by Desirée Hetzel (Author)
Horticulture in Oceania has been under increasing scrutiny due to climate change and related policies. In Vanuatu, cultivators navigate crop growth and community life within the context of shifting environments, storm events, and innovations in climate projects. Desirée Hetzel offers new insights into the encounters and dynamics of climate change in this unique island nation by showing the routes around and roads towards gardening as both an environmental and a social practice. This reflection on indigenous agency from environmental anthropology and the anthropology of climate change comes at a critical moment of planetary transformation.
Author Biography
Desire Hetzel works with ni-Vanuatu climate activists and political representatives, and with women, men and children in the village communities of Dixon Reef on Malekula and Siviri on Efate, two islands in the South Pacific state of Vanuatu. Such intensive collaboration has contributed to ethnographic details on the links between gardening and climate change in Vanuatu.