Last night while I was killing time until the season premiere of Family Guy, I caught the last 20 minutes of the program Nature on PBS. The title of last night's show was Lost World of the Holy Land, and it was all about nature in the Middle East and the work that conservationists are doing to protect and restore threatened wildlife populations there. The little bit that I watched was about migratory birds, which live in all areas from Egypt to Israel to Syria and Jordan to Turkey and Iran. Israeli scientists were raising young vultures in order to help the population recover and spread. A Palestinian scientist was banding and releasing songbirds and teaching students how to track their migrations through interactive computer programs. Another scientist led a group of students on a nature hike and taught them about bird populations in the area. The students had arrived on three buses--one filled with Jewish Israelis, another filled with Arab Israelis, and the third filled with Palestinians. The students were grouped into threes, one from each bus, and the groups worked together on worksheets and study guides to learn about the local wildlife. Some groups even helped release birds that had been caught and banded.
This was before the escalation in violence, and they haven't been able to get together since then. But the symbolism is obvious. There is much that humans can learn from nature and through nature. The three buses of kids realized that although their backgrounds were very different, they shared the same interest in wildlife and could learn together about the populations of birds that live in all of their lands. While learning about wildlife together, they were also learning about each other, interacting as different cultures coming together for a common cause. Maybe the next generation of Middle Easterners will be more progressive, more willing to work together, more cognizant that despite their political, religious, and cultural differences, they share the same concerns about land conservation, wildlife, natural resources, and the environment around them.
