الصحراء

by Michael Welland (ترجمة مروان سعد الدين)

From endless sand dunes and prickly cacti to shimmering mirages and green oases, deserts evoke contradictory images in us. They are lands of desolation, but also of romance, of blistering Mojave heat and biting Gobi cold. Covering a quarter of the earth’s land mass and providing a home to half a billion people, they are both a physical reality and landscapes of the mind. The idea of the desert has long captured Western imagination, put on display in films and literature, but these portrayals often fail to capture the true scope and diversity of the people living there. Bridging the scientific and cultural gaps between perception and reality, The Desert celebrates our fascination with these arid lands and their inhabitants, as well as their importance both throughout history and in the world today.
           
Covering an immense geographical range, Michael Welland wanders from the Sahara to the Atacama, depicting the often bizarre adaptations of plants and animals to these hostile environments. He also looks at these seemingly infertile landscapes in the context of their place in history—as the birthplaces not only of critical evolutionary adaptations, civilizations, and social progress, but also of ideologies. Telling the stories of the diverse peoples who call the desert home, he describes how people have survived there, their contributions to agricultural development, and their emphasis on water and its scarcity. He also delves into the allure of deserts and how they have been used in literature and film and their influence on fashion, art, and architecture. As Welland reveals, deserts may be difficult to define, but they play an active role in the evolution of our global climate and society at large, and their future is of the utmost importance. Entertaining, informative, and surprising, The Desert is an intriguing new look at these seemingly harsh and inhospitable landscapes.

Genres: Geography, Nonfiction, Nature

446 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 2015

About the author

Well, not so much a biography, as some thoughts.

As a geologist, I have been fortunate enough to see diverse and wonderful parts of our planet. Its workings and processes are a never-ending source of fascination, and demonstrate what is intoxicating about science - the provocative conspiracy between what we know and what we don't. All too often, science is presented as done and dusted, whereas the fascination is the vast realm of what we don't know. All too often, we think we know more than we do, and that can get us into trouble. And, being of a certain age, I treasure the time available to enquire into the endlessly compelling amount of stuff that I, personally, don't know.

I hope that this comes through in my books, that the reader will be surprised and entertained at what sand, an apparently mundane material, has to tell us and what the words 'the desert' mean to us culturally, historically, and in the imagination - and how different the meaning of those words is for all the people for whom the desert is home.

Reviews

[Yazeed AlMogren · Rating 5 out of 5]

"لن تستطيع جمع الصحراء في كتاب"
يبدأ كاتب هذا الكتاب الرائع العالم الجيولوجي مايكل ويلاند بهذه الكلمات مبرهنًا عظمة وضخامة الصحراء برمالها وصخورها؛ بجبالها وساكنيها، يعارض وبشكل شديد وصف الصحراء بأنها مقفره و وصف سكانها بأنهم متخلفين عن ركب الحضارة، في كتابه هذا يوضح تركيبة الصحاري والكائنات التي تعيش فوقها وتحت رمالها وكيف تتميز كل صحراء عن أخرى حسب بقعتها الجغرافية، الكتاب غيّر مفهومي عن الصحراء وأعاد تعريفها بالنسبة لي، أعجبني جودة الطباعة ونوعية الورق الجيدة والرسومات التوضيحية الملونة

[Maria · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I read Michael's book Sand, I was hit by jolts of surprise ending in spurts of laughter. This time there were jolts of shock. I grew up in a wetland environment and have spent most of my life on the water. My only two contacts with desert were watching the movie Hidalgo and a driving trip to California where I crossed a desert after Salt Lake City. It seemed to take forever, I worried the whole time about running out of gas where there were no gas stations, there were rippling waves of heat making the desert look like waves, and in the distance, I could see cities, which turned out to be a mirage. I have had absolutely no desire to repeat the experience. So, I know nothing about deserts . . . until now. I was very impressed by the information Michael has pulled together about various deserts, many of which I have never heard. I was also impressed, as an American, by the objectivity of a British writer, who I would have assumed would tout the colonial line so often demonstrated by arguably the country that has historically colonized more lands than any other. The understanding and support that he shows toward the aborigines of Australia, the American Indians of North America, the Tuaregs of the Sahara, and more was unexpected and much appreciated. I bogged down a bit in some of the terminology and the chapter that took on the desert as represented in literature and movies, since I had not read or seen most of them. Michael's research and reading boggle the mind. I was fascinated by the flora and fauna of the desert, of which if I had been asked, I would have said that there was none, and I would have been very wrong. He covers deserts from the ground to outer space with wonderful photographs. Then he pulls it all together in a wonderfully shocking and worrying final chapter about water usage, desertification and misguided efforts to turn that around to reclamation, and the role of dust in everyone's lives, emphasizing the importance of it. I loved his comments about overengineering and dams. He also mentions the price we may have to pay for taking out the earth's resources (oil, coal, gold, water, etc.) with no consideration for the future. I found the book both thought-provoking, informative, and a little scary. When writing about the models currently being extrapolated from numerical data on the deserts of the world, he includes a quote by Albert Einstein that, being a mathematician and a computer programmer, I loved, although I found a source that attributes it to William Bruce Cameron in a 1963 publication. I don't really care who came up with it, because it really hits home. "Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." Very true! Something us math types need to keep in mind.

[Nasreen Ghori · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent information on deserts and dry lands. Changed my perspective about deserts. WOW ..!