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Climate change is forcing a cultural change.
While governments seek technical solutions to climate-related problems, Quechua-speaking farmers in the Andes are struggling to understand events that are altering their livelihood. Drip irrigation and water reservoirs are only a partial response to a profound change in their relationship with their environment.
People in the Andes "lead vertical livelihoods," says Jeffrey Bury of the University of California at Santa Cruz. They take advantage of every ecological niche, growing crops in valleys and grazing llamas and alpacas on to bleak mountaintops. But farmers are being squeezed by warmer temperatures that shift crops up mountainsides and the expansion of mountaintop mining that destroys high wetland pastures, Bury says.
Andean peaks are more than scenery; they are protective deities, or apus. For generations, the massive and powerful Mt. Ausangate near the Qoyllur Rit'i sanctuary has been white. Now, it is streaked where snow has melted and bare rock shows. Andean farmers struggle to understand the changes. Some say the mountains are turning black because they are angry or sad. Some blame pollution.
Carmina Sicusta has another explanation. "The earth itself is sick," she says. Sicusta, 48, lives in Amaru, a village of small adobe houses on a mountainside above Pisaq, a picturesque town near Cusco that is best known for Inca ruins and a Sunday market that draw tourists from around the world.
In the past decade or so, Amaru's farmers have watched the pattern of hillside fields change. On the frigid hilltops, the tundra-like pasture suitable only for llamas is receding. Fields of grain blanket high hillsides that were once too cold for anything but animals. Families that used to own dozens of llamas now have only a handful.
"The earth is warming. The waters are warming. The springs are drying up," Sicusta says in Quechua, looking up from her weaving. "There is going to be a shortage of food. Our children will have less to eat."
While physical scientists may consider people's perceptions of climate change subjective and unreliable, Bury insists it is important to see the world as mountain people do. "When you lose your crops, it's not a subjective event," he says. "People have a good 10-year memory of how things have changed."
In some cases, perceptions may run ahead of scientific evidence, he says, because people could see very local changes that do not show up on computer models with a 100-kilometer resolution. This is not the first time people have had to adjust to climate change in the Andes.
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Source: The Daily Climate
