Green Solutions lead to “Peace” in the Middle East — Students lead the way

Alisa Ananbeh, a student leader on the environment, about her plans to help Jordan go green

By Marcus Nobel
UnitedEarth.us
Jan 7, 2012

One of the main premises of Earth Ethics is that we need a new set of “values” to deal with our current set of problems… and some of these problems are ancient.

Recently young student scholars from the Middle East partcipated in a US funded five-week program to help young people from the Middle East deal with environmental problems. Just under twenty students from Gaza, Jordan and the West Bank travelled to America to learn about the US environmental movement and ways to build leadership on the issue in their own countries.

Green leadership in the volatile Middle East is documented in a very encouraging website called Greenprophet, that shows by working together to solve our common environmental problems, humanity can overcome many of the issues that divide us; including race, religion, ethnicity etc.

Although humanity has always shared a common physical existence on Earth, it has only been recently that the fact of our interconnectedness–financial, cultural and biological, to name a few — has become unavoidable. We are one.

One of the most widely distributed photographic images in existence, The Blue Marble is a famous photograph of the Earth, taken on December 7, 1972, by the crew of the Apollo 17 . The image is one of the few to show a fully illuminated Earth, as the astronauts had the Sun behind them when they took the image. To the astronauts, Earth had the appearance of a glass marble, hence the name.

Since that iconic photograph was taken a global consciousness has emerged that states, to solve our global problems –internationally as well locally- humanity needs to work together.

Green Prophet’s Eco-Heros of 2011 include both men and women from countries including United Arab Emirates, Israel, Qatar, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia.
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