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Blogging on Fieldwork in Peru: Melting glaciers, camera-shy bears and nasty stomach viruses
Excuse the radio silence. I’ve been holed up writing grant applications to fund an expedition that El Fotografo and I want to do this year in the dept. of Cusco. Keep your fingers crossed. Expeditions are not the only projects in Peru that are eligible for funding. Research projects undertaken by investigators in the “hard” and social sciences, as well as the humanities, also attract seed money and, in some cases, hefty grants that can sustain grantees abroad for up to a year or more. A substantial number of these grantees come from the United States, whose major grant-giving entities include the U.S. government (National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health), corporations and nonprofit foundations. Foreign researchers and…
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Peru Plants Half a Million Trees a Day to Combat Climate Change
Here’s some good news for the environment: According to ANDINA and other news outlets, Peru’s Ministry of Agriculture has initiated an ambitious countrywide tree-planting campaign to counter the effects of climate change. The project began in December with the goal of planting 40 million trees by February 20. That translates to half a million trees per day or more than 40 million trees in a little less than three months. The trees will capture more than 570,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide annually, a representative for the Ministry of Agriculture estimates. Notes El Comercio: “A workforce of 130,000 people has been recruited, and each person will be planting about 4.5 trees per day. Eucalyptus, pine, cypress and…
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Climate Change Threatens Peru’s Native Potatoes
Here’s a timely article from Eliza Barclay on a topic close to many Peruvians’ hearts: potatoes. Cover photo from The Potato, Treasure of the Andes Extreme weather shifts caused by global warming are interrupting millenia-old agricultural cyles in the high Andes, reports Barclay for the Miami Herald. That turmoil is having a devastating effect on crops of native Peruvian potatoes, which grow at altitudes of 3,000+ meters above sea level. Barclay notes in “Peru’s Potato Farmers Adapt to Climate Change” (Sept. 11, 2008): For the first half of his life, Gregorio Huanuco farmed to a rhythm that dictated the survival of his grandparents and ancestors for thousands of years. He waited…
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Worthy Read: “Darkening Peaks” Tells of Glacier Loss & Human Impacts
A new book (March 2008) co-edited by a UC Davis professor of environmental science and policy looks at the world’s glaciers from all sides, scientific, social and economic. “Darkening Peaks: Glacier Retreat, Science and Society” (Univ. Cal. Press) brings together researchers from five continents to discuss how scientists study glaciers, how climate change is altering glaciers’ size and distribution, and what effects these changes are having on human life. The book’s co-editor, Ben Orlove, is a specialist in the human dimensions of climate variability, and his work is of particular interest to anyone who cares about the Andes because he’s spent decades studying the region. He also is the author…
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Big Sister, Little Sister, Ausangate-style
Adorable big sister from Puca Rumi I met this girl two weeks ago while trekking around Mount Ausangate. We were camping on her father’s land in Puca Rumi, and she shyly came up to our tents, wanting to meet us. When I took out a bag of chupetas (lollipops) her two brothers magically appeared in our campsite. For two hours the girl followed us around. The entire time she carried her little sister on her back, tied in a fabric sling. She didn’t complain once. The baby sister peeked over her big sister’s shoulder and sucked on her bottle of straw-colored liquid. I have no idea what it was. My…
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Beautiful Weavings Made on Nevado Ausangate
Justina weaving on her hand loom, in Pacchanta We spent about 45 minutes talking with this lovely Quechua-speaking woman, who lives with her children and mother-in-law in a small village called Pacchanta. It’s on the trekking circuit around Nevado Ausangate. Justina earns money by weaving textiles on her handloom. The day I met her she was weaving a striking piece of fabric with condors and geometric designs, made from handspun, home-dyed wool. The colors were quite beautiful. Her daughters looked on as she deftly wove the threads in and out, tracing intricate patterns. The weaving would be done in two weeks, she told me. The symbolism of weavings like Justina’s…
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Back from the Land of the Blue-eyed Alpaca
I spotted this unusual blue-eyed alpaca on a hillside in Upis I returned to Lima this past Saturday after a week trekking around Mount Ausangate, in southern Peru, with my cousin and a Quechua-Spanish translator from Cusco. What an experience. It was a work trip, rather than a vacation per se; we’d wake up at six each morning, bolt down some oatmeal and then walk to the next pueblo to find people to interview. I was there to talk to people about climate change and how it’s impacting their daily rituals and religious celebrations. A few random observations: (1) The ice caps are melting rapidly, and extreme weather events are…
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Blog Babysitting
For the next eight days I’ll be in the Andes with little to no Internet access, so I won’t be publishing new posts. This wasn’t my plan. I wrote a bunch and wanted to schedule them in advance, but the Schedule Post feature in WordPress (what this blog runs on) is a dud and it simply queues the posts ad infinitum. Sigh. It’s a programming glitch that WordPress has not solved, and if this kind of thing interests you, click here to follow the thread on the WordPress Boards. I’ll be back to the blog on Sunday, September 21, with news about my trip to Ausangate and hopefully some great…
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Photo of the Day: Apu Veronica
The beautiful Apu Veronica, considered a female mountain lord by indigenous people in the Peruvian Andes Many mountains in the Andes are considered male by the local people, but a few are female, like Nevado Veronica. She rises wide and conical over the Urubamba Valley, like a big-hipped mama towering over her children. In the photo above, she’s bathed in luscious drifts of snow that resemble swirls of soft-serve ice cream. I suspect the photo was taken a while ago or immediately after a heavy snowfall because Veronica has lost much of her snowcap in the last fifteen to twenty years, as a result of global warming. She’s mainly brown now. Veronica is my favorite mountain in…
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Photo of the Day: Masked Sheep’s Head Dancer, Qoyllur Rit’i Pilgrimage 2006
Masked dancer at Qoyllur Rit’i festival, Peru, 2006 El Fotografo spied this guy at the 2006 pilgrimage. He embodies the fertility cult that underpins the festival’s Catholic traditions, which have been sycretized with older, Andean rituals. I find this image rather terrifying, for some reason. We looked again for the Sheep’s Head Dancer this past May but didn’t see hide nor hair of him, as they say. —Barbara R. Drake
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Photo of the Day: Ausangate Mountain Range
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Preparing to Visit Apu Ausangate
The local Quechua-speaking people consider Ausangate the mightiest apu or mountain lord of the region. Like all apus, Ausangate has a gender (male) and a personality (powerful, easily offended). Local customs dictate that we pay our respects to the apu prior to beginning our trek, to ensure a successful journey.
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Climate Change Briefing for Peruvians
It’s not every day that you can spend an evening with several brilliant climatologists and have them give you a simplified mini-course on climate change – a sort of “Global Warming and Glacier Recession 101,” if you will — but that’s what I experienced this past Tuesday (6/17) at Lima’s Catholic University (UCP). What a privilege. El Fotógrafo, I and about 300 other people gathered in the university’s law auditorium to attend a free forum on “Deglacination en el Perú y Cambio Climático.” EF and I care about deglacination because that process is happening to the mountains at the Qoyllur Rit’i shrine, whose rituals we’ve been documenting since 2006.
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Largest Indigenous Religious Pilgrimage in Western Hemisphere
Media outlets such as National Geographic speak of Qoyllur Rit’i as “the largest indigenous religious pilgrimage in the Western Hemisphere.” But how big is it, really? The number of pilgrims most frequently cited by writers is 40,000. I’ve also seen estimates at 60,000 and 80,000. Wikipedia lowballs attendance at an incredible 10,000 pilgrims. But these figures seem skewed when you visit the site when the pilgrimage is in full swing. I tend to agree with a volunteer for Peru’s Civil Defense, who puts total number of pilgrims at around 300,000 over the four days of the event.
