Where I Will Be - The Desert

I don’t know exactly when it was that I fell in love with deserts. In the last five years there were a few books I read that really turned me on to their amazing biology and ecology (Voice of the Desert, Desert Solitaire), but I think that there must be something about me as I’ve gotten older that’s drawn me to these places. Allow me to meditate a little bit on the life of the desert and maybe I can help you understand why they excite me so much.

Life began in the oceans 3.8 billion years ago and until about 400 million years ago, almost nothing even attempted to colonize the harsh, dry land. The story of life on land is not the story of gradually leaving the oceans, but the story of how to ever more cleverly bring the oceans with you. At first, only brackish water close to the ocean could be colonized, then farther and farther away as adaptations like roots, vascular systems, and waxy coatings in plants enabled even those organisms that can’t move to gather, store, and hold on to their precious water supply. Deserts represent the absolute pinnacle of this achievement of evolution.

The true signature of life on earth is its perpetual battle against entropy, or disorder. When James Lovelock was looking for ways to detect life on other planets, he wondered at how an alien might detect life on ours – his answer was disequilibrium. Entropy would dictate that all disequilibrium naturally goes toward equilibrium states – all ordered things dissipate into randomness. And yet on earth we find a huge amount of disequilibrium, even in the constitution of our atmosphere; oxygen and methane don’t last long together, but in Earth’s atmosphere they’re both perpetually present due to living processes. Dump water into the sand and it will slowly dissipate, spreading out and evaporating. All that water together in such a dry place is a disequilibrium that would naturally go towards randomness. And yet look at all those plants and animals living in such places! I see thousands of ants scurry across the sand – little tiny packets full of water! Trees and cacti, bushes and scrub have all evolved ways to thrive here, gathering the trifle of water that falls so seldom and turning themselves into little oceans protected from the agents of entropy - heat and the dry, sucking wind. One animal, the kangaroo rat of the US southwest, has even evolved the ability to make its own water from the dry food it eats. You may remember from high school biology that the products of animal respiration are water and carbon dioxide; well this rat eats dry food and can use that metabolic water to hydrate.

All of the solutions that these animals have developed over hundreds of millions of years are wonderfully elegant, all very well adapted to the local conditions, and all tried and true. They require no mass reconstruction of the landscape, diversion of massive amounts of water, or infusions of vast amounts of energy (except of course, for sunlight). On all these fronts the most recent inhabitants of the dry lands could use a little work.