In his new book, Contesting Páramo, Fausto Sarmiento, professor of geography in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, has provided a humanized view of biogeography as it relates to the part of the tropical Andes known as the Páramo.
Sarmiento, director of the Neotropical Montology Collaboratory, presents a new angle for understanding the northern Andean highlands—one that requires the inclusion of critical social theory on traditional biogeography and ecology for a deep -understanding of cultural landscapes in the Andes amidst the tropical farmscapes’ transformation of the present.
Informed by ecological theory and by the Humboldtian paradigm of mountain vegetation, the book contains observations that evoke larger questions at the nature/culture interface.
Sarmiento’s knowledge of and affinity for this region of Highland South America have grown out of his early life experience in Ecuador and decades of research.