New publication: Dry: Life Without Water

These are the people that we meet in Dry: Life Without Water, recently published by Harvard University Press. The book is based in part on research that was overseen by TWAS and the Third World Network of Scientific Organizations (TWNSO) under a project sponsored by the Global Environment Facility (GEF). Dry is edited by Daniel Schaffer, TWAS's public information officer, and Ehsan Masood, a freelance writer living in London. It includes 16 stories written by leading science journalists from around the world. The book explores, for example, the ancient communal knowledge that continues to guide the management of grazing lands in Kenya's Maasai. And it looks at recent efforts by the highland people of Chile's Atacama Desert to install giant mountainside nets to capture water-laden fog that rolls in from the Pacific coast.