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Book Review
| Pollution in a Promised Land: An Environmental History of Israel. By Alon Tal. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. xviii + 546 pp. Cloth $85.00, paper $34.95.
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| This is a unique book and a very good one. Few countries have been the subject of such a comprehensive environmental history, and Alon Tal tells his story with skill and an insider's firsthand knowledge. Born and trained in the United States, Tal has been one of Israel's leading environmental activists for many years, and as chairman of an umbrella group for that country's eighty-odd environmental organizations he is deeply in touch with the pulse of environmentalism there. |
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The environmental history of Israel combines aspects typical both of developed countries and developing ones. Despite strong European cultural influence, in terms of development issues Israel's short history as a nation resembles that of other postcolonial states. Israel industrialized rapidly, but at significant cost to the environment and public health. For example, incidence of childhood asthma is 17 percent, and breast cancer rates are among the highest in the world. Tal remarks that "because it was so small, the country did not enjoy the margin of error that allows larger nations to make mistakes with relative ecological impunity" (p. 411). The picture drawn is of a crowded, polluted little nation where untrammeled ecosystems have nearly disappeared and escape from the waste products of modernity is all but impossible. It is an image that Israelis themselves have only recently begun to perceive. |
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Given the sacredness of the land in question, the treatment it has suffered at human hands throughout the past fifty years begs for explanation. Tal's analysis offers no simple answers, but the broad themes of the story are familiar enough: short-term vision, corruption, greed, and a basic and generalized lack of ecological literacy, overlaid in this case with the particular urgencies of establishing a Jewish state in a hostile region. Readers even marginally familiar with Israeli society or political history may marvel that such conditions could leave room for any environmental concern at all. |
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Certainly the establishment of environmental consciousness in Israel has been an ongoing battle for space on a crowded agenda. Tal gives ample attention to the major political figures who helped bring environmental issues to the table, as well as to key players in Israel's emerging environmental movement. He explores the complete range of environmental problems, from Israel's extreme water scarcity (exacerbated by the competing needs of the country's Arab neighbors), the poisoning of its air, water, and land through the continued intensive use of agrochemicals, substandard industrial technologies and waste disposal systems, the destruction of open space for urban development and roads, and the ambiguous legacy of plantation forests. Alongside this litany of woes, however, the author is careful to highlight occasional victories of environmental legislation, and he seems to feel that environmental consciousness in Israel is on the rise. |
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This well-written book will be of considerable interest to anyone concerned with the fate of the state of Israel—which, it must be acknowledged, hinges on more than the already formidable obstacle of establishing peace with Arabs. For environmental historians, the book offers a case study of unusual depth and singularity. |
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Reviewed by Richard C. Foltz, assistant professor of religion, history, natural resources, and Asian studies at the University of Florida. He is editor of Worldviews, Religion and the Environment: A Global Anthology (Wadsworth, 2002) and Islam and Ecology (Harvard University Press, 2003). |
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