ENVIRONMENTAL EUPHORIA

When Yossi Sarid (see Figure 25) presented his credentials at the Environmental Ministry's headquarters on the third floor of the Interior

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Ministry, the atmosphere was reminiscent of the liberated country of the Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz. The mood turned positively euphoric once the staffers got to know Sarid. They found that, in contrast to his sar-castic sound-bite image, Sarid was warm, charming, and genuinely sym-pathetic to environmental interests, (despite his chain smoking). On his first day at the job, he made the rounds of the departments at the Ministry's three Jerusalem offices, introducing himself as the new worker at the Ministry.^[65] The staff also learned that Sarid was positively eloquent. At first, however, he mostly listened, absorbing information in an entirely new area. He proved a quick study.

To expand his base of power, Sarid opened his doors to environmental groups, in particular the Society for the Protection of Nature. This an-noyed some of the bureaucracy's old-timers, who resented the promotion of SPNI activists to senior managerial positions, without appropriate aca-demic credentials. Uri Marinov still grumbles that under Sarid, govern-ment policies and orientation were supplanted by the SPNI agenda.^[66] The truth is that the organization's natural vision for Israel's landscape ap-pealed to Sarid more than the technocratic, urban perspective that charac-terized Marinov's professional experience. Indeed, Marinov would later argue that Israel had to get used to being an urbanized city-state on the Singapore model.^[67] Sarid felt that it was not too late to preserve the open spaces remaining in the land of Israel. He was also ambitious enough to pursue an agenda far broader than the government had envisioned for the Ministry of the Environment.

Sarid also infused the Ministry with an ethos of public service. Mickey Lipshitz coordinated nature preservation at the Society for the Protection of Nature until he became a Deputy Director at the Ministry of the Environment. He was excited to find a Minister who had no patience for bureaucracy, who felt that every single public complaint deserved an an-swer, and whose militancy on environmental issues was typically greater than his own, scolding his deputies that they were “moving too slowly.”^[68] Workers at all levels in the Ministry recount the overtime they put in out of a sense of devotion to their new boss.