CONCEPT: Desertification

Desertification: This is a long-term process brought about and sustained primarily by climate change. It occurs gradually in the form of a retreat of forest cover and grasslands in the wake of significantly diminished rains as well as the depletion of ground water. The causal factors in desertification are widely documented in scientific research. One thing is certain, however: the great deserts of the world -- such as the Sahara, the Gobi and the Middle East deserts -- are not the products of "the human hand". And yet "the human hand" has now become a crucial driver in the spread of deserts.  

A well-known characteristic of deserts is the almost invariable absence of vegetation and animal life. So deforestation is inescapably built into our conception of deserts. This is certainly so in contemporary conversations about what we see happening, and what the media report. 

Besides deforestation and the historical ebb and flow of climate change, however, three forms of "poor land use", as Reed (1992: 115) suggests, can also trigger (or exacerbate) desertification. These triggers or exacerbators, she tells us, are: overcultivation, overgrazing and "poor irrigation practices". 

But she 'forgets', here, two equally crucial ones: (a) the rapid growth of human populations increasingly resident in sprawling urban centres with a manifestly insatiable thirst for water; and, (b) a rapacious demand for wood as a key input in many things. There is a practically 'unlimited demand' for it in, inter alia, the construction of homes and other kinds of buildings and shelters; meeting our fuel-consumption needs, our demand for furniture and frequent need for caskets to bury the dead; and the manufacture of paper, paper products and packaging material.