Jordan River 'to run dry next year'

[ensho]

http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/2010/05/20105510484475825.html


Normally on bus tours the guide will make numerous pit stops for the sightseers. But as we drove from Jerusalem out of the Judea Mountains and into the open space of the Jordan Valley, our Jordan River tour guide asked the participants to use the bathroom at the gas station where we first stopped, because we would be avoiding all other toilet facilities until we reached the Sea of Galilee.

"All the sewage of the communities along the Jordan River goes right into it and we want to avoid adding ours," Gidon Bromberg said with a wry smile.

Bromberg is the Israeli co-director of Friends of Earth Middle East (FoEME), an Israeli-Palestinian-Jordanian environmental NGO that is making surprising headway into the most critical environmental crisis facing Israel, Palestine and Jordan: water.

FoEME organised the tour to teach journalists about what is killing the renowned Jordan River and to share the results of two groundbreaking studies it released that identify for the first time how to save the river - both in terms of how much water is needed and where the water would come from.

The studies reveal that with cooperation between Israel, Jordan and Palestine, the river can be saved - and FoEME itself offers an example of such cooperation.

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One look at the river and we understood why we came on the trip. It was pitiful.

The Jordan River, for all its fame, was a narrow foul brownish stream that gurgled its way south.

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As we would see later on our bus trip, the water of the Jordan River is no longer coming from the Sea of Galilee but from the sewage, the contaminated agricultural run-off and saline water that was dumped into it.

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We continued north, passing a crusader castle on our left, and we crossed Herod's stream, a contributor to the river, which today is contaminated by Israeli fishpond waters filled with feed, hormones, and fish droppings.

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Time is running out."
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time is also running out in the Gulf of Mexico

actually the world is all out of time - its gone