Alon Tal

Tal was born on July 12, 1960, and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina, as Albert Rosenthal.[8] He was active in the Young Judaea youth movement, served on its national executive board, and participated in its Israel program in 1977. After graduating from the University of North Carolina in 1980, he moved to Israel and enlisted in the Israeli army.[9][10] He changed his name to Alon Tal after making aliyah to Israel and becoming an Israeli citizen. He served in the Nahal paratrooper division and saw action in the 1982 First Lebanon War.[10] After his discharge, Tal attended Hebrew University Law School in Jerusalem.[10] During his time at law school, Tal played saxophone and fiddle in the popular Jerusalem-based rock band, Liquid Plummer. In 1983 he began work as a legal intern in Israel's Environmental Protection Service (part of the Ministry of Interior) and subsequently clerked in the office of Israel's Attorney General, Yitzhak Zamir.[11] In 1986, Tal returned to the U.S. and enrolled in the Harvard School of Public Health, where he studied Environmental Science and Public Policy.[10] His doctoral dissertation, which was funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, analyzed state strategies to control agricultural nonpoint source pollution.[11]

Tal returned to Israel in 1989 and settled at kibbutz Ketura with his wife Robyn.[10] In 1990, he founded the Israel Union for Environmental Defense, one of Israel's leading advocacy groups.[9] In this capacity, he initiated successful legal action to address a range of environmental hazards (for example, illegal sewage discharges and air and water pollution), repeatedly sued the government for inadequate implementation of environmental law, and provided free legal representation to numerous local environmental organizations. In 1995, the organization filed a highly publicized – but ultimately unsuccessful – petition to the Supreme Court to prevent the building of Highway 6.[12]

In 1996, Tal founded the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies at kibbutz Ketura, an advanced academic program that brings together Israelis, Palestinians, Jordanians and international students.[13] In 1999, he was elected chairman of Life and Environment, the umbrella organization for Israel's environmental groups, which grew from 24 to 80 member groups during his five-year tenure.[14]

In 2001, Tal co-founded the Green Zionist Alliance: The Grassroots Campaign for a Sustainable Israel, a New York-based nonprofit that would later become Aytzim: Ecological Judaism. Since then, Tal has served as one of the Green Zionist Alliance's Israeli representatives.[6]

Between 2012 and 2015 Tal served on the international board of the Jewish National Fund (JNF), Israel's forestry and land reclamation agency, as an elected representative of the Green Zionist Alliance, in partnership with the Conservative Movement.[15] He was appointed chair of the JNF's subcommittee for sustainability, which in 2005 drafted new policies for the organization's forestry, reservoirs and stream restoration program. In 2006, Tal was appointed chair of the Land Development Committee, which oversees the JNF's forestry and land restoration work. Advocating a new sustainable agenda for the organization, he promoted, expanded funding for sustainable afforestation, bike trails and research.[16] In 2014 he launched an initiative to prioritize JNF financial support for environmental projects in Israel's Arab communities.

In 2007, Tal and Mohammad Said Al-Hmaida, former director of the Palestinian Ministry of Environment, prepared a “shadow treaty” for a final settlement between Israel and the Palestinians,[17] which offered an ambitious vision of cooperation and coordinated management.[18] Tal also helped bring together 15 Israeli and 15 Palestinian water experts to consider specific areas of agreement and disagreements in regional water management, which was published in the 2010 book Water Wisdom.[18]

Tal won the Charles Bronfman Prize for young humanitarian leadership in 2006, and used the prize money to establish the Tal Fund, which supports grassroots Israeli environmental activism.[19][20] Tal received Israel's Environment Ministry's lifetime achievement award as a 48-year-old, in honor of Israel's 60th anniversary in 2008.[18]

In 2015, he joined Professor Uri Shanas as one of the founders of the "This is My Earth - TIME" initiative [21] an international effort to purchase biodiversity "hot spots" as conservation sanctuaries through crowd sourcing.[22]

Tal has remained active in a range of environmental advocacy initiatives, including preparation of proposed biodiversity protection legislation and involvement in public interest litigation. He was a plaintiff in the successful, 2014 class action suit following the massive oil spill in Israel's Ein Avrona nature reserve, that sought to cover the damage caused by negligence on the part of the Eilat Ashkelon Pipeline Company.[23] In March, 2018, along with colleagues in academia and attorney Tzvi Levinson, Tal filed another class action against polluting chemical factories located the Rotem planes, based on the massive contamination of the underlying groundwater and the resulting polluting of the pristine Boqeq stream in the Dead Sea region. At the time, it was the highest damages ever sought in an Israeli environmental civil action.[24]

Tal taught at the Tel Aviv University Law School from 1990 until 2004. In 2005 he joined the faculty of the Desert Research Institutes at Ben Gurion University. His research has focused on water policy, monitoring transboundary stream water quality, assessing the Israeli government's environmental enforcement program, evaluating national environmental education programs, forestry policy, surveying Israel's environmental movement and assessing a range of environmental history and policy issues.[25] He has been a visiting professor or affiliated with numerous universities including the Harvard School of Public Health (1989-1997); University of Otago Law School (1998, 2003, 2008, 2016); Stanford University Center for Conservation Biology (2011, 2013–14); Michigan State University (2015) and Renmin University of China (2015). In 2017, Tal returned to Tel Aviv University to assume the position of Chair of the Department of Public Policy.

In 2006, in conjunction with the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, he initiated a bi-annual international Conference on Drylands, Deserts and Desertification at Ben Gurion University,[26] which brings together some 500 participants from over 60 countries to discuss a range of research findings and issues associated with sustainable land management in drylands.[27] He chaired five consecutive conferences, most recently in 2014.[28]

• The Land Is Full: Addressing Overpopulation in Israel, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2016. Hebrew Edition, "V'Haaretz Melayah", B'nei Brak, Hotzaat HaKibbutz HaMeuchad, 2017.
• All the Trees of the Forest: Israel’s Woodlands from the Antiquity to the Present, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2013. Hebrew Edition - "Kol Atzei HaYa'ar", B'nei Brak, Hotzaat HaKibbutz HaMeuchad, 2014.
• From Ruin to Restoration, Israel’s Environmental History, (eds., with Daniel Orenstein and Char Miller) Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012
• Water Wisdom: Preparing the Groundwork for Cooperative and sustainable Water Management in the Middle East, (eds., with Alfred Abed Rabbo). New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010. ISBN 9780813547718
• Building Green: Policy Mechanisms for Promoting Energy Efficiency in Buildings in Israel, (with Yael Bar-Ilan and David Pearlmutter) The Technion, Center for Urban and Regional Studies Press, 2010.
• The Environment in Israel: Natural Resources, Crises, Campaigns and Policy from the Advent of Zionism until Twenty-first Century, (in Hebrew) B'nei Brak, HaKibbutz HaMeuhad Press, 2006.
• Speaking of Earth: Environmental Visions and Speeches, New Brunswick, NJ, Rutgers University Press, 2006.
• Pollution in a Promised Land – An Environmental History of Israel, Berkeley, California, University of California Press, 2002.
• Environmental and Policy, (eds., with Amir Adleman). Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies, Jerusalem, 2002.

• The Israel Forum for Population, Environment and Society founded by Alon Tal (Hebrew)