Hardin, Garrett

English

University of New Mexico

Volume 21 
Issue 1 Winter 1981 
Winter 1981 
Deserts on the March, Paul B. Sears 
Garrett Hardin 
Recommended Citation 
Garrett Hardin, Deserts on the March, Paul B. Sears, 21 Nat. Resources J. 189 (1981). 
Available at: https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/nrj/vol21/iss1/14 
This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the Law Journals at UNM Digital Repository. It has 
been accepted for inclusion in Natural Resources Journal by an authorized editor of UNM Digital Repository. For 
more information, please contact amywinter@unm.edu, lsloane@salud.unm.edu, sarahrk@unm.edu. 
BOOK REVIEWS
DESERTS ON THE MARCH
By PAUL B. SEARS
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. 1980. Pp. 264.
To a shocking extent, deserts are man-made; world-wide, their area
increases by one South Carolina per year. Professor Sears explained
the desertification process better than anyone else in the first edition
of this book in 1935. Conservation measures followed, and in the
1947 edition the author said that, in the United States at least, the
deserts were in retreat.
Alas! The succeeding thirty years have brought a reversal of sound
husbandry practices and new expansion of desert or near-desert. The
high price of grains in the seventies led the government to encourage
farmers to cut down the windbreak tree belts planted in the thirties.
Intensive crop farming brings short-term gains at the price of long-
term soil losses. Grasslands, which Sears identifies as the bonds of a
conservative agricultural investment program, are plowed up to make
way for cereal grains (the speculative stocks). Weather varies. Disaster
follows unwise speculation in cereals. The overstressed agriculture
ratchets down to ruin. To expand farming operations based on the
availability of fossil water is to base the future on sand (which is
more than a figure of speech).
Deserts on the March, a fine science popularization, is now a
classic. After forty-five years its essential points are as valid as ever;
the up-dating required for the new edition was in secondary matters
only. The new examples emphasize both the timeliness and the time-
lessness of the message.
GARRETT HARDIN
The Environmental Fund
Washington, D.C. 20036


Deserts on the March, Paul B. Sears

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Deserts on the March, Paul B. Sears

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