Builder, Photographer, and Forest Defender

Builder, Photographer, and Forest Defender

September 08, 2011

When he’s not pushing for greener buildings in Jordan, Mohammad Asfour is out in nature taking photographs. They’re not just pretty images. They’re weapons in the fight for the environment

Words by Laith Abou-Ragheb

(Lindsey Leger)

MOHAMMAD ASFOUR’S PASSION for preserving Jordan’s natural beauty began at a remarkably young age. He was just six years old when men from the municipality came to chop down the trees in front of his home, and that was something he wasn’t going to let happen without a fight. He marched out to the trees and literally hugged one. He held on until an adult peeled him off.

Asfour is now in his mid-thirties and his love of nature hasn’t dimmed. Over the years, he’s become one of the most active members of the Kingdom’s environmental movement. His diverse advocacy work includes, among many projects, helping found Al Shajarah, a forest-preservation NGO, and chairing the Jordan Green Building Council.

Asfour says campaigning for green issues was a fringe activity until just recently. That’s changing, and quickly. Jordanians are arguably now more environmentally conscious than ever thanks to the work of the growing band of young, tech-savvy environmentalists elbowing their way into the public sphere with clear agendas and goals.

“There is a green movement, and for sure it’s not shrinking. We can see this through the interaction we get through social media, for example. We can see this through the volunteerism we witness through the Jordan Green Building Council,” he says, adding that Jordanians are finally beginning to understand what’s at stake when it comes to the threats facing their environment. “People are now realizing that the quality of their lives, and the quality of their children’s lives, will be really affected negatively unless they do something about it.”

Much of Asfour’s time is now devoted to the council, which launched back in 2009 and offers training courses on how to make the buildings around us more environmentally friendly. This can be done in large part by incorporating simple water- and energy-efficient materials and products in the design and construction process—all which needn’t be expensive.

“Despite the misconception that it’s always cost-intensive, it is not always the case. It depends on what you want out of your building and how creative you are in applying these practices in your home, office, university, school,” he says.

His organization is calling on the government to get more serious about green building practices. “They have developed guidelines, but we would like to see them embedded into existing codes and we’d like to see these codes enforced,” he says. He’d also like to see the private sector and civil-society groups play a bigger role by introducing their own voluntary eco-rating system to raise standards.

Asfour’s commitment to the environment doesn’t end when he leaves work. He’s never happier than when taking photographs of Jordan’s wilderness, which ties directly to his keen interest in preserving Jordan’s scarce forests. His campaign work in this field started around the middle of the last decade, when he worked with the RSCN and several other NGOs to successfully stop a proposed amendment to the Agriculture Law that would have allowed forest land to be leased or sold for development.

Asfour says the highly disciplined and coordinated campaign became a model for subsequent environmental fights, including the recent battle to prevent a military academy from being built in the northern Bergesh Forest. “To me it was not only an issue of just protecting biodiversity, but also to do with violating important laws that had to do with forests. So we had to take a stand,” he says.

Asfour was heavily involved in the campaign, taking photographs of the forest and distributing them through social media. “I used my photography to let people know how beautiful our forests are. Without having these photos it was very difficult for people to know the beauty that existed perhaps forty-five minutes away from where they lived,” he says.

Even though it’s still hard to tell if the campaign has managed to stop the academy’s construction, Asfour is nonetheless buoyed by the level of interest it generated among everyday Jordanians who previously might have never batted an eyelid over the planned development.

“Even if the project moves forward, we now know there are several thousand more Jordanians who care about their forest. This is a great achievement,” he says. “People now are linking forests to their national identity, to their wellbeing of themselves and their children for generations to come.”