WILDERNESS

 Yermo is a concept with several uses, according to what is detailed by the Royal Spanish Academy ( RAE ) in its dictionary. The term, whose etymological root refers us to the Latin eremus although its origin is in the Greek language, can be used as an adjective or as a noun .

The notion can be used to name the surface that is devoid of life. In this sense, a land can be barren if it does not have vegetation or if there are no people or animals that live on it. For example: "The stranger walked for hours through the barren terrain, finding no help" , "This barren field is worth nothing" , "Looking at the barren wasteland, the young man wondered how he could have spent so much time in that place . " It is also possible to use this adjective in a figurative sense, or to speak of the impoverishment of a population.

While many people suffer from the lack of soil fertility - since this prevents them from growing their food or even enjoying the presence of plants and grass, two fundamental elements for maintaining our health - others seek with absurd urgency the way to turn fertile land into wasteland, in order to decorate it with stones, grass and artificial flowers.

It takes a lot of work to believe that people who are dying of thirst, or those who become ill from the contamination of the water they drink live on the same planet as those who consider themselves surrounded by too much nature, and have the luxury of eliminating life to replace it with their own elements. of a large scale model. To "create" a barren terrain, it is necessary to apply herbicides and other products to the soil, in addition to drowning it with sand and gravel.

Although the formal definition of wasteland refers to a land in which there is no vegetation and that cannot be cultivated, it is not uncommon to find this term with a less definitive connotation, that is, to speak of not very fertile soils. In very dry areas, where the rain occurs for a few days a year to green the land as if it were a dream and then leaves for long months, it is possible to say that the terrain is barren.

For cases like this, in which the earth is not completely devoid of life, there are several varieties of plants that adapt very well to the lack of water, such as pines, since they are ideal for dry and stony areas, and a great number of shrubs, among which the strawberry tree, eleagnus and raphiolepsis stand out . It is important to note that these plants also need water to develop, especially during the first two years of life; in other words, although they endure the scarcity of nutrients in the soil, they cannot grow without any kind of care.

With this same meaning, wasteland can be used as a noun: “We must cross the wasteland before dark” , “The woman's gaze was lost in the wasteland, while her mind traveled in time” , “I don't understand what you like about this lonely wasteland ” .

It is known as Fathers of the Wasteland or Fathers of the Desert to the group of Christian religious who, in the fourth century, decided to leave the cities of the Roman Empire and settled in desert areas of Egypt and Syria.

In the field of botany , yermo is the genus of a class of plant , which is part of the Asteraceae family .This genus consists of a single perennial species, which can reach a height of a foot with petioled leaves.

A town in the Cantabrian municipality of Cartes and a Galician parish of Ortigueira, in Spain, also bear the name of wasteland.