Wetlands Lost and Found in the Levant - Restorative Redevelopment of Devastated Ecocultural Landscapes - page 67

and trampling on fields. The managerial solution was to provide supplemental food,
which has led to a corresponding tourist boom with people driving up from as far away
as the Negev Desert on weekends to see the cranes and perhaps buy promotional wine
and other products. In addition, nearby commercial fish ponds were suffering from
pelican overfeeding. Using the same strategy as for grain-eating waterfowl, wetland
managers stocked the newly created lake-wetland with thousands of juvenile and adult
fish (Degani et al. 1998) to attract the birds away from the fish ponds.
In terms of what might be referred to as being “too much of a ( perceived ) 'bad'
thing,” one unexpected problem that developed in the Hula restoration experience
was the failure to convince environmental groups that elements of commercial tour-
ism could in fact be integrated aesthetically and environmentally into the newly
restored landscape. So here is an ironic situation whereby today's environmentalists,
many of whose grandparents lobbied to preserve a small sliver of the Hula swamps
a half century ago as the Nature Reserve and founded the national environmental
group, were the most critical of attempts to work with the farmers in establishing
ecotourism, believing such a fusion to be an impossibility. There certainly are bad
examples in Israel of outdoor recreation facilities such as hedonistic water parks,
and it is unfortunate that there appears to be little or no knowledge of what has
transpired next door in Jordan with respect to its Royal Society for the Conservation
of Nature's (RSCN) projects (see chapters 7 and 16) which demonstrate that it is
certainly possible for nature and people to coexist (the whole subject of creating
restored landscapes for people as much as for nature is the subject of Handbook of
Regenerative Landscape Design [France 2007a]). As a result, when I first visited
the restored Agmon lake-wetland complex in 2001, there were no interpretive signs
nor a single person seen. Farmers had become angry because they had sold their
land for the restoration project on the understanding that they would become part
of the future ecotourism development, which, however, was being held in limbo by
the green movement. When I next visited the site three years later, the situation had
started to change: the supplemental feeding of cranes had raised national conscious-
ness about the role of ecotourism, and planners were revisiting the concept in an
improved light.
Finally, there was one major ecological problem that developed in the reflood-
ing of areas that had been desiccated for long periods of time. Initially there was
a massive growth of Typha recolonizing during the first three years. But, surpris-
ingly, this was followed by a near complete die-off the following year. So in terms
of restoration, things looked like they were progressing well until suddenly all that
was present was vacant water. The reason turned out to be due to the complicated
biogeochemistry characteristic of such desert wetland systems (Markel et al. 1998).
The oxidizing peat affected the water chemistry of the shallow lake and restored
wetlands. Gypsum, which had been formerly held by peat, became dissolved and
produced sulfate levels as high as that of seawater. So in the end, the “restoration”
project turned what had once been a freshwater wetland into an inland salt marsh.
This was related to organic matter from the large blooms of filamentous algae which
accelerated redox reactions such that the iron protection of plant roots failed due to
the high hydrogen sulfide levels. The solution to this serious problem was to follow
some Australian research showing the need to maintain low water levels in summer