The leaders of Friends of the Earth Middle East (FoEME), a joint Israeli, Jordanian, and Palestinian environmental organization that uses environmental advocacy as a peacebuilding tool, were recently recognized as “Heroes of the Environment 2008” by Time magazine. FoEME understands that “the road to sustainability, like the road to peace, is going to be a slow, messy human project of community organizing, education and trust-building,” says Time correspondent Andrew Lee Butters.

FoEME’s projects include Good Water Neighbors, which uses joint water management to strengthen ties between Israeli and Arab communities on opposite sides of the Jordan River; as well as a plan to build a transboundary peace park on an island in the Jordan River that would attract ecotourism. “We share the same environment, particularly the same water resources,” says Gidon Bromberg, Israeli director of FoEME. “And if we don’t start working together, we’re not going to have an environment.”

For more information on FoEME’s environmental peacebuilding activities, see “Rehabilitating the Jordan River Valley Through Cross-Border Community Cooperation” (May 8, 2006) and “Good Water Makes Good Neighbors: A Middle East Pilot Project in Conflict Resolution” (January 22, 2003), two events hosted by the Environmental Change and Security Program.

The Middle East is home to some of the most intractable conflicts in the world. But it is also generating some of today’s most creative approaches to peacebuilding—several of which use the environment to promote harmony and stability.

Time magazine recently highlighted the efforts of Friends of the Earth Middle East (FOEME) to restore the Jordan River to a more healthy, natural state (video). Currently, the Israeli and Jordanian governments both heavily subsidize water for farmers, who grow unsustainable, water-intensive crops. As a result, in many places, the Jordan River has been reduced to a sluggish, polluted trickle. The water level in the Dead Sea, which is fed by the Jordan, sinks approximately one meter each year because it is no longer being replenished. In addition, according to FOEME, because much of the Lower Jordan River “is a closed military zone and off limits to the public, most people simply do not know that the river is drying up.” If less water were diverted from the Jordan, pollution were reduced, and access to the river were increased, FOEME believes that local communities could establish—and thrive on—ecotourism and sustainable agriculture.

FOEME has also proposed the creation of a transboundary peace park on an island in the middle of the Jordan, and has secured the endorsements of the mayors and communities on both sides of the river.

A USAID-supported project on the Israeli-Jordanian border—this one in the Arava desert—brings young people together to study the environment in an attempt to forge personal connections and build peace. The students study the survival mechanisms of desert fauna and flora; learn how to tap solar energy and build structures out of natural materials; and are even carrying out research on the controversial plan to divert water from the Red Sea into the Dead Sea. One-third of each semester’s students are Israeli Jews; one-third are Arabs from Israel, Jordan, the Palestinian territories, or other nations; and one-third are American and European. “The main problem in the Middle East is that people don’t know their neighbors,” says Rabbi Michael Cohen, founding faculty member of the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, which runs the program.

Photo: The Jordan River is only a muddy trickle in many places. Courtesy of Flickr user j.fisher.

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The news is filled with stories of how natural resources—including water—can lead to resentment, unrest, and even violent conflict. But the Good Water Neighbors project, launched by Friends of the Earth Middle East (FOEME) in 2001, seeks to use transboundary water resources as a means to build peace. According to a recently published analysis, the ongoing project, which brings Israeli, Jordanian, and Palestinian communities together to protect their shared water resources, has significantly improved the local water sector and helped build peace at the local level. For instance, two communities, Tulkarem in the West Bank and Emek Hefer in Israel, are now cooperating over olive mill waste issues. Until recently, waste from the Tulkarem olive mills was dumped into the Alexander River, which flows through Emek Hefer to the Mediterranean Sea. Today, thanks to cooperative transboundary management, “the waste from the mills is placed in a truck and taken to Israel for treatment, reducing to a big extent the pollution of the shared water resource.”

The United States and Israel could garner more meaningful engagement from Syria in the Middle East peace process by proposing the creation of a peace park in the disputed Golan Heights area, say University of Vermont Associate Professor Saleem Ali, a recent speaker at the Wilson Center, and Rabbi Michael Cohen of the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies in Israel in “Salvaging Peace with Syria,” available on the Carnegie Council’s “Policy Innovations” website. Noting that transboundary conservation areas have helped resolve past conflicts—as with the Cordillera del Cóndor Transboundary Protected Area, established between Peru and Ecuador in 1995—the authors argue that a Golan Heights peace park should be on the agenda at tomorrow’s Middle East peace conference in Annapolis.

The vista of Ethiopia’s ancient Rift Valley, speckled with shimmering lakes, stretches before me as our motorized caravan heads south from Lake Langano, part of a study tour on population- health-environment issues organized by the Packard Foundation. Sadly, the country’s unrelenting poverty and insecurity are as breathtaking as the view—Ethiopia currently ranks 170 out of 177 countries on the UN Development Programme’s Human Development Index. These numbers become quite personal when child after child sprints alongside the truck, looking for any morsel. Here, I don’t need to read between the lines of endless reports to see the country’s severe population, health, and environment challenges—they are visible in the protruding ribcages of the cattle and the barren eroding terraces in the nation’s rural highlands.