Israeli trip a learning experience for UCR professor
Janet Zimmerman
Press-Enterprise
08/02/2010
A Riverside college professor home from a 10-month sabbatical in Israel says that country is "leaps and bounds" ahead of the southwest United States when it comes to conserving and reusing water.
The regions are similarly hot and dry, but in Israel, lawns and pools are reserved for community open spaces, not individual homes. Residents take shorter showers, less often. Appliances are smaller. And the Israelis are experts in desalination and recycling water for irrigation and industry instead of drawing from precious potable sources, said Sharon Walker, an associate professor of chemical and environmental engineering at UC Riverside.
"They've figured out how to make the desert blossom, and they're doing it without compromising their drinking water standards," said Walker, who made the trip as a Fulbright scholar. "We (Americans) use potable water to water plants. That's a serious design flaw."
The Fulbright program, sponsored by the U.S. government, sends scholars abroad to teach and study.
Walker, 34, chose Israel because she wanted to work with Moshe Herzberg, a researcher at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. She and her husband, Franklin Kline, a pipe fitter who quit his job to go along on the trip, lived in Sede Boker, a village of 1,200 people in the Negev Desert, which is much like the Coachella Valley, she said.
Israel has chronic water shortages, from drought and disputes with neighboring countries over water rights. But the country is able to reuse 75 percent of its domestic wastewater, primarily for irrigating agriculture, Herzberg said in a phone interview.
"Water is a very precious resource in Israel, and that's why we try to use it again," he said.
When Walker arrived, she was 18 weeks pregnant, so she hired an American nurse living there to translate and be her medical advocate. Having a baby in another country speeds up the process of learning how a community and culture work, said Walker, who discovered how much Israelis value family when she and Kline were showered with meals and care after the birth.
Their daughter, now 5 months old, is named Ma'ayan, which in Hebrew means "a spring of water."
Outside of family time, Walker mentored her UCR grad students each week using Skype, an Internet video and voice conferencing system, and worked at Ben-Gurion to improve desalination of sea and groundwater.
Much of the work there mirrors research under way at UCR, she said. Scientists are working to improve membranes that remove salt and contamination, and studying how bacteria clog them. Walker's area of expertise is how bacteria stick to surfaces such as the membranes.
Realizing how much overlap there was, Walker applied for, and won, a U.S. Department of Agriculture grant to help researchers make international connections to address problems in this country. The money will be used to create an exchange program for UCR and Israeli graduate students and faculty for three years, so they can kick-start projects that will last for years.
"There are benefits technologically in the United States from the point of research and analysis, and from the Israel point of view, we are quite ahead of all the world in reclamation of wastewater," Herzberg said.
Walker also established a curriculum exchange with the Israeli professors to share course materials, which she will start this fall.
