Michael J. Balick, Ph.D., is Vice President for Botanical Science and Director and Senior Philecology Curator of the Center for Plants, People, and Culture at the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG); K. David Harrison, Ph.D., of VinUniversity in Hanoi, Vietnam, is an NYBG Affiliate Scientist; Gregory M. Plunkett, Ph.D., is Senior Curator at the Center for Plants, People, and Culture; and Dominik Ramík, Ph.D., is a Vanuatu-based researcher.

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Indigenous cultures care for nearly one-quarter of Earth’s terrestrial surface but face challenges ranging from natural disasters and environmental degradation to loss of cultures and languages. Vanuatu, a biodiversity and language hotspot, is one of the few remaining countries that maintain strong customary stewardship of their biodiversity resources and nature-dependent culture. Since 2019, an international team has been carrying out a project titled Daylight, Culture, and Plants in Vanuatu, with researchers from the New York Botanical Garden; VinUniversity, Vietnam; Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania; University of the South Pacific, Fiji; Department of Forests (Vanuatu); and Vanuatu Cultural Centre, along with local communities.

Our team members include a variety of specialists—including botanists, linguists, and anthropologists—all of whom are working with Indigenous communities in Vanuatu to help document and preserve highly valued yet fragile traditional knowledge about plants, daylight, and seasonality. We continue to compile information on local knowledge and skills that connect plants and plant-related technologies to the diurnal cycle and yearly seasonal cycle and conduct community outreach activities with local people who are the holders and beneficiaries of this traditional knowledge.

These resilient Indigenous societies are remarkable in that they are cultures oriented towards the sun and daylight in their plant-based technologies, skills and lifeways, much of which is held by older generations. This project is a unique and fleeting opportunity to learn from ancient cultures on the cusp of radical technological change but still maintain belief and knowledge systems that may have long since vanished elsewhere. What these experts know about plants, seasonality, and sustainability has immense value for a world coping with environmental degradation and the effects of climate change.

As we have discussed with our colleagues in the Daylight Academy, plants are “light factories,” and the useful products they produce from light include food, medicines, building materials, fuel, and other necessities of life. Most people in “modern” societies are disconnected from the plant world because we do not grow our own food, make our own medicines, or gather plants to construct our own shelters. Yet in the tropical Pacific Islands, plant-centered cultures continue to thrive—even as they adopt modern technologies—by using their skills and knowledge to extract maximum value from the plant world.

In Vanuatu, we find experts who maintain high levels of species awareness (ability to name and describe hundreds of local species), traditional use knowledge (how to make medicines, dyes, etc.), gardening and culinary expertise (they grow and prepare most of their food), and traditional plant-based skills (constructing houses, weaving baskets, building boats). What is important—and is one of the foci of this project—is that they possess sophisticated knowledge of how plants relate to daylight (and moonlight reflected from the sun) in their planting, cultivation, collection, and processing. People in Vanuatu observe changes in plants during the daily diurnal cycle, lunar monthly cycle, and solar year, and optimize plant use accordingly. This study of the connections between traditional knowledge, the plant world, and daylight can support resilience of local communities facing global change.

We and our co-authors published a study about daylight-related traditional beliefs titled “‘The children of the Sun and Moon are the gardens’—How people, plants, and a living Sun shape life on Tanna, Vanuatu.” The paper is authored by a group of international researchers and Indigenous Tanna islanders and is the first of two such papers focusing on beliefs on specific islands. Based on original ethnographic and ethnobotanical research, we share how in the cosmology of Tanna, an island in Vanuatu’s southernmost province of Tafea, the Sun is viewed as a living, interactive being. Our initial interviews explored knowledge and beliefs concerning individual plant species, then follow-up interviews further explored topics that emerged therefrom.

The results of these interviews are a series of oral narratives of the mytho-historical past involving the Sun and the description of contemporary practices that are influenced by the Sun. In traditional narratives, the Sun is both a creative and destructive force that is sometimes viewed as an active, personified character but in other circumstances appears as an instrument created and used by greater powers. People from Tanna recount—and we adopt as a hypothesis—that the Sun’s physical manifestation and role in the world has changed since the earliest days of its mythological creation and that it remains an active player in Tanna’s biocultural landscape within practices that included time-reckoning, agriculture, and architecture. Through its relationships with humans and non-humans alike, the Sun ultimately shapes the cultural practices and even the landscape of Tanna. The nature of these relationships is changing as linguistic and cultural practices shift alongside people’s relationship with the land, but the Sun remains a critical factor in lives and livelihoods of Tanna today.

We are grateful for the generous support of the U. S. National Science Foundation and Velux Stiftung, along with other funders as well as the Daylight Academy for helping us to carry out and promote this project.

The paper that appears in PLOS One can be found here, and a press release about the study is available here.