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Environmental activist to use award money to fund green groups
By: Zafrir Rinat
Haaretz
January 9, 2006
Environmental organizations in urgent need of financial support for waging their public struggles may in the near future find an address for a rapid response to their appeals.
One of the leading environmental activists in Israel, Dr. Alon Tal, is to receive on Monday the $100,000 Charles Bronfman Prize, and he intends to earmark a sizable part of the award toward the establishment of a fund to assist environmental organizations.
The Bronfman family established the prize with the objective of granting awards to young Jewish leaders around the world. This year, it chose to award the prize to Tal for his continuing activity on behalf of the environment in Israel. The prize is to be awarded to Tal at the Jerusalem municipality, in the presence of Mayor Uri Lupolianski.
"I want to set up a fund that will assist environmental organizations in urgent need of money, which have no time to go through acceptance processes and submitting paperwork, as is usually the case for receiving grants," Tal explained. "I intend to bring other bodies into the fund, and from the accumulated interest, it would be possible to assist green organizations in the years to come. In many instances, small amounts can help environmental groups, but these sums are unavailable, and then people throw up their hands in despair, and give up."
Tal, who specializes in environmental law, immigrated to Israel from the United States 25 years ago, and in the early 1990s established the Israel Union for Environmental Defense (known in Hebrew as Adam, Teva V'Din), an NGO that is now one of Israel's most prominent environmental organizations, along with the Society for Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI). Through the IUED, Tal has brought to Israel the American method of environmental activism using legal tools.
The activism has led to significant achievements. The IUED became an important factor in compelling polluting factories along the Kishon to considerably reduce the pollutants they release into the stream. In conjunction with the SPNI, Tal's organization succeeded in largely blocking construction along the coastline. Lawsuits brought by the two groups led to a ban on new construction of privately owned housing along the coastline, under the guise of "vacation apartments."
Ten years ago, Tal established the Arava Institute of Environmental Studies at Kibbutz Ketura in the Arava region. At the institute, Israeli students study alongside Jordanian and Palestinian students. The institute now takes an active part in projects such as dealing with trans-border river pollution, which is now taking place, for instance, in the streams that flow from Palestinian Authority territory into Israel.
Tal, who has also served as chairman of Life and Environment, an umbrella group of green organizations, is the author of "Pollution in a Promised Land -An Environmental History of Israel" (University of California Press, 2002), the first book of its kind. He is now a researcher at the Desert Research Institute in Sde Boker, a division of Ben-Gurion University.
Explaining his penchant for establishing new organizations and then soon moving onto the next project, Tal says: "There are too many environmental groups that suffer from a syndrome of the founder who doesn't know when to leave and let the organization develop on its own.'
Despite his adherence to fighting for the cause solely through legal means, six years ago Tal agreed to take part in an illegal struggle to halt bulldozers that were carrying out licensed earthworks for the paving of the Trans-Israel Highway. "I did it out of a feeling of solidarity with the young people who were then waging the struggle against the road," he says, "but in retrospect, I would not do it again. Israel does not yet have a heritage of civil disobedience, and if everyone who felt they were an injured party would then violate the law, our civil fabric would be torn to shreds.
"In the end, the struggle against the road was one of the biggest failures of the environmental movement. Maybe we should have called for various improvements in how the road was paved and not opposed it so absolutely, but that's the wisdom of hindsight," says Tal.
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