In this concise, clear, and convincing critique of discourse about drylands from Herodotus to UNESCO, Diana Davis exposes hoary myths that still govern modern practice in dryland management around the world. Exacting historical scholarship with immediate relevance to the real world.
J. R. McNeill, University Professor, Walsh School of Foreign Service and History Department, Georgetown University
In this book, Diana Davis excavates the fascinating environmental history of arid lands and their variegated histories as no one else has done before. This masterly crafted account will indeed change forever the way we look at, understand, and engage with desert lands.
Erik Swyngedouw, University of Manchester, author of Liquid Power and Social Power and the Urbanization of Water
In her new book The Arid Lands, Diana Davis conducts us on an exhilarating trek through more than 2,000 years of history to demonstrate the extraordinary diversity of the idea of the desert. But this is no piece of mere academic genealogy. Far from it. Rather, it's an intensely practical exercise in historical retrieval, providing crucial resources for reimagining the desert in our own time in order to fashion a new and critically engaged political ecology of the arid lands. For, as she so eloquently demonstrates, reimagining the desert is the first step toward disrupting the colonially charged assumption that deforestation, desiccation, and desertification are causally intertwined.
David N. Livingstone, Professor of Geography and Intellectual History, Queen's University Belfast
Diana Davis has produced an extraordinarily important and engaging book, a tour de force of historical geography and intellectual history and a must-read for anyone concerned with the environment of nearly half the world's landscapes.
Nathan Sayre, Professor of Geography, University of California, Berkeley
This book is a call for a new understanding of arid lands, their history, their future, and their possibilities. Turns out deserts aren't such a dry subject after all.
Landscape Architecture
