The Dream of Trees in the Negev

A pine tree from Georgia could make Moshe Rivlin a happy man.

Or it could erode a dream like a bad case of root rot.

Rivlin, you see, is a sort of Middle Eastern Johnny Appleseed. He’s the world chairman of the Jewish National Fund, a relatively obscure Israeli agency that, among other things, is trying to push a thin line of green into that country’s Negev desert.

Beginning this fall, when peak temperatures have cooled from summer highs well past 100 degrees, the fund will begin planting about 45,000 “super” pines in that arid and forbidding climate. It will mark the first time that the species--a variety of loblolly pine developed by Georgia Pacific Corp. in the Deep South to withstand environmental extremes--has been planted in such a hostile zone.

“If that is successful, it will be really most important,” Rivlin said Friday in an interview. “If that (tree) can be accepted in an arid zone, in a desert, if you can push back that little bit, then it’s a great step.”

Although it’s much too early to jump to conclusions, the fund’s tree experts say that, if successful, the experiment could have implications for combating global warming, the predicted outcome of the so-called greenhouse effect. Growing trees absorb carbon dioxide--probably the most important factor in the suspected trapping of heat in the atmosphere--and expanding the tree range in hostile environments might help decrease the greenhouse effect, they maintain.

Rivlin, who was in Southern California to spread the word about his agency, heads an organization that has no exact counterpart in the United States. Its scope includes functions divided here between the departments of interior and agriculture. Most broadly, the fund is responsible for much of the proud Israeli assertion that it has made the desert blossom with trees.

Southland Donations

Much of the fund’s financial support comes from abroad, Rivlin acknowledged. In Southern California annual donations total about $7 million, according to a local fund spokesman. Rivlin said the support is broad-based, cutting across religious and political lines. “We are getting quite a lot of support from non-Jews . . . because the work we are doing is constructive in nature and whatever is being done helps all the citizens of the country,” he said.

Established in 1901, well before the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, today the fund holds in trust about 92% of Israel’s land. It is responsible for nearly all tree planting in that country, which is 60% desert, and for land reclamation, national parks, forest fire fighting, as well as promoting agricultural research and soil rehabilitation. About 3 million trees are planted in Israel each year and the fund’s dominion includes 200 million trees, predominately varieties of eucalyptus and pine, according to Rivlin.

The modern history of trees in Israel stretches back about 100 years when the first imported eucalyptuses were planted to dry up swampy areas, said Rivlin, whose family settled in the region in 1810.

‘Tree Is a Must’

“You are dealing with a country where a tree is a must and a country where the first tree was not given by nature. They had to plant it,” Rivlin said. “They had to plant not only in areas where it is easy to plant trees but in areas where nobody before had.”

But it is only in the last few decades that trees have become a focus of national energy and policy, Rivlin said.

“When we started about 30 years ago to plant trees there, most experts in the world told us it’s a waste of time, it’s a waste of energy,” the 64-year-old Rivlin recalled. “Today the same experts are coming to us.”

Proving the experts wrong apparently has a lot to do with the enthusiasm that people of all stripes have for trees. Rivlin explained that in Israel “real millionaires” are those who have planted a million trees. Recently, he added, a man wrote to the fund offering to pay for 18,000 trees--provided he can plant them with his own hands.

While 80% of Israel’s forests require no irrigation, Rivlin said that the patience to wait for moisture is a great virtue in the tree-growing business in Israel.

In areas where there is very little rain, the fund’s workers dig and line holes so that almost every drop of scant rain is collected and preserved. “You can wait a year, two years. It might be three years,” he explained. “Now when the land has become real wet from the water you accumulate, then you put in the tree sapling. . . . You start in a place where you have a certain amount of rain and go to an area that has less rain. There are areas where you say it can be done not in two years but in four years. . . . We are doing all that with the sole purpose to see what it is that we can push back in the desert.”

Rivlin is a realist about how much can be done in areas where raindrops must be hoarded like diamonds. Creating a forest in such a climate isn’t possible, he conceded. But it may be possible to create a savanna, a combination of grasses, shrubs and widely scattered trees that soften the landscape and possibly help blunt the extremes of aridity and temperature, he explained.

At the moment, prospects for the experiment this autumn look promising, thanks to the vagaries of the weather.

“This year in most parts of Israel, we are 15% to 18% short of rainfall” but in the Negev rainfall has been 50% to 80% above normal, Rivlin said. “Nobody can explain why.”

Arsonists at Work

On a bleaker note, Rivlin said that the arson-set forest fires that blackened thousands of acres in Israel last summer may be beginning again. Last week, an arsonist set fires in eight different locations within a forest, he said, noting that the technique of starting widely scattered fires makes it difficult for fire fighters to gain an upper hand.

In 1988 Israeli authorities arrested about 200 arson suspects, including many Israeli Arabs--Palestinians who live in Israel proper as opposed to the occupied territories--for setting fires in sympathy with the revolt in the West Bank and Gaza.

In fact, during the interview Rivlin several times alluded to or otherwise acknowledged Israel’s bitter and much criticized struggle with Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Accidental as well as deliberate forest fires are a problem every summer in Israel, and high temperatures this month have contributed to the danger of fire, Rivlin said.

In 1988, 1,200 fires ravaged about 40,000 acres of forest in Israel. Authorities said they confirmed arson in 30% of those fires and suspected arson in most of the remainder.

Reflexes Sharpened

But this year the fund has sharpened its reflexes against arson-set fires with the addition of more fire trucks, watchtowers and an improved communications system, he said.

Now, the fund is trying to replace the 3 million trees that were destroyed, Rivlin said.

“That’s a terrible thing, to think that people are coming to kill trees,” he said. “The response of people all over--they can be against the policies of Israel--has been ‘We’ll help you restore it.’

”. . . When you see a forest burn, a forest nurtured for 25 or 30 years in all the difficulties of that climate and you see in one hour it’s gone, it’s terrible. . . . It’s a terrible thing to think people are coming to destroy nature.”