Barren, wild, and worthless: living in the Chihuahuan Desert

These seven elegant personal essays explore the Chihuahuan Desert of northern Mexico and the southwestern United States. With eloquence, passion, and insight, the author describes and reflects on the relationship between the land, history, and people of this little-known, underappreciated desert region. Ever mindful of the difficulty of loving the desert, Susan Tweit introduces us to its unique attractions, telling the stories and histories of diverse subjects like the spadefoot toad, Organ Mountain evening primrose, extinct southwestern grizzly bear, Chihuahua Archaic culture, water, illegal aliens and the international border, tuberculosis sanitariums, and making a home in the desert. Sometimes with affection, sometimes in anger, always with passion, she reminds us that human cultures are part of a delicate ecological and biotic community. She cautions that destroying the desert is also diminishing human society.