Journalist and award-winning author Kavitha Iyer recommends a book that reminds us to stand still long enough for the landscape to speak.

Among books on the natural environment that I like to re-read, there are a few you can actually live in. Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness (1968) is one of them. Written by Edward Abbey, the late American author, essayist and environmental activist who worked two seasons as a US park ranger in the Utah desert of the 1950s, the book dwells on how industrial tourism was changing the nature of the American wilderness. 

Early on, the book pauses to ask if the desert actually has adequate water, a resonant subject for me given my years of writing on drought and scarcity in Marathwada, Maharashtra. About proposals to dam rivers elsewhere to channel water to Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico, he writes: … growth for the sake of growth is a cancerous madness, that Phoenix and Albuquerque will not be better cities to live in when their populations are doubled again and again. They would never understand that an economic system which can only expand or expire must be false to all that is human. 

In prose that can only emerge from the kind of solitude in which one lives months in a government trailer with mice and a gopher snake for company, Abbey writes of mountain trails, sandstone arches, dry riverbeds, desert storms and prickly cactus pears. Yet, Desert Solitaire is more than a love letter to the desert. Part memoir, part natural history, part philosophical meditation on wilderness, the book’s central argument is that landscapes were turning into scenic commodities. 

I came across Edward Abbey in college, and I read The Monkey Wrench Gang first, his novel about a group of radical environmental activists. Six decades after he wrote it, Desert Solitaire could not be more relevant for anyone with an interest in rural India. Abbey writes of the desert as the only place to see the earth in its most raw form. As a rural India reporter, I take this as advice to strip away noise in order to perceive more clearly; to resist the urge to interpret too quickly and to instead walk, watch, listen, until the land begins to, over time, reveal its quiet warnings.

For a world in a hurry, Desert Solitaire is a reminder that insight comes from being present. Abbey’s desert, much like the forests and farmlands of rural India, rewards those willing to observe patiently. For a reporter, understanding begins with humility, and the willingness to stand still long enough for the landscape to speak.