A Place Against Time: Land and Environment in the Papua New Guinea Highlands

Popular support for Green causes evidences current widespread concern over environmental degradation, unsustainable agricultural practices, forest destruction and so on. While land management inevitably implies some modification of nature’s arrangements to meet human food needs, a crucial question is whether these interventions are sustainable in the long-term or simply deplete her productive capacity. This is an ethnographically-focused environmental study of Montane, New Guinea, where people were among the world’s first to cultivate crops some ten millennia ago, and where today an enduring agricultural tradition continues. It arranges its account of climate, vegetation topography and geology according to their relationship with the soils of the region occupied by Wola speakers in the Southern Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea, in the Western Pacific.