Read more about Eric Pallant's West Bank wanderings in his story about keynoting a green-building conference there. There is a hamsin today, so the wind is whipping hot Saharan air and dust across the landscape. Despite the limited visibility, I can see that the cities that string south back from Ramallah, where I lectured at Birzeit University, to Jerusalem are well-kept and orderly. Palestinian military personnel stand in pairs every few miles. There is no trash in the street or in yards. Tall apartment buildings are tidy; no laundry is hanging from windows the way it does in Israeli tenements. …

At the West Bank's first green-building conference.Courtesy Eric Pallant Read more about Eric Pallant's eco-explorations in the Middle East. Al Quds University in Abu Dis, Palestine, hosted the first Green Building conference in the West Bank this week. It wasn't just students who showed up -- there were suits, too. Forty-nine people attended, and the audience held a fair share of regional environment ministers, deans, and reporters. I was the invited keynoter. It is a difficult thing to fly into a developing country -- the United States Department of State coordinated my visit -- and to know I burned up …

In the first class of the 2005-2006 school year, after calling roll and introducing myself and co-professor Terry Bensel, I told our students they were participating in an experiment. An experiment that, as far as we knew, no one else had undertaken. They were taking an Introduction to Environmental Science course with no textbook. Saved by the screen. Photo: iStockphoto. Here at Allegheny College -- a liberal-arts, undergraduate institution in northwestern Pennsylvania with 2,000 students -- approximately 180 students are distributed among four sections of this annual course. For the 19 years I've been teaching the class, they've been required …