Virginia D. Nazarea Livres

Focusing on the interplay between biodiversity and cultural memory, the book emphasizes the importance of preserving indigenous agricultural knowledge alongside traditional plant species. Virginia Nazarea examines the farming practices of indigenous people in Bukidnon, Philippines, particularly regarding sweet potatoes. She highlights how the conservation of genetic resources can enhance cultural preservation, advocating for a holistic approach to agricultural sustainability that honors both the crops and the communities that cultivate them.

Through characters and stories that offer a wealth of insights about human nature and society, Heirloom Seeds and Their Keepers helps readers more fully understand why biodiversity persists when there are so many pressures for it not to. The key, Nazarea explains, is in the sovereign spaces seedsavers inhabit and create, where memories counter a culture of forgetting and abandonment engendered by modernity. A book about theory as much as practice, it profiles these individuals who march to their own beat in a world where diversity is increasingly devalued as the predictability of mass production becomes the norm.