Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ

Deserts: The Encroaching Wilderness edited by Tony Allan and Andrew Warren,
Mitchell Beazley/IUCN, pp 175, £19.99

Deserts: A Miracle of Life by Jim Flegg, Blandford, pp 160, Pounds Sterling
16.99

Nature’s Last Refuges edited by Robert Burton, Blandford, pp 256, Pounds
Sterling 19.99

Deserts attract a bad press. Perhaps they need a new name. Just as jungles
were transformed in the public imagination by being rechristened
rainforests, maybe deserts also need better PR. I look forward to the first
‘Save the deserts’ book.

Meanwhile, Tony Allan and Andrew Warren’s ‘world conservation atlas’ on arid
lands is a delight. It’s not a real atlas, of course. There are only 20
maps, some of them small and none of the quality found in the two previous
books in this series, on rainforests and oceans. But the illustrations and
captions are as superb as they were in its predecessors, and precisely keyed
to the themes of the text.

The editors – both British academics with a keen sense of the political,
economic and cultural as well as geographical and conservation aspects of
deserts – span a huge canvas with great authority. Here, beside vivid
material on desert landforms and wildlife, are discussions of whether Islam
is ‘a religion born of the desert’, of the history of mining in Chile’s
Atacama Desert, of the catastrophic desiccation of the Aral Sea in central
Asia, of Colonel Gaddafi’s Great Manmade River project, and of the economics
behind the growth of American retirement cities in the Arizona desert.

There are signs of tension between the various contributors. Witness the
uneven treatment about just how important a part human activities such as
grazing cattle play in the desertification of arid lands. In places we are
told the ecosystems found in deserts are resilient and highly adapted to
coping with long droughts. In others they become ‘fragile’, and vulnerable
to ‘rapid degradation’.

And fatuity occasionally creeps in. We are told on the subject of drought
that ‘we should not confuse short-term fluctuations with long-term climate
change of the sort that could lead to major changes in the extent of the
world’s deserts’. An important distinction, but in reality virtually
impossible to make. Which description best fits the Saharan fringe in the
past two decades, for instance?

The section on desertification concludes, reasonably enough: ‘There is a
growing number of people who dismiss the concept of desertification. The
danger this raises is that the real problems of managing dry lands will be
overlooked, especially the perennial problems of drought and the looming
threat of climate change.’ But given that the UN is currently negotiating a
global treaty to combat desertification, it would have been valuable if the
authors had been more assertive as to what, if anything, they believe the
negotiators should be talking about.

Inevitably, there are the odd strange gaps and errors. India’s Thar Desert,
which by most reckonings is the most densely populated desert in the world,
has ‘very few people’, we are told. But these are minor points in a book
vibrant with camels’ humps and fertility goddesses, gold fields and Gila
Monsters, Apaches and aquifers – and above all with eclectic knowledge,
wisdom and good sense. The sand barely gets a look in.

By comparison, Jim Flegg’s desert book is limp. Picture reproduction is
poor, the choice of pictures worse. Its only map manages to miss out one of
the word’s greatest expanses of desert, the high plateau of Tibet.

The plodding nature of this natural history is reflected by chapter titles
in which mammals are ‘masters of concealment’, plants ‘struggle for a root
hold’ and invertebrates have ‘survival strategies’. A brief chapter on
humans in the desert does not get beyond Bushmen, Australian Aborigines and
a brief discourse on British explorers, for whom the desert was a ‘cruel
adversary’. Television wildlife programmes got beyond these cliches years
ago, so why does Blandford aim so low?

Nature’s Last Refuges, like the deserts conservation atlas, is published in
association with the World Conservation Union (IUCN). But, though ambitious
and almost global in perspective (Antarctica gets just three paragraphs), it
is a disappointment. This is partly because, in spite of having a large
number of photographs and maps, it is undistinguished visually. And partly
because of its oddly dated idea of what conservation should be about.

In the deserts conservation atlas, national parks and nature reserves, the
traditional basis of nature conservation, are almost ignored. The book takes
to heart the current ethos of the IUCN that parks can become conservation
ghettos, and that sustainable development of the rest of the landscape,
integrating conservation with human activity, is of paramount importance.

But Robert Burton seems to have missed this message. Each regional text
begins with a description of the natural environment and the pressure on it
before homing in on the management of a selection of protected areas.

As a global study of wild areas and national parks, it is valuable. But the
confusion is summed up by its title. Protected areas are not ‘nature’s last
refuges’. Most nature, however threatened, still remains outside these
areas. Concentrating on protected areas alone is as likely to create as to
save endangered species.