Is Jordan flowing toward oblivion?

DEGANYA, Israel — At a baptismal site on the Jordan River just south of the Sea of Galilee, pilgrims kneel in the water as a priest intones a blessing, a high point of their visit to the Holy Land.

A few hundred yards downstream beyond an earthen dam, a pipe spews raw sewage into the riverbed, next to a canal dumping saline water collected from springs. With the fresh river water blocked by the dam, all that flows on is a polluted, salty stream meandering 60 miles south to the Dead Sea.

The Jordan, venerated by Christians as the place where Jesus was baptized and the scene of many biblical narratives, is dying, depleted by water projects in Israel, Jordan and Syria.

"A river that is holy to half of humanity has become little more than an open sewage canal," said Gidon Bromberg, Israeli director of Friends of the Earth Middle East, an environmental advocacy group. "The demise of the Jordan has nothing to do with climate change. It is totally man-made."

The process has been going on for decades, but it has been accelerated by growing populations and rising demand for water in countries bordering the river. Now, environmental advocates say, the condition of the river is so desperate that parts of it have begun to run dry in summer, with matters certain to get worse if action is not taken to reverse the trend.

Fed by tributaries flowing from Lebanon, the Israeli-held Golan Heights, Syria and Jordan, the Jordan River flows into the Sea of Galilee but is dwindling south of the lake, a victim of competing demands in a region where water is scarce and political conflict has prevented cooperation.

"There is no river there," said Hillel Glassman, head of the streams monitoring unit of Israel's Nature and Parks Authority. "What exists is not in its natural state."

In a written account of an expedition he led down the Jordan River in 1848, the U.S. Navy Lt. William Francis Lynch described swiftly moving water and rapids, an abundance of fish and birds, and lush vegetation along the banks.

Today more than 90 percent of the natural flow of the Jordan has been taken, leaving its lower part a mixture of sewage, saltwater, agricultural runoff and discharge from Israeli fish-farming ponds.

Natural habitats and biodiversity have been damaged by the changes in the river's composition. Freshwater plants have died out, leaving only those that can grow in saline soil, reducing feeding grounds for animals and for birds migrating between Europe and Africa through the Jordan Rift Valley.