The Dry Drought Quotes

the way i see it, hard times aren't only about money, or drought, or dust. hard times are about losing spirit, and hope, and what happens when dreams dry up.

The way I see it, hard times aren't only about money, or drought, or dust. Hard times are about losing spirit, and hope, and what happens when dreams dry up.

The desert and the ocean are realms of desolation on the surface. The desert is a place of bones, where the innards are turned out, to desiccate into dust. The ocean is a place of skin, rich outer membranes hiding thick juicy insides, laden with the soup of being. Inside out and outside in. These are worlds of things that implode or explode, and the only catalyst that determines the direction of eco-movement is the balance of water. Both worlds are deceptive, dangerous. Both, seething with hidden life. The only veil that stands between perception of what is underneath the desolate surface is your courage. Dare to breach the surface and sink.

Some days words flow through me like the Nile, and other days I’m as dry as the Sahara. I’m afraid you’ve caught me in the middle of a drought, but I’m confident rain shall fall again.

You told me once of t he plants that lie dormant through the drought; that wait, half dead, deep in the earth. The plants that wait for the rain. You said they'd wait for years, if they had to; that they'd almost kill themselves before they grew again. But as soon as those first drops of water fall, those plants begin to stretch and spread their roots. They travel up through the soil and sand to reach the surface. There's a chance for them again. One day they'll let you out of that dry, empty cell. You'll return to the Separates, without me, and you'll feel the ram once more. And you'll grow straight, this time, towards this sunlight. I know you will." - Gemma

It's so dry the trees are bribing the dogs.

The Crone, the Reaper... She is the Dark Moon, what you don't see coming at you, what you don't get away with, the wind that whips the spark across the fire line. Chance, you could say, or, what's scarier still: the intersection of chance with choices and actions made before. The brush that is tinder dry from decades of drought, the warming of the earth's climate that sends the storms away north, the hole in the ozone layer. Not punishment, not even justice, but consequence.

No risk is more terrifying than that taken by the first root. A lucky root will eventually find water, but its first job is to anchor -- to anchor an embryo and forever end its mobile phase, however passive that mobility was. Once the first root is extended, the plant will never again enjoy any hope (however feeble) of relocating to a place less cold, less dry, less dangerous. Indeed, it will face frost, drought, and greedy jaws without any possibility of flight. The tiny rootlet has only once chance to guess what the future years, decades -- even centuries -- will bring to the patch of soil where it sits. It assesses the light and humidity of the moment, refers to its programming, and quite literally takes the plunge.

I learned perhaps more than any university could ever teach me. I learned that the world revolves around money. There are values and virtues and morals; there are relationships and trust and love---and all of that is important. Money, however, is more important and it is dripping all the time, like precious water. Some drink deep; others thirst. Without money, you shrivel and die. The absence of money is drought in which nothing can grow. Nobody knows the value of water until they've lived in a dry, dry place---like Behala. So many people, waiting for the rain.

The brush that is tinder dry from decades of drought, the warming of the earth's climate that sends the storms away north, the hole in the ozone layer. Not punishment, not even justice, but consequence.

It was July. Crazy hot and dry. It hadn't rained in, like, sixty days. Drought hot. Scorpion hot. Vultures flying circles in the sky hot.

Terrible drought, crops dead, sheep dying. Spring dried up. No water. The Hopi, and the Christian, maybe the Moslem, they pray for rain. The Navajo has the proper ceremony done to restore himself to harmony with the drought. You see what I mean. The system is designed to recognize what's beyond human power to change, and then to change the human's attitude to be content with the inevitable." - Tony Hillerman, Sacred Clowns, 1993

There's no radar image for a water crisis. No storm surges, no debris fields - the Tap-Out is as silent as cancer. There's nothing to see, and so the news is treating it like a sidebar.

There is love to overcome hate; generosity can diminish greed; truthfulness can reveal the lies in the same way the wind dries the flood and rains end the drought.

Thanks to the centrifugal pump, places like Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas had thrown on the garments of fertility for a century, pretending to greenery and growth as they mined glacial water from ten-thousand-year-old aquifers. They'd played dress-up-in-green and pretended it could last forever. They'd pumped up the Ice Age and spread it across the land, and for a while they'd turned their dry lands lush. Cotton, wheat, corn, soybeans -- vast green acreages, all because someone could get a pump going. Those places had dreamed of being different from what they were. They'd had aspirations. And then the water ran out, and they fell back, realizing too late that their prosperity was borrowed, and there would be no more coming.

The way I see it, hard times aren't only about money, or drought, or dust. Hard times are about losing spirit, and hope, and what happens when dreams dry up. And I'm learning, watching Daddy, that you can stay in one place and still grow.

Plants began the process of land colonization about 450 million years ago, accompanied of necessity by tiny mites and other organisms which they needed to break down and recycle dead organic matter on their behalf. Larger animals took a little longer to emerge, but by about 400 million years ago they were venturing out of the water, too. Popular illustrations have encouraged us to envision the first venturesome land dwellers as a kind of ambitious fish—something like the modern mudskipper, which can hop from puddle to puddle during droughts—or even as a fully formed amphibian. In fact, the first visible mobile residents on dry land were probably much more like modern woodlice, sometimes also known as pillbugs or sow bugs. These are the little bugs (crustaceans, in fact) that are commonly thrown into confusion when you upturn a rock or log.

It's really just the memory of a river. All Southern California waterways have become like phantom limbs. We might feel that they're still there, but it's just an illusion cast in cement.

I decided then to tell Artichoke to be ugly. To make herself as ugly as possible and not worry too much about beauty or what anyone thought of her. To be unpainted, to live in the breeze and stand under waterfalls and not be worried over the height of mountains, of quiet trails deep in the woods. To not be scared of roads slick with rain, of valleys dry in drought. I'd tell her 'no fear' and she'd know it was the deepest truth and she would be everything I was not. She would be wild and free. And I wouldn't worry because I knew the secret. That through all of her ugliness, all her hiking and running and jumping and falling and getting back up and saying no and saying what she wanted, her scraped hands, her freckled skin, her smart brain, she would of course be beautiful.

The Fairy Godmother sat beside him. “You as well,” she said. “You weren’t at home, so I figured I would find you here. Are you having trouble writing this evening?” “Unfortunately so,” Hans said. “Some days words flow through me like the Nile, and other days I’m as dry as the Sahara. I’m afraid you’ve caught me in the middle of a drought, but I’m confident rain shall fall again.” “I have no doubt,” the Fairy Godmother

It's hard to think of the divide where I grew up as a watershed. The creeks are dry most of the year, rainfall is undependable at best, and folks in one river system are always trying to steal water from another.

I need to stop thinking about peeing. I should focus on dry things.  Like California’s drought, month old Christmas trees, British wit. And my vagina while listening to the world’s most boring date mansplain to me about his fantasy football club.

You know? Here’s my new perspective: my mouth is dry, my heart is still thundering against my ribs, the difference between a smile and a scowl on her face is the difference between rainfall and drought and— Oh shit no no no no no… I am so into Celine.

There’s a category of prayer in which god is begged to intervene in human history or just to right some real or imagined injustice or calamity—for example, when a bishop from the American West prays for god to intervene and end a devastating dry spell. Why is the prayer needed? Didn’t god know of the drought? Was he unaware that it threatened the bishop’s parishioners? What is implied here about the limitations of a supposedly omnipotent and omniscient deity? The bishop asked his followers to pray as well. Is god more likely to intervene when many pray for mercy than when only a few do?

It was June in Maharashtra, and the monsoon would not come. The whole district lay panting in the heat, the burning sky clapped tight overhead like the lid of a tandoor oven. Lean goats stumbled down the narrow alleyways, udders hanging slack and dry beneath them; beggars cried for water in every village. Dust-devils swept over baked clay and through the dry weeds, whistling and shrieking. Hot sand blew into the eyes of torpid bullocks as they leaned into the yoke, whips snapping over their bony backs. A single stream crept along the valley floor, shrunken and muddy, and women stood ankle deep in its shallows, beating their laundry against rocks that rippled and danced in the sun.

Edge of Things" I wait at the twilit edge of things, A dry spell spilling over into drought, The slippages of shadow silting in, The interchange of dusk to duskier, The half-dark turning half-again as dark. There: night enough to call it a good night. I wait for the resurrection, but wake to morning: Mist lifting off the river. Ladders in the orchard trees although the picking's done.

The chief mate of the Pequod was Starbuck, a native of Nantucket, and a Quaker by descent. He was a long, earnest man, and though born on an icy coast, seemed well adapted to endure hot latitudes, his flesh being hard as twice-baked biscuit. Transported to the Indies, his live blood would not spoil like bottled ale. He must have been born in some time of general drought and famine, or upon one of those fast days for which his state is famous. Only some thirty arid summers had he seen; those summers had dried up all his physical superfluousness. But this, his thinness, so to speak, seemed no more the token of wasting anxieties and cares, than it seemed the indication of any bodily blight. It was merely the condensation of the man. He was by no means ill-looking; quite the contrary.

THE WELL Be thankful now for having arrived, for the sense of having drunk from a well, for remembering the long drought that preceded your arrival and the years walking in a desert landscape of surfaces looking for a spring hidden from you so long that even wanting to find it now had gone from your mind until you only remembered the hard pilgrimage that brought you here, the thirst that caught in your throat; the taste of a world just-missed and the dry throat that came from a love you remembered but had never fully wanted for yourself, until finally after years making the long trek to get here it was as if your whole achievement had become nothing but thirst itself. But the miracle had come simply from allowing yourself to know that you had found it, that this time someone walking out into the clear air from far inside you had decided not to walk past it any more; the miracle had come at the roadside in the kneeling to drink and the prayer you said, and the tears you shed and the memory you held and the realization that in this silence you no longer had to keep your eyes and ears averted from the place that could save you, that you had been given the strength to let go of the thirsty dust laden pilgrim-self that brought you here, walking with her bent back, her bowed head and her careful explanations. No, the miracle had already happened when you stood up, shook off the dust and walked along the road from the well, out of the desert toward the mountain, as if already home again, as if you deserved what you loved all along, as if just remembering the taste of that clear cool spring could lift up your face and set you free.

But Adam, looking out over his dry dust-obscured land, felt the panic the Eastern man always does at first in California. In a Connecticut summer two weeks without rain is a dry spell and four a drought. If the countryside is not green it is dying. But in California it does not ordinarily rain at all between the end of May and the first of November. The Eastern man, though he has been told, feels the earth is sick in the rainless months.

A climate's changes are tough to quantify. Butterflies can help. Entomologists prefer "junk species--" the kind of butterflies too common for most collections-- to keep up with what's going on in the insect's world. They're easy to find and observe. When do something unusual, something's changed in the area. Art Shapiro's team at UC Davis monitors ten local study sites, some since the 1970s. The ubiquitous species are the study's go-tos, helping distinguish between lasting changes (climate warming, habitat loss) and ones that will right themselves (one cold winter, droughts like last year's). Consistency is key; they collect details year after year, no empty data sets between. A few species have disappeared from parts of the study area altogether, probably a lasting change. On the other hand, seemingly big news in 2012 might be just a year's aberration. Two butterflies came back to the city of Davis last year, the umber skipper after 30 years, the woodland skipper after 20-- both likely a result of a dry winter with near-perfect breeding conditions of sunny afternoons and cool nights.

A Sonoran Desert village may receive five inches of rain one year and fifteen the next. A single storm may dump an inch and a half in the matter of an hour on one field and entirely skip another a few hours away. Dry spells lasting for months may be broken by a single torrential cloudburst, then resume again for several more months. Unseasonable storms, and droughts during the customary rainy seasons, are frequent enough to reduce patterns to chaos. The Papago have become so finely tuned to this unpredictability that it shapes the way they speak of rain. It has also ingrained itself deeply in the structure of their language. Linguist William Pilcher has observed that the Papago discuss events in terms of their probability of occurrence, avoiding any assumption that an event will happen for sure... Since few Papago are willing to confirm that something will happen until it does, an element of surprise becomes part of almost everything. Nothing is ever really cut and dried. When rains do come, they're a gift, a windfall, a lucky break.

Jack Sanford looks back fondly on childhood visits to the old family farmhouse in New Hampshire. In particular, he’s never forgotten the old well that stood outside the front door. The water from the well was surprisingly pure and cold, and no matter how hot the summer or how severe the drought, the well was always dependable, a source of refreshment and joy. The faithful old well was a big part of his memories of summer vacations at the family farmhouse. Time passed and eventually the farmhouse was modernized. Wiring brought electric lights, and indoor plumbing brought hot and cold running water. The old well was no longer needed, so it was sealed shut. Years later while vacationing at the farmhouse, Sanford hankered for the cold, pure water of his youth. So he unsealed the well and lowered the bucket for a nostalgic taste of the delightful refreshment he once knew. But he was shocked to discover that the well that had once survived the worst droughts was bone dry. Perplexed, he began to ask questions of the locals who knew about these kinds of things. He learned that wells of that sort were fed by hundreds of tiny underground rivulets, which seep a steady flow of water. As long as water is drawn out of the well, new water will flow in through the rivulets, keeping them open for more to flow. But when the water stops flowing, the rivulets clog with mud and close up. The well dried up not because it was used too much but because it wasn’t used enough. Our souls are like that well. If we do not draw regularly and frequently on the living water that Jesus promised would well up in us like a spring,66 our hearts will close and dry up. The consequence of not drinking deeply of God is to eventually lose the ability to drink at all. Prayerlessness is its own worst punishment, both its disease and cause. David’s description of his prayer life is a picture of a man who knew the importance of frequent, regular prayer—disciplined prayer, each morning. Each morning I bring my requests to you and wait expectantly. He knew how important it was to keep the water flowing—that from the human side of prayer, the most important thing to do is just to keep showing up. Steady, disciplined routine may be the most underrated necessity of the prayerful life.

The late American golfing coach and writer, Harvey Penick, held that any who played golf was his friend – in the politer sense of Arcades ambo, I gather. … I myself hold with Honest Izaak that there is – and that I am a member of – a communion of, if not saints, at least anglers and very honest men, some now with God and others of us yet upon the quiet waters. … The man is a mere brute, and no true angler, whose sport is measured only in fish caught and boasted of. For what purpose do we impose on ourselves limits and conventions if not to make sport of a mere mechanical harvest of protein? The true angler can welcome even a low river and a dry year, and learn of it, and be the better for it, in mind and in spirit. So, No: the hatch is not all that it might be, for if it is warm enough and early with it, it is also in a time of drought; and, No: I don’t get to the river as often as I should wish. But these things do not make this a poor year: they are an unlooked-for opportunity to delve yet deeper into the secrets of the river, and grow wise. … Rejoice, then, in all seasons, ye fishers. The world the river is; both you and I, And all mankind, are either fish or fry. We must view it with judicious looks, and get wisdom whilst we may. And to all honest anglers, then, I wish, as our master Izaak wished us long ago, ‘a rainy evening to read this following Discourse; and that if he be an honest Angler, the east wind may never blow when he goes a-fishing.

Get used to it. The weather may feel like science fiction, but the science underlying it is very real and mundane. It takes only a small increase in global average temperatures to have a big effect on weather, because what drives the winds and their circulation patterns on the surface of the earth are differences in temperature. So when you start to change the average surface temperature of the earth, you change the wind patterns—and then before you know it, you change the monsoons. When the earth gets warmer, you also change rates of evaporation—which is a key reason we will get more intense rainstorms in some places and hotter dry spells and longer droughts in others. How can we have both wetter and drier extremes at the same time? As we get rising global average temperatures and the earth gets warmer, it will trigger more evaporation from the soil. So regions that are already naturally dry will tend to get drier. At the same time, higher rates of evaporation, because of global warming, will put more water vapor into the atmosphere, and so areas that are either near large bodies of water or in places where atmospheric dynamics already favor higher rates of precipitation will tend to get wetter. We know one thing about the hydrologic cycle: What moisture goes up must come down, and where more moisture goes up, more will come down. Total global precipitation will probably increase, and the amount that will come down in any one storm is expected to increase as well—which will increase flooding and gully washers. That’s why this rather gentle term “global warming” doesn’t capture the disruptive potential of what lies ahead. “The popular term ‘global warming’ is a misnomer,” says John Holdren. “It implies something uniform, gradual, mainly about temperature, and quite possibly benign. What is happening to global climate is none of those. It is uneven geographically. It is rapid compared to ordinary historic rates of climatic change, as well as rapid compared to the adjustment times of ecosystems and human society. It is affecting a wide array of critically important climatic phenomena besides temperature, including precipitation, humidity, soil moisture, atmospheric circulation patterns, storms, snow and ice cover, and ocean currents and upwellings. And its effects on human well-being are and undoubtedly will remain far more negative than positive. A more accurate, albeit more cumbersome, label than ‘global warming’ is ‘global climatic disruption.’ 

Here's the advantage of being water: It's forgiving and ever-changing and unpredictable and strong-willed. It's stronger than rock; it can wear it down or move it or break it, or slowly seep through the surface. It can flow around anything and through anything or under or on top. It can change into so many forms. It can be so calm it's invisible, so wild it's uncontainable. It can smother fire with one spray. But here is the weakness: People with water are susceptible to drought. We can run dry, and when we do, we shrink, until something replenishes us. We rely on others. We need love and support. When we're not fed, we become a bit calloused and cracked, like dry skin. We wither, we wrinkle, and we can disappear inside ruts, until we flow again.

It's already happening. After falling for years, California's greenhouse gas emissions rose 1.7 percent in 2012, pushed up by the drought and the closure of the San Onofre nuclear plant in San Diego County. The state has not yet released emissions data for 2013. Experts say a sustained drought wouldn't prevent California from reaching its climate change goals. Instead, years of dry weather would force energy providers to find new strategies - ones that would likely cost more. In addition to being clean, hydropower tends to be cheap. "It makes things harder," said Victor Niemeyer, program manager for greenhouse gas reductions at the Electric Power Research Institute. "If there's less hydro, the power has to come from somewhere. You have to burn more gas, and that costs more money, all things considered.

By Charlie Hubacek release date June 30, 2014 John Randolph, left Missouri following a long and devastating drought the caused him to lose his farm. He had heard of gold just for the taking in Colorado. On his way, he nearly died traveling over the hot, dry high plains, but he was rescued and taken to a new town just beginning in the Rocky Mountain foothills. There, he found a new life as a lawman. This only presented to him new challenges as he was forced to deal with greedy gold miners and settlers also looking for a new life and the Ute Indians who had lived in the mountains for hundreds of years. "Your job is to write the most honest book you are capable of writing, persuade someone to publish it at whatever terms are attainable, and get that book on the library shelves. Let it find it's own level, while you go immediately to work on the next one. Rack your brains on how to make this one even better. All else is irrelevant.

God’s Word is a supernatural seed that brings forth miraculous results. However, if you don’t have a strong root system, you will not be able to sustain the growth that you are blessed with. God wants to bless you with “fruit that will remain” not fruit that will dry up and wither away. So He encourages us to abide in His Word. And we will develop a strong spiritual root system. One that will support every blessing He has for us and will continue to sustain us even in a drought.

At the center of any tree is the great pillar of the central trunk... It's like building a cathedral by applying paint every week and waiting for it to dry before applying the next paint-thin layer of living material. Each angelic layer is applied, in times of drought and times of moisture alike. The tree simply keeps growing, higher and higher, expanding its territory, pushing out new growth.

Dear Lord, we are now as a church in the holy Season of Lent. These are days of salvation, these are the acceptable days. I know that I am a sinner, that in many ways I have offended You. I see that sin withers Your life within me, as drought withers the leaves on a tree in the desert. Help me now, Lord, in my attempt to turn from sin. Bless my efforts with the rich blessing of Your grace. Help me to see that the least thing I do for You, or give up for You, will be rewarded by You “full measure, pressed down, shaken together and flowing over.” Then I shall see in my own soul how the desert can blossom, and the dry and wasted land bring forth the rich, useful fruit which was expected of it from the beginning. Amen. —COUNTRY PRAYER FOR LENT,

One of the earliest treatises was written at the end of the twelfth century or the beginning of the thirteenth by a shadowy figure called Walter of Henley, who may have been a bailiff. He seems in some ways to anticipate the changes that were to occur with the breakdown of the feudal system. Walter of Henley describes an essentially feudal estate operating both two-year and three-year rotations and employs the didactic style so popular with Roman writers.8 He advises on how to select labourers, rather in the Roman style. He has a small section on manure, so clearly its value was recognised even then: “Do not sell your stubble… or… you will lose much. Good son, cause manure to be gathered in heaps and mixed with earth… And before the drought of March comes let your manure, which has been scattered within the court and without, be gathered together… Put your manure which has been mixed with earth on sandy ground… Manure your lands and do not plough them too deeply.” Walter seems to ascribe the benefit of manuring to its ability to retain moisture in dry weather, especially if it is mixed with marl or soil.

THE ECONOMIC barometer at Harvard University had consistently pointed to bad weather. But even its precise readings could not have predicted such a swift deepening of the crisis. Wars and the elements had turned the earth into a waster of its own energies. Oil wells were running dry. Black, white, and brown coals were producing less and less power every year. An unprecedented drought had swaddled the sere earth in what felt like a dozen equators. Crops burned to their roots. Forests caught fire in the infernal heat. The selvas of South America and the jungles of India blazed with smoky flames. Agrarian countries were ravaged first. True, forests reduced to ashes had given place to ashy boles of factory smoke. But their days too were numbered. Fuellessness was threatening machines with motionlessness. Even glacier snowcaps melted by the perennial summer could not provide an adequate supply of waterpower; the beds of shrinking rivers lay exposed, and soon the turbine generators would stop. The earth had a fever. Flogged mercilessly by the sun’s yellow whips, it whirled around like a dervish dancing his last delirious dance.

The way he understood hozho was hard to put into words. “I’ll use an example. Terrible drought, crops dead, sheep dying. Spring dried out. No water. The Hopi, or the Christian, maybe the Moslem, they pray for rain. The Navajo has the proper ceremony done to restore himself to harmony with the drought. You see what I mean. The system is designed to recognize what’s beyond human power to change, and then to change the human’s attitude to be content with the inevitable.

Her face looked like the bottom of a dried up creek bed after a drought,

Crazy thing about dirt roads. Get very much rain and they’d pack down like tracks of clay, sticking to tires and caking to the wheel wells. Have a drought, though, and the dust would puff up for what seemed like a mile following a car’s path, turning the sky into a dingy haze. Dirt-colored smoke. Maybe Holly had lived there long enough that her heart mirrored the roads. It had been one heck of a dry season, but she’d seen a few showers lately. If she could just learn hang onto those downpours a little longer, maybe the dry days wouldn’t cause such a deep ache.

Give Yourself Some Flowers And in the beginning, God gave your body a checklist: Keep your heart on beat and your lungs dancing with oxygen, not passive to air. Make sure the path of your blood slows down for checkpoints and avoids bumps in the road. Train your nerves to keep a balanced pace and stay within the lines of steady flow. Push forward without putting too much pressure on movement. Remember to return to water when your spirit and its frame are in drought. Treat your body like a well-rounded planet built for all seasons, or pretend you are an adaptable star: Float in the black and stay there if you need to, save some light for yourself. In other words, rest like the sun does: Schedule some time to stay out of sight when too many people praise warm energy. Keep in mind all of these things when depression tells you nothing is working. Keep in mind all of these things when it tells you there is no invisible force connecting us, when your veins are stopped by blood clots, when your bones are dry, and the water is too quick to boil. Keep in mind all of these things when it tells you that the soul is like the body: Made to be broken, open to deterioration and doubt. Yes, keep in mind all of these things and remember: Even when it seems like the clock isn’t ticking, you were made perfectly for this moment in time.

The fountain of living water never runs dry.

He pointed his chin at the springs and around at the narrow canyon. "This is where we come from, see. The sand, this stone, these trees, the vines, all the wildflowers. this earth keeps us going." He took off his hat and wiped his forehead on his shirt. "These dry years you hear some people complaining, you know, about the dust and the wind, and how dry it is. But the wind and the dust, they are part of life too, like the sun and the sky. You don't swear at them. It's people, see. They're the ones. The old people used to say that droughts happen when people forget, when people misbehave.

My sexual dry spell has been going on so long it’s less of a drought and more of a biblical pestilence.

The Negeb, the south of Israel, is a vast desert. The watercourses of the Negeb are a network of ditches cut into the soil by wind and rain erosion. For most of the year they are baked dry under the sun, but a sudden rain makes the desert ablaze with blossoms. Our lives are like that—drought-stricken—and then, suddenly, the long years of barren waiting are interrupted by God’s invasion of grace.

Diversity is No Gimmick (The Sonnet) Diversity is no gimmick, Diversity is no belief. Diversity is life itself, Diversity is uplift. Diversity is sanity, Diversity is joy. Diversity is monsoon, After a drought most dry. There ain't no humanity, If there is no diversity. We ain't no human, If inside we have no amity. It ain't enough to talk of toleration! Each of us is to be the vessel of unification.

The fire raged across the Desert after starting in scrubland. There are a thousand ways for such a blaze to begin: sun shining through to a scatter of dried plants; sparks from a passing vehicle; Sometimes it’s intentional. On a landscape fried dry by terrible drought and baked day after day by a merciless sun. The fire was a demon that stalked from place to place, searching for where to settle its blazing roots.

The autumn had been unseasonably dry, and the vines that had taken up residence on the canal side of the brick wall surrounding the property extended themselves in parched desperation towards the water. Brunetti was struck by the resemblance between the vines, exposed to the sun almost all day, every day, and The Raft of the Medusa. The human limbs in the foreground of the painting, like the vines on the wall, fell weakly towards the water, while the figures behind stretched towards a glimpse of what might be a boat, a speck of land, or yet another swiftly arriving wave, bent on their destruction. How much worse the vines looked than the men on the raft, even though the accounts of the incident that had inspired the painting spoke of dehydration and starvation.

When visitors came to the fine state of Texas, they expected a dry, rolling plain studded with longhorn cattle, oil derricks, and an occasional cowboy in a huge hat. According to them, that plain had only one type of weather: scorching. That wasn’t true at all. In fact, we had two types, drought and flood.

There’s more drought and more flooding than there’s ever been. England’s changing into a desert, the bogs and moors are drying up. Entire species of fish are gone, just damn gone, and only in a year or two…

Diversity is no gimmick, Diversity is no belief. Diversity is life itself, Diversity is uplift. Diversity is sanity, Diversity is joy. Diversity is monsoon, After a drought most dry.

The River Between, by James Ngugi (later Ngugi wa Thiongo), redoes Heart of Darkness by inducing life into Conrad’s river on the very first page. ‘The river was called Honia, which meant cure, or bring-back-to-life. Honia river never dried: it seemed to possess a strong will to live, scorning droughts and weather changes. And it went on in the very same way, never hurrying, never hesitating. People saw this and were happy.’51 Conrad’s images of river, exploration, and mysterious setting are never far from our awareness as we read, yet they are quite differently weighted, differently—even jarringly—experienced in a deliberately understated, self-consciously unidiomatic and austere language. In Ngugi the white man recedes in importance—he is compressed into a single missionary figure emblematically called Livingstone—although his influence is felt in the divisions that separate the villages, the riverbanks, and the people from one another. In the internal conflict ravaging Waiyaki’s life, Ngugi powerfully conveys the unresolved tensions that will continue well after the novel ends and that the novel makes no effort to contain. A new pattern, suppressed in Heart of Darkness, appears, out of which Ngugi generates a new mythos, whose tenuous course and final obscurity suggest a return to an African Africa. And in Tayb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, Conrad’s river is now the Nile, whose waters rejuvenate its peoples, and Conrad’s first-person British narrative style and European protagonists are in a sense reversed, first through the use of Arabic; second in that Salih’s novel concerns the northward voyage of a Sudanese to Europe; and third, because the narrator speaks from a Sudanese village.

Precipitation is also expected to become “lumpier,” with dry areas becoming drier and wet areas wetter with more periods of intense rainfall. This could lead to an increase in flooding in some areas, but since higher temperatures would also increase evaporation from land, droughts might also increase. There is little consensus among models about exactly how, where, and when these changes would play out.

The drought was in its fourth year, and it was the worst in at least a generation’s time. But long dry periods were as much a part of the Great Plains as the grass itself. What was different in 1935 was that the land was naked. If the prairie had been held in place by adequate ground cover—grass, or even the matted sprouts of wheat emerging from winter dormancy—the land could never have peeled away as it did, with great strips of earth thrown to the sky.

September 13 “His heavens shall drop down dew.” Deuteronomy 33:28 WHAT the dew in the East is to the world of nature, that is the influence of the Spirit in the realm of grace. How greatly do I need it! Without the Spirit of God I am a dry and withered thing. I droop, I fade, I die. How sweetly does this dew refresh me! When once favoured with it I feel happy, lively, vigorous, elevated. I want nothing more. The Holy Spirit brings me life, and all that life requires. All else without the dew of the Spirit is less than nothing to me: I hear, I read, I pray, I sing, I go to the table of communion, and I find no blessing there until the Holy Ghost visits me. But when he bedews me, every means of grace is sweet and profitable. What a promise is this for me! “His heavens shall drop down dew.” I shall be visited with grace. I shall not be left to my natural drought, or to the world’s burning heat, or to the sirocco of Satanic temptation. Oh, that I may at this very hour feel the gentle, silent, saturating dew of the Lord! Why should I not? He who has made me to live as the grass lives in the meadow, will treat me as he treats the grass: he will refresh me from above. Grass cannot call for dew as I do. Surely, the Lord who visits the unpraying plant will answer to his pleading child.

Yemen is paralyzed by the world’s first true civil war over access to fresh water. All but two of the country’s aquifers have run dry, prompting armed conflict to protect the sources of water still there.

Photograph of the Girl The girl sits on the hard ground, the dry pan of Russia, in the drought of 1921, stunned, eyes closed, mouth open, raw, hot wind blowing sand in her face. Hunger and puberty are taking her together. She leans on a sack, layers of clothes fluttering in the heat, the new radius of her arm curved. She cannot be not beautiful, but she is starving. Each day she grows thinner, and her bones grow longer, porous. The caption says she is going to starve to death that winter with millions of others. Deep in her body the ovaries let out her first eggs, golden as drops of grain.

But most scientists studying the western climate believe the freak will become the norm. Researchers recently concluded that the extended dry period in the West over the last ten years is the worst in eight hundred years—that is, since the years between 1146 and 1151. Eight hundred years! If we were just talking about another decade of this or, worse, a decade of the type of heat we were seeing in the summer of 2012, the results would be catastrophic. But climate scientists believe it will keep getting hotter. If so even drought-resistant plants will die, reservoir levels will continue to fall, crop production will drop. Worse, as vegetation withers, it will no longer be able to absorb carbon dioxide, further exacerbating climate change. And now to this precarious and combustible mix we have decided to add fracking. We have chosen to do this not with caution but on a massive scale, and to do it right next to our precious rivers, right smack in the middle of aquifers. We go into these places and use, mixed with the millions of gallons of water, a secret recipe of chemicals, many of them poisonous to humans, which we then force into fissures of rock with high-powered blasts to flush out the fuel we are seeking. The man in the bar had warned about earthquakes, but fracking is, in essence, a small seismic event, designed to blast out minerals. We have decided to inject poisons into the ground, then shake that ground, in a region where potable water is more precious than gold. But not, we have decided, more precious than oil. One thing is crystal clear. Though fracking is unproven technology, we are not treating it that way. Instead we are conducting a vast experiment all over the country, from the hills of Pennsylvania to the deserts of Utah. Since we are moving into unfamiliar territory you would think, if we were wise, that we would carefully monitor any and all results. We are not. When people in the fracked area complain that their water is fizzling out of their taps in a foamy mix, smelling of petroleum, the companies are quick to offer other water sources, like cisterns, but not quick, of course, to question the enterprise itself. In fact, the corporate response to the contaminated water supplies and groundwater has been consistent. They tell the landowners and anyone else who complains that they are concerned but that they will not slow down until there is conclusive proof that what they are doing is dangerous and poses a health risk. This is standard operating procedure in today’s world, but it is also, to anyone with a dollop of common sense, an ass-backwards way of doing things. “Despite the troubles people are having, we’ll keep going full-speed ahead until someone proves to us the trouble is real,” they tell us. Never, “Maybe we should slow down until we learn the facts.

Water crises, beyond the famous California drought, have in recent decades surfaced in places as close to the Great Lakes as the city of Waukesha in the heart of Waukesha County, where once-abundant groundwater supplies have been so depleted and are now so dangerously polluted with naturally occurring radium that the city is under a federal order to find a fresh, safe source for its residents. Water scarcity troubles have popped up east of the lakes in New York City, where politicians once publicly eyed the Great Lakes as a potential salve. And they have emerged south of the lakes in Atlanta, Georgia, where less than a decade ago an extreme dry spell nearly drained the public water supply and left politicians looking north for emergency relief.

The collapse of world grain markets would have been catastrophe enough, but people would have eaten. In 1929, drought devastated much of the harvest, and for nine more years crop conditions denied the prairies a satisfactory harvest. In 1931, the wind began lifting the dry topsoil in great black clouds. In 1932, the first great plague of grasshoppers devoured every green thing, plus clothing and tool handles. In 1933, drought, hail, rust, and frost joined the grasshoppers, as though all nature’s forces had united to give prairie settlers notice to quit.

The Syrian and Iraqi seeds, Ceccarelli told me, “could hold the secret to adaptation to drought . . . After ten thousand years more or less of evolution in a very dry place, we can see what natural selection has left behind.

drought specialists, and while humid conditions prevailed, they had been confined to small patches of ground that had somehow been deprived of abundant rainfall. Now, not only were the tropical rains failing because of a global drying trend, but the North American plains were under a special disadvantage. With the Rockies in place, storms that rolled in from the Pacific tended to drop their precipitation as they swept up the western slopes. By the time they reached the plains, they were pretty much wrung out. But grasses don’t require much moisture, and this characteristic gave them a competitive edge. Over the next several million years (between about 24 million and 3 million years ago), grasses gradually became the dominant plants across the Great Plains.

Dutybound, Sonnet 1315 To treat disease you need medical license, To treat injustice being human is enough. To fly a plane you need pilot's license, To lift up society being human is enough. To talk to computers you gotta learn coding, To listen to people being human is enough. To build a shuttle you need rocket science, To build a society being human is enough. To analyze behavior study neuropsychology, To accept people being human is enough. To practice law you gotta pass the Bar exam, To practice humanity being human is enough. To make it rain on land in drought, you gotta seed the clouds with dry ice. To make it rain on hearts in drought, just lend a hand, and smile without price.