Start-up Nation

The country’s disadvantage of having some of its area taken up by a desert was turned into an asset. Looking at Israel today, most visitors would be surprised to discover that 95 percent of the country is categorized as semi-arid, arid, or hyperarid, as quantified by levels of annual rainfall. Indeed, by the time Israel was founded, the Negev Desert had crept up almost all the way north to the road between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. The Negev is still Israel’s largest region, but its encroachment has been reversed as its northern reaches are now covered with agricultural fields and planted forests. Much of this was accomplished by innovative water policies since the days of Hatzerim. Israel now leads the world in recycling waste water; over 70 percent is recycled, which is three times the percentage recycled in Spain, the country in second place.¹⁰

Kibbutz Mashabbe Sade, in the Negev Desert, went even further: the kibbutzniks found a way to use water deemed useless not once, but twice. They dug a well as deep as ten football fields are long—almost half a mile—only to discover water that was warm and salty. This did not seem like a great find until they consulted Professor Samuel Appelbaum of nearby Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He realized that the water would be perfect for raising warm-water fish.

“It was not simple to convince people that growing fish in the desert makes sense,” said Appelbaum, a fish biologist. “But it’s important to debunk the idea that arid land is infertile, useless land.”¹¹ The kibbutzniks started pumping the ninety-eight-degree water into ponds, which were stocked with tilapia, barramundi, sea bass, and striped bass for commercial production. After use in the fishponds, the water, which now contained waste products that made excellent fertilizer, was then used to irrigate olive and date trees. The kibbutz also found ways to grow vegetables and fruits that were watered directly from the underground aquifer.

A century ago Israel was, as Mark Twain and other travelers described it, largely a barren wasteland. Now there are an estimated 240 million trees, millions of them planted one at a time. Forests have been planted all over the country, but the largest is perhaps the most improbable of all: the Yatir Forest.

In 1932, Yosef Weitz became the top forestry official in the Jewish National Fund, a pre-state organization dedicated to buying land and planting trees in what was to become the Jewish state. It took Weitz more than thirty years to convince his own organization and the government to start planting a forest on hills at the edge of the Negev Desert. Most thought it couldn’t be done. Now there are about four million trees there. Satellite pictures show the forest sticking out like a visual typo, surrounded by desert and drylands in a place where it should not exist. FluxNet, a NASA-coordinated global environmental research project, collects data from over a hundred observation towers around the world. Only one tower is in a forest in a semi-arid zone: Yatir.

The Yatir Forest survives only on rain water, though only 280 millimeters (about eleven inches) of rain fall there each year—about a third of the precipitation that falls on Dallas, Texas. Yet researchers have found that the trees in the forest are naturally growing faster than expected, and that it soaks up about as much carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as lush forests growing in temperate climates.

Dan Yakir is a scientist at the Weizmann Institute who manages the FluxNet research station at Yatir. He says that the forest not only demonstrates that trees can thrive in areas that most people would call desert, but that planting forests on just 12 percent of the world’s semi-arid lands could reduce atmospheric carbon by one gigaton a year—the annual CO₂ output of about one thousand 500-megawatt coal plants. A gigaton of carbon would also amount to one of seven “stabilization wedges” that scientists argue are necessary to stabilize atmospheric carbon at current levels.

In December 2008, Ben-Gurion University hosted a United Nations–sponsored conference on combating desertification, the world’s largest ever. Experts from forty countries came, interested to see with their own eyes why Israel is the only country whose desert is receding.¹²

The Israeli Leapfrog