Israel’s threatened biodiversity (2015)

Israel’s threatened biodiversity A LO N TA L THE Bible is replete with references to wildlife: After generic descriptions of the biodiversity in the Garden of Eden and then on Noah’s Ark, the narrative focuses on the Land of Israel itself. The Bible metaphorically speaks of a ‘Land of Milk and Honey’. But zoologists with evolved taxonomical inclinations would more aptly call it a land of mammals, reptiles, birds and amphibians. From asses and antelopes to vipers and vultures; from bears and bees to wolves, worms and wild goats – the scriptures literally teem with life. Samson combats lions while Daniel calms them down. Botanists could refer to the dozens of plants and trees mentioned in the Bible, some of whose identity we can only guess about today. Years later, ecologists can explain this extraordinary species richness as a function of the unique location of this tiny land (containing only 22,000 sq km – roughly half the size of Costa Rica) that serves as a bridge between the continents of Europe, Africa and Asia and their contrasting assemblages of flora and fauna. Moreover, the extraordinarily steep rain gradient, that runs from as little as 10 mm of rain/ year in the jejune drylands of the south, to 700 mm/year in the temperate lands of the Galilee only 300 kilometers away, allows for an idiosyncratic mixing of species and extraordinary variety within a very small area. Unfortunately, modern natural history for Israel’s non-human residents has taken a turn for the worse. A 2013 report by the Society for Protection of Nature in Israel, the country’s largest environmental NGO, describes alarming trends: 23% of the freshwater fish are endangered; 83% of the country’s amphibians; 35% of the reptiles; 60% of the mammals; and 30% of the plants are declining and some heading towards extinction. There are many proximate reasons or ‘direct drivers’ behind the Holy Land’s alarming loss of biodiversity. But all share a common denominator: as more people sprawled out across the countryside, with their ecologically unfriendly habits, there was less and less room for the other creatures that call Israel home. Against all odds, much still remains today, but unless public policies and demographic trends change, Israel’s natural history will be one of a biological paradise lost. The number of people living in Palestine over the ages has always waxed and waned, responding to the vicissitudes of warfare, disease, famine and political oppression. Some ancient historians reported millions of residents living throughout the land. SEMINAR 673 – September 2015 43 Archaeologists and historians today, however, tend to dismiss these claims as inflated. During the Iron Age there may have been over 100,000 residents in the country, although these numbers soon shrunk by two-thirds. The human population during the tumultuous Roman rule at its peak probably reached one million and even swelled a little beyond that several hundred years later during the Byzantine period. But the litany of conquerors and internecine violence, oppressive policies, land degradation, malaria and unimaginably bad hygiene barely allowed local denizens to replace themselves. During most of the past millennium, population in Israel rarely exceeded 300,000. A 44 s long as the population of the country was modest, most ecosystems flourished. To be sure, thousands of years of human settlement took its toll. Even though the settlements were dispersed, massive abuse of the soil took place due to relentless overgrazing, deforestation and imprudent cultivation which took its toll on land fertility. Erosion was epidemic and catastrophic in its dimensions. Such a long and turbulent human past arguably provides Israel with more archaeological and historical sites than any place on earth per square kilometre. But it surely did little to enrich the country’s non-human inhabitants and especially the ever vulnerable vegetation and trees. Over time they paid a heavy price for human activity which invariably took from the land but did little to renew it. Nonetheless, with hunting at modest levels, the vast variety of species and ecosystems did surprisingly well. Besides the natural world appearing in the Bible, Talmud and other religious texts penned in the Holy Land, there are intermittent reports from travellers that survive, describing the natural world of Palestine over the centuries. The most famous of these SEMINAR 673 – September 2015 was penned by Henry Baker Tristram, a British priest who visited Palestine four times between 1858 and 1881. Tristram’s writings, later published in some five separate volumes upon his return to England, contain detailed descriptions of animals and plants that he saw along the way. Although professionally he always remained a man of the cloth and his children were missionaries, he was an early supporter of Darwin (and Wallace’s) theories of evolution. Tristram’s knowledge, exceptional intuition and talent for writing provides a thorough cataloguing of the natural history of Palestine just as the sun began to set on the Ottoman Empire at the end of the 19th century. What we learn is that Palestine was home to a rich array of all kinds of animals: African mega fauna served as the high predators with cheetahs, leopards, bears, hyenas and crocodiles enjoying a rich variety of prey. Many species at the time were unknown. (There are six bird species and a couple of gerbils named after Tristram himself.) T he reason why so many animals thrived was not only the low density of humans and their general (non)interference, but also the relatively low availability of firearms for hunting. As guns became more accessable towards the end of the 18th century, hunting took on new dimensions. The population of Dorcas gazelles, a ‘keystone species’, which had always been a mainstay of the local ecosystems, became greatly depleted, with only 400 gazelles surviving by the mid-20th century. Many other species were not so lucky: for instance reptiles like the Levant viper, the Nile crocodile and the European pond turtle did not make it. Neither did the speedy cheetah, the local ‘Caucasian’ squirrel, the ‘water rats’ (European water voles), the lovely white oryxes, or the imposing Syrian bear that once roamed the Golan Heights. The local population of lions presumably was hunted out of existence long before this especially lethal period for mammals began, during the end of the Ottoman Empire at the turn of the 20th century, continuing throughout the British Mandate until the mid-20th century. W ith the advent of British colonial rule came a strong conservation ideology. Accordingly, the first half of the 20th century should have been a time of prosperity for the land of Israel’s natural systems. It was not. The British administration that oversaw the Mandate in Palestine between 1918 and 1948 was actually keenly aware of Israel’s unique natural systems and was keen to repair them. Much of the impulse behind their efforts that established almost 200 forest reserves, protecting over 56,534 hectares of open spaces involved the desire to restore the natural history of Palestine to its earlier, Biblical splendour. In retrospect, however, there are many reasons why British rule was not the healthiest for Israel’s ecosystems. The lack of ecological expertise among the colonial government and the focus on planting forests that lacked indigenous integrity and diversity meant that many policies were misguided. And the considerable enthusiasm for ‘the hunt’ among the British male administrators themselves meant that serious regulation of hunting was never part of the government’s conservation strategy. The ecological restoration that they did pursue was all too often an exercise in theoretical planning. When the Mandate came to a close in 1948, very little remained of the millions of trees their hundreds of government foresters had planted. Losses were primarily due to the vandalism and arson by the local Arab community which resisted the colonial forestry proscriptions which excluded them from lands they had always seen as public rangelands for their herds of goats and sheep. W hen the State of Israel was established in 1948, it inherited a countryside that was largely unpopulated. With the hostilities leading to the exodus of most of the Arab majority, there were hardly a million people living in the country and many more animals. The land of Israel was hardly pristine and it bore the signs of the aforementioned millennia of abuse. Almost all of the original woodlands were extirpated and desertification was advanced in many areas. But the novel ecosystems that emerged in place of the original wilderness contained a rich variety of animals, even though many populations had dwindled considerably after being hunted for more than half a century. Immediately upon becoming independent, the government acceded to requests by Israeli zoology professor, Heinrich Mendelssohn to ban hunting, given the traumatized state of natural systems after years of armed conflict. This preference for the ‘hunted’ over the ‘hunter’ continues until this very day. In the decades following Israel’s independence, there was still little information about the state of local biodiversity. For instance, it was thought that the ibex (the Biblical wild goat) and local leopards had been hunted into extinction. In fact, they had not; under the continued protection of Israel’s new hunting legislation, the public delighted when they began to make an appearance. For many years their populations seemed to rebound. Strict regulation of hunting was perhaps the less important part of the Israeli government’s ecological interventions. The country’s primary policies to protect biodiversity involved ‘set asides’. After innumerable pro- posals and considerable parliamentary debate, in August 1963 Israel’s Knesset passed the National Parks and Nature Reserve Law. The legislation created separate nature and national park authorities with the twin mandates of preserving habitats and heritage sites respectively. For some thirty years, it was the Minister of Agriculture who oversaw the independent Nature Reserves Authority, even as the Minister of Interior signed off on the protected status of dozens of nature reserves as part of National Masterplan ‘Number 8’. Today under the plan, roughly 250 reserves are located on about a quarter of the country’s lands. Most of the reserves are small by international standards – with the largest in the sprawling, southern desert regions never exceeding 40,000 hectares – roughly a tenth the size of significant national parks such as the Yosemite. In the centre and northern Galilee regions, reserves tend to be far smaller: the largest, Mount Meron, is a little less than 10,000 hectares in area. O n reserves, regulations are stringent: there is no construction, few paved roads and, frequently, no camping or hiking off the trails. Humans presumably are visitors to these protected zones which typically are closed around sunset to give the animals a modicum of respite. Soon after the enactment of the law it became clear that animals and plants move around and that it was important to protect them even outside the confines of the newly declared reserves. A list of ‘Protected Natural Assets’ was compiled and codified as regulations which protected wild flowers, trees and all sorts of creatures, prohibiting their taking in any form. In addition, about eight per cent of Israel’s lands are designated as forests, where constraints are not as strin- gent, but which still serve as critical habitats and ecological corridors. The forests were originally planted as conifer monocultures and proved vulnerable to massive pest infestation and collapse. But over the years, new policies mandated the planting of more diverse strands, relying primarily on indigenous non-conifer species. As the succession process unfolds, more natural assemblages of trees make for more stable and richer forest ecosystems. For much of Israel’s history, this profound commitment to conservation yielded exceptional results: species abundance rebounded. Nature reserves provided a home to an astonishing variety of life systems. As the ecosystems recovered, the ecosystem services they provided became healthier over time. I sraelis’ natural inclination to hike and take excursions into nature found dozens of new destinations as immigrants and veteran citizens got to know the many wonderful natural treasures of the country during the weekends or on holidays. One expression of this commitment to conservation was the very robust and often aggressive civil society that emerged to protect the environment. Chief among the conservation NGOs remains the Society for Protection of Nature in Israel. Founded largely by nature loving, kibbutz members in June 1954, the organization had no trouble attracting members from all walks of life and soon became the country’s largest NGO with tens of thousands of paid members, wielding considerable influence among decision makers. A vibrant and diverse ‘green’ interest group emerged to consolidate these conservation gains and seek even greater protection for the creatures and plants living in the land. During the country’s first fifty years, Israeli biodiversity even made SEMINAR 673 – September 2015 45 something of a comeback. Several animals that had gone extinct locally were reintroduced through the ‘Hai Bar’ programme. The fallow deer, not seen locally since the Crusader days, was found in a tiny surviving population in Iran. A small group was flown into the country from Iran and became the core of a captive breeding programme that eventually was large enough for a release into reserves in the Galilee and the Judean hills. The country cheered when in November 2011 a pair of painted frogs reappeared. The frog was thought to have become globally extinct after its wetlands habitat was drained, and this was the first siting in some 50 years. The 1960s, ’70s and ’80s were golden years for biodiversity and biodiversity protection in Israel. Strong legal protection, competent institutional capacity and enthusiastic public support all contributed to a collective sense of purpose and ecological restoration. When Israelis looked over their borders to those of neighbouring Arab countries, they saw that their country was not only literally greener due to an 800% increase in forest cover, but had far greater number of fauna species due to the protection they had received. The assemblage of plants and animals in the country were undoubtedly different than that which inspired prophets thousands of years earlier during the days of old. But these novel, Israeli ecosystems were still compelling, inspirational places where evolutionary processes continued to unfold and where animals were largely safe from the heavy hand of human progress. W 46 hen Israel joined the OECD in 2010, the international organization’s constant monitoring offered a rare opportunity to evaluate the country’s performance in a number of areas relative to other developed countries. In 2011, the first environmental report SEMINAR 673 – September 2015 that assessed the state of biodiversity in Israel was issued. The country has a range of well known, significant environmental problems: from groundwater contamination to high greenhouse gas emissions. Nature protection was thought to be a happy exception – an area where the country excelled due to strong public policy. But the results of the data collected by the OECD analysts came out surprisingly negative: Already 34 vertebrates had become extinct. These numbers were just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. The report calculated that roughly 33% of the country’s vertebrate species are endangered, with especially high numbers of amphibians and mammals at risk. The exploitation of the country’s water sources have led to considerable extinctions among species in aquatic habitats. Indeed, Israeli mammal population are more endangered than that of any other developed country. W hat is the reason for this dramatic change in performance and the dismal and discouraging present picture? After all, Israel’s Nature and Parks Authority had recently commissioned a review of its activities by an international committee of experts. The conservation agency received kudos from the international evaluation of its scientific competency and the professionalism of its efforts. Relative to most countries, the public in Israel is extremely engaged in outdoor activities: from hiking and camping to rock climbing and cycling, millions of Israelis visit the country’s forests and nature reserves each year. From the very inception, love of nature was considered to be an integral expression of patriotism and school curricula include ‘love of homeland’ classes with annual trips to familiarize the next generation about their natural heritage. This passion was an important part of Zionism – the Jewish national movement that founded the country and appears to be relatively unique in its intensity. It is manifested in the country’s diverse and very robust environmental movement. And yet, it seems that Israeli biodiversity, once an exemplar of conservation interventions’ ability to stem negative trends, has gone into free fall. The OECD report was succinct in its assessment: ‘Israel’s biodiversity is subject to serious pressures from several sources: habitat fragmentation, the introduction of invasive species, over-exploitation of natural resources, and pollution. Demographic changes, economic development and climate change are the main drivers of these pressures.’ T he report was reserved and understated in its analysis. Yet, the upshot appears to be clear. Israel’s demographic growth has been extremely rapid. In 1950 there were but one million people in the country. Since then, the country’s population has grown by one million people each decade. Today, Israel has over eight million citizens. During the country’s first years, immigration was the major engine of demographic growth. Since that time, a high birth rate has been the major reason. Israel’s total fertility rate has reached 3.0 children per family on average – almost 50% higher than the next developed country, New Zealand whose TFR is only 2.2. This is not a coincidence. Government policies actually encourage large families and provide pro-natal subsidies, from generous child allowances to direct grants to new mothers. Not only is demographic stability nowhere in sight, the birth rate continues to increase with religious communities reaching average fertility levels of 6.5. This demographic policy is undermining conservation efforts and unravelling the achievements of the past. The OECD report makes it quite clear in its assessment that population growth is responsible for a range of environmental negatives, especially to natural systems. When looking at the decimation of local wetland species it explains: ‘Population pressures, continued construction activities and climate change will likely contribute to the continuation of this trend unless policy action is taken.’ People require housing, roads and places of employment. As larger numbers become more prosperous, habitats are sacrificed for new neighbourhoods, communities and highways. Humans also bring with them invasive species which supplant limited resources for local animals and plants, already under significant pressure. Over 200 endangered species of insects, 18 bird species, all manner of fish and a couple of mammals have been identified. Pollution control efforts are focused on human needs and often leave natural systems exposed to pesticides and other contaminants. Streams and springs dry up when water is tapped for human consumption, agricultural or domestic. Israelis may love nature, but given present densities, they challenge its ability to survive. U ltimately, species diversity is a function of how much habitat is available. The so-called ‘species-area effect’ is one of the few ecological laws which appears to be highly reliable across a wide range of climates or topographies. Species numbers grow geometrically as the ‘island’ on which they live on increases in size. Because of its unique geographical features, the land of Israel came to support an unusually large number of flora and fauna species, especially given its diminutive dimensions. But as the country became cut up into urban and suburban islands by highways and urbanized centres, in many places the minimum amount of space required for the genetic diversity of a small animal community was no longer available. Cooperation with Jordan, Palestine, Lebanon and Syria through establishment of ‘peace parks’ may possibly relieve some of the pressure and provide critical lands. Many such transboundary sanctuaries have been proposed by academics and NGOs. Sadly, Israel has not yet found governmental partners who are equally enthusiastic about such arrangements. On the contrary, over the past decade, uninvited influxes of refugees, contraband and terror have only precipitated Israel’s proclivity towards building security walls and border fences. These greatly exacerbate existing habitat fragmentation. T oday, Israel appears to be at a crossroads. Against all odds, ecosystems have survived centuries of conflict and land degradation. During the past sixty years, Israeli conservation policies largely reflected the ‘state-of-the-art’ in the field and the national commitment to preservation has been significant, as manifested in an impressive network of nature reserves. But nature reserves are not inviolate. For example, the army is permitted to avail itself of many of the largest sanctuaries in the country for military manoeuvres. And just as the country declared reserves, in a relentless search for new lands for suburbs and cities, it can re-zone lands for residence. Ultimately, this is a political decision; people vote – and want to live in spacious homes. It would seem that the state of Israel must make a choice: It can either change its demographic policies and stabilize population, incentivizing life in dense, but hopefully pleasant, urban environments. Or it can watch the slow and steady disappearance of its magnificent natural heritage. It cannot have it both ways. 47 SEMINAR 673 – September 2015