In 1961, when most science fiction looked to the stars, Mack Reynolds pointed his gaze at the dying Sahara. Johnny McCord works for the Sahara Reforestation Commission, tasked with turning the desert green again. But the young trees keep dying, not from drought or disease, but from the goats of local nomadic tribes, whose ancient way of life depends on grazing their herds across land that McCord's project wants to reclaim. As sabotage cuts off water supplies and a sharp French journalist named Hélène Desage arrives to document the ecological destruction, McCord finds himself caught between bureaucratic idealism and the brutal mathematics of survival. What begins as a straightforward conservation effort unravels into something far murkier: external powers have their own designs on the desert, and the nomads are caught in the middle. Reynolds writes with genuine sympathy for all sides, refusing easy villains, asking instead what it means to save a landscape while destroying a culture. The novel anticipates our contemporary environmental dilemmas with startling clarity: who has the right to the land, when everyone depends on it to live.
