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. 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.Ĭovering 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. 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. 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. They are lands of desolation, but also of romance, of blistering Mojave heat and biting Gobi cold. From endless sand dunes and prickly cacti to shimmering mirages and green oases, deserts evoke contradictory images in us.
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