• Finalist, 2007 Independent Publisher Book Awards, Environment/Ecology/Nature Category

When it comes to water conservation, ancient wisdom often turns out to be far superior to modern insight...This is an insightful, not to say stunningly beautiful, book...Some of the longest-lasting and most successful initiatives described in Dry are those that promote, revive or build on indigenous knowledge and research. So let us not be so smug about the presumed intrinsic superiority of our modernity. The goat-rearers of Brazil, the camel herders of Sudan and the Bedouin of Jordan have a great deal to teach us, if only we could learn to listen.
   --Ziauddin Sardar, New Statesman

Dry: Life Without Water tells 16 stories of dryland life, from fog catching above Chile's Atacama Desert to the forest nurseries helping to regenerate Burkina Faso's near-barren terrain. A distillation of work by the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World and the Third World Network of Scientific Organizations, these snapshots of sustainability are models of how science and traditional knowledge can profit from each other.
   --Nature

Forty percent of the world's land surface and more than half the land surface of the developing world is arid. Sixteen stories from Africa, Asia, Central and South America, and the Middle East show how more than a billion people who live in these extreme hot, cold, or high places cope with the lack of water and other challenges to survival...Thoughtfully written with an impressive artistic layout and many poignant photographs, this is a book that deserves an international audience.
   --Phaedra Greenwood, Santa Fe New Mexican

These stories, which were collected over three years by photographers, writers, and scientists from four continents, contain a wealth of information and images that convey life as it is carried on in the Earth's driest regions.
   --Natural Hazards Observer

Ehsan Masood is a London-based science journalist and consultant to the Science and Development Network.

Daniel Schaffer is the Public Information Officer for the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World (TWAS).