S4E45: The Desertification Myth: Unpacking the Truth About Dry Lands

0:00:00 - (Chris Clarke): 90 miles from the desert Protection Podcast is made possible by listeners just like you. If you want to help us out, you can go to 90 miles from needles.com donate or text needles to 53555.

0:00:25 - (Joe Geoffrey): Think the deserts are barren wastelands. Think again.

0:00:34 - (Joe Geoffrey): It's time for 90 miles from Needles, the Desert Protection Podcast.

0:00:45 - (Chris Clarke): Thank you, Joe, and welcome to 90 Miles from Needles the Desert Protection Podcast. I am your host, Chris Clarke, and in this episode, I want to talk about a word. When we talk about deserts and dry lands and even global issues like climate change and just general land use, there's a word that comes up a lot in the environmental community, a word that sounds scientific and urgent and even a little ominous.

0:01:14 - (Chris Clarke): The word is desertification. Desertification summons up an image of good land going bad, green trees and grass turning to brown dust. And it suggests that deserts themselves are what you get when a landscape is broken. But deserts aren't mistakes. They're not broken landscapes. They're not landscapes that forgot how to work. They're ancient living systems shaped by scarcity and timing and restraint and by a kind of resilience that looks different from what people are used to in wetter places.

0:01:53 - (Chris Clarke): So today, I want to sit with that word desertification for a while. I want to talk about what it's supposed to mean. I want to talk about what it ends up meaning in practice. And lastly, let's talk about how the way we refer to dry places shapes what we do to them. For a lot of people, desertification means desert spreading like a stain, like the Sahara, slowly swallowing up everything in its path.

0:02:49 - (Chris Clarke): You see that image everywhere, in textbooks, in documentaries, in fundraising appeals from major global green groups. And it sticks because it fits a really deep instinct a lot of us carry around that greener is better, weather is healthier, and that anything that is arid must be a warning sign. But that picture is, at best incomplete, at worst, it's indicative of a colonialist mindset. And I use that word deliberately.

0:03:24 - (Chris Clarke): Most deserts didn't start out as forests or meadows that failed. They're deserts because of rain, shadows and ocean currents and monsoons that come and go because of where the mountains are and where the winds blow. Deserts are dry for reasons that have nothing to do with something going wrong. So when we hear the word desertification, it's worth slowing down and asking desertification of what exactly?

0:03:54 - (Chris Clarke): And compared to when and according to whose idea of what this land is supposed to look like? Now, to be fair, in scientific and policy circles, desertification usually has a more precise and careful definition, which is still problematic, but less so. It's often described as land degradation in dry lands. Soils losing function, vegetation thinning out, biological productivity dropping, driven by climate swings and by human use.

0:04:27 - (Chris Clarke): And that's not entirely wrong. Land in dry places really can be damaged. Soils can erode or compact. Springs can fail. Native plants can disappear. The amount of dust blowing around can increase. And these are real problems, and we have documented them for the last four seasons on this podcast. But the trouble starts with the word itself. Desertification turns a set of specific processes into a story about a place.

0:05:02 - (Chris Clarke): It makes it sound like land is becoming a desert, as if desert were the end stage of ecological failure. And that is based on the quiet assumption that the desert is a broken landscape. That frame does a lot of heavy lifting, whether we notice it or not. There's a long history behind that frame. For a couple of centuries now, through colonial science, through development policy, through stories of famine and dust bowls, dry lands have often been treated as problems to be solved.

0:05:41 - (Chris Clarke): The unspoken ideal is usually something wetter. European farmland, Midwestern cornfields, landscapes where ecological health looks like lushness. And that way of seeing deserts as lands that have somehow fallen short didn't just appear out of nowhere. There's a geographer named Diana K. Davis whose work has really opened up the deeper roots of the story. Not just the fact that the concept of desertification has colonial roots, but just how deeply those roots run into the desert landscape.

0:06:20 - (Chris Clarke): In her book The Arid Lands and in other works, Davis points out that what most of the world learned about deserts didn't come from listening to the people who lived in them, but came from a long lineage of Western thought that began well before the word desertification was coined in the 1920s. For centuries, Western imperial powers described deserts and dry lands as if they were inherently ruined, devalued landscapes, places that had somehow fallen short of what land was supposed to be.

0:06:52 - (Chris Clarke): Now, that idea didn't spring up in a vacuum. It was shaped by European notions of forests and fertile land. And it was deeply bound up with colonial governance in places like North Africa and Central Asia. Early colonial officials didn't just observe dry lands. They actively tried to manage and reshape them based on their own ideas of what a landscape should look like. In the 19th century, French colonial foresters and administrators launched reforestation schemes and massive tree planting projects aimed at holding back the assumed advance of deserts.

0:07:27 - (Chris Clarke): Projects like colonial Algeria's 1500-kilometer Barrage Vert (green wall), which displaced nomadic peoples and often failed because it ignored the local environment. And here's the twist: sometimes the efforts to fix dry lands produce the very kinds of degradation that later get called desertification. Irrigation without adequate drainage turned soil saline. In British India. In the Soviet, engineered Aral Sea Basin, canals built to grow cotton dried up an entire sea.

0:08:02 - (Chris Clarke): Large tree planting and irrigation projects have lowered water tables and stressed local ecosystems. Part of this history involves sidelining the traditional ecological knowledge of the people who had lived in dry lands for generations and assuming their land use was the problem. That suppression of local ecological knowledge wasn't just an unfortunate side effect. It was built into how imperial and postcolonial powers thought about land productivity and progress.

0:08:34 - (Chris Clarke): What Davis ultimately calls for — she frames it as decolonizing our understanding of deserts — isn't just rejecting the old myths. It's about bringing ecological science and indigenous knowledges together, rethinking what we count as value and productivity in an ecological sense, and recognizing that much of what we've treated as desertification is shaped by ideological and political forces and not just by environmental decline.

0:09:04 - (Chris Clarke): And that makes a powerful point relevant to our talk now. When we talk about desert degradation, we're not just dealing with ecology. We're dealing with history, power, and the stories we've been told about who gets to define land's worth. Now, that matters in policy, in conservation, and in how communities on the ground are treated. You see that in a few familiar patterns. And once you see the history, once you realize how much of the story was shaped by power and not just by observation, it's hard not to notice how familiar the patterns still feel.

0:09:43 - (Chris Clarke): The first pattern, desert as ruin. The word becomes shorthand for loss. This land has been desertified, as if becoming desert and being destroyed were the same thing. And you see echoes of this in concepts like food deserts and media deserts. Just absence. A food desert isn't a vibrant place full of food. That's just different from what we're used to. A food desert is a place where the food sucks and there's not enough of it.

0:10:18 - (Chris Clarke): That's not a very flattering concept of desert. The second pattern, false baselines. Dry lands swing wildly. Wet years long, droughts boom and bust in grasses and wildflowers. Davis refers to these as non-equilibrium ecosystems. And the problem is that generally people pick one unusually wet moment as normal. Look at the Colorado River Compact for an example. If you pick one unusually wet moment as normal, then everything else looks like decline.

0:10:54 - (Chris Clarke): The third pattern, blame flowing downhill. People who've lived in dry places for generations get framed as the problem. Pastoralists, small farmers, indigenous land use, all those traditional uses get fingers pointed at them. While things like groundwater pumping and export, agriculture and mining, dams, city growth, energy sprawl, and these days, data centers fade politely into the background. The fourth pattern, green as virtue.

0:11:32 - (Chris Clarke): Green is good, therefore less green is bad. So tree planting, also known as afforestation, which is like reforestation, except it's planting trees where there weren't any before. So afforestation and terracing and reclamation, so to speak, start to feel like obvious solutions. Even where water is scarce and soils evolved as uncovered by vegetation, all of these grow out of that one simple assumption, that deserts are what happens when land goes wrong.

0:12:06 - (Chris Clarke): What Davis found is that going back to the 19th century, colonial officials kept telling a very specific story about drylands. They said the deserts used to be greener. They said they used to be more forested and more productive, whatever that means. And that local people, pastoralists and farmers and fire users had wrecked it through mismanagement. Small scale grazing, cutting trees, burning. All of these were problems that the colonialists decided they had to fix.

0:12:40 - (Chris Clarke): Does that sound familiar? The problem is that when Davis went back and looked at historical records and old maps and travelers accounts and even data from things like pollen deposits and lakebed sentiments, that greener past often did not exist. A lot of these places had been dry for centuries or longer. But the story that desert lands used to be better was incredibly useful for the Western powers.

0:13:09 - (Chris Clarke): If you say local people ruin the land, it makes sense to take control of it, to regulate grazing, to ban burning, to turn commons into state property, to bring in European style forestry and agriculture as the fix for this ruined landscape. So the idea that dry lands are degraded versions of something they should be instead, wasn't just a scientific mistake. It was a political story. It was a story that helped justify who got to own the land and who got to decide how it was used.

0:13:42 - (Chris Clarke): And that story didn't disappear when the colonial era transformed into what we have now. It got baked into development policy, into conservation. It got baked into the way international agencies and NGOs started talking about dry places in the 20th century, especially in the 1970s when a drought in the Sahel threatened hundreds of thousands of lives. That was a true emergency. When we hear the word desertification used today, we're hearing echoes of a much older narrative that deserts are lands that have fallen from grace and that someone else needs to step in and put them right.

0:14:27 - (Chris Clarke): Now, I want to pause here and say this clearly. None of this is an argument that dry lands and deserts are fine or that we should relax about what's happening in them. Deserts are under real pressure. Climate change is pushing temperatures higher and scrambling the timing of rains and snow melt that organisms have come to rely on over tens of thousands of years. Hotter droughts are stressing plants and animals already living close to the edge.

0:14:57 - (Chris Clarke): Groundwater pumping is drying up springs and seeps and riparian corridors, the arteries of desert life. Once those go, they don't come back on any timeline that matters to people. Invasive grasses are changing fire regimes in places like the Mojave and Sonoran deserts, Turning ecosystems that almost never burned into ones that burn too often. We're fragmenting deserts with roads, energy, sprawl, border infrastructure.

0:15:27 - (Chris Clarke): We're crushing soils mainly with industrial mining and grazing, but also with things like off road vehicles in the wrong place. We're exporting desert water to feed distant cities and fields, growing alfalfa for export. So yeah, land in dry places is being damaged, but the danger isn't that deserts are spreading. The danger is that deserts are being broken. And that's a very different story. The story matters because your choice of story determines the solutions that are available to you.

0:16:05 - (Chris Clarke): If you think the problem is that land is becoming desert, then the fix looks like making it less desert, like more green, more trees, more engineering. But if the real problem is groundwater collapse, the fix isn't planting anything, it's pumping less. If the problem is soil crust being destroyed, the fix isn't greening. It's keeping hooves and tires and boots off fragile ground. If the problem is invasive grasses driving fire, the fix isn't afforestation, it's breaking the grass fire cycle.

0:16:41 - (Chris Clarke): When you misname the problem, you reach for the wrong tools. And sometimes, not always, but sometimes those tools make things worse. There's a recent study from the semi-arid northern Negev desert in Israel that stuck with me. Researchers looked at land that had been restored, end quote. By building contour terraces and planting trees and shrubs. And that's a classic anti desertification approach meant to catch runoff and green the land.

0:17:11 - (Chris Clarke): The researchers compared areas planted about a decade earlier with nearby natural desert. And what they found was mixed. In some places, planted areas had taller grasses. But when the researchers looked at the soil, the natural desert sites consistently had better soil quality. Building the terraces had scraped away the upper soil layers, the living skin of the desert. A decade later, the soil still hadn't really recovered.

0:17:45 - (Chris Clarke): Now, the takeaway wasn't that restoration is hopeless. It was that in dry lands, well-meant greening can undermine the very processes that make the desert soils work. It's starting from the idea that the desert is the problem. And when you do that, you end up damaging what you should be trying to protect. So I'd like to suggest a small practical rule that I think might help us make sense of this. Name the process, not the biome.

0:18:21 - (Chris Clarke): What do I mean? It's just this. If you hear someone say desertification is increasing here, try translating that in your head. Do they mean soil erosion? Do they mean loss of vegetation? Do they mean groundwater decline? Do they mean more dust because the crusts that protect the soil surface are broken? Do they mean fire because invasive grasses have moved in? Each one of those things has a different cause and a different response that's necessary.

0:18:52 - (Chris Clarke): Now, if I had a magic wand that I could wave over people's brains to replace the word desertification with stuff that was more accurate and more appropriate, it'd be great if I could get them to use phrases like dry land degradation or soil function loss or groundwater dependent ecosystem collapse or type conversion or… Yeah, you know, none of those is great. They're. They're clunkier, but they're more accurate.

0:19:21 - (Chris Clarke): They're honest. And honesty is what deserts need from us. Out here in the deserts I know best in North America, you can see this play out over and over. When a spring dries up because the aquifer that feeds it has been pumped away, that's not desertification. That is a water politics problem. It's an engineering problem. When a desert plain turns into a sheet of dust because the cryptobiotic soil crust was destroyed, that's not desertification. It's habitat destruction.

0:19:54 - (Chris Clarke): When buffelgrass or Mediterranean split grass or Sahara mustard turns hillsides into tinder, that's not desertification. That's an invasive species rewriting fire ecology. Using the word desertification to describe all of those related but distinct harms with different causes makes it sound like you're blaming the desert as the perpetrator of dryness, instead of a living system being actively disrupted by outside actors.

0:20:28 - (Chris Clarke): And it lets the biggest drivers hide behind a vague word. So where does that leave us? Well, for me, it comes back to respect. Deserts don't need pity. They don't need rescue stories that treat them as what's left over when better ecosystems fail. Deserts need us to respect limits. They need us to defend water in desert places. They need us to tread lightly on soils that took centuries to form. Deserts need us to listen to people who've lived with aridity for generations, in some cases since time immemorial, and Especially deserts need us to stop pretending every place should look like an English cottage garden.

0:21:17 - (Chris Clarke): Land can be damaged in dry places, but deserts themselves are not damage. For many of us, they're home.

0:21:27 - (Joe Geoffrey): Don't go away. We'll be right back.

0:21:29 - (Chris Clarke): At this point, I think it would be nice to take a quick break from the deep thinking. So let's go to our installment for this week of Fred Bell's Nature Recordings. This week we'll hear a phainopepla, a wonderful native desert bird commensal with mistletoe at Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge. And astute listeners will hear a white crowned sparrow in there somewhere too. Enjoy.

0:22:10 - (Joe Geoffrey): You're listening to 90 miles from Needles, the Desert Protection Podcast. When you've used half your water, it's time to turn around.

0:23:06 - (Chris Clarke): One last thought. The United Nations has designated June 17 as a global day in which people are supposed to think about desertification and drought. And drought is very real. Those of us in the Southwest are sitting in the worst one in a couple of millennia right now. And land degradation in dry lands is just as real. For example, see every other episode of this podcast. But for me, I'd love to see June 17 become something a little different. A day to stand up for deserts themselves.

0:23:35 - (Chris Clarke): Not as mistakes, not as dire warnings of a global arid future, but as ecosystems worth protecting just as they are. We've been playing here with the idea of calling June 17th desert protection day, not as a big official rebrand and trying to steal thunder from the UN but just as a way of nudging the conversation in a better direction. And we've gone one small step further than just talking about it. We put together a draft template that cities and towns can use if they want to pass a simple municipal declaration recognizing Desert protection day on June 17.

0:24:11 - (Chris Clarke): Something that says in plain language that local deserts matter, that they're alive, and that they deserve care and respect. It's not complicated. It's not meant to be political. It's not divisive. It's just a way for communities to say this place matters. Now, if that sounds interesting, look in our show notes for a link to a draft template. I would love to hear from you if you think your town might be a good place to try it out.

0:24:37 - (Chris Clarke): Definitely going to try it out where I live. So whether you take this proclamation to your local municipality or county and get it passed, or just mark June 17th on a calendar, or just remember to spend a little time in a desert you care about, maybe we could make June 17th be a day to look at dry places a little differently, not as what's gone wrong, but as what's worth defending. And that's it for this episode of 90 Miles from Needles, the Desert Protection Podcast.

0:25:37 - (Chris Clarke): Big thanks to you for listening all the way through. We have three new donors to thank. They're Sherry Schwaninger and Mitch Miller, a hiking buddy of mine. We're overdue for one, as well as Larry Hogue, who has been a longtime supporter of our work and in addition wrote an amazing book on the desert in San Diego and Imperial counties in California called All the Wild and Lonely Places. Look for it. We'll see if we can hook it up to our bookstore at 90miles from needles.com

0:26:08 - (Chris Clarke): books. Thank you all three of you for signing up. If you want to join them and sit at the cool kids table, you can go to 90 miles from needles.com donate and there are options there for you. Also want to thank Joe Geoffrey, our voiceover guy, as well as Martin Mancha, our podcast artist, and Fred Bell, our Nature Sounds recordist. Our theme song, Moody Western, is by Bright side Studio. Other music in this episode is by audio agent.

0:26:38 - (Chris Clarke): We have some good news coming up in the next episode. I'll give you a preview in that Folks in Imperial county dealt a serious, though not mortal blow to a data center that is proposed for the city of Imperial, right next to a frontline community neighborhood. There's a really inspiring group of people that mobilized against it and we're going to be talking to some of them. So look for that. In the meantime, take care of yourselves. The desert needs you.

0:27:08 - (Chris Clarke): Bye now.

0:27:11 - (Joe Geoffrey): 90 miles from Needles is a production of the Desert Advocacy Media Network.