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This digital document is an article from The Geographical Review, published by American Geographical Society on July 1, 2003. The length of the article is 1274 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Global Desertification: Do Humans Cause Deserts?(Book Review)
Author: Lennart Olsson
Publication: The Geographical Review (Refereed)
Date: July 1, 2003
Publisher: American Geographical Society
Volume: 93Issue: 3Page: 413(3)

Article Type: Book Review

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Product Description
This magnificent history of the desert relates the human consequences of its remorseless spread. As a result of the past several thousand years, the Great Desert now stretches in almost unbroken continuity from Mauritania's Atlantic seaboard through the Middle East and Central Asia to the Great Wall of China. The author seeks to understand how the great civilizations in the original "green lands" of North Africa, Ancient Egypt, the Middle East, South Asia, and China responded and changed under the pressure of invaders fleeing growing environmental degradation in the surrounding deserts. In fascinating detail, Brian Griffith's cultural history of the deserts of Africa and Asia shows how the expanding wasteland fundamentally reshaped people's images of nature, women, politics, and religion. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

Water's role in World History is amazing !
This book is eye opening as to the role of wate in shaping cultures throughout the time of recorded history. The interactions between the types of societies, the role of women, and future planning makes amazing logical sense. We are running out of time as water becomes scarcer and deserts become more pre-imminent. This scholarly work should be a classic but will more than likely languish on shelves.

A fantastic journey of suffering and healing
I was surprised how much is packed in this book. It mixes the history of religions, empires, migrations of people, with big movements of environmental destruction and healing. Somehow it all fits into one huge story of people's efforts to live on our planet. Sometimes it's so detailed I had to put it down for awhile, but then I got curious about all the questions it raises. I never thought that making deserts could generate so many waves across the world, or turning the land green again could change life so much.

Especially good on the history of women
This book describes many impacts of environment destruction in many countries like Egypt, India, China and Arabia. But the best thing is its explanation of how this has affected women. The parts on the ancient Middle East offer important insights for understanding what happened to the women's roles in history.

The history of a growing circle of desertification
According to Griffith, we have been slowly denuding the land and turning it into desert for several thousand years. The places where civilization began in the Middle East were degraded first, and a circle of largely man-made desertification has spread outward ever since. As we've depleted nature, people in the affected areas often moved away in waves of migration toward greener areas. And where people degraded their environment, there have been big impacts on their culture and way of life. Griffith describes how environmental destruction has affected things like politics, religion, or economics. It's a very colorful, expansive book, and makes you realize how old a lot of our modern problems are. It also makes solving these problems seem quite possible, since many groups of people are having some good success. I found it a dense book that's packed with information on many countries in many periods of history. It took me a long time to read, but was well worth it.

More story than science, but a big, important story
This book tries to explore what happened in the past when people have turned their land into a desert. How has that affected society, politics, women, religion, etc? To answer, Griffith gives many stories from Africa, the Middle East, India, China, or Europe. One thing he looks at closely is the fate of women in areas where the land became unproductive. And in this he gives one of the most convincing explanations of of why inequality developed between men and women in certain parts of the world. To balance this Griffith tells inspiring stories of how local people have struggled to heal their environment and recover the benefits of a healthy countryside. ... Read more

Product Description
The Wadi Faynan is a harshly beautiful and desertic landscape in southern Jordan, situated between the hyper-arid deserts of the Wadi 'Arabah and the rugged and wetter Mountains of Edom. Archaeology and Desertification presents the results of the Wadi Faynan Landscape Survey, an inter-disciplinary study of landscape change undertaken in the Wadi Faynan by a team of archaeologists and geographers with the goal of contributing to present-day desertification debates by providing a long-term perspective on the relationship between environmental change and human history. The Wadi Faynan was the focus for some of the earliest farming in the Near East, and the earliest metallurgy, and in Roman times was a centre for copper and lead mining. The project reveals how past communities of farmers, shepherds, and miners managed their challenging environment, the solutions they developed, their successes and failures, and their short- and long-term environmental impacts. The richness of the palaeoclimatic, archaeological and palaeoecological data reveals an environmental/cultural history of complex pathways, synergies, and feedbacks operating at many different geographical scales, rates, and intensities. The project's findings on the complexity of past and present people: environment relations in the Wadi Faynan affirm the power of inter-disciplinary landscape archaeology to contribute significantly to the desertification debate. With global warming likely to threaten the lives of millions of people in the semi-arid and arid lands that comprise over a third of the planet through the course of this century, with potentially dire consequences for adjacent populations in better-watered regions, understanding the complexity of past responses to aridification has never been more urgent. ... Read more

Product Description
Desertification is land degradation due to climatic and anthropogenic causes where ‘land includes soil, water and the biological productive capacity. This has become a major environmental, economic and political issue in Mediterranean countries. In order to address the problem in the European countries of the Mediterranean, the European Commission established a number of major research projects under its DGXII Environment and Climate Programme MEDALUS (Mediterranean Desertification and Land Use). This book describes the results from the first phase of the project, dealing with local physical, socio-economic and political controls on desertification. In particular the book concentrates on the models developed, calibrated and validated, the field investigations into biological, hydrological and erosional processes at the seven main sites, and provides an introduction to the problems associated with global warming in the Mediterranean context. GIS and remote sensing are an integral part of the investigation and the results are described and discussed in detail. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

First phase of MEDALUS project
The 21 chapters are essentially a report of the first MEDALUS research project. There are 4 good chapters presenting the regional background and overview of the project, followed by 6 detailed in-depth reports of the sites investigated in Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece, whereas those researched in France are not included. Eight chapters deal with special topics of the program, including the Slope Catena Model, remote sensing applications and effect of rock fragments. A valuable but uneven effort. ... Read more

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Lands lost to desert may effectively be lost for ever, so desertification is humanity's most obvious despoliation to the planet. It is certainly one of the most serious environmental problems facing the world today. In this book the author describes what is happening and where. Although the problem is greatest in developing countries, it is by no means confined to them. Australia, Africa, the USA and India are all affected. In the 1970s an international Plan of Action was drawn up to bring the phenomenon under control, but it was never implemented. Now that the situation is more serious than ever before, this book urges new action and describes many of the myriad ways in which it is possible to arrest the progress of desertification. It describes, too, not just the failures, but the considerable successes that have been achieved. ... Read more

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The Mediterranean countries of Europe have been undergoing rapid change and development over the last thirty years and especially during the last ten. These changes have occurred in all aspects of life and livelihood, and for many countries such change has had far reaching social and economic impacts. In addition, the results of centuries of distinctive manenvironment relationships in a climatically marginal region have been swept aside and the landscape itself is undergoing a rapid transformation. Large areas are being abandoned temporarily or permanently by rural populations; urban growth is rampant; agriculture has been intensified; and water scarcity, fed by the severe droughts of the 1980s and 1990s, has become a major environmental and resource concern. At the same time the threat of global climate change and the indication of deeper and more sustained future droughts has brought these issues into sharp focus. Based on the findings of the European Communitys Medalus Project, this Atlas brings to a wide audience the background to and a contemporary understanding of the environmental crisis, which is now facing the Mediterranean region of Europe, as well as the future prospects for a solution. ... Read more

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The World Atlas of Desertification summarises the state of scientific knowledge on the drylands of the globe. Representing in graphic form the current stage of our understanding of desertification, as well as its extent and possible solutions, it contains an extraordinary amount of information of value to students and experts alike. The Atlas clearly shows that desertification is one of the world's most pressing environmental problems, and that it is a truly global issue.

Since the publication of the first edition in 1992, over 100 countries have ratified the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification. This 2nd edition reflects major advances in our understanding of desertification over the past few years and has been thoroughly revised and expanded to almost twice its original size. Because combating desertification involves all aspects of environmental issues, this edition covers a broader range of topics, including concerns surrounding poverty, biodiversity, climate change and the availability of water. Social and economic conditions also have a major impact on the progress and control of desertification and this edition contains the latest information on population movements which result from, and lead to desertification.

Desertification directly affects the livelihoods of more than one billion people who are directly dependent on the land for their survival. Using the latest updated digitised maps of desertification and fully referenced throughout, this Atlas is essential reading for everyone concerned with the drylands and their people. ... Read more

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This wide-ranging selection of original papers covers many aspects of desertification including environmental and weather factors, land management policy, groundwater resources, understanding biodiversity in fragile ecosystems, technological approaches to the study and remedy of desertification.

Customer Reviews (2)

Marvelous regional overviews, full of human drama
A powerfully written tour of selected anti-desertification efforts around the world. Walls paints a series of fascinating big pictures from particular areas of China, Australia, Tunisia, Iran, Israel, Iraq, or the USA. In each case he captures both an overview of environmental trends on the ground, and a dramatic human story involving tragedy, courage, strategy, and ingenuity.

author of The Gardens of Their Dreams

Marvelous regional overviews, full of human drama
A powerfully written tour of selected anti-desertification efforts around the world. Walls paints a series of fascinating big pictures from particular regions of China, Australia, Tunisia, Iran, Iraq, or the USA. In each case he captures both an overview of environmental trends on the ground, and a dramatic human story involving tragedy, courage, strategy, and ingenuity. ... Read more

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Contributed articles. ... Read more