ABSTRACT
Deserts are some of the most romanticized and mythologized of all landscapes, and as a result they, and especially their associated oases, are becoming popular tourist destinations (e.g., chapter 7). Signicantly, tourism, if approached sensitively with respect to both the physical and social environments, has the potential to play an important role in the sustainable development of desert communities (chapter 16). The transformation of the environmentally degraded Las Vegas Wash (chapter 8) into the award-winning Clark County Wetlands Park (France 1999, 2011) is one of the most successful examples of how tourism can be a positive agent for social and ecological change in arid regions, and one that may offer lessons for plans to convert a portion of the restored Iraqi marshlands into a national park at some future date.
