Desert Legends: Re-Storying the Sonoran Borderlands

by Gary Paul Nabhan, Mark Klett (Photographer)

Parables and photographs demonstrate and evoke the life that thrives in this apparent wasteland, a place where plants, animals, and people live in true symbiosis

207 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 1994

About the author

Gary Paul Nabhan is an internationally-celebrated nature writer, seed saver, conservation biologist and sustainable agriculture activist who has been called "the father of the local food movement" by Utne Reader, Mother Earth News, Carleton College and Unity College. Gary is also an orchard-keeper, wild forager and Ecumenical Franciscan brother in his hometown of Patagonia, Arizona near the Mexican border. For his writing and collaborative conservation work, he has been honored with a MacArthur "genius" award, a Southwest Book Award, the John Burroughs Medal for nature writing, the Vavilov Medal, and lifetime achievement awards from the Quivira Coalition and Society for Ethnobiology.

--from the author's website

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellent collaboration between a writer and photographer. Mark Klett's photographs augment & somehow "complete" the text in a way that was a bit surprising. The short stories compiled have much to say about the limits and dangers of border walls; prescient for 1994, but downright essential in 2017. But it has more to offer than that.

Growing up on the edge of desert, the stories and photographs are familiar and yet revelatory, driving me to think about the southwest and life in general in different ways. Wendell Berry has asserted that in order to accelerate growth, one also has to accelerate rot; when things don't rot, they don't enrich the soil for new things to grow. In the arid desert, things rot incredibly slowly, if at all. Sometimes, they just desiccate.

But there is life there; in Nabhan's closing story he suggests a parallel between the sounds of the Sonoran desert with the the Australian outback. There's a drone in both places that simply resonates in our bones, a bit like the sound of the didgeridoo. Anyone who has lived there for very long, feels it in their bones.