barrenness

“It was in a state of barrenness. I’ll be honest: I said to the Lord, ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’”

A mega drought across the Western U.S. has sucked moisture from the land, leaving cracks and barrenness in its wake.

Bone-dry, bitterly cold and bathed in cosmic radiation, the surface of Mars may well be dead, with not so much as a single microbe breaking its state of barrenness.

Europeans had to invent an Africa as a place of emptiness and barrenness and backwardness in order to justify the enslavement of 12.5 million human beings who were shipped across the Atlantic Ocean between 1501 and roughly 1866.

Squinting into the inexpensive telescopes my parents bought me, I gasped at the sight of Jupiter’s swirling red storm, Venus’ greenish glare, distant star clusters, Halley’s Comet and the pitted barrenness of the moon.