Four specific activities have been identified as major contributors to the desertification processes: overcultivation, overgrazing, firewood gathering, and overirrigation.
His real breakthrough as a novelist came with 1980's desert, whose tale of a lost culture in the North African desert and a Europe seen through the eyes of immigrants won him a French Academy prize.
If one focuses on the wet months, one calls the Maya homeland a "seasonal tropical forest"; if one focuses on the dry months, one could instead describe it as a "seasonal desert".
Xiao Yu, the driver got from somewhere a few cans of Coke, so we collected all the water in all for the night, when we came to realize how one feels at "Shang Gan Ling or deep in the desert.
But there've been times in the past when monsoon rains soaked the Empty Quarter and turned it from a desert into grassland that was dotted with lakes and home to various animals.
The people who hunted the sparse desert animals responded to drought by managing the wild resources they hunted and gathered, especially wild oxen, which had to have regular water supplies to survive.
At dawn, three weeks before the winter solstice, the last tendrils of fog curled gray against the pinking sky over a sand dune on the eastern edge of the Namib Desert.
Skirting the edges of the harsh and inhospitable Taklimakan desert, the Silk Road actually had several different branches, each passing through different oases.