FLOWER POWER
With a system of postage-stamp-sized reserves, it became crucial to ex-pand protection beyond the boundaries of the reserves themselves. The “protected natural assets” statutory provisions offered the NRA just such an extraterritorial vehicle. Ultimately, hundreds of ferns, fish, trees, shrubs, and well-known mammals were listed for protection regardless of their location.[88] The list of proscriptions even includes the damaging or taking of four different types of geological formations. The rules were first tested on Israel's wildflowers; the wildflower protection campaign of the 1960s showed the potency of government and public-interest groups working in concert.[89]
Springtime in Israel carries resplendent blossoms, and meadows are transformed into multicolored quilts. Since the advent of Zionist settle-ment, wildflowers have inspired a spontaneous race to the countryside. Israelis delighted in bringing home the colorful anemone, the edible lupine, and the rare iris by the sackload. Picking wildflowers was in fact part of nature education. As Israel's population grew, however, the child-hood pastime became destructive. Entrepreneurs sold commercial quanti-ties of posies by the roadside. With no time to germinate, the blossoms began to disappear.
Moshe Dayan had finally gotten the nature nuts out of his hair and was unwilling to entangle himself in any more legislative squabbling on envi-ronmental issues. And so Uzi Paz quietly prepared a draft, and in 1964 laureate Yizhar Smilansky shepherded it through the Knesset as an amend-ment to the National Parks and Nature Reserves Law. The amendment prohibited sales of protected natural assets without a license (granted by the Director of the NRA[90]). The campaign was ready to begin. Immediately thereafter a list of protected wildflowers was submitted to the newly formed National Parks and Nature Reserves Council for approval.
Passing the law was easy; the primary challenge was educational. The first step was to simplify the list of protected flowers. For instance, by in-cluding all types of irises, many varieties that were in no way endangered rode on the coattails of the threatened species. In the same way, blanket
Aesthetics was also considered. Only flowers that were attractive made the list. Initially there were two flower designations: protected and de-fended. The public was allowed to pick ten flowers each from the former list, which included cyclamens, narcissus, buttercups, gladiolus, and the conspicuous red anemones.[91] But with time this only confused the public and the inspectors in the field, and so picking flowers from this group was banned as well. In all, seventy wildflowers were “defended.”[92]
Consultation with public-relations experts did not produce any novel ideas. The initial slogan for the campaign, “Don't Pick, Don't Uproot, Don't Sell, and Don't Buy,” came off heavy-handed. Eventually it was changed to “Go Out to the Landscape, but Don't Pick,” a rhyming jingle in Hebrew, which survives to this day. So does the campaign poster of wildflowers on a black backdrop, based on paintings by Heather Wood, a British artist who had impressed Yoffe during his travels.[93]
Yoffe raised the equivalent of forty thousand dollars for the campaign. Every national newspaper published the new regulations and sported a wildflower-of-the-week column in their expanded Friday editions. National lottery tickets featured wildflowers on them. The NRA sent the wildflower poster to tens of thousands of public institutions. But the mar-keting strategy targeted children, especially in the compulsory kinder-gartens (children around five years old). They would bring the message of self-restraint home to their parents. Elementary and preschool teachers were the frontline troops, and their effectiveness exceeded everyone's ex-pectations. And to beef up enforcement presence, the Authority appointed hundreds of “volunteer inspectors.”[94]
Except for a few cynics, who saw the whole campaign as a front for the T'nuva agricultural cooperative of commercial flower-growing interests, it was an extremely popular campaign.[95] Many factors can be put forward to explain its phenomenal success, relative to other public appeals: the ideal-istic spirit of Israel during the 1960s; the population's homogeneity; the availability of an alternative, inexpensive flower supply; and the lack of in-convenience (as opposed to efforts to increase public-transport ridership or antilitter campaigns). None of the explanations is particularly satisfying. The simplest may be the best: Israelis love their wildflowers and came to understand that without collective self-discipline they would disappear. The NRA and the SPNI had a simple message, and they stuck to it, together.
Flowers tend to be more popular with the public than are other types of plants. The energy and creativity surrounding their protection also served as an exception that proved a rule. Ironically it was the zoologist, Mendelssohn, who in the early 1970s admonished both the NRA and the SPNI for neglecting the preservation of relatively arcane flora species in favor of less endangered but more attractive wildlife.[96]