Can’t see the desert for the trees: Countering common misconceptions of drylands

Abstract

The drylands of the world constitute nearly half of our landmass (45%–50%) and provide a home to roughly 38% of humanity, or about 2.5 billion people. The drylands are arid to semi-arid, have highly variable precipitation and about 88% of the drylands are utilized as rangelands. This “dry half” of our world is commonly conceived as deforested and overgrazed, a worthless or empty wasteland that has been mismanaged for many years by destructive local populations. The received wisdom is that the drylands need to be “improved” with tree-planting, sedentarizing pastoralists, irrigated agriculture and more centralized control over environmental management. This article demonstrates that these common notions of the drylands and their people are misconceptions with a long history dating to before the colonial period. Moreover, most of these misconceptions are deeply rooted in arborocentrism, a tree-centric world view which sees trees as the “best” vegetation which belongs nearly everywhere, a view not informed by current science. Colonial ideas, especially desertification, have become institutionalized and continue to motivate development projects, like mass tree-planting, that are often misaligned with the biophysical and social realities of the drylands. The evidence reveals that drylands are valuable in many ways, play important roles in global geochemical cycles and the carbon cycle and many are high in biodiversity. Drylands are also very productive when local peoples like pastoralists and farmers are allowed to steward them with their indigenous knowledges, as they are frequently skilled at thriving with variability. All too often, though, governments and international political-economic forces use false desertification narratives to constrain local peoples from making the best uses of the drylands. The article concludes with a call to desert “desertification,” and the arborocentric notions embedded in the term, in order to liberate more scientifically accurate ways of thinking about the drylands, their inherent value and their management.