Tariq Talahmeh, a Palestinian ecologist, spoke Aug. 23 on campus about efforts to bring sustainable development to rural areas in the West Bank. The luncheon seminar in the university's Rice Hall was sponsored by Cornell's Center for the Environment (CfE) and was attended by about 30 Cornell faculty members, graduate students and community members.
Talahmeh, who was introduced by Associate Professor Max Pfeffer, associate director of the center, has been a visiting scholar at CfE this August. He was a student at Israel's Arava Institute for Environmental Studies, a joint program involving Israelis, Palestinians and Jordanians and became the institute's Arab outreach coordinator. He mediated more than 40 cases on environmental conflicts in Israel and the West Bank before founding, in 1999, a U.N.-sponsored nongovernmental agency, or NGO, dedicated to helping rural Palestinians improve their lives. The agency was the only NGO to locate in a remote area in the West Bank as well as the only one working to solve rural environmental problems.
Talahmeh chose a name for his agency, the Rural Center for Sustainable Development-Palestine, that he thought would appeal to rural residents. Its initials, RCSD, are similar to an Arabic word, rasad, that suggests God's vigilance and protection. "It's a word with a good sound," Talahmeh told the audience. "It suggests that no matter what harm people may do, God will monitor and protect."
In an underplayed, engaging story-telling style, Talahmeh related how he persuaded a Palestinian farmer to rent him a tiny room that had been a rabbit hutch. Despite the doubts of friends who declined to help, he managed to clean and furnish it, put in windows and doors and set it up as an office. His industriousness soon attracted curious locals. "After three hours, 10 people were helping," he said.
Convinced that sustainable development would not be possible unless other problems were solved in tandem, Talahmeh circumvented the usual West Bank bureaucratic roadblocks when he talked Palestinian energy officials into bringing low-cost solar energy and other sustainable forms of electricity into the village. Their introduction enabled him to hook up a computer and link the isolated area to the outside world. He also persuaded residents to build a school for children, instead of their planned mosque, by offering the imam-to-be a teaching job at the proposed school.
Talahmeh's NGO had a staff of nine volunteers when the recent onset of violence in the Israeli-occupied West Bank forced it to abandon most of its efforts, including an organic foods factory that was to employ 25 and bring in needed revenues. Now the village is back to no electricity or telephone connection. Only one initiative has survived the conflict: getting residents to collect and store drinking water in cisterns during the rainy season instead of getting drinking water from streams polluted by industrial runoff.
"Most NGOs were forced to close their offices when the violence started," said Talahmeh, who laments the economic deprivation accompanying the ongoing conflict. "A thousand children won't go to school because their parents can't afford to send them." He said he doubts that real sustainable development or economic growth can take place in the West Bank while the struggles are going on. While he hopes to return to the village eventually, he said, he is now pursuing a graduate degree in environmental science at York University in Toronto.
| Cornell Chronicle Front Page | | Table of Contents | | Cornell News Service Home Page |