What man calls civilization always results in deserts.

The line is a bleak, epigrammatic indictment of “civilization” understood as human expansion, extraction, and control over nature. By saying it “always results in deserts,” Marquis suggests that what people praise as progress often leaves ecological and cultural barrenness in its wake—land stripped of fertility, communities hollowed out, and life reduced to sterility. The absolutist “always” heightens the satiric bite: it reads less as a literal historical law than as a moral warning about unintended consequences and the arrogance of equating technological or economic development with genuine flourishing. The image of the desert functions as both environmental outcome and metaphor for spiritual emptiness.