This desert flower / No sweet perfume ever tortured me more than this

–Sting

“The desert is in full bloom! You just have to go see it!” I’ve been hearing too much of this for a few weeks now, from my chronically infected wanderlust stricken neighbors, who are simply unable to spend even a single weekend here in our quaint, green suburban Ra’anana. “Sure”, I thought, “You mean you think that I too should drive for hours and hours to the middle of a barren no-place just to see a couple of small bushes with three tiny wilted greenish white petals stuck to them. Yeah, right.”

But my wife, naive and easily convinced as she is, packed up our day pack, delicately but forcibly packed me into the driver’s seat and made me drive about an hour and a half southwards, on one of Israel’s most boring stretches of asphalt wastelands, to see for ourselves what all the fuss is about. When we neared the borderhills of the Northern Negev desert, I realized we were in for a vast surprise. Instead of the dry, dusty gray middle-eastern desert that I had expected, what came into view was more like Province, France, in the height of spring! Wherever you looked, wild poppies had painted hills brilliant red and abundant uncultivated yellow Daisies had decorated the rolling wadi-sides with expansive blotches of bright yellow. I’ve seen a few deserts in my life, but this was more like a sub-tropical paradise than a desert!

The Negev desert, in southern Israel, is an arid region at the northeastern edge of the large Saharo-Arabian desert belt, which extends from the African Atlantic seaboard on the west, across the Arabian Desert eastwards, all the way to the Sind in India. The fairly small Negev is in fact one of the least dry deserts in the world, as it gets plenty of moist air, thanks to its proximity to the Mediterranean Sea. This allows for a wealth of human activity in the desert. In modern days, eco-tourism is a biggie, but so is desert agriculture. Just beyond the blossoming reserve that we were exploring were vast expanses of cultivated plots ripe with potatoes, open fields of winter wheat, just beginning to turn from green to golden and greenhouses sheltering juicy organic winter tomatoes nearly bursting on their vines, being picked for sale in Europe and other for international markets – all growing on reclaimed desert lands.

Not all world deserts have it this well off. In fact, desertification is one of the biggest environmental problems the world has, and it’s getting worse all the time. The UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) defines desertification as: "land degradation in arid, semiarid and subhumid tropics caused by a combination of climatic factors and human activities." Drylands are fragile ecosystems, and desert environments depend on a delicate balance of soil, wind and humidity. Human over-exploitation can and does lead to encroachment and expansion of these deserts. Desertification is not only a land issue: Soil erosion from damaged lands causes siltation, which destroys river and sea habitats. For example, coral reefs of Caribbean Islands and elsewhere have been identified as being ruined by shifting sand.

Don’t think that if you live far away from the nearest desert that desertification does not influence you directly. Global politics and economics play a role too: farm subsidies in the developed world push crop prices down in developing agricultural dryland areas which in turn forces poor farmers and countries to spend less and less on managing and maintaining the delicate balance of land usage. Also, as demand for (cheap) goods rise in the industrialized world, developing nations strive to increase outputs by bringing marginal land areas into production, again increasing desertification. The problem is so pronounced, that UNEP estimates around 10-20% of the world’s dryland – about 8-10Mllion sq kilometers, an area the size of Canada, China or Brazil – already degraded. In China alone the arable land and the homelands of nearly 400 million people are threatened by desertification. UNEP selected the problem of desertification for last year’s “World Environment Day” theme. You can learn more about the scope of desertification and related facts here.

In conjunction with international experts and the UNCCD, Israel’s Blaustein Institute for Desert Studies recently held the “Deserts and Desertification - Challenges and Opportunities” conference at Sde Boker, located in the Negev desert. The Institute routinely hosts students from around the world who come to get graduate degrees in Desert Studies, researching desert related topics from climate-sensitive agriculture to desertification remediation and drylands management.

One lesson learned from recent Israeli history is that desertification is not irreversible destiny. When soil conservation, irrigation and sustainable desert agriculture and forestry become national priority, trends can be changed. The Negev desert, accounts for over half of this tiny country’s area. The Negev, especially the northern part, had been a highly productive region during various periods of ancient history. Over time, it had turned into a wasteland, due to overgrazing, deforestation and poor soil stewardship. Indeed, when the modern State of Israel was founded, in 1948, the Negev desert extended as far north as Gedera, today a southern suburb of Tel Aviv. The equilibrium that allowed for a flourishing desert life in the past had been lost for many centuries. In recent years, Israelis have relearned how to live in harmony with their arid environment. National projects were set into motion to revive the desert heritage. During the 1950s, water infrastructure projects were built to deliver water from the rainy north to the desiccated south. Newly established desert settlements invented and then implemented drip irrigation technologies (now used around the world), allowing local agricultural economies to grow while conserving precious water resources. Trees were planted trees on dry and salty lands, where common forestry knowledge thought it to be impossible. Policy makers introduced organized grazing, and enforcers maintained seasonal allocations to ensure that the land's capacity was not exceeded.

So, next time your wife offers to take a trip to see your local desert in full bloom, accept her offer gratefully. With a third of the world’s land being degraded drylands, one can easily appreciate a shade-blessed desert Acacia tree, a seasonally flooded riverbed and a flowering green desert hill.