No more nature reserves?
צילום: ד"ר עוז גולן
'Want nature? Leave Tel Aviv'
Rather than making the desert bloom, Tel Aviv developers are doing away with the last vestiges of nature in Israel's largest city
It’s a bit tiring to hike with Amit Mendelson. OK, he’s in shape, but it’s his knowledge that wears you out. After a half-hour he's loaded your brain with so many details about planning and about the area—what was, what is, and what will be, who opposes whom, and where the border of the privately owned land was between the two Bedouin tribes who once lived here, and what the current mayor did and what the previous one did and what each of them promised—that you’re sorry you didn’t bring a 1 GB memory extension. It isn't easy to catch a butterfly, or your breath, in the middle of it.
The story is personal, local, and regional. The new regional master plan for the Tel Aviv region is progressing slowly in the halls of planning. Opposition to the plan is now being expressed. This discussion is not about the roadmap sketched in the plan, but about nature sites: The master plan does not include even one urban nature site in the entire district.
Mendelson, together with representatives from green organizations, this week made known his opposition to the investigator appointed by the National Planning and Building Council. As we walk around the Neveh Sharett wadi he talks about what Tel Aviv district deputy planner Tali Dotan said: “There will be no nature reserves in the Tel Aviv district because the public wants parks. If people want nature, let them leave town."
Disturbing God
We started at the edge of the city. Yonatan Street in Tzahala ends in a boulevard with a lawn that looks out beyond the city borders. Among the trees you can see fields and also Samaria (and electrical pillars and Ramat Hasharon). The area is well tended, and the edge of the sidewalk is not painted in colors that show where you get fined for parking. Great for starters.
Hundreds of thousands of people know this open area, which is located to the left of the route from Morasha to Kfar Hayarok, but to the right when you go from Morasha to Geha. We walk along a stream that Mendelson calls “Nahal Hapardesim,” as it flows into the clay earth, and you can see the various geological layers.
The bottom is covered with sand, and the banks have wild flora. There is no lack of garbage here, and kingfishers, falcons, herons, and crows can be seen in the skies, as well as thin black water birds in a flight formation worthy of former Israeli Air Force commander Dan Halutz.
We walk with the stream until it turns into the edges of the parking lot of one of the Kiryat Atidim high tech companies, and cut into the orchard from which strange sounds can be heard. Three rows from us, between two trees, is a stork speaking to the heavens. I want to tell it to ask God to leave the “forest” for it and for us, but I don’t want to disturb it.
Close to home
It’s walking distance from the house where I grew up, on the border between the officers’ housing and the transit camp that used to be there and still is. My mother still lives there, and I can only imagine the number of friends I have here.
But much of the charm of the place has been lost in the last two decades. The beautiful spots in the heart of the orchards—the reed-covered “Hill of Skulls,” the eucalyptus grove surrounded by pricky pears—were dipped in the green of the orchards that gave off an intoxicating scent in spring and dim coolness in summer as well. Today, the area is already very dry. Perhaps it is my throat that is dry because all of this will no longer be here. One thing has remained as it was: the smell of the purified sewage water that is used for watering gardens.
Weed Killer
We had a crazy spring this year, and the narrow-leafed lupine is still blooming. The plan—let us be clear here—is to make a “green” area here. A vacation strip, they call it, a metropolitan park. In addition to vacation facilities, they will probably cover the area with water-wasting lawns, and the city gardening department will make sure to stick in some Australian trees for shade, and to till the flowerbeds occasionally to keep things in order. The wildflowers that are blooming here now will be taken care of with weed killer.
Someone has managed to convince the planning institutions that there is no way to do this without building—take note—5,700 housing units right next to Tzhala. It sometimes seems they plan parks only to increase the value of the apartments that overlook the park. Municipally, by the way, the area belongs to Ramat Hasharon, and it is apparently the mayor’s custom to hold the stick on both ends: city taxes will come from the neighborhood, but physically the neighborhood will be “there,” cut off and near to Tel Aviv. After all, he did make an election promise to preserve a small city.
Tel Aviv in red
When we get to Givat Hashikmim, the last clay hill remaining in Tel Aviv, the light of the sunset colors everything red. Mendelson is very happy to finally find some rare corrigiola plants, of interest to a small group of botanists. “If we manage to preserve the hill,” says Mendelson (and we will, he says), “they’ll have to take the trees down here.” Someone has planted young eucalyptus trees on the blossoming hill.
They aren’t making the desert bloom, but drying out what is blooming. Note what is happening under all these trees in the city—trees and sand, not a bud and not a flower. Desert.
I think about the butterflies. I have been seeing them more and more in the past year. I’ve noticed once again the variety, the differences between them. We encountered quite a few butterflies in one afternoon. You don’t see them in the city any more, and if you are lucky enough to see them, they are different.
Here, more than 20 years ago, I chased those pretty creatures for the first time. The orchards are gone and the landscape has changed unrecognizably, but the butterflies are still here. When the park lawn is here, when the residential areas are here, then the children who live in the expensive towers won’t have butterflies.
