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[ID: A digital halfbody art piece of Aphrodite from the Hades game. She is a fat brown woman with curly pink hair that goes past her waist. There are stretch marks on her belly and butt. She has green and gold bracelets, rings, and hair ornaments. Otherwise, she is not wearing other clothing. On the top left is the sprite of Aphrodite from the game. End ID.]

[id: a redraw of the aphrodite sprite from the second hades game. aphrodite is fat and has curlier pink hair. she holds a spear and a shield. the second image is the transparent version of the piece. end id.]

Sands from the ancient deserts of Chad are blown across the Atlantic to fertilize the nutrient poor soils of Brazil.

Source

Dust from the Gobi, in turn, provides redwoods with the fuel they need to become the tallest trees on Earth.

But --

Why must deserts serve forests to be worthwhile?

Why must deserts be carbon sinks at all to be valued?

Deserts are beautiful, rich and unique ecosystems, with communities and histories all their own

The fact that they appear sparse, that -- in technical terms -- they have a lower density of biomass than other habitats, does not mean that they are empty of life. The plants and animals of the world's deserts are hardy, clever, and resilient; like tundra and mountains, their communities grow slowly, with many plants growing only fractions of an inch per year, for thousands of years -- damage is catastrophic. Others, and many animals, flourish in the rare moments when water is plenty, erupting into a frenzy of life and activity before retreating to dormancy

Without the camel, or the sidewinder snake, or the hairy scorpion; the African lungfish, and the constellated diversity of Tanganyika cichlids; without the saguaro or the Joshua tree or strange, ancient Welsitschia; the Syntrichia moss that draws water directly from the air; the dense, bulbous Ilareta shrub --

Without the painted mountains of Peru; without the stone forests of Tsingy de Bemahara; without the singing sands of the Namib, and Gobi, and Taklamakan; the high salt flats of the Atacama where flamingoes raise their young --

Our world would be so much poorer.

Over the millennia of human existence countless peoples have made their homes with deserts. On every continent save Antarctica, human cultures and histories have molded & been molded by desert homes; have lived with them, and loved them, and managed them, and been part of them

The camel, llama, and alpaca; the lion, crocodile, and and sacred vulture; even our beloved housecats -- we owe them all to deserts

The pigeon! Our everyday, ubiquitous Columba livia! Heroes of world wars, foundational to the theory of evolution, prized friends and companions (and, yes, livestock) to humanity for five thousand years! Whose ability to find home across hundreds of miles originated (we believe) to bring them back to their cliffside roosts after foraging faraway sources of food and water across the Mediterranean deserts of their origin!

The Nazca lines survive only because their desert environment is dry enough to preserve them; the Pueblo peoples carved homes into cliff faces; Uluru (map by Tony Tjamiwa) is sacred to the Pitjantjatjara people

And the thoughtless colonial erasure -- "greening" -- of these deserts is the genocide of their peoples, packaged as environmentalism, appealing to Euro-centric aesthetics and ideals of "nature." The label of "wasteland" is historically inextricable from genocide -- literally, labelling a land and the people who live there "waste" to discard and obliterate

We see this today in Palestine, where olive groves are razed for pine forests planted over the ruins of Palestinian towns whose people were slaughtered and exiled in the founding of the state of Israel, to hide that they were ever there, that any atrocity was committed -- an ongoing genocide that has continued for some 70 years, a proud slogan upheld by the Israeli occupation! "Making the Desert Bloom" ... in a manner economically productive for European industrial agriculture, fertile on the bodies of Palestine's people, on the eradication of the "empty" "wasteland" the first Zionist settlers "found"

Whether deserts serve as carbon sinks; how they compare as carbon sinks to other habitats; whether they feed forests -- all of these questions are important, true, but none of them matter as to whether deserts are worthwhile. Whether deserts get to exist.

Whenever I’m “off trail” in the desert, whether doing volunteer work, or going off trail on a hike to snag that mylar balloon remnant dangling in the botany, or walking over that-a-way to that boulder to get a better photograph, I look down for two reasons. One, avoiding stepping on cryptogamic soil, and, two, to avoid rattlesnakes. I think I’m more fearful of getting yelled at by a desert conservationist about the soil than I am about rattlesnakes.

Excerpt from this story from Sierra Club:

I hadn’t walked very far along the trail in Arches National Park before I started to see the signs. Planted alongside the asphalt of the trail were little posts that read “Your steps matter. Protect park soils.”

Many visitors hadn’t gotten the message. Boot and sneaker prints extended past the boundary, out into the pale red soil. Perhaps the people who had left them didn’t understand that the pleas weren’t just the national park equivalent of “Keep off grass.” When hikers tread off the path, they are trampling on empires—incredible, communal organisms that are vital to the health of the desert.

Microbiotic soils (also known as biocrust or cryptogamic soil, depending on who you’re talking to) are found in arid places around the world. The term might seem a bit strange, given that all soil contains a panoply of microscopic organisms  But what distinguishes microbiotic communities is that they are a collaboration of different entities—fungi, lichen, cyanobacteria, algae, and other tiny organisms that come together in just the top few millimeters of soil.

The half-circles are called zaï! They're a traditional farming practice in the Sahel desert, and their introduction + reintroduction can be largely credited to Yacouba Sawadogo, the man linked above! He reintroduced and innovated on the zaï on his own farm in the 1980s, and did extensive outreach (along with scientist Mathieu Ouédraogo) to encourage other farmers to adopt them as well.

He also promoted the use of cordons pierreux, which are basically just lines of rocks to reduce erosion, preserve sediments, and increase water absorption.