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The Voice of the Desert, a Naturalist's Interpretation.
The what and why of desert country -- It suits him fine -- Strange forest -- How they got that way -- He was there before Coronado -- The moth and the candle -- The mouse that never drinks -- Settlers, old and new -- And every single one of them is right -- First on the mountain top -- Love in the desert -- Conservation is not enough -- The mystique of the desert.
223 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1955
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221 people want to read
About the author
Joseph Wood Krutch
93 books9 followersWorks of American critic, naturalist, and writer Joseph Wood Krutch include
The Modern Temper
(1929) and
The Measure of Man
(1954).
He worked as a professor at Columbia University from 1937 to 1953. Moving to Arizona in 1952, he wrote books about natural issues of ecology, the southwestern desert environment, and the natural history of the Grand Canyon, winning renown as a naturalist and conservationist. Krutch is possibly best known for A Desert Year , which won the John Burroughs medal in 1954.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_...
He worked as a professor at Columbia University from 1937 to 1953. Moving to Arizona in 1952, he wrote books about natural issues of ecology, the southwestern desert environment, and the natural history of the Grand Canyon, winning renown as a naturalist and conservationist. Krutch is possibly best known for A Desert Year , which won the John Burroughs medal in 1954.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_...
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
November 28, 2025
A fascinating read that held my attention from cover to cover. In everyday language, Krutch explores the unique characteristics of some of the more unusual flora and fauna of the American South-West. This is Nature up close and at it's most interesting.
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On reading this book a second time in 2025, I found Krutch's essays on Arizona's climate zones and its unique flora and fauna just as fascinating and absorbing as the first time around. Though not a biologist by training, Krutch was a keen observer of nature, an informed amateur naturalist and a very able writer. His philosophical essays, which come in the latter part of this collection, were written in a more academic style that I found wordy and much less interesting.
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On reading this book a second time in 2025, I found Krutch's essays on Arizona's climate zones and its unique flora and fauna just as fascinating and absorbing as the first time around. Though not a biologist by training, Krutch was a keen observer of nature, an informed amateur naturalist and a very able writer. His philosophical essays, which come in the latter part of this collection, were written in a more academic style that I found wordy and much less interesting.
January 2, 2026
In the decade or so before Rachel Carson wrote her seminal book, Joseph Wood Krutch started writing environmental literature. In this book Krutch describes in detail several plants and animals that are found living in the desert near his home in Tucson, Arizona. He starts with describing the desert in general terms then to what is a desert – the dryness. Then he starts with the animals, a desert toad that lives most of his life just under the surface until the summer thunderstorms when they come out to mate. Then onto the roadrunner.
In describing different cactus trees, and how it can grown into a forest, I was surprised to learn the saguaro is the quintessential cactus that symbolizes a desert with its upended arms. Despite that, the saguaros have limited range of where they grow.
The scorpion and tarantula are two unexpected animals described in the book. The scorpion is an ancient animal, one of the first animals to breathe air, and it hasn’t changed very much since those early days.
This leads Krutch into a discussion about evolution and contemplation of a guided approach. He leaves it mostly as questions. Going further he discusses if any animal has purposefully made a decision thus encouraging evolution a specific direction, as opposed to just purely nature making all movements and actions on the part of the animal. During this part Krutch was mostly talking about insects, such as a wasp.
Then there was the moments when he mentions the climate changing, which was a surprise to me for a book from the mid-1950s.
Overall this was a thought provoking packed book for under 225 pages, and included some black and white photographs. The author is not nearly as known, nor popular as other environmental writers, but I don’t think Krutch should be overlooked.
Book rating: 4.5
In describing different cactus trees, and how it can grown into a forest, I was surprised to learn the saguaro is the quintessential cactus that symbolizes a desert with its upended arms. Despite that, the saguaros have limited range of where they grow.
The scorpion and tarantula are two unexpected animals described in the book. The scorpion is an ancient animal, one of the first animals to breathe air, and it hasn’t changed very much since those early days.
This leads Krutch into a discussion about evolution and contemplation of a guided approach. He leaves it mostly as questions. Going further he discusses if any animal has purposefully made a decision thus encouraging evolution a specific direction, as opposed to just purely nature making all movements and actions on the part of the animal. During this part Krutch was mostly talking about insects, such as a wasp.
Then there was the moments when he mentions the climate changing, which was a surprise to me for a book from the mid-1950s.
Overall this was a thought provoking packed book for under 225 pages, and included some black and white photographs. The author is not nearly as known, nor popular as other environmental writers, but I don’t think Krutch should be overlooked.
Book rating: 4.5
February 14, 2016
After Abbey I believe this is my favorite desert writing. Great book.
September 9, 2020
Joseph Wood Krutch's books on nature are divided into magazine-article-sized essays that are a pleasure to read. His The Voice Of The Desert, A Naturalist's Interpretation covers primarily the deserts of Arizona, where Krutch lived near Tucson. I learned some interesting facts, such as that cacti are not found outside the New World. There are no native cacti in Europe, Asia, Africa, or Australia.
Krutch highlighted several plants, such as yucca, Saguaro and barrel cacti -- as well as such fauna as scorpions, tarantulas, jackrabbits, the kangaroo rat (which, interestingly, never drinks liquids), and the coyote.
Highly recommended.
Krutch highlighted several plants, such as yucca, Saguaro and barrel cacti -- as well as such fauna as scorpions, tarantulas, jackrabbits, the kangaroo rat (which, interestingly, never drinks liquids), and the coyote.
Highly recommended.
November 8, 2018
A former New York critic and prolific author becomes a naturalist by interest and inclination, not training. He died in 1970, but this book is not bounded by time. He is on intimate terms with the area around Tucson in the Sonoran desert. Moving there for his health around 1950 spelled a transformation that is truly remarkable.
One of my earliest memories was spending the night in adobe shelter at the entrance of Palm Canyon in the Anza Borrego desert. My grandfather and mother took me there as a first overnight camping experience. One of the wonders was feeding a "kangaroo rat", who stood on his rear feet and accepted the food with smaller "hands". Krutch provided a rare glimpse at the complicated creature that is unique among desert creatures in that he drinks no water directly, nor does he need to kill other animals to obtain it indirectly. He can live on the driest of dried seeds and flourish. Dipodomys Whereas man can concentrate urine to 4 times that of blood plasma, the kangaroo rat can concentrate it to 17 times, the highest of any known animal. He is not a water waster!
I could go on and on about the wonders that are revealed in this book. All the 800 species of cactus are found in the Western Hemisphere (1 is found in Africa). The majestic ocotillo is not a cactus! If you enjoy forays to the desert, this is your book.
I like that a person who is not trained the biological science can render such a philosophical treat while giving plenty of fact based information. I read the book a second time before writing the review and enjoyed it just as much as the first time through.
One of my earliest memories was spending the night in adobe shelter at the entrance of Palm Canyon in the Anza Borrego desert. My grandfather and mother took me there as a first overnight camping experience. One of the wonders was feeding a "kangaroo rat", who stood on his rear feet and accepted the food with smaller "hands". Krutch provided a rare glimpse at the complicated creature that is unique among desert creatures in that he drinks no water directly, nor does he need to kill other animals to obtain it indirectly. He can live on the driest of dried seeds and flourish. Dipodomys Whereas man can concentrate urine to 4 times that of blood plasma, the kangaroo rat can concentrate it to 17 times, the highest of any known animal. He is not a water waster!
I could go on and on about the wonders that are revealed in this book. All the 800 species of cactus are found in the Western Hemisphere (1 is found in Africa). The majestic ocotillo is not a cactus! If you enjoy forays to the desert, this is your book.
I like that a person who is not trained the biological science can render such a philosophical treat while giving plenty of fact based information. I read the book a second time before writing the review and enjoyed it just as much as the first time through.
April 14, 2016
"Hardly more than two generations ago Americans first woke up to the fact that their land was not inexhaustible. Every year since then more and more has been said, and at least a little more has been done about "conserving resources," about "rational use" and about such reconstruction as seemed possible. Scientists have studied the problem, public works have been undertaken, laws passed. Yet everybody knows that the using up still goes on, perhaps not so fast nor so recklessly as once it did, but unmistakably nevertheless. And there is nowhere that it goes on more nakedly, more persistently or with a fuller realization of what is happening than in the desert regions where the margin to be used up is narrower.
First, more and more cattle were set to grazing and overgrazing the land from which the scanty rainfall now ran off even more rapidly than before. More outrageously still, large areas of desert shrub were rooted up to make way for cotton and other crops watered by wells tapping underground pools of water which are demonstrably shrinking fast. These pools represent years of accumulation not now being replenished and are exhaustible exactly as an oil well is exhaustible. Everyone knows that
they will give out before long, very soon, in fact, if the number of wells continues to increase as it has been increasing. Soon dust bowls will be where was once a sparse but healthy desert, and man, having uprooted, slaughtered or driven away everything which lived healthily and normally there, will himself either abandon the country or die. There are places where the creosote bush is a more useful plant than cotton.
To the question why men will do or are permitted to do such things there are many answers. Some speak of population pressures, some more brutally of unconquerable human greed. Some despair; some hope that more education and more public works will, in the long run, prove effective. But is there, perhaps, something more, something different, which is indispensable? Is there some
missing link in the chain of education, law and public works? Is there not something lacking without which none of these is sufficient?
After a lifetime spent in forestry, wild-life management and conservation of one kind or another, after such a lifetime during which he nevertheless saw his country slip two steps backward for every one it took forward, the late Aldo Leopold pondered the question and came up with an unusual answer which many people would dismiss as "sentimental" and be surprised to hear from a "practical" scientific man. He published his article originally in the Journal of Forestry and it was reprinted in the posthumous volume, A Sand County Almanac, where it was given the seemingly neutral but actually very significant title "The Land Ethic."
This is a subtle and original essay full of ideas never so clearly expressed before and seminal in the sense that each might easily grow into a separate treatise. Yet the conclusion reached can be simply stated. Something is lacking and because of that lack education, law and public works fail to accomplish what they hope to accomplish. Without that something, the high-minded impulse to educate, to legislate and to manage become as sounding brass and tinkling cymbals. And the thing which is missing is love, some feeling for, as well as some understanding of, the inclusive community of rocks and soils, plants and animals, of which we are a part.
It is not, to put Mr. Leopold's thoughts in different words, enough to be enlightenedly selfish in our dealings with the land. That means, of course, that it is not enough for the farmer to want to get the most out of his farm and the lumberer to get the most out of his forest without considering agriculture and wood production as a whole both now and in the future. But it also means more than
that. In the first place enlightened selfishness cannot be enough because enlightened selfishness cannot possibly be extended to include remote posterity. It may include the children, perhaps, and grandchildren, possibly, but it cannot be extended much beyond that because the very idea of "self" cannot be stretched much further. Some purely ethical considerations must operate, if anything does. Yet even that is not all. The wisest, the most enlightened, the most remotely long-seeing exploitation of resources is not enough, for the simple reason that the whole concept of exploitation is so false and so limited that in the end it will defeat itself and the earth will have been plundered no matter how scientifically and farseeingly the plundering has been done.
To live healthily and successfully on the land we must also live with it. We must be part .not only of the human community, but of the whole community; we must acknowledge some sort of oneness not only with our neighbors, our countrymen and our civilization but also some respect for the natural as well as for the man-made community. Ours is not only "one world " in the sense usually implied by that term. It is also "one earth." Without some acknowledgment of that fact, men can no more live
successfully than they can if they refuse to admit the political and economic interdependency of the various sections of the civilized world. It is not a sentimental but a grimly literal fact that unless we share this terrestrial globe with creatures other than ourselves, we shall not be able to live on it for long.
You may, if you like, think of this as a moral law. But if you are skeptical about moral laws, you cannot escape the fact that it has its factual, scientific aspect. Every day the science of ecology is making clearer the factual aspect as it demonstrates those more and more remote interdependencies which, no matter how remote they are, are crucial even for us."
First, more and more cattle were set to grazing and overgrazing the land from which the scanty rainfall now ran off even more rapidly than before. More outrageously still, large areas of desert shrub were rooted up to make way for cotton and other crops watered by wells tapping underground pools of water which are demonstrably shrinking fast. These pools represent years of accumulation not now being replenished and are exhaustible exactly as an oil well is exhaustible. Everyone knows that
they will give out before long, very soon, in fact, if the number of wells continues to increase as it has been increasing. Soon dust bowls will be where was once a sparse but healthy desert, and man, having uprooted, slaughtered or driven away everything which lived healthily and normally there, will himself either abandon the country or die. There are places where the creosote bush is a more useful plant than cotton.
To the question why men will do or are permitted to do such things there are many answers. Some speak of population pressures, some more brutally of unconquerable human greed. Some despair; some hope that more education and more public works will, in the long run, prove effective. But is there, perhaps, something more, something different, which is indispensable? Is there some
missing link in the chain of education, law and public works? Is there not something lacking without which none of these is sufficient?
After a lifetime spent in forestry, wild-life management and conservation of one kind or another, after such a lifetime during which he nevertheless saw his country slip two steps backward for every one it took forward, the late Aldo Leopold pondered the question and came up with an unusual answer which many people would dismiss as "sentimental" and be surprised to hear from a "practical" scientific man. He published his article originally in the Journal of Forestry and it was reprinted in the posthumous volume, A Sand County Almanac, where it was given the seemingly neutral but actually very significant title "The Land Ethic."
This is a subtle and original essay full of ideas never so clearly expressed before and seminal in the sense that each might easily grow into a separate treatise. Yet the conclusion reached can be simply stated. Something is lacking and because of that lack education, law and public works fail to accomplish what they hope to accomplish. Without that something, the high-minded impulse to educate, to legislate and to manage become as sounding brass and tinkling cymbals. And the thing which is missing is love, some feeling for, as well as some understanding of, the inclusive community of rocks and soils, plants and animals, of which we are a part.
It is not, to put Mr. Leopold's thoughts in different words, enough to be enlightenedly selfish in our dealings with the land. That means, of course, that it is not enough for the farmer to want to get the most out of his farm and the lumberer to get the most out of his forest without considering agriculture and wood production as a whole both now and in the future. But it also means more than
that. In the first place enlightened selfishness cannot be enough because enlightened selfishness cannot possibly be extended to include remote posterity. It may include the children, perhaps, and grandchildren, possibly, but it cannot be extended much beyond that because the very idea of "self" cannot be stretched much further. Some purely ethical considerations must operate, if anything does. Yet even that is not all. The wisest, the most enlightened, the most remotely long-seeing exploitation of resources is not enough, for the simple reason that the whole concept of exploitation is so false and so limited that in the end it will defeat itself and the earth will have been plundered no matter how scientifically and farseeingly the plundering has been done.
To live healthily and successfully on the land we must also live with it. We must be part .not only of the human community, but of the whole community; we must acknowledge some sort of oneness not only with our neighbors, our countrymen and our civilization but also some respect for the natural as well as for the man-made community. Ours is not only "one world " in the sense usually implied by that term. It is also "one earth." Without some acknowledgment of that fact, men can no more live
successfully than they can if they refuse to admit the political and economic interdependency of the various sections of the civilized world. It is not a sentimental but a grimly literal fact that unless we share this terrestrial globe with creatures other than ourselves, we shall not be able to live on it for long.
You may, if you like, think of this as a moral law. But if you are skeptical about moral laws, you cannot escape the fact that it has its factual, scientific aspect. Every day the science of ecology is making clearer the factual aspect as it demonstrates those more and more remote interdependencies which, no matter how remote they are, are crucial even for us."
May 16, 2018
A truly unique work, the author dedicates each chapter to a specific organism that has adapted to life in the American southwest desert. Both scientific and enchanted, the author is quick to revel in the wonder brought from the implications of facts learned. He goes beyond the mere physicality of it all, and speculates well on implications, meaning, and wisdom gained. A heavy case for the love of nature, and I can't believe it was written over sixty years ago. A truly timeless work.
September 11, 2021
“Thus nature:
…fulfills herself in many ways lest one good custom should corrupt the world.”
…fulfills herself in many ways lest one good custom should corrupt the world.”
January 31, 2025
4.25 stars
December 13, 2025
This is basically a rejiggering of his earlier book The Desert Year. As much as I enjoyed it I was often wondering why he was covering the exact same territory. This was a bit more from the scientific viewpoint and lighter on the pantheistic philosophy but it’s hard to beat the charm of TDY which is one of my top 5 reads ever.
August 31, 2009
After reading Mary Austin,
I came across this find. He
writes so beautifully of the
desert. The cactus moths, the
little lizards, the creatures
that come out on moonlit nights
around the deserts near Tucson.
A drama critic who moved west.
Tucson moon.
I came across this find. He
writes so beautifully of the
desert. The cactus moths, the
little lizards, the creatures
that come out on moonlit nights
around the deserts near Tucson.
A drama critic who moved west.
Tucson moon.
June 3, 2012
I can't believe it took me this long to find this book! Some of the best natural history prose I've ever read, on par with Aldo Leopold and David Quammen. Am looking forward to reading more of JWK's work!
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews