Deconstructing the desert

Dear reader,

what do you mean by desert? What meanings do you associate with this word? We have often asked ourselves this question while cultivating the Mangrove that you will read and, at Zenit, listen to this month.

Something in that privative ‘de-‘ didn’t quite fit: the word “desert” is the result of the ancient Romans’ gaze on territories abandoned because they were not sown (one of the meanings of the verb sĕro) and therefore arid, sterile.

But abandoned by whom? And what makes them sterile? Have they always been like this? Some graffiti from thousands of years ago testify to the contrary.

And those people who live or have lived in those places indicate what we call the desert with different words and meanings: e.g.,in Arabic the root of صحراءI (Sahara) means ‘to make red with the sun’, in Hebrew מִדְבָּר, (midbàr) is ‘wilderness’ that can simultaneously be both ‘place of pasture’ and ‘place of speech’, the central area of Australia is called ‘red centre’, i.e. ‘red heart’.

So, we worked in “levare”: we realised that our idea of the desert was too full of emptiness and we started to make space. Space for sounds, smells, encounters. To the dunes and clouds that have the same shapes shaped by the wind, but also to the rocks, the plants, the animals, the life that exists in what we call desert. To feeling like a grain of sand and rock in front of immense spaces and at the same time feeling that each grain counts.

We discovered millenary ways of surviving in hostile environments such as making oases, which have so much to teach us now that the desert could become our home. We discovered the cold desert, which perhaps is not so cold. We discovered stories of people who through art, culture, science and technology seek ways to live better together.

Desert is also a state of mind: it is no coincidence that this month we will begin to tell you how and why we have chosen to experiment with the use of Artificial Intelligence software in our newsroom. We do not resign ourselves to predictions that will desertify our future, but we would like to try to help build it together, this future, with transparency, head, heart and body.

We are there and we invite you to this journey.