Growing chamomile from melting ice: Everyday adaptations in women's home gardens in the Peruvian Andes

In the Peruvian Andes, huertas (home gardens) are sites of everyday adaptation that are critical for communities living with melting ice, droughts, and the many intertwined social and physical effects of climate change. Huertas are most often managed by women and to date, there have been no studies on how women's home gardens in the Andes facilitate adaptation to both social and environmental change. These everyday spaces are critical because they offer counternarratives of adaptation that resist dominant discourses of loss and center Quechua women, who are consistently sidelined in adaptation projects. Through an ethnographic examination of women's everyday lives in the Peruvian Callejón de Huaylas, we argue that huertas are undisciplinable sites where adaptations can be tried regularly and can fail flexibly, creating at times joyous spaces that elevate feminist care practices, which offer alternatives to large-scale government and NGO-sponsored adaptation projects. We also argue that these everyday adaptations cannot continue indefinitely without support, given the disproportionate amount of labor that falls on women and the rapid pace of social and environmental change that is transforming daily life in the region. This article contributes to the growing body of literature on everyday and transformative adaptation, which centers justice for people who have been pushed to the margins of major adaptation programs and who must therefore create emergent, flexible adaptations that cannot be distilled into structured and scalable projects. By highlighting counternarratives of adaptation from women's huertas , we show distinct spaces where everyday adaptations are currently unnoticed and unsupported, but where globally applicable lessons for feminist and care-centered adaptations consistently emerge.