Abstract
Arid lands have a strange fascination for man for many different and coherent reasons. The stark contrast they offer to the ‘normal environment’ in which the vast majority of mankind lives; their arid climate with its implications for their population and the limitations and dangers it imposes; the vast empty spaces; the nomadic and sometimes fearsome peoples roaming the desert; the peculiar colours and shades of desert landscapes, and, in more recent times, their mineral resources, such as iron, manganese, uranium and, above all, petroleum1—- all these exert a powerful and compound challenge. This challenge has become more acute in our century for two reasons. Firstly, due to the revolutionary advances in modern technology, mankind now commands the appropriate technology for the development of arid lands. Secondly, the unprecedented rate of population increase since the late nineteenth century has sparked off a search for new lands to absorb this increase, and can contribute significantly to feeding the added population. Arid lands, with their comparatively very low population density seem to many to offer an attractive solution to the problems created by a critically crowded world. Both these motives need sober evaluation.
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References
In the ’traditional’ past, salt and local precious stones and minerals were the major exportable goods of deserts.
United Nations: 1982. Demographic Yearbook32, 1980. New York, Table 1, p. 133.
Note the decrease in time for a one-billion increase: 85 years for the second billion, 35 for the third, and 15 for the fourth; note as well, a slow-down of increase in recent years, presumably related to the widespread acceptance of family planning in China, the Western World, and the Eastern bloc.
7.9 per km2 for 1960 vs 22 for the entire globe, 86 for Europe. The densities for 1979 were 32 for the world and 98 for Europe. (United Nations: Statistical Yearbook 31,1979/80, Table 1, p. 2.
Cf. the classic studies of Isaiah Bowman, 1931. The Pioneer Fringe, New York, Amer. Geogr. Soc., Spec. Publ. 13; the companion volume of regional studies, Pioneer Settlement, ibid. 14, 1932, and Isaiah Bowman (ed.): 1937, Limits of Land Settlement, New York, Council of Foreign Relations.
Even if this is in most cases unjustified, witness the shanty towns at the peripheries of many a Third World city. The social motivation has been strikingly illustrated for the department of Cuzco in Peru by D. W. Gade and M. Escobar: 1982, ’Village Settlement and the Colonial Legacy in Southern Peru’, Geographical Review72, pp. 430–449, ref. p. 440/1.
In the Atacama Desert of North Chile ore was trucked from mines to ports such as Huasco over dirt roads as late as 1959. The rate of turn-over of these trucks was 10–11 months (!), a sheer waste of equipment.- Before improvement of the road from Beer-Sheva to Eilat, the southernmost port of Israel (a distance of 240 km, or 150 miles), buses plying this route had to have a complete check-up after every second round-trip.
E.g., the extraction of nitrogen from the air by the Haber-Bosch process, substituting for the nitrate quarried in the Chilean desert as the essential component of chemical fertilizer.
More often than not, limited by the availabilty of water, and possibly local food production.
Competitiveness being an outstanding factor influenced by distance, quality of transportation, and the deterioration of goods this might cause (especially to perishable goods) under the conditions of desert climate.
D. H. K. Amiran : 1965, ’Arid Zone Development: A Reappraisal under Modern Technological Conditions, Economic Geography, 41, pp. 189–210, ref. p. 195/9.
In 1878–1883, Chile fought a long and costly war with Peru over possession of the ’nitrate desert’. To this day, many of the projects initiated, or only discussed, for development of this area on both sides of the border are reverberations of this conflict, and aimed at justifying the ’guerra del Pacifico’, as the Atacama desert forfeited its major economic value just before World War I. The ’free port’ status of the Chilean border town of Arica, revoked after some years, or the attempt to lure industry into the industrial park at Tacna, the Peruvian border town, by offering incentives, were motivated more by psychological and political motivation than by economic reasoning. The same goes for the integrated but strangely misconceived project for ’Puerto Grau’, a port development in southernmost Peru, fortunately never realized.
Many well-to-do Lima families maintain second homes on the sunny, non-polluted slopes above the inversion layer, beyond the barriadas, the peripheral belt of shanty towns of Lima.
Prior to the worldwide introduction of chemical fertilizers, guano was another profitable product of the area. This rich organic fertilizer was deposited in thick crusts on the offshore islets and coastal slopes by the millions of birds feeding on the fish.
Cf. pp. 4 and 5 above.
For generations, the inhabitants of the Nordeste of Brazil have been the most migratory element of the nation. They are found in significant numbers in São Paulo, the Amazon Basin, and elsewhere, where there seems to be the prospect of work and subsistence. The media reported in June, 1983, that the area had been stricken again by the failure of rains for the fourth year in succession.
Certain technical measures can increase the ’availability’ of water. These include more conservant methods of irrigation, especially trickle or drop irrigation, computerized programming of irrigation to prevent over-application of water by restricting it to times of minimal evaporation, etc. In exceptional cases, rainwater can be increased by cloudseeding, using advanced methodology. Cf. D. H. K. Amiran: 1978, ’Geographical Aspects of National Planning in Israel: The Management of Limited Resources, Transactions, Institute of British Geographers, N.S., 3, ref. p. 120/1; and A. Gagin and J. Neumann: 1974, ’Rain Stimulation and Cloud Physics in Israel’, in W. N. Hess (ed.), Weather and Climate Modification, New York, Wiley-Interscience, pp. 454–494.
D. H. K. Amiran : 1976, ’Environmental Constraints and Opportunities for Development: The Changing Value of Land for Man, ’ in D. H. K. Amiran and Y. Ben-Arieh (eds.), Geography in Israel, Jerusalem, pp. 18–21; and Amiran, op. cit., n. 17 above, pp. 115–128.
D. H. K. Amiran and A. W. Wilson: 1973, Coastal Deserts: Their Natural and Human Environments, Tucson, Univ. of Arizona Press, ref. p. XII.
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Amiran, D.H.K. (1985). Arid Zone Development: An Appraisal Towards the End of the Twentieth Century. In: Gradus, Y. (eds) Desert Development. The GeoJournal Library, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-5396-3_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-5396-3_1
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