Jordan River Reduced To A Trickle Of Sewage - Guardian

[hatrack]

"Once it was the mighty Jordan river, a crossroads of civilisations and continents, and a favourite of pilgrims seeking baptism in its waters. Now just about the only thing that flows for large parts of the year, keeping the river alive, is sewage. Decades of competition for water have turned the lower Jordan river, running between the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea, into little more than a drainage ditch. Dams and pumping stations have diverted almost 90% of the river's water to leave parts of the surrounding valley and the Dead Sea on the brink of ecological disaster.

Yesterday, Israel's environment minister and Jordanian royalty met on a small island in the river to discuss the crisis. But the only area of agreement between them was that the most obvious solution - restoring the original water supply - is not even up for discussion. The Jordan river provides Israel with nearly a third of its water supply, and Jordan relies on dams to sustain agriculture in the area. With demand ever increasing for the most precious commodity in the region, neither country is prepared to give up a drop.

"Unfortunately, environmental policies are governed by politics," said Jordan's Prince Hassan Bin Talal, brother of the late king. "We're talking about a 70-mile zone of crisis. We don't have a comprehensive peace but I don't see why we have to continue with the policy of mutually assured destruction of the environment and resources."

Fifty years ago, 1.3bn cubic metres of water flowed through the lower Jordan each year. Today, environmentalists say that if 200m cubic metres travel the lower Jordan then it is a good year, and nearly half of that is raw sewage from Palestinian villages and Jewish settlements, the effluent from commercial fish farms and other untreated waste water. "Ironically, it is sewage that is maintaining what little biodiversity there is along the Jordan," said Gidon Bromber, head of Friends of the Earth Middle East (FoEME) in Tel Aviv. "Right now the river is so desperate, the sewage is the only thing keeping the river flowing at times. It feeds life there."

EDIT

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1433221,00.html

[Ian David]

1. At first I thought you said, "Joan Rivers." This makes a LITTLE more sense