
The cedar is Lebanon’s national symbol. But Lebanon’s renowned cedar forests are not what they used to be. Today, all that remains of Lebanon’s cedar forests are a dozen fragmented islands, threatened by livestock grazing and climate change. The key to restoring them is their genetic diversity.
Planet Earth is covered in water. Ninety-seven percent is in earth’s oceans. Most of the rest is frozen solid — locked up in sea ice and terrestrial ice sheets, glaciers and permafrost. Earth’s cryosphere plays a huge role in regulating climate. As our planet warms, its cryosphere is slowly melting, triggering positive feedbacks that make earth scientists worry.
Climate change is a human rights issue. Nowhere is this clearer than in Israeli-occupied/colonized Palestine, where land and natural resources required for climate adaptation are controlled by Israel, and systematically denied to Palestinians. Of all these resources, none are more vital than water.
Long before the ‘intractable conflict’ between Israeli Jews and Palestinians gets resolved, climate change will have thrown everything up for grabs — literally. It already has.
That awful A-word, preceded by the adjective ‘Israeli’. Israel boosters scream ‘antisemitism’ when they hear or read the phrase. Mainstream media avoid it like the plague. The international legal community has no difficulty likening Israel’s system of governance in the colonized West Bank to the South African prototype. Listen to my conversation with Professor Dugard.
A roof over one’s head. A home. Other than food and water, nothing is more essential to human life and health. Conversely, save forced starvation, there’s no better way to eliminate a people than to reduce their homes to rubble. No one knows this better, or carried out the practice more ruthlessly and efficiently, than the State of Israel.