Where’s the Coverage? Israel Leads the Fight against Desertification
You may have read some of the thousands of articles about the conflict in Mali. The United States may even get involved in the French operation there. The Council on Foreign Relations links the conflict to “food insecurity related to desertification.” The Guardian’s Comment is Free asserts in a headline “Mali crisis caused by development failures” and cites specifically “corruption, desertification, impoverishment, and the inability to lure investment.” So, one would think the media would report on advances in combating desertification and the country that leads the world in doing so – unless, of course, that country were Israel, which it is.
In November, Israel hosted the fourth biannual International Conference on Drylands, Deserts and Desertification at the Sde Boker campus of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Israel also hosted the 2008 and 2010 conferences. This is not surprising since, according to Sharon Megdal, director of the Water Resources Research Center at the University of Arizona, “Israel is leading the way in water resources and management.”
Yet, CAMERA could find no mention of the conference in the popular press though, since the conference, desertification has been covered in Forbes, The New York Daily News, again The Guardian, Agence France-Presse, BBC News, and many other news outlets. The Los Angeles Times ran a glowing 1,250-word profile of an Iranian environmentalist but of the world leader… not a word.
In the conference’s opening plenum, Professor Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University declared that Israel, “as one of the most scientifically advanced countries, can play a major role in bringing all of these problems to global attention.” Perhaps Professor Ehrlich hasn’t noticed, but if there’s a story that shows Israel in a positive light, one must almost unfailingly ask… Where’s the coverage?
Conference delegates walk through the desert landscape of the Negev.
(Photo by Wolfgang Motzafi-Haller/BGU)
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