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Populating Israel's Mountains while Preserving Their Environmental Quality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 August 2009

Arnon Soffer
Arnon Soffer
Affiliation:
Senior Lecturer, Department of Geography, University of Haifa, Mount Carmel, Haifa 31999, Israel; Adviser to several Planning Teams, and Member of the Master Plan Team for the Northern District of Israel.
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Extract

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Galilee Mountains were still practically a ‘closed system’, as a result of which the balance of land-use was more or less preserved. Rural settlements had then hardly developed, and stagnation of the few remaining mountain towns was observed. In general, the roads were unpaved routes, the economy served for subsistence only (based mainly on agricultural terraces), while most of the area was of forest or rocky ground serving as pasture.

During the British Mandatory period, the Galilee Mountains area opened up slowly, and this process has increased ever since the establishment of the State of Israel. The Mountains are facing a tremendous increase in population as a result of natural local increase (mostly Arabs) and migration (mostly Jews). This excessive mountain population in Israel is an unusual phenomenon in comparison with other mountain regions in the western world, which have generally decreased in population though there, too, the equilibrium of land-use has been shaken—for instance in the Swiss Alps (Bugmann, 1980; Gallusser, 1980; Messerli et al., 1980), and in the Rocky Mountains of the United States (Kelly, 1980).

Type
Main Papers
Information
Environmental Conservation , Volume 8 , Issue 2 , Summer 1981 , pp. 151 - 158
Copyright
Copyright © Foundation for Environmental Conservation 1981

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