Desert Notebooks

A Road Map for the End of Time

By: Ben Ehrenreich

Narrated by: David Bendena

Length: 11 hrs and 42 mins

Publisher's summary

As inhabitants of the Anthropocene, what might some of our own histories tell us about how to confront apocalypse? And how might the geologies and ecologies of desert spaces inform how we see and act toward time - the pasts we have erased and paved over, this anxious present, the future we have no choice but to build? National Magazine Award winner Ben Ehrenreich examines how the unprecedented pace of the destruction of our environment and an increasingly unstable geopolitical landscape have led us to the brink of a calamity greater than any humankind has confronted before. But in the canyons and oases of the Mojave and in Las Vegas’s neon apocalypse, Ehrenreich finds beauty, and even hope, surging up in the most unlikely places, from the most barren rocks and the apparent emptiness of the sky. He draws on that stark grandeur to ask how we might reckon with the uncertainty that surrounds us and fight off the crises that have already begun.

Layering climate science, mythologies, nature writing, and personal experiences, Desert Notebooks offers a vital and necessary chronicle of our past and our present - perfect for fans of Robert Macfarlane and Elizabeth Rush - that’s unflinching, urgent, and yet timeless and profound.

©2020 Ben Ehrenreich (P)2020 Dreamscape Media, LLC

Extraordinary intellectual trip!

Take this journey with an intelligent friend who is weaving together today’s dire dangers with a freshly interrogated intellectual history of how the West arrived in this mess. Unsparing and unsettling yet refreshed with frequent excursions into the beauties of endangered natural and mythical worlds.

Not about the desert, Not about Joshua Tree

This book is simply a deception. It offers itself as a meditation on the desert, perhaps as a metaphor for the end of time, the decay of the human moment in history, but instead it is a political diatribe against all that ills our society today, from Global Warming to Donald Trump. The Irony is that I am perfectly in alignment with all those views, but this clumsy text just drones on and on with an endless hopeless screed against all that is wrong today in the world. This would be fine if the writing had any kind of penetrating perspective. Instead this is just a guy who reads the newspapers and has nothing insightful or revealing to add to the general media take on these serious issues that face us.

More importantly there is no serious engagement with the desert, its landscape, its ecology, its experiences or the transformational power that it has, and has had, on the humans who have inhabited it historically, for long and short periods of time. This is not a Notebook on the desert. This is a notebook about Ben's thinking in the desert, which only tangentially relates to the desert in any way. The owls are nice, but he misses the opportunity to engage or examine or question the meaning of the owls and instead drones on an on about which species the owls are, or weather that species even exists in the JT area. The specifics of the owls cannot be of interest in and of themselves, in a notebook on the desert... what about the owls as metaphor, the owls as symbol, the owls as a message from the desert.... a message entirely missed on the author.

Do we need more superficial takes on the desert? I dont think so. Edward Abbey, has a much better take on the desert, as do so many others. This is not a book that reveals truth about the desert, it only reveals the shallow political ideas that the author seems to so earnestly convey. There is, however, no meat here, just dried bones of a lot of old arguments that people like me already hold dear, and that those who disagree will dismiss as liberal clap. If you love the desert, like I do, this book is worse than a mirage, it is a stagnant pool of water that holds nothing for you to drink.