News
U.S.-born environmental warrior rewarded for his efforts
By: Ira Moskowitz
Haaretz
January 13, 2006
In a ceremony Tuesday night at the Jerusalem Municipality, environmentalist Alon Tal received the second annual Charles Bronfman Prize, a $100,000 award recognizing humanitarian work that has contributed significantly to the world and enriched Jewish life. Tal, 45, was chosen from among 80 international candidates by a team of judges including former World Bank president and Quartet envoy James Wolfensohn, Canadian Supreme Court Justice Rosalie Silberman Abella and former Israeli minister Dan Meridor.
Meridor spoke about Tal's unique contribution in bringing environmental issues to the fore in Israel. With its priorities focused on defense and settlement, this was a particularly difficult mission in Israel, Meridor noted. The attitude was: "Who has time to think of the environment?"
Tal cited environmental achievements of recent years and the distinctive "technological optimism" of Israeli environmentalism, but acknowledged that the country has been preoccupied with its political and economic survival. He expressed hope that this focus would shift toward the "health and spirit" of the country as "we reclaim our role as an indigenous people living in harmony in our homeland."
Jerusalem Mayor Uri Lupolianski, Charles Bronfman and his son-in-law, Andrew Hauptman, also spoke at the ceremony. Several hundred of Tal's colleagues, students, family and friends, including prominent members of academia, the business community, Jewish organizations and the Knesset, filled the council chambers.
In a pre-ceremony interview with Anglo File at his home in Maccabim, Tal said he was "completely speechless and very, very excited" when he received the phone call about the prize. "The only weird thing about it is that it's like a life achievement award in the middle of your life, and hopefully the best is yet to come."
`Diehard Zionist'
Sitting in his patio, Tal reviewed the course of his life so far, taking a moment now and then to help Zoe, the youngest of his three daughters, with an art project. "The big decisions in my life have sort of been laid out before me," he explains. One of these "self-evident" decisions was to immigrate to Israel after completing college in North Carolina in 1980. He grew up in a Zionist home and spent a summer in Israel with his family and a year in high school in Israel on a Young Judea program. So, it was a "no-brainer" for him: "If I was serious about being Jewish, I would be in Israel." He arrived in Israel alone, but his parents followed five years later, and a sister now lives in Rehovot.
Thirty days after landing in Israel, Tal was already a soldier in the Nahal Brigade. "I loved the army. I always ran track and distance running, so the physical stuff wasn't hard. I learned the language and I met some great people from all over the country. Until the war in Lebanon, it was great." He notes that his experience as a soldier at the gates of Beirut and the death of some friends in Israel's Lebanon campaign "sobered me up about Israel."
At this point, Tal's loquacious delivery enters high gear, with his green eyes flashing above his trim beard. "I still feel I'm a diehard Zionist, but it made me less naive about the excesses of certain Zionist axioms, which leads right into the environment. That's one of the things I wrestle with today - how to be a Zionist in the second century of Zionism and make peace between the Zionist vision and the ecological vision." For example, "The paradigm of Zionist planning is horizontal. So now we have this horrible sprawl and are wiping out the last of the open spaces. The same thing with the population policies in the country: Once there was a time when we had a real imperative to grow demographically; that isn't the case any more."
A passion for the environment
Tal traces the roots of his environmental passion to hikes in the green forests of North Carolina, growing up in the 1970s (he remembers the first Earth Day), and dinner-table conversations about his father's ecology-related work as a chemist. However, he says that his focus on environmental work really began during law school, when he also worked at the Interior Ministry's Environmental Protection Service. "I answered an ad for a law student and it changed my life."
Law school was not initially one of the "self-evident" decisions in Tal's path. After finishing his army service, he received a scholarship for Yale University's Ph.D. program in politics. But he did not want to leave Israel, and law school at Hebrew University became a suitable "excuse" to stay in the country. He also felt obliged to remain in Israel because he had promised friends to form a rock band together. The band, Liquid Plumber, played at the university, kibbutzim and army bases. "If I could have been a rock star I would have, but I guess I didn't have the hairline for it," he smiles, alluding to his hair-challenged pate.
Tal found law school to be an "anti-intellectual" experience and spent more time working at the Environmental Protection Service than in the classroom. He cites Ruth Ruthenberg, the woman who hired him and who currently serves as the legal advisor to the Environment Ministry, as one of his mentors. "I look back at it and think: What was she thinking? Here I was, this basically illiterate oleh; I had to make 500 spelling corrections on everything I wrote, but she gave me the chance."
After graduating from law school, Tal clerked with then attorney general Yitzchak Zamir. "It was a privilege. I don't have many heroes, but he's one of them. But it was clear to me then - even though it was an unbelievable clerkship - the environment is where I want to be." The next step was to pursue environmental studies, which returned him to the United States.
"They wouldn't take me at the environmental science program at [Hebrew University of Jerusalem's] Givat Ram [campus] unless I first did a year of physics and chemistry courses, so I said the heck with that, I'll go to Harvard. I went for a master's and it turned into a doctorate."
While doing his graduate work at Harvard, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the largest American environmental group, appointed him to an advisory panel. "I was very impressed and I saw what an engine they had been for environmental progress in the States and I said: `That's what I want to do.'"
Changing the world
Upon returning to Israel, Tal was offered a job at the newly established Environment Ministry, but decided to pursue his goal of creating an environmental advocacy organization. In 1989, at age 29, he founded the Israel Union for Environmental Defense (Adam, Teva V'Din). Tal recruited two other lawyers and an office manager, and rented an office in Tel Aviv.
"We were literally living on ideology. It was like a kibbutz - everyone made the same salary of $1,000 per month. It was really a sense there that we were going to change the world, and I think in some ways we did change environmental law and environmental advocacy for sure."
During this period, Tal split his week between his home on Kibbutz Ketura in the Arava, near Eilat, and the IUED office in Tel Aviv. "I spent three to four days in Tel Aviv, working until midnight and sleeping on a mattress on the floor in the office." From these humble beginnings, IUED has evolved into a robust advocacy organization, with a current annual operating budget of about $1 million. While no longer directly involved in the organization, Tal is very proud of its work: "It's the greatest thing in the world to open the paper and see what they have done. They're doing the good fight."
In 1994, Tal was part of an Israeli delegation that met with Arab environmentalists in Tunisia. This meeting led to the first regional environmental initiative, which initially operated from IUED's offices and is now called Friends of the Earth Middle East. Two years later, Tal started another initiative to encourage trans-border environmental cooperation: the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies. Tal notes that Charles Bronfman's charitable foundation in Israel provided the initial scholarships for Middle Eastern students, thus making this academic program and model of Arab-Jewish co-existence a reality.
Tal also helped advance environmental work in Israel as the chairman of the Life and Environment umbrella group, which grew during his tenure from 24 to 80 organizations, mainly through his efforts to enlist small, local organizations. He now hopes to use the money from the Charles Bronfman Prize to assist these grassroots initiatives. "The idea is that I want to take the lion's share of the money and find matching sources and to create a new environmental foundation that will focus on assisting grassroots groups in facing environmental emergencies. Sometimes a 5,000-shekel notice in a local newspaper about a demonstration is enough to save a park, or one small $3,000-4,000 lawsuit against a major polluter can make a whole neighborhood breathe freely."
In addition to his plans for this new foundation, Tal is focusing his sights on the Jewish National Fund; he currently serves on the JNF's board and aspires to become its chairman. He also teaches and conducts research at Be'er Sheva's Ben-Gurion University, is working on two new books and will chair an international conference on desertification in Sde Boker in November, the first conference the United Nations has agreed to co-sponsor in Israel.
While feeling very gratified personally with the prize award, Tal also regards it as "an expression of a certain maturation of the environmental movement in Israel" and is pleased by the recognition of the environment as "an essentially Jewish impulse and aspiration."
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