The University of Arizona Press
February 12, 2026
The University of Arizona Press podcast features an interview with Allison Caine, author of Restless Ecologies: Climate Change and Socioecological Futures in the Peruvian Highlands. Allison Caine is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Wyoming. Her research in Peru takes a multidisciplinary and collaborative approach to understanding contemporary environmental problems in partnership with international and Indigenous citizen scientists. Her ongoing research program aims to understand diverse experiences of health and aging in changing landscapes in Peru and the United States.
When asked what drew her to follow the herders in the Andes and study them in the context of ecology, Caine replied, “So much of what we know about the earth’s climate comes from this part of the world. A few hours distance from where I work in Peru is the site of the Quelccaya Ice Cap. This is the site of an extensive climate science initiative where for decades, teams of scientists have been monitoring the earth’s climate . . . . So my primary goal was to write about climate change from the ground up: to go to this place that has generated so much knowledge and really understand how the people living there see the world, and see the world changing.”
Listen to the full podcast here, on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
About the book:
In the high Andean grasslands 4,500 meters above sea level, Quechua alpaca herders live on the edges of glaciers that have retreated more rapidly in the past fifty years than at any point in the previous six millennia. Women are the primary herders, and their specialized knowledge and skill is vital to the ability of high-elevation communities to survive in changing climatic conditions. In the past decade, however, these herders and their animals have traversed a rapidly shifting terrain.
Drawing on the Quechua concept of k’ita, or restlessness, Allison Caine explores how herders in the community of Chillca in the Cordillera Vilcanota mountain range of the southeastern Peruvian Andes sense and make sense of changing conditions. Capricious mountains, distracted alpacas, and wayward children deviate from their expected spatial and temporal trajectories. When practices of sociality start to fall apart—when animals no longer listen to herders’ whistles, children no longer visit their parents, and humans no longer communicate with mountains—these failures signal a broader ecological instability that threatens the viability of the herder’s world.
