Description

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Swearing and mumbling against heat and drought, I was unwittingly seduced by this wonderful land. A passionate fascination grew in my heart. Slowly, gradually, the desert won my affections.' —from the foreword by Exequiel Ezcurra
This evocative and informative excursion into the Sonoran Desert along the U.S.-Mexico border brings to life the beauty of a spare and seductive terrain, telling the stories of the people, plants, and politics that layer a landscape in need of understanding and protection. The contributors, all experts in their fields, bring to their respective essays both a passion for and a wide-ranging depth of knowledge of this jewel of the Southwest. The book also continues a stunning array of both color and black and white photographs.
The book is divided into six sections:
I. The Place: delves into the geography and geology of the region, giving shape to its rivers and ranges.
II. People of the Place: introduces those who make the desert their home, including both native peoples and visiting scientists.
III. The Desert: discusses birds, bugs, and botany, all the things that live and grow in the borderlands.
IV. The Gulf: examines the waters and the aquatic life of the region from the Colorado River to the Sea of Cortez.
V. Conservation: focuses on protecting and preserving the desert and its increasingly endangered species into the future.
VI. Place-names: includes a geographic dictionary.
Part natural history, part call to conservation, and part love song, Dry Borders speaks to the parts of our souls that long to delve beneath surface appearances to find the true, beautiful heart of a place.

About the Author

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Richard Stephen Felger studies natural history in arid lands, specializing in the Sonoran Desert. He is founding director of the Drylands Institute in Tucson.
Bill Broyles is a research associate at the Southwest Center at the University of Arizona. 

Praise For…

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 "Everyone will find something of interest here, from overviews of the history and geology to tributes to those hardy explorers who set the standards for the decades of fieldwork that followed. Highly Recommended."
—CHOICE

 "Blending natural and cultural history, biogeography, and conservation, Dry Borders presents a comprehensive background to the Sonoral Desert that is extraordinarily readable. Although scholarly, the conversational tone and nontechnical prose makes the personality and passion of the contributing authors apparent and creates an engaging work. This large, handsome volume imparts to readers a profound "sense of place" and will be an asset to anyone seeking to understand the history, complexity, and future challenges of this starkly beautiful region."
—Quarterly Review of Biology

"Provides an intriguing blend of natural and human history, scientific information, personal reminiscence, and pleas for conservation of the region, presented by some of the key figures in the recent scientific exploration of the lower Sonoran Desert. Clearly a labor of love that will remain for many years an essential introduction to this remarkable desert region."
—Journal of Anthropological Research
 

 "A series of elegant, sometimes haunting love letters to the Sonoran Desert. A vital, important book. If you're already a desert fiend, it's a must-have, and if you don’t know diddley about the desert, you need to pick it up. There really is no other book like this."
—Tucson Weekly

 "I can imagine many readers in a colder or more thickly peopled terrain curling up with it to dream, with this difference: what it's selling is not the idea of moving to the desert, but of caring about it."

—Orion