If you keep a sharp eye open as you drive the world’s lowest road, along the Israeli side of the Dead Sea, you may spot a short black line painted on a cliff face some feet above your head. It was made a century ago by British geographers, floating on a boat on the sea’s surface, to mark its level at the time.
But if you then turn, as I did this week, to look for the present-day sea, you’ll only spot it far beneath you, at the bottom of another cliff. For its level has since fallen by more than 80 feet, mainly over the past few decades.
At the same time the sea, famously the saltiest on Earth, has lost a third of its surface area. Indeed, the maps and atlases that show it as a single stretch of water are long out of date. It has shrunk so much that it has separated into two distinct lakes, connected by a canal to prevent the southernmost one from drying up altogether. And the waters are continuing to drop by more than three feet a year.
The dying of the Dead Sea is a huge, under-reported, environmental disaster. It was once described by a water minister of Jordan, on the opposite shore, as worse than the better-known catastrophe of the desiccation of Central Asia’s Aral Sea, because it is happening faster and threatens greater danger to the region’s economy and ecosystems, as well as the world’s cultural and religious heritage. Yet this weekend sees the beginning of an attempt to save it.
Certainly the Dead Sea is extraordinary, indeed unique. Glittering turquoise blue, more than 1,300 feet below sea level, amid dramatic golden mountains, it is a place of stark, breathtaking beauty. Some 10 times saltier than the world’s oceans, it is lifeless – apart from its own species of bacteria – but is at the heart of a complex ecosystem of nearly 600 species, many endangered, and some found only there. And around it, of course, Sodom and Gomorrah rose and fell, Moses glimpsed the promised land, Masada was besieged, the Dead Sea Scrolls were hidden, and Jesus was baptised.
Since Cleopatra, countless hordes have bathed in its waters and plastered themselves with its mud in search of healing. Yet resorts built on its shores are now up to half a mile from the sea, their empty lifeguard towers and folded beach umbrellas left high and dry. In almost biblical retribution, more than 2,000 deep pits have yawned open on the western shore alone, dangerous “sink holes” created by the falling waters.
The sea is under attack from both ends. To the north, the once mighty Jordan, on which it depends for replenishment, has shrunk to a polluted trickle, carrying only one fiftieth of the water it did 70 years ago: after gushing spectacularly out of the side of Mt Hermon far to the north, the river is almost entirely depleted by domestic and agricultural use. And to the south, big industrial concerns deliberately evaporate the sea’s waters to gain valuable minerals.
The crisis has long been recognised – the 1994 Israel-Jordan peace treaty bound both nations to restore the river, holy to half of humanity – but international squabbling has often got in the way. A decade ago, the two countries agreed to bring water by pipeline from the Gulf of Aqaba, but a crucial World Bank feasibility study due at the end of last year has still not been published, reputedly because the Israelis, Jordanians and Palestinians cannot agree.
It might not be the best plan anyway. Both environmentalists and the industrialists fear that importing water could change the chemistry and ecology of the sea, making it harder to extract minerals, reducing its therapeutic qualities and causing toxic substances to form. And it does nothing to revive the River Jordan.
Friends of the Earth groups in Israel, Jordan and Palestine have long argued for an alternative plan, based on persuading the industries to adopt new technologies that do not evaporate water, and replenishing the Jordan through increasing conservation (for example, even though Israel leads the world in water-efficient agriculture, it discourages recycling rainwater in homes). But earlier this year the Israeli cabinet rejected a bill from its environment minister that would have facilitated this approach.
Now the environmentalists have another chance. This weekend they are launching a $4 million project, financed by the EU, to draw up a plan for the region, and also encourage its differing peoples to co-operate by making it a Unesco Biosphere Reserve.
And if that fails? Well, there is always the alternative, once voiced by another environmentalist. “If we cry enough, perhaps we can refill the sea with our tears.”
Here are the planning rules – but don’t ask what they mean
After scrambling back from the brink with its dramatically improved planning reforms – in the wake of a Telegraph campaign – the Government seems intent on jumping off the cliff again.
Ministers and officials are refusing to answer queries from councils on what parts of their 50-page National Planning Policy Framework actually mean. Ruth Stanier, deputy director of planning in the Communities Department, told a forum organised by Planning magazine last week that “we very much need to avoid answering” such questions “in a great deal of detail”.
The idea is that councils should interpret the reforms themselves but – while I am all for localism – this is, frankly, bonkers. Many local authorities do not have the resources to do this, and those that do, risk creating a patchwork of different interpretations across the country. That would lead to legal challenges, greatly increasing the money and time spent on planning applications – all things the new framework is supposed to avoid.
Another likely result is that, fearing court action, councils will just wave applications through, recreating the free-for-all threatened by the original proposals. But perhaps that’s the whole idea.
The world’s most toxic frog is meeting a poisonous fate
What’s in a name? Quite a bit, it seems, when it comes to Phyllobates terribilis, possibly the world’s deadliest creature. Recognised – despite stiff competition from some of the French presidential contenders – as the world’s most toxic frog, it contains enough poison in its two-inch frame to knock off 10 people within minutes.
Even handling the golden poison frog, to give it its common name, for a minute can make your hands and arms go numb – and if you have a cut or graze it could be fatal. The Chocó Emberá Indians of Colombia have only to brush their arrow tips along its back for them to remain deadly for two years.
But despite its fearsome armoury, the bright orange animal is facing extinction, surviving only in patchy areas across a stretch of Colombian forest no bigger than Barbados. Ironically, it is itself being poisoned – by illegal gold miners releasing cyanide into streams to help extract the precious metal. And illegal logging is clearing its habitat.
Now environmental bodies, including the Wild Land Trust and Global Wildlife Conservation, have helped buy 124 acres of the forest to try to save it. One of the trust’s leaders has explained: “We would all be much poorer without such a creature to give us nightmares.” I’ll take his word for it.