Prof. Diana K. Davis, a geographer and veterinarian in the History Department at the University of California, Davis, has written an intriguing account about deserts and dry lands, which cover 40-45% of the earth and support about 38% of its population. Deserts come in several varieties: 1) hot and dry, 2) foggy, 3) cold/frigid, and 4) marine; Davis examines the torrid, arid ones. These are, in fact, ecologically dynamic zones due to quantities and variability of rainfall.

Davis relies on her own fieldwork among peoples in southern Morocco, southeastern Afghanistan, and Baluchistan; she also draws more broadly on extensive publications that focus on other desert and dry land regions and their inhabitants around the world and through time. The book, written for specialists, comprises a list of illustrations, a forward, a preface, a list of abbreviations, six chapters, extensive endnotes, and an index.

Davis traces the history of attitudes by non-desert dwellers (mainly Europeans and other Westerners from classical antiquity until the present) about “desertification,” an erroneous, ideologically and politically driven concept lacking universally accepted definition or quantification and a notion whose meaning has morphed over the centuries. She argues persuasively that many current policies endorsed by the UN, national governments, various NGOs, and other institutions and individual specialists have been conceived, in part, based on western ignorance about desiccated places and what caused them to become so.

Attempts over approximately the last two centuries to impose anti-desertification programs on marginal arid lands, especially in North Africa and the Middle East during colonial times, have …