Deserts: The Encroaching Wilderness

The vibrant red and orange cliffs and spectacular deep canyons of the southwestern United States, the vast salt flats of the Sahara and the rolling sand seas of Arabia, the huge alluvial fans buttressing the high Andes, the steppes of Patagonia, the blood-red Ayers Rock towering over an arid plain in Australia--formed over the course of millions of years, the deserts of the Earth offer landscapes of breathtaking diversity and beauty. Now, in Deserts, general readers have an authoritative, comprehensive, and stunningly beautiful guide to the people, flora, and fauna of these stark regions.
Boasting informative and appealing new maps, photographs, and artwork, this lavishly illustrated volume covers all of the major deserts of the world, from the badlands of North America, to the hyper-arid Namib desert where ocean fog sweeps the land at night, to the high-altitude Karakoram Desert of Pakistan where temperatures drop so low that rocks shatter. We see the remarkable adaptations animals make to survive inhospitable conditions. The spadefoot toad, for instance, passes time between infrequent rains by burrowing several feet into moist soil, living up to nine months without food or water. Even more remarkable, some specimens of desert moss in museums have been known to recover and grow after more than a century without water. We also get a glimpse of the peoples living in or on the margins of arid lands, ranging from the Bushmen of the Kalahari and the nomadic tribes of the Middle East and Asia, to the Mormons by the Great Salt Lake in Utah and the farmers of the Texas Panhandle, who used some 50,000 wells sunk into the Ogallala aquifer to irrigate their lands. Equally important, Deserts is a comprehensive reference work, featuring an extensive atlas section that maps the world's deserts region by region, charting their growth, the location of resources such as ores and petroleum, and the patterns of human settlement. This section also covers key issues of individual deserts--from pollution and development to religion and desert warfare. Thus it is both a fascinating read for armchair travelers and an authoritative factbook on the deserts of the world.
Perhaps most important of all, Deserts provides readers with a thoughtful look at the ecological issues that confront people living in arid regions. Written in conjunction with the World Conservation Union, it illuminates the ways in which human activities affect the fragile balance of desert ecosystems and the changes we need to make in the ways we use the desert.