Earth Day, for better or worse

Happy Earth Day! Does anyone else feel the irony: Israel’s Independence Day and a celebration of the global environment falling on the same day?

Our country is engaged in a ceasefire, while still battling on all fronts. We have, in the past two-and-a-half years dropped so much ordinance on Gaza it will be years before they can return to growing crops; we are in the midst of a scorched-earth campaign in Southern Lebanon.

We are standing side-by-side with the US in a war over a major shipping lane for fossil fuels, in a vain effort to keep oil prices low and polluting cars on the road. We stand side-by-side in an effort to prevent another country from attaining nuclear weapons – an effort that has so far entrenched the resolve of the other side to develop those weapons. If our efforts are successful, we’ll be handing out warplanes and weapons all around to our friends, instead of cigars.

Of course, war is not all bad for the environment. When gas prices rise, even temporarily, more ecological alternatives become attractive. When people are stuck in their bomb shelters, animals begin to return to rural, and even urban areas. Farmers lose their livelihood, its true, but wild flora creeps in from the edges, along with insects, amphibians and reptiles. And in Israel, working from home or hybrid work has become the norm as the war alternately cools and threatens to reheat.

Despite the ceasefires – despite our rush to return to normal, even for a week or two – the Independence Day celebrations have been muted, limited to a small number of people or without the public altogether. Still, by around three o’clock, the air is be thick with smoke as people light their grills and throw slabs of environmentally-unfriendly red meat on the coals. Not even I would dare suggest they celebrate Earth Day with some nice eggplant salad and hummus.

On this Earth Day, the clouds have finally cleared from our skies, and the weather is warm and mild. Due to late rains, the spring flowers – nasturtiums, sweet peas, poppies and salvia – have run rampant in the garden, blocking my sidewalk and choking off the herbs growing underneath. The snails and slugs are having a field day, and the frogs are still chirping in the verges. You would never know, looking at my garden, that the rainy season is shifting, with dryer winters and more unstable spring weather patterns, hotter winds followed by sprinklings of mud.

I would love for my country to acknowledge Earth Day. We might acknowledge, for example, that the environment does not recognize borders. We do ourselves, as well as our local ecology, harm when we destroy the Earth around us. We might acknowledge we are a part of this living, breathing planet, and we share responsibility with all other humans for caring for that fragile shell on a tiny ball spinning in space.

We might take a minute on this Earth Day, this barely-there ceasefire, this breathing space, this Independence Day in a county that is losing the concept of independence and democracy, to stop and look at the flowers. Ironically enough, despite our role in the cheap-oil war, our country leads in sales of electric cars, and solar panel installation has taken off in recent years. We could, if we so desired, aim for zero-carbon output, restoration of wild areas and increased investment in green tech. We could, instead of patting ourselves on the back for our cyber-based tech, aim for ecological tech parks in the North and South.

We might take this day to take a more holistic view of ourselves and our world. We may be independent, but we do not exist in a sort of walled-off vacuum. We depend on water that flows to us from Lebanon and Syria, on dust that flies in from North Africa, on currents flowing up and down the Red Sea, on fish swimming in our shared Mediterranean, on winds that sweep across continents to our east and west, north and south.

We could remind ourselves it is still possible to act as citizens of the Earth and citizens of the state of Israel simultaneously. It would be a balancing act, for sure – one made difficult by our wars over oil and means of destruction. In an increasingly fractured world, one in which the largest powers cling to their fossil-fuel economy, dreaming of a cleaner world seems almost naïve. But I would argue it is essential if we want our children to live healthy, happy lives.

For me – and many Israelis – love of our county is tied up in love of the amazing variety of natural wonders to be found within our tiny borders. The Hula Valley, for example, is a wayside inn for millions of migrating birds on their way to and from Africa and Europe. We could elect those birds to be our symbols of nature preservation, rather than the red flowers that we dare not pick, but which disappear, year after year, under builders’ cranes. We could celebrate their border crossings, their rhythms that tie the continents together. Because celebrating the Earth means celebrating the entire planet.

So yes, I wish my county happy Earth Day! May we learn to live on the Earth as though we belong here.