Pacific Standard - Mark Schapiro
Some of climate change's earliest effects have desolated areas of the Middle East and destabilized regional governments. For local journalists to cover the problem, that requires finesse in navigating the tightly controlled press.
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| A herd of camels drinking a pool of polluted agricultural run-off in an
otherwise dry riverbed near Jericho in the West Bank. (Photo: David
Silverman/Getty Images) |
"We
must be elegant." This is how a Jordanian journalist describes how she
and her colleagues are learning to report on the environment in the
Middle East. That elegance — a capacity for finesse — is a requirement
to do such reporting: In many countries here, a media largely controlled
by royal governments and oligarchs is struggling to reckon with the
impacts of industrial development often conducted without significant
oversight by the government or by independent watchdogs. Every country
has a term for "the influentials," as I heard them referred to in
Jordan — the political and economic figures whose power is tied to
rulers or petro-princes who have been able to operate for many years
with impunity.
That
is, slowly, starting to change as environmental degradations
accumulate. A growing cadre of journalists is pursing assertive
reporting on the deterioration that they see and experience daily, and
which represents, for many of them, a more acute threat than the battles
over radical Islam that dominate American coverage of the region. The
limits of impunity are being tested by conditions you can see and
smell — and by ever-increasing access to international scientific source
material.
European
powers sketched the national borders here almost a hundred years ago to
facilitate Western access to oil. Now the region is at the frontline of
disruptions caused by oil's collateral atmospheric damage, a sort of
focal point for the Anthropocene — this era in which humans have become
the primary influence on the planet's ecological conditions. According
to a recent paper in
Nature Climate Change,
the Middle East is where the convergence of rising temperatures and
intensifying drought are accelerating quicker than almost anywhere on
Earth. One visceral example of the consequences: A significant
contributing factor to the conflict in Syria, many
scientists have suggested,
was a five-year drought that exacerbated already tense relations
between those close to the Assad regime and those excluded from its
dispensing of favors and resources.
The
struggle with violent fundamentalists hangs over every country in the
region to varying degrees, for secular and religious Muslims alike, but
what's at least equally if not more potent on a daily basis is the
threat of environmental degradation and the predations of climate
change.
There
is perhaps no better way to glimpse how the environmental tensions are
playing out than by spending time with the journalists who are
struggling to keep pace with them. Recently, I went to Amman, Jordan, to
conduct a one-week master's workshop in investigative environmental
reporting at the invitation of the Arab Reporters for Investigative
Journalism and ended up learning as much from them as, I'd like to
think, they did from me.
Over
the past decade, ARIJ, a non-profit based in Amman, has been a
galvanizing force in bringing methodologies and principles of
investigative reporting to the Arab world, offering workshops, advice,
and, in some cases, financial support to journalists in nine Arab
countries. Most recently, ARIJ organized the Middle East contribution to
the
Panama Papers
investigation, revealing the names of more than a hundred powerful
Jordanian and Lebanese financial and political figures who had stashed
funds or companies in offshore tax havens.
The
Arab world hasn't had an abundance of role models like Seymour Hersh or
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to look to for guidance and
inspiration. ARIJ's founder and director, Rana Sabbagh, a former
correspondent with Reuters and the
Times of London, is hoping to fill that gap with a new generation of post-Arab Spring journalists.
The
14 participants in the ARIJ program hailed from Egypt, Tunisia,
Palestine, Bahrain, and Jordan, most of them working for publications,
radio, or television in their home countries. Some were attending at
political risk. One journalist from Syria was unable to attend after the
government in Turkey, where he and his family fled following his home
country's civil war, refused to guarantee his ability to return.
About
15 minutes along a highway at 10:00 at night, in a taxi just after
arriving in Jordan, I was jarred out of jet-lag by the exit sign for a
turnoff, in Arabic and English: ″Iraqi border″ and, under that, ″Syrian
border.″ A two-hour drive to the northeast, Iraq was still seething
violently from the American invasion; due north was the brutal civil war
in Syria, a conflict triggered partially by the impacts of the drought
intensified by climate change, and from which as many as a thousand
people a day flee into Jordan's hastily assembled refugee camps. We sped
past. About five minutes later, coming into focus through the darkness
alongside the highway, a long rectangular building with huge block
letters painted on it in strangely familiar blue and yellow, "IKEA."
War
to the left of me, furniture to the right, these two contrasting images
seemed somehow emblematic of Jordan, sketched from the desert by the
British in 1921 and promptly handed to a local monarch. Now it's a
relatively stable redoubt in the region with the backing of foreign aid
from the United States and other Western governments. Of all the Gulf
countries, Jordan has by far the closest relations with the U.S. and
Europe, a Western educated elite, and a middle class with a taste for
the accouterments — even while it's consistently swept into the
conflicts that rage across one of the planet's most volatile regions.
A
day later, at our opening session, the journalists introduced
themselves, and it was striking to hear of the common interests they
share with their distant peers in the U.S. The struggle with violent
fundamentalists hangs over every country in the region to varying
degrees, for secular and religious Muslims alike, but what's at least
equally if not more potent on a daily basis is the threat of
environmental degradation and the predations of climate change. Like
journalists everywhere, they want to understand it, explain it to their
readers, point to those responsible, and help indicate how to stop it.
There's
the journalist in Jordan who's been investigating the polluted
river-water in Zarqa, the city's third-largest city, where the water is
so tainted from local industries that it's unusable for farmers and
residents who live in the environs. There's the Bahraini studying the
cocktail of chemical effluents from factories there, and the cluster of
cancers in surrounding neighborhoods; and the Tunisian writing about the
impact of accumulating piles of old batteries leaking cadmium, mercury,
and other toxins in the capital of Tunis. Both the Egyptian and
Tunisian journalists spoke, independently, of what turns out to be a
common concern, the disappearance of native seed varieties in North
Africa as global seed companies come to dominate those markets.
And
let's drop for a moment into Palestine, a place where our view is
shaped almost entirely by reporting on violent clashes with Israel.
Inside Palestine, meanwhile, journalists are attempting to carve out an
independent space to report honestly and thoroughly on the environmental
challenges they face.
"Professionalism is the antidote to working in these kinds of regimes."
Firas
Taweel, a TV and radio journalist with the AyjaL Radio Network, is
probing into the health impact of diesel fuel pollution emitted by
Palestine's trucks and cars. Ruba Anabtawi Alloun, a writer for
Afaq Environmental Magazine,
affiliated with BirZeit University, has been investigating illegal
logging by Palestinians and Israeli settlers inside one of the few
protected forests of Palestine.
Then
there was the reporting feat accomplished by Maha Al-Bidiny, an
independent journalist based in Cairo, who set off on her own to
reveal the impact
of fracking's expansion into rural Egypt, and the toxins released into
the water supply of Egyptian farms. She had returned to the fields 19
times to convince the workers to allow a woman — her — to visit the
sites that had been flooded with polluted waste water.
But
while similarities in subject matter abound, and reporting strategies
can be replicated, it's much harder to practice journalism in the Middle
East than in the U.S. Many of the journalists I met are operating in a
journalistic context that had opened, briefly, in the wake of the Arab
Spring, but then closed.
Tunisia
remains the major exception. According to Meriam Khadraoui, an editor
and reporter at the Tunisian Press Service, there has been a flowering
of independent press since the revolution in 2011. Before then, she
recalled, her journalism was forcibly limited to writing mostly "stupid
stories about nothing." Now she's starting up a team to do in-depth,
investigative projects at the agency.
The rest of the Arab-speaking world, though, remains one of the most dangerous places to pursue journalism, according to the
Committee to Protect Journalists.
Certainly the reporters who pass through ARIJ are trying to navigate
through a thorny journalistic space, and to respond to a population
that, according to almost every one of the journalists, is becoming more
environmentally aware and concerned. That space contracts and at times
expands. Independent newspapers in Egypt and Jordan, as well as pan-Arab
publications based in Lebanon and London, are at the forefront of
testing, with "elegance," the boundaries of what is officially
acceptable.
"Sometimes,"
says Rana Sabbagh, "there are imaginary lines in your brain. You have
to push the boundaries to see where they are…. The main thing is to keep
pushing, and get the facts right. Professionalism is the antidote to
working in these kinds of regimes."
ARIJ
also provides critical assistance, such as legal review of stories
published under its purview; and, in some instances, assisting with
publication in one of several Arab news outlets overseas, such as
al Hayat, a pan-Arab daily based in Lebanon, and
Alaraby Aljadeed, based in London, if the story is deemed too dangerous to publish at home.
As the
Columbia Journalism Review
recently expressed it, "a community of Arab investigative reporters
exists even when it shouldn't." Environmental reporting is still
relatively new to the region, and until now has been broadly limited to
identifying sources of pollution but not necessarily the people
responsible. What may lie ahead, however, is sobering: Journalists who
have pursued corruption and human rights abuses, or who critique
government policy, can find themselves under threat, imprisoned, or
deported. In Egypt this June, one of the country's top TV journalists
was
fired
after an ally of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi took over the station
where she worked, and shortly thereafter deported back to her home
country of Lebanon. Even relatively mild criticism of the government in
Egypt can lead to dismissal, loss of a passport, or imprisonment. In
other countries, the pressure can range from subtle — a discreet call to
an editor — to more heavy-handed, as it's been in Egypt and Bahrain,
both of which have imprisoned numerous journalists. The boundaries for
environmental journalism are still being tested, and the journalists I
met in Jordan will no doubt be at the forefront of finding out where
they are.
Recognition
of climate change itself is not controversial in the Middle East: All
countries in the region submitted greenhouse gas reduction goals
following the Paris climate talks, even though Saudi Arabia has been a
key player in trying to slow the implementation of global initiatives.
Alterations in the weather and the physical landscape are being
experienced in all the Arab countries, by rich and poor alike — though
the ability to deal with the consequences varies hugely across the
socio-economic spectrum. Everyone is living through enormously volatile
changes in the natural order that are a prime symptom of climate change,
and which scientists have come to call "the death of
stationarity" — the end of predictable patterns of rainfall and
temperature. As baselines crumble, the Middle East and North Africa, by
virtue of their place on the map, are among the hardest hit. And as
climate change keeps putting the squeeze on water and arable land,
social tensions over resources will only increase — which is how climate
reporting can get very tense very fast.
The
World Bank estimates
that, by 2025, as rainfall diminishes in already dry areas and
groundwater supplies are depleted, 80 to 100 million people in the
region will be exposed to severe water stress. Already, the polluted
Zarqa River in Jordan, like so many other rivers in the region, is
running with dramatically less water than usual, which means less
natural filtering of environmental toxins. Numerous studies, including
one
by a team from the University of California–Berkeley's Goldman School
of Public Policy, forecast an increasingly violent struggle in an
already tense region over water as these stresses increase. At current
emission levels, according to the Max Planck Institute, a leading
climate research center, temperatures are expected to soar to an average
of 114 degrees Fahrenheit by 2050 and 122 degrees Fahrenheit by the end
of the century, along with more intense heat waves and less time
between them, throughout the Middle East — and, to a lesser but still
significant degree, in North Africa.
Today the River Jordan is more powerful as a metaphor of depletion than as an actual river.
Or
consider native seeds. Those disappearing seeds are treasured not only
for their central role in the evolution of North African
agriculture — and thus North African culture — but also for their
ability to respond to heat and drought conditions without the need for
massive applications of chemical fertilizers and pesticides — a major
downside to the new seeds entering the market.
Prompted
by growing knowledge of climate change's disruptive impacts, an
umbrella group representing Islam's major spiritual leaders and thinkers
issued the
Islamic Declaration on Global Climate Change
last August, calling for action to reduce fossil fuels to limit global
warming to, at most, 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius. This religiously based
call for action was issued two months after the Pope's historic climate
encyclical, though it received nowhere near the press attention. The
Declaration did provide an important affirmation, to journalists and
their editors, as well as political figures, that climate change is real
and must be addressed. It may have provided some protective cover to
non-governmental organizations that are emerging in the region,
including
IndyAct, which has emerged as a civil-society lobbying force.
Safa'
Al Jayoussi, IndyAct's head of climate and energy, told the workshop
that divisions are emerging between countries in the region that produce
fossil fuel, and those which don't. For example, in Morocco, Tunisia,
and Jordan, there has been increasing attention on the development of
solar and other renewable energy sources. Of course, creating renewable
energy initiatives does not necessarily signal freedom of the press:
Morocco, for example, will be hosting the next round of climate
negotiations, but its media is still highly constrained in its ability
to cover the king, his financial interests, and his powerful and wealthy
court.
On my
final day in Jordan, Rana Sabbagh took me on a field trip about an hour
outside Amman to a hilltop castle in Aljoun, built in the 12th century
to fight off the Crusaders. Nearby is the recorded birthplace of the
Biblical figure Elijah. Standing atop the parapets, looking down on the
ochre-colored hills, just past the ridges in the distance, one can see
the city of Hebron in the West Bank; not far from there, in the haze of
sunset, were Bethlehem and Jerusalem. Here, within a hundred-mile
radius, you have the birthplace of two, and the key spawning ground of a
third, of our major religions — Judaism, Christianity, Islam, each of
them saturated in the soil and sweat of these rolling hills and olive
orchards along the banks of the River Jordan.
That
river, a defining feature of the Middle East's political troubles, is
also central to our own iconography of salvation and deliverance — a
landmark in the language of Martin Luther King and the black civil
rights movement; a recurring metaphor of freedom and a lyrical reference
point for American blues musicians. Now, over the course of its 156
miles, the river is a polluted trickle, the victim of water diversions
and a shrinking water supply. Today the River Jordan is more powerful as
a metaphor of depletion than as an actual river.
It's
the desire to clean up that trickle, both as metaphor and as river,
that is connecting the journalists of the region to each other, and to
the rest of us, to hold the abusers of our common landscape to account.
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