Sunday, July 30, 2006
Another casualty of war
My cousin Tim Abbott, proprietor of the thoughtful ecology blog Walking the Berkshires, writes about another casualty of the war, the ecology of Lebanon. Read this post about the Al-Shouf Cedar Nature Preserve and Tim's friend Nizar Hani, who works there. Unfortunately, the Al-Shouf preserve lies along the main road to Syria, and is in the center of Israel's strategic campaign. Yesterday, Tim received an email from Nizar:
Israeli aircrafts are constantly roving in the sky and they don’t hesitate to shoot at any moving vehicle...(The Reserve) was bombed three times, and the continuous shelling targeting the highways linking Lebanon to Syria is only 100 meters away from the Reserve...People are sometimes desperately running away from the shelling taking shelter anywhere they can especially those who find themselves attacked on the road. Pretty soon we won’t be able to keep the gates closed...The wildlife of the forest is already stressed from direct attacks, the very loud sounds of shelling and military airplanes and the air pollution resulting from the explosions.
This war, like most, is hell. If in my disgust at Hezbollah and outrage at the world's hatred of Israel I sometimes seem hard-hearted, then I am not leaving an accurate impression of my feelings for the victims of the war. I don't even know him, but I very much hope Tim's friend Nizar stays safe, and that Lebanon's relatively fragile ecology survives.
1 Comments:
By 
GreenmanTim, at
Sun Jul 30, 07:35:00 PM:
Thanks, TH. Even in a just cause, war has many victims. Thanks for having the courage to acknowledge these impacts, even if it is hard to imagine how to avoid them.
