, from the water table on up.
It seems a very shabby way to express national sentiment.
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Note: I will post my Chicago Humanities Festival lecture on a separate page, complete with a partial list of sources, and will post an update here when its up.
BadGirl31
/ October 10, 2009EPA, the Court granted standing where the injury was in the form of projected future rising sea levels injuring a state in its capacity as a landowner, an injury suffered not just by the entire nation, but the entire world. ,