Thu, September 2, 2010 9:41:11 PM
shabbat shalom 03.09.10 ...
Hi everyone, This has been a busy week. I spent three days of it in the Negev, in my old desert home at Sede Boqer, attending an international conference.  It has been sixteen years since I lived in beautiful Sede Boqer with its view over the Wilderness of Zin. In those days we were in a pioneering situation, small and isolated, with the kibbutz and local Beduin as our nearest neighbors, and a total population of 400 in our own settlement. We started the Institute for Desert Research from scratch, living in caravans, scrounging and building equipment from the scrap heaps of the kibbutz, building our own laboratories. It was a great adventure and I was priviledged to be part of it. But those days are past, and the Institute is three times the size it was when I left Sede Boqer, with modern buildings and laboratories, and new dormitories for an international group of graduate students coming from all continents, especially the arid lands of China and Africa, but also including some Americans and Europeans. Germans were taking part in the work there since the beginning, and German students are still common there today, doing ecological, hydrological and agricultural research. Entire new neighborhoods of villas have sprung up, build in ecologically sound designs with architecture reminding me of the adobe villages of North Africa or New Mexico. It is a pleasant place but not the wild adventure it was when I started there. I'm still the lucky one. The conference (on long term ecological studies) was about 60 scientists, coming everywhere from Scotland to Jordan. In fact there were two Jordanian scientists at the meeting, one of them a delightful tall, blond, blue-eyed Arab Christian whose family originally came from Nablus. Looked more French than Arab; that would be the Crusader blood, I guess. (There are blue-eyed Arabs in Jordan and Galilee, no doubt offspring of Crusader women taken into the harems of conquering Moslems 800 years ago.....just one more dash to the rich ethnic mixture that is called Palestinian.) I was glad to connect with two of my EBONE colleagues, one from England and the other from Slovakia. We are working on issues of biodiversity measurement and I wanted their ideas. In fact I presented my own ideas on measuring biodiversity at the meeting, and although the lecture time was short, I got a lot of supportive feedback to keep going the way I am going; it seems to be the right track to solving a tough problem. The English EBONE partner is also head of the international ILTER program and able to push some things forward internationally. He threw out his own proposal for a cooperation, and both the Jordanians and my own working group on Avdat signed up for it. (Okay, I frogmarched the site manager of Avdat to sign up, so he got even by signing my name first.) That's a little sticky because the Jordanians are easier about cooperating with universities than the Israeli government, so we will have to officially switch around, but on the personal level, the cooperation looks good. We went on a field trip to the desert watershed where I began my Israeli field work in 1981.....memories of clambering over those rocks when I was nearly 30 years younger. It looks almost the same; only a trained eye can see the changes, but like everything else in this country, it's gotten drier over the years. Fewer snails, for one thing, and fewer isopods (a good indcator of soil moisture). The 40+ years of data on that hillside will be useful as we try to anticipate the future in a region that is getting less rain and warmer temperatures. I did my little part, but the whole body of observations was done by a couple dozen scientists and scores of graduate students over the years, some of them now full professors too. I like the Negev. The smell of the desert at dawn (we were out at 5:30 am to avoid the heat) is special: a mixture of rock dust and aromatic shrubs, clean and astringent. The sun burns away any kind of rot, and leaves the earth clean. It's a demanding life to be a desert rat, but it has compensations. I hitched a ride north again after the conference, and stopped en route to see my former student, now a bio-statistician at Ben Gurion University. He's helping us with some analysis of classification methods. It goes forward, despite the fact that he travels today for America (Columbus, Ohio! to work on a project at OSU) and I leave soon for Sweden. How on earth did we manage before email and skype...... Sergei will be in Ohio and our remote sensing scientist in Brisbane, but the cooperation goes forward smoothly..... Back home on Wednesday night, and my Dutch M.Sc. student left for Holland on Thursday night, so we had some busy time on Thursday morning. A friend of my sister, an Arab American, is in Palestine for two weeks and came over to my office with a parcel from my sister: Fritos and Reese's peanut butter cups (decadent luxuries of the past), two wildly colorful Hawaiian shirts and some lens cleaning cloths. (Yeah, these are the things I miss from the Olde Countrie.) In thanks, I took her and my grad student on an evening in Jerusalem. We prowled the Mahane Yehuda market, where my student bought piles of spices to take home. Then we had dinner in a simple Kurdish restaurant, with mujjaderah and stuffed vegetbles, until we were stuffed ourselves. Waddling back to the center of Jerusalem, coffee in a Tunisian bakery, a stroll down Ben Yehuda Street. Here a Russian playing classical violin, there a North African Jew playing traditional Sephardic airs on an electric oud. I got a small gift that the visitor could take back to my sister, and then dropped her at the walls of the Old City to get an Arab bus back to Ramallah, and dropped my student where he would spend a few hours before his shuttle to the airport. So all alone again, and catching my breath before leaping off to Sweden, Holland and Belgium at the end of this month. A few quiet weeks will be welcome, in fact, but I think work is going forward quite nicely now, and work is consuming 80% of my waking time, so it sure as hell better be going forward. shabbat shalom, Linda |
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Tweeted by Peta-de-Aztlan~
shabbat shalom 03.09.10 Blog Post via Prof. Linda Whittaker ~my friend/sponsor > http://bit.ly/9dA5QZ
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