Abstract
Haynes begins her exploration of deserts with a discussion of arid areas which receive, on average, less than 250 mm of precipitation a year. ‘Desert’, she explains, is not an innocent term. It may be easy to define in geographical and scientific terms, but its very name – drawn from the Latin desertum, meaning abandoned – conjures ‘a sense of foreboding’ (p. 7). It is this image of the desert as a barren, dangerous, threatening space that Haynes seeks to tease out, explore and challenge in her book. Desert sets out a rather ambitious task; to explore the desert as both a physical and cultural entity, in its various and diverse guises. Forming part of Reaktion’s ‘Earth Series’, which traces the historical significance and cultural history of natural phenomena and resources, Desert brings scientific knowledge and cultural, religious and historical representations of the world’s deserts into conversation, revealing them to be important ecologies requiring conservation as well as places that shape and are shaped by human action. The book is structured as a catalogue of the world’s deserts. Firstly it provides details of the biological adaptations nature has evolved to survive the harsh and distinct desert environments, and secondly the book describes the long history of diverse spiritual, artistic, imaginative and economic engagements humans have developed in order to survive, dwell, travel through and exploit deserts. Beginning by introducing the diversity of deserts across the Earth’s surface – including hot dry deserts, cold winter deserts, cool coastal deserts and polar deserts – the spaces of ‘the desert’ are prised open as Haynes points out that only one-fifth of the world’s deserts are covered with sand (p. 11). From the outset this highlights an issue that this text is faced with. Deserts may be geographically and scientifically defined, but their inherent diversity – ecologically, physically, culturally and economically – renders them rather difficult to treat holistically. It is difficult to say very much about the desert as a concept or space beyond describing the richness of the deserts which populate the Earth’s surface. In order to address this issue Haynes structures the book around chapters on ‘Desert Religions’, ‘Travellers and Explorers’ Deserts of the Imagination’, ‘Deserts in Western Art’ and ‘Exploitation and Opportunity’. Each chapter moves across the different deserts, picking examples that highlight adaptations, histories and engagements (biological and cultural) with deserts, but also their particularities and peculiarities. In this sense Desert provides an inventory of deserts, an index of their histories and geographies; it is in short an introduction to how to frame research into deserts, how to approach imagining the desert conceptually and methodologically. Further, due to the scale and scope of the book, there is a limited exploration of the connections between the nature(s) and the culture(s) of deserts, and the structure served to sever nature/culture, so that the desert was explored as a natural space on which culture adapted and has hence impacted upon nature. That said, Haynes has written a book that reveals the richness of the desert as the subject of cultural geographic study. She is correct in acknowledging that deserts are not only spaces of foreboding but are also alluring places; rich and tempting spaces for cultural geographical research. Desert is a good place to begin this journey.