A single whole picture can explain a desert’s ecology to outsiders

Evidence

What you see here is a story of diminishing rainfall, or rather, of precipitation. There has been a “flight” from increasing aridity over the many centuries. If you, the visitor, have come here from a region that receives forty inches of rain and snow a year, this is what, in general aspects, your land would look like, and the way the organic life would be forced to behave, if the rain clouds became reluctant. — Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage, 312

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: The ‘flight from aridity’ desert story works as an ecosystem narrative in the manner of the trees-as-infrastructure piece’s landscape reading.
• XREF: connects to: A reasoned whole picture transforms scattered facts into landscape meaning — Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage, 123; Interpretation should present a bounded whole rather than any single part — Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage, 306