Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?

by Alan Weisman

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  PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERTO NEUMILLER

  for Beckie,

  for seeing it through.

  This calls for wisdom. If anyone has insight, let him

  calculate the number of the beast, for it is man’s number.

  —REVELATION 13:18

  NEW TESTAMENT,

  NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION

  When wisdom dictates that you do not need more children,

  a vasectomy is permissible.

  —THE AYATOLLAH ALI KHAMENEI,

  CA. 1989

  Author’s Note

  Many readers may recall my last book, The World Without Us, as a thought experiment that imagined what would happen if people vanished from our planet.

  The idea of theoretically wiping us off the face of the Earth was to show that, despite colossal damage we’ve wreaked, nature has remarkable resilience and healing powers. When relieved of the pressures we humans daily heap upon it, restoration and renewal commence with surprising swiftness. Eventually, even new plants, creatures, fungi, et al., evolve to fill empty niches.

  My hope was that readers, seduced by the gorgeous prospect of a refreshed, healthy Earth, might then ask themselves how we could add Homo sapiens back into the picture—only in harmony, not mortal combat, with the rest of Earthly life.

  In other words, how might we continue to have a world with us?

  Welcome to another thought experiment, on exactly that subject. Only this time, there’s no imagining: the scenarios here are real. And in addition to the people I describe, locals and informed experts, there’s everyone else—including you and me. As it turns out, we’re all part of the response to what basically came down to four questions I went around the world asking—questions that several of the aforementioned experts called the most important on Earth.

  “But probably,” one of them added, “they’re impossible to answer.”

  When he made that remark, we were lunching at one of the world’s oldest, most hallowed institutions of higher learning, where he was distinguished faculty. In that moment, I was glad not to be an expert. Journalists rarely claim depth in any field: our job is to seek people who dedicate their careers to study—or who actually live—whatever it is we’re investigating, and to ask them enough common-sense questions so the rest of us might understand.

  If such questions are arguably the most important in the world, whether or not the experts deem their answers impossible is irrelevant: we’d damned well better find them. Or keep asking until we do.

  So I did, in more than twenty countries over two years. Now, you get to ask them for yourselves, as you follow my travels and inquiry.

  If by the end you think that we’re onto the answers—well, I’m pretty sure you’ll figure out what we ought to do next.

  A.W.

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER 1

  A Weary Land of Four Questions

  i. Battle of the Babies

  A cold January afternoon in Jerusalem, late Friday before the Jewish Sabbath. The winter sun, nearing the horizon, turns the gilded Dome of the Rock atop the Temple Mount to blood-orange. From the east, where the muezzin’s afternoon call to Muslim prayer has just ended on the Mount of Olives, the golden Dome is suffused in a smudged pinkish corona of dust and traffic fumes.

  At this hour, the Temple Mount itself, the holiest site in Judaism, is one of the quieter spots in this ancient city, empty but for a few scholars in overcoats, hurrying with their books across a chilly, cypress-shaded plaza. Once, King Solomon’s original tabernacle stood here. It held the Ark of the Covenant, containing stone tablets on which Moses was believed to have incised the Ten Commandments. In 586 BCE, invading Babylonians destroyed it all and took the Jewish people captive. A half-century later, Cyrus the Great, emperor of Persia, liberated them to return and rebuild their temple.

  Around 19 CE, the Temple Mount was renovated and fortified with a surrounding wall by King Herod, only to be demolished again by the Romans within ninety years. Although exile from the Holy Land occurred both before and after, this Roman destruction of Jerusalem’s Second Temple most famously symbolizes the Diaspora that scattered Jews across Europe, northern Africa, and the Middle East.

  Today, a remaining fragment of the Second Temple’s sixty-foot-high perimeter in Jerusalem’s Old City, known as the Western (or “Wailing”) Wall, is an obligatory pilgrimage for Jews visiting Israel. Yet, lest they inadvertently tread where the Holy of Holies once stood, an official rabbinical decree prohibits Jews from ascending to the Temple Mount itself. Although it is at times defied, and exceptions can be arranged, this explains why the Temple Mount is administered by Muslims, who also hold it sacred. From here, the Prophet Muhammad is said to have journeyed one night upon a winged steed all the way to Seventh Heaven and back. Only Mecca and Medina, Muhammad’s birthplace and burial site, are considered holier. In a rare agreement between Israel and Islam, Muslims alone may pray on this hallowed ground, which they call al-Haram al-Sharif.

  But not as many Muslims come here as they once did. Before September 2000, they flocked by the thousands, lining up at a fountain ringed by stone benches to perform purification ablutions before entering the crimson-carpeted, marbled al-Aqsa Mosque across the plaza from the Dome of the Rock. Especially, they came on Friday at noon for the imam’s weekly sermon, a discourse on current events as well as the Qur’an.

  One frequent topic back then, recalls Khalil Toufakji, people jokingly called “Yasser Arafat’s biology bomb.” Except it was no joke. As Toufakji, today a Palestinian demographer with Jerusalem’s Arab Studies Society, remembers: “We were taught in the mosque, in school, and at home to have lots of children, for lots of reasons. In America or Europe, if there’s a problem, you can call the police. In a place with no laws to safeguard you, you rely on your family.”

  He sighs, stroking his neat gray moustache; his own father was a policeman. “Here, you need a big family to feel protected.” It’s even worse in Gaza, he adds. One Hamas leader there had fourteen children and four wives. “Our mentality goes back to the Bedouins. If you have a big enough tribe, everyone’s afraid of you.”

  Another reason for the large families, Toufakji agrees, is definitely no joke to Israelis. The Palestine Liberation Organization’s best weapon, its leader Arafat liked to say, was the Palestinian womb.

  During Ramadan, Toufakji and some of his own thirteen siblings would be among the half-million worshippers overflowing al-Aqsa Mosque, spilling onto al-Haram al-Sharif’s stone plaza. That was before the day in September 2000 when former Israeli defense minister Ariel Sharon paid a visit to the Temple Mount, escorted by a thousand Israeli riot police. At the time, Sharon was a candidate for prime minister. He had once been found willfully negligent by an Israeli commission for not protecting more than a thousand Palestinian civilian refugees massacred by Christian Phalangists during Lebanon’s 1982 civil war, while his occupying Israeli forces stood by. Sharon’s trip to the Temple Mount, intended to assert Israelis’ historical right to it, ignited demonstrations and rock throwing, which were met by tear gas and rubbe
r bullets. When stones from the Temple Mount were hurled at Jews worshipping at the Western Wall below, the ammunition turned live.

  The mayhem soon spiraled into hundreds of deaths in Jerusalem and beyond, in what became known as the Second Intifada. Eventually came suicide bombings—and then, especially after Sharon was elected prime minister, years of mutual retaliation for shootings, massacres, rocket attacks, and more suicide bombs, until Israel began walling itself in.

  A barrier of towering concrete and wire more than two hundred kilometers long now nearly encircles the West Bank—except for where it thrusts deeply across the Green Line that delineates captured territories Israel has occupied since the 1967 Six-Day War with its surrounding Arab adversaries. In places it zigzags through cities like Bethlehem and Greater Jerusalem, curling back on itself to isolate individual neighborhoods, cutting Palestinians off not just from Israel but from each other and from their fields and orchards, and prompting charges that its purpose is to annex territory and seize wells as much as to guarantee security.

  It also stops most Palestinians from reaching the al-Aqsa Mosque, except if they live in Israel or the parts of East Jerusalem within the security barrier. Yet of those, often only Palestinian men over age forty-five are allowed by Israeli police past the metal detectors at Temple Mount gates. Officially, this is to forestall any Arab youths tempted again to stone worshipping Jews—especially foreign Jewish tourists, as they tuck written prayers into crevices between the Western Wall’s massive blocks of pale limestone rising above the adjacent plaza.

  That custom is particularly popular as Sabbath begins, but in recent years, getting anywhere near the Western Wall on Friday at sundown has become a challenge even for Jews. Unless you’re a haredi, and a male.

  The Hebrew word haredi means, literally, “fear and trembling.” In today’s Israel, it refers to ultra-Orthodox Jews, whose dour dress and fervid quaking before God hearken to bygone centuries and distant lands where their ancestors lived during two millennia of Diaspora. To the alarm of non-haredi Jews, the Western Wall has been effectively usurped and converted into a haredi synagogue. On Shabbat, tens of thousands of bowing, trembling, rejoicing, chanting, praising, praying black-frocked men in broad-rimmed hats and ritual fringes engulf it, save for a small fenced section reserved for women—that is, for women who dare approach it. Females who insist on a Jewish woman’s right to don prayer shawls and phylacteries—or the ultimate haredi horror: to actually touch and read from a Torah scroll—may be spat upon by haredi men, who have flung chairs at the brazen blasphemers, and be called whores by screaming rabbis who try to drown out their Sabbath songs.

  Women, extremist haredim believe, should be home readying the Shabbat meal for their pious men and their burgeoning families. Although still a minority, Israel’s haredim are relentlessly bent on changing that status. Their simple tactic: procreation. Haredi families average nearly seven children, and frequently hit double digits. Their multiplying offspring are considered both the solution to modern Jews, who defile their religion, and as the best defense against Palestinians, who threaten to outproliferate Jews in their historic homeland.

  The Jerusalem daily Haaretz reports a haredi man who boasts 450 descendents. Their soaring numbers force Israeli politicians to include haredi parties in coalitions that rule Israeli governments. Such clout has won the ultra-Orthodox privileges that elicit howls from other Israelis: exemption from military service (supposedly, they defend Judaism by incessant study of Torah) and a government allowance for each Israeli child brought into the world. Until 2009, this subsidy actually rose for each new birth, until the cost of the escalating demographics shocked even conservative Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu, who modified it to a flat rate. Any dampening effect on haredi reproduction is not yet evident at the Western Wall, where thousands of young boys with black yarmulkes and bouncing sidelocks swirl around their dancing, bearded fathers.

  A waxing moon, yellow as Jerusalem limestone, climbs high above the walled Old City, and haredim begin to stream homeward—on foot; no motorized conveyance allowed on Shabbat—to their pregnant wives and their daughters. Most head into Mea She’arim, one of Jerusalem’s biggest neighborhoods, which is visibly deteriorating under the pressure of so many people. Torah scholarship pays little or nothing; haredi wives mostly work at whatever jobs they can sandwich between child-rearing, and more than one-third of the families are below the poverty line. Vestibules and staircases of shabby high-rises are jammed with baby strollers. The air whiffs of overflowing garbage, overstressed sewers, and—surprising for a place where no vehicles can circulate on Shabbat—diesel exhaust. Because many haredim insist that the Israel Electric Corporation’s nonstop coal-fired plants commit a sacrilege by working through Sabbath, before sundown they crank up hundreds of portable generators in Mea She’arim basements to keep the lights on. The traditional z’mirot heard around Sabbath tables are sung over their dull roar.

  Four kilometers north of Mea She’arim, the land rises into limestone ridges. A hill just across the Green Line, Ramat Shlomo, is the site of an ancient quarry that provided the nearly thirty-foot foundation slabs Herod used to build the Second Temple’s wall. In 1970, not long after the area was captured, Israel planted a forest there. Unlike the early Jewish National Fund forests—regimental rows of Australian eucalyptus or monocultured Aleppo pines, financed with coins saved by Jewish children worldwide in blue JNF collection tins—this was a mixed woodland that included some native oaks, conifers, and terebinths. The young forest was declared a nature preserve, a designation that Palestinians protested, claiming the real intention was to prevent a nearby Arab village, Shuafat, from growing. Their suspicion was confirmed when, in 1990, the forest was bulldozed to make way for a new haredi Jerusalem neighborhood—or new West Bank settlement, depending on who’s describing it.

  “Shaved the whole hill,” admits Ramat Shlomo settler and Hasidic rabbi Dudi Zilbershlag. A founder of Haredim for the Environment, a nonprofit organization whose name also translates as Fear for the Environment, he regrets that. “But then,” he adds, brightening, “we replanted.”

  In his living room, Zilbershlag sips rose hip tea, surrounded by glass-fronted hardwood bookshelves that hold rows of leather-bound Kabbalah and Talmudic literature. One case is devoted to silver menorahs, Shabbat candlesticks, and kiddush cups. A robust man in his fifties with a wide smile, thick gray payos curling out from either side of his black skullcap, and a gray beard reaching the black vest he wears over his white shirt and ritual fringes, he is also the founder of Israel’s largest charity: Meir Panim, a soup kitchen network. His ultra-Orthodox environmental group mainly focuses on urban issues: noise, air pollution, congested roads, open burning of trash, and ubiquitous junk food wrappers strewn through packed haredi neighborhoods. But his own interest goes beyond, to the preservation of nature.

  “According to Gematria,” he explains—Kabbalist numerology—“the words God and nature are equivalents. So nature is the same as God.”

  You don’t need miracles, he says, to know that God exists. “I see God in nature’s details: trees, valleys, sky, and sun.” Yet in a mystery that perhaps only a Kabbalist can resolve, he notes that Jewish survival has depended on miracles involving God’s dominion over, and even suspension of, natural law. “A classic example is when Israel left Egypt, He made the seas part.”

  That act was preceded by other unnatural miracles: water turning to blood, swarms of frogs in the desert, night that lasted for three days, hail that selectively battered Egyptian crops, and death that slaughtered only Egyptian livestock and Egyptian firstborn children. All these divine interventions are commemorated in the Passover seder, which begins with Jewish children asking four traditional questions about the evening’s symbolism. The answers, given over the course of the meal, recount Israel’s miraculous deliverance from slavery.

  In each corner of Dudi Zilbershlag’s home is a reminder—a stroller, a playpen, a crib—of children who have asked thes
e questions: he and his wife, Rivka, had eleven themselves, and they expect to be grandparents many times over. Yet nothing is ever certain in this mythic land, where tension between two peoples who claim it crackles the atmosphere. As pressures and stakes rise daily—and sheer numbers, with each trying to outpopulate the other—so does a reality that has begun to dawn on Jews and Arabs alike, spanning both sides’ political and religious spectra:

  In historic Palestine—that is, between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River in the disputed lands of Israel and Palestine, a distance of barely fifty miles—there are now nearly 12 million people.

  In the aftermath of World War I, the British, who governed Palestine under an international mandate, believed that this land, much of it desert, could sustain 2.5 million at most. During the 1930s, to persuade a doubtful Crown that it should be a homeland for Jews, Zionist David Ben-Gurion argued that Jewish determination and ingenuity to transform what the British considered a backwater should not be discounted.

  “No square inch of land shall we neglect; not one source of water shall we fail to tap; not a swamp that we shall not drain; not a sand dune that we shall not fructify; not a barren hill that we shall not cover with trees; nothing shall we leave untouched,” wrote Israel’s future first prime minister. Ben-Gurion was referring to the carrying capacity of Palestine’s soil and water resources to support human beings—both Jew and Arab, who in early writings he imagined coexisting.

  He was convinced that the land could support 6 million people. Later, as prime minister, Ben-Gurion would offer prizes to Israeli “heroines” who had ten or more children (an offer eventually discontinued because so many winners were Arab women). Today, Israel’s haredi population doubles every seventeen years. At the same time, with half of all Palestinians just entering or nearing their reproductive years, the Arab population of historic Palestine—Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip—could surpass that of Israeli Jews by 2016.