Call me unrealistic, call me naïve: I dream that Palestinians can rebuild their community with sustainable technologies on land that they securely call their own.
First, may every Palestinian have nutrient dense food and clean water, immediately and every day.
May your clinics have sufficient supplies, physicians and nurses. May your children become healers.
May you generate your own energy, access your own water and grow your own nutrient-dense food. Your communications, transportation and banking systems will not depend on Israel's leaders, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg or international supply chains. Palestinians will control these systems, and they'll be biodegradable. They will not be toxic or emit electromagnetic radiation.
May the late Jerry Mander's eight attitudes toward technology support your designs.
May forums with Palestinian homemakers, engineers, architects, construction workers and physicians who welcome questions and observations guide what you create. May the world watch in awe as you build a sustainable society.
ENERGY
Avoid large-scale generation (and distribution) powered by fossil fuels, solar PVs or industrial wind turbines. Avoid large-scale battery storage. Go for small systems that keep power and distribution local.
If you electrify homes by solar energy, keep to low-voltage direct current (LVDC) with a 48-volt battery. With direct current, you don't need inverters to alternating current (AC)-- and that saves energy. Use DC appliances commonly used by boats and motor homes.
Solar photo voltaics (PVs) are not perfect. Beware of their drawbacks.
May every household have a biodigester. A biodigester turns kitchen scraps and human or animal manure into liquid fertilizer and methane gas. 20 million Chinese families (and some American schools) use this waste-generated methane for cooking fuel and/or to power generators. One day of one household's waste can generate enough methane to cook for two hours.
See How to make biogas at home with a biogas digester, Mother Earth News; Building a Biodigester with T.H. Culhane, and Food waste audit at the University of Florida BioEnergy Summer School 2007.
Biodigesters work for households and school cafeterias.
For industrial applications, I don't know of an ecologically-sound energy system.
FOOD
May every household have at least two insulated raised garden beds with soil that's 40% compost and 60% amendments (coconut coir, perlite, pumice, rice hulls, expanded shale, humus, worm castings, biochar, feather meal, fishbone meal, blood meal, alfalfa meal, oyster shell, metamorphosed evaporite, flax seed meal, cotton seed meal, dried molasses, kelp meal, azomite, potassium sulfate, limestone, yucca extract, and mycorrhizae). In winter, water condenses within the tents. The garden needs water only once every two weeks.
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