This blog began as a personal research project of trying to understand the environmental dimension of political and social change in the Eastern Mediterranean. The research began in the late 1990s, when global environmentalism was changing the way many people thought about the challenge of the future and when political developments gave hope that there might be a chance for stable, peaceful relations in the Eastern Mediterranean. A network of Israelis, Palestinians, and Jordanians began to work towards a common understanding of issues of water, energy, waste, transportation, consumption, biodiversity and sustainable development, and to fashion a way of turning that common understanding into one of the elements for peace and human security in the region.

After a few years of recording relevant stories from the regional newspapers and collecting academic articles, I decided to do this in public and let others with similar research interests have access to what I was reading. Itay Greenspan joined me as co-administrator and contributor. Others have contributed as well. For a number of years the project took the form of a list-serve. Now it is a blog. There are other excellent sites; see the links. This blog, though, tries to represent not an Israeli, Palestinian, Jordanian, Lebanese, or Syrian perspective, or an Arab or Jewish perspective, or the perspective of a particular organization. Instead, it is one of those places in cyberspace where these different perspectives are juxtaposed against each other in the regional conversation about the environment and climate change. Stuart Schoenfeld