"Water in the Desert is the enthralling story of a world-class ethnobotanist and agrarian visionary." --Denis Hayes, coordinator of the inaugural Earth Day celebration "Set against the upheavals of the late 1960s, this fascinating account follows a young man whose political awakening, illness, and retreat into wild places become acts of survival. Gary Paul Nabhan beautifully recounts a story of moral courage as well as the transformative power of the natural world. Readers will be captivated by Water in the Desert , its meaning, resistance, and wonder resonating long after the last page." --Diana Abu-Jaber, author of Fencing with the King and Crescent " Water in the Desert is a naturalist's trance, an inspiring and compelling parable about healing and repair in a time of destruction. With his deep empathy for people, commitment to a life's work, and scientific rigor, Gary Paul Nabhan has the eye of a naturalist and the voice of a prophet. Brother, father, and defender, Nabhan not only has taught us what the desert smells like, but models for us a deep respect for the cultures that arose from that land and for the wisdom of their relationships with other species. Water in the Desert reminds us that the world sang us all into being and offers us vivid dreams of sentient beings and ancestors, ecotones and song maps, stories of caretaking and Ojos de Aguas, racism and Martin Luther King's assassination and, finally, seeing the world whole.
Nabhan is a translator between worlds, an edge walker who prefers solitude but knows animals as kin, and helps us to see and to smell and to love. Water in the Desert shows that life was always waiting for Nabhan, and for all of us." --Peter Forbes, author of A Man Apart "Any writing by Gary Paul Nabhan is soul-nourishing, wildly informative, crucially redemptive, and should not be missed!" --Naomi Shihab Nye, author of Everything Comes Next "A magnificent and tender-hearted account of what it is to come alive in the world--alive to oneself, to the presence of all other living beings, and to the spiritual vitality that sustains it all. Beautifully written, wonderfully observed, quirky and pulsing with life. Just the kind of strong medicine we need to heal what ails us in the present moment." --Douglas E. Christie, author of The Blue Sapphire of the Mind " Water in the Desert is testimony to Gary Paul Nabhan's lifelong dedication to the 'heterologue'--the sumptuous, multispecies, sensory conversation of creature-full landscapes. Nabhan's storied journey recounts a tangle of relations as fascinating as the ecotones he has had a hand in researching, including the creativity and persistence required to restore the reciprocal links between nature and culture, place and people, body and spirit, and science and poetry.
" --Gavin Van Horn, author of The Way of Coyote "This book is an extraordinary testimony to the allure of the living Earth community in one person's life. Nabhan is a brilliant ecologist and skilled nature writer responding to the miracle of biodiversity. He has been instrumental with others in preserving monarch butterfly migration as well as honoring Native sacred sites destroyed for a border wall. Gary is a fearless champion of life in its myriad forms who inspires us to do the same. May his writing and activism continue to light the way forward for the community of life." --Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, co-directors of the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology.