Dry: Life Without Water

Harvard University Press, £22.95 0674022246

Nearly a billion people live in the drylands of the developing world. These often isolated mountain and desert communities spend much of their time trapping, channelling and conserving what little water there is. As a result, they are expert in one of today's urgent tasks — learning to cope with finite resources.

Dry: Life Without Water (Harvard University Press, £22.95) 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 (pictured). 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.

Credit: J. HARTLEY/PANOS

The riveting images, from Massai managing their wetlands to vicuña shearers at work in the high Andes, underline a message that is vital at a time when drought, desertification and impending water wars are high on the international agenda.

B.K.