Until a few weeks ago, I had never spent a week in a desert before. There is much to learn from the desert. There is perhaps no place on earth as inhospitable as a desert. If water is the basic necessity for life, then a place without water is more threatening than anywhere else on earth. One third of earth’s land surface is desert. To survive as a species, human beings will have to learn how to live in the desert.

The desert I am speaking of is the Mojave in southern Nevada that would also include the Joshua Tree National Monument and Death Valley in California as well as parts of Arizona. We might be the first people to land at the Las Vegas airport and never set foot in the city, drive the strip, or enter a casino! Instead, our explorations included the Lake Mead Recreation Area, Valley of Fire State Park, Red Rock Canyon and Sloan Canyon Conservation Areas, the towns of Henderson and Boulder City, and the Hoover Dam.

The Colorado River borders the eastern part of this desert. It carved out the Grand Canyon millions of years ago and has supported ancient desert dwelling peoples for thousands of years. The Hoover Dam on the Colorado River was an engineering marvel ahead of its time that sought to harness the power of the river—and indeed it was a great success toward that end. It was built by more than 5,000 laborers who worked 24/7/365 for two years during The Great Depression in the 1930s and now provides power and water for over 20 million people as far away as Los Angeles. No wonder it is one of the highest security zones in the USA apart from the White House! Las Vegas, Henderson, and Boulder City have literally sprung up in the middle of the desert because of the dam. All of the water used by these cities is treated and released back into Lake Mead (created by Hoover Dam) to continue the water cycle all over again. Human ingenuity and creativity have enabled millions of people to survive living in a desert. The sad part of the story is that the Colorado River no longer reaches the sea because all the water is used up before it gets there. This caused me a reflective pause.

I live in a temperate rainforest where we take an abundance of water for granted and sometimes complain about too much of it. My week in the desert made an indelible impression on me because it taught me the fragility of life. A desert gets less than four inches of rain in a year. Human beings can not survive without water and so we have developed ways to store water, transport water, and to recycle and reuse water. But we must remember that we live in relationship with water and the rest of creation: plants, animals, rocks, and trees. It is a relationship with a delicate balance.

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” We saw versions of this quote on a plaque in at least two nature centres in the area. It is from John Muir (1838-1914), a notable ecological philosopher and environmental advocate who spent time in the Mojave Desert, and whose writings became a personal guide into nature for generations after him. Today, we have an annual “Earth Day” to celebrate and reflect on the relationship between humans and the earth. In John Muir’s day he was a voice crying in the wilderness.