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. Billboards advertise state banks and Coca Cola.

My afternoon will be given over to the Faisel Husseini Foundation for Educational Improvement, located in the heart of the Old City of Jerusalem. Once we arrive, we enter the famous Old City walls through the Damascus Gate into the Arab Quarter, winding our way past vegetable sellers hollering the names of produce and extolling the quality of their chickpeas, tomatoes, and grape leaves. Walking deeper inside the market, past the clothes boutiques and spice and sweets sellers, we make a left in an alleyway and ascend several flights of limestone stairs.

At work on a new kind of craft.Eric PallantI have been brought to help teachers with no environmental training understand the value of reduce, reuse, recycle. I do my usual spiel about how I barely care about solid waste and landfills, but am concerned instead about the energy and water required to make and transport a product in the first place. My audience is three Christian Armenian women, six covered and scarved Arab women, and one man with the mark of praying to Mohammed bruised into his forehead.

In two hours I show them how to make paper, turn used fryer oil into biodiesel (methanol, caustic soda, and olive oil that has fried too many falafels), and create fused plastic-bag fabric. This plastic-bag fabric is proving to be a big hit on the West Bank. If there is an international fruit in the developing world, it is the plastic bag. So ubiquitous are they that in many countries I have visited, these inexpensive, flimsy bags are speared on branches like apples in an abundant year.

I had arrived with plans for taking an iron and melting together eight layers of bags. My plan was to demonstrate how to create the fabric, hope someone in the room could sew better than I can, and have the teachers begin to teach their students to make recycled shopping bags. I dream — or as they say in Arabic about virtually anything worth hoping for in the future, Inshallah (literally, it will be God’s will) — that the fashion in five years will be like it is at Target. Show up with your own bag, eschew the inadequate one they give you, and even wash yours out if it gets messy. It’s only plastic, after all.

I am not a plastic bag.Eric PallantBut like the college students at Al Quds, at Faisel Husseini these women began designing things I had no idea were possible. They mix different colored bags to design multihued flowers and then fuse their flowers onto latchable purses. They make gardening gloves, wall hangings for children, and religiously adorned shoulder bags. There are picture frames and jeweled tissue dispensers, little heart-shaped diaries, and ornate appliqué florets sewn onto cloth bags. All this in under two hours per group.

I had mentioned to the teachers that they could finish the edges with discarded fabric from worn-out clothing or the famous red and black embroidery worn by many Palestinian women, but it is clear from the intensity of their eyes as they cut, iron, sew, and gossip that my suggestions are not going to be needed. Fusing plastic on the West Bank has legs.

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 more carbon doing so than most of the students in the room consume in a month. The majority live at home with their parents in small apartments, commute to campus in city buses or taxis, shower in water heated by the sun, and, come to think of it, consume on average one-fifth as much water as their Israeli neighbors and one-tenth as much as an American.

Even considering what materials to recommend for building new green homes kept me awake for weeks before I arrived. Stone, the traditional building material, lasts forever (two bonus points), but quarries on the West Bank generate some of the worst particulate matter in a region where the air is not much better than Beijing’s. Wood? Forget about it. There are no forests to speak of. Steel and glass? When I considered the energy required to mine the iron, manufacture the steel, and ship it from China, it didn’t seem like a better solution. I suggested adobe. They’ve been using it in Jericho for 10,000 years. If it is good enough for the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world, it probably is worth a second look. Then again, I’m not aware of a lot of adobe highrises.

In the native-plant garden.Courtesy Eric PallantThe really interesting information emerged when I was finally done talking. Scientists on the Al Quds faculty were already running a project treating university wastewater to make it drinking quality and then pumping it around campus for irrigation. An environment minister told me his ministry is constructing a model green building with ground source heating and cooling in Ramallah. A large wind turbine will produce a hospital’s electricity in Hebron. And my month-old suggestion that I work with students when I was on campus to create a garden of native plants had nearly been completed before I even arrived. In fact, after my talk all the participants trekked to the garden at the center of campus. With the TV cameras rolling and flowers in the backdrop, I got my official interview alongside the Dean of the University and the Cultural Affairs Officer of the U.S. Consulate.

It was the students who really carried the day, however. They organized a green building exhibit that filled a small convention center. They had built a wind turbine from a disassembled vacuum cleaner, which they spun by hand to light three small lamps. They had a motion sensor turn on a light inside a small Styrofoam house and turn it off again in 20 seconds. They were making paper from discarded stationery and had sewn bags and purses from plastic bags they recycled themselves. They built models of green roofs, demonstrated a small photovoltaic panel, and had three old Coke bottles filled with biodiesel they had made from used falafel oil. One wall was covered by large panels of environmental art, and the welcome to the exhibition was drawn in Arabic across twenty meters of floor space using only rich red soil to form the letters.

To be frank, today’s exhibition will never make the headlines of the Western media. Where’s the thrill in optimism in a region that for centuries could be relied upon instead for conflict? But I’ve seen it with my own eyes. A new generation of youth is preparing to make Palestine a greener place to live. In two days on campus, no one ever asked my religion. When it comes to caring for the planet, it did not seem to matter.

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 to select one of the myriad textbooks that flood what must be a very lucrative market. But this year, in place of a 3.92-pound textbook (I weighed my complimentary copy of Miller’s Living in the Environment), the class readings consisted entirely of websites collated on our online syllabus.

Initially, Terry and I were motivated by the prospect of supplying students with real voices on environmental issues in real time, and reaping the altruistic pleasure of saving the students a hundred bucks. We hoped, too, to counteract the disease that is carried by only two known vectors, Tsetse flies and textbooks: sleeping sickness. While it is hard to be certain whether fewer students fell face-first into their keyboards than would have collapsed on a textbook, surveys we collected at the end of the first semester suggested they preferred the online version of learning.

Site Unseen

Many students born in the late 1980s are more comfortable doing their homework reading from a screen, with their iPods blaring, IM screens blinking, and Facebook accounts open in another window. That’s a change us old guys, accustomed to the feel of paper and the sound of, well, nothing, had to come to terms with. But once we did, we discovered a gold mine.

Because environmental science is more current, than, say calculus, it naturally lends itself to online readings. When we were teaching population growth, for example, and wanted students to understand the impact of demographic momentum, we sent them to the U.S. Census Bureau. There, students could select from scores of countries and observe dynamic changes in population pyramids over the next 50 years, as many times as they were willing to click on a new country.

During our unit on air quality, we directed students to the U.S. EPA’s AIRNow website. It provides daily maps of ozone and particulate matter, as well as video loops that show pollution accumulating over the course of a day, and has map archives back to 2002, so students could hunt for the summer days when their hometowns had turned toxic.

The National Park Service supplies real-time air-quality data and webcams for 16 national parks. On bad air days, smog from L.A. can be seen overtaking the Grand Canyon. Only a textbook used by Harry Potter could make pictures do as much as this website does.

Of course, we didn’t just turn students loose on the web, since we feared that after a quick scan and a succession of clicks, too many would be looking at sites that had nothing to do with our assigned topic. For every web reading, we provided a set of directives specifying what content students should focus on. We also stoked our students with additional online information. Our syllabus has links to the PowerPoints we used in class and to assignments. As environmental news appears in The New York Times or Washington Post, we email those articles to the class. The syllabus even has Muckraker and Daily Grist at the top — which means, I suppose, our students will read this article about themselves on Grist.

For years, our assignments had been filled with directions to pages scattered through a textbook like weeds in a field of hybrid corn. Or we’d ask students to consume whole chapters, only a portion of which was pertinent. Textbook writers, trying to be all things to all students, tend toward the encyclopedic. For our students, it was all those additional pages written in desolate style that brought on the first signs of trypanosomiasis.

School’s Out for Summer

So did it work? Well, 41 of 46 students in our first-semester class self-reported doing the same or more reading than they would have in a textbook. This wasn’t necessarily due to a sudden interest in the topic; Andrew Mihalcin, a first-semester freshman, said, “I read more because I would be messing around on my computer and get bored, so I would look at the class website and do some of the readings.” That’s better than nothing.

Of those who admitted to reading less, three said there was less reading to do, because there was less filler than in textbooks. To be totally truthful, however, a lot of students didn’t think there was much difference. Tegan Millspaw, for example, walked into my office one day to discuss a class topic and without solicitation blurted out, “I just wanted you to know I hate the online readings. I don’t always have access to a computer, and the fact is I really don’t like reading from a screen.” (She did add that she doesn’t like reading textbooks, either.)

At times it felt like a hollow victory to think one group of students saw online readings as the lesser of two evils, and another clicked on our carefully selected websites only after Facebook turned out to be even more boring. But from my perspective, it was still a successful experiment.

The hard part, the potential barrier for other professors, is that it takes a lot of time and effort to put together readings this way. A careful observer will notice that there are a lot fewer readings at the end of our current syllabus, when Terry and I started running out of time and energy, than in the first several weeks of the semester. Moreover, while the major publishers are remunerating their authors to create new editions, a professor reliant on the web could find himself scrambling to replace URLs that have suddenly vanished.

The good news for me is that my entire department has bought into the concept, so we have distributed the work among us, with faculty members adding websites that suit their particular specialties. We’re building a bank of readings and PowerPoints that each of us can dip into to create a course that suits our needs. It will probably be close to three years before my department has deposited enough material into our collective bank that everyone feels confident enough to kick the textbook habit.

While others might repeat this experiment, there’s way too much money to be made selling textbooks for it to catch on. In fact, most publishers now make related websites accessible to purchasers of their product — in essence outsourcing the work my colleagues and I have done. Still, I’ll continue the text-free battle, if for no other reason than this: our survey revealed that a majority of students recognized a link between the content of the class and our method of delivery. “I didn’t print any of the readings, because I didn’t want to waste the paper and ink,” said Justine Law.

According to a report prepared this spring by the National Wildlife Federation and the Green Press Initiative, Green Textbook Initiative: Campus Toolkit [PDF], the U.S. paper industry uses a million tons of paper a year. Textbooks represent approximately 20 percent of that, consuming the equivalent of 4 million trees annually.

The Green Textbook Initiative is organizing consumers to demand textbooks printed on recycled paper. But like most of the environmental problems we talk about in class, there’s often a better alternative. In our case, we dispensed with the textbook altogether. That might just be the answer.