Dan Charles
Appearances
Short Wave
Not All Nature Comebacks Are Equal
Yeah. And that is all true. Farming is expanding in places like Brazil or Indonesia. But at the same time, in other places, it's retreating, which gets less attention, but it's also important.
Short Wave
Not All Nature Comebacks Are Equal
This is the debate. So I flew to Bulgaria in Eastern Europe to see what land abandonment looks like. And also to meet an ecologist named Gergana Daskalova, who is right in the middle of this debate, literally.
Short Wave
Not All Nature Comebacks Are Equal
This is a very specific scene you have painted, Emily.
Short Wave
Not All Nature Comebacks Are Equal
She showed me around this small Bulgarian village where she lives. There is abandoned land and abandoned houses all over the place. And she's trying to answer a lot of these questions. about that land.
Short Wave
Not All Nature Comebacks Are Equal
And I'll tell you, Emily, these questions are not just scientific ones. For her, they are very personal.
Short Wave
Not All Nature Comebacks Are Equal
Gargana has an interesting story. When she was growing up, she spent summers with her grandparents in this village called Turkmen.
Short Wave
Not All Nature Comebacks Are Equal
It was a place with just a few hundred people. More cows and goats, actually.
Short Wave
Not All Nature Comebacks Are Equal
Yeah, she loved it. But there was something going on in the village that people just kind of took for granted because it had been going on for a really long time. The village was shrinking. When those children grew up, they mostly moved to the city. When I visited, it seemed like half the houses in Turkmen were empty.
Short Wave
Not All Nature Comebacks Are Equal
You see roofs falling in and there's land around the village that's been abandoned too. Shrubs and small trees are taking over fields and also the pasture land where animals used to graze.
Short Wave
Not All Nature Comebacks Are Equal
Yeah. These are small plots, not typically worth a lot of money, owned by the children or the grandchildren or even the great-grandchildren of people who once lived in the village, like Gargana, actually.
Short Wave
Not All Nature Comebacks Are Equal
They are remnants of fences. They are like ghosts of vanished ecosystems.
Short Wave
Not All Nature Comebacks Are Equal
And this is kind of what land abandonment looks like around the world. This migration from the countryside to cities, the decline of small-scale farming, you know, village agriculture. And Gargana was part of this.
Short Wave
Not All Nature Comebacks Are Equal
She went off to university, University of Edinburgh, got her PhD in ecology, did research in the Arctic, in Australia. And then one day she realized, you know, that thing I grew up with, the changes in my village, this is actually a huge global ecological phenomenon that deserves way more attention.
Short Wave
Not All Nature Comebacks Are Equal
Right. So as part of her research, she moved back to Turkmen.
Short Wave
Not All Nature Comebacks Are Equal
Well, you see, a lot of the forests in the eastern U.S. used to be farmland. Settlers cleared that land and they made fields, they made pastures. But then more than a century ago, lots and lots of those farmers gave up. They couldn't make a living. They abandoned that land. And I guess a forest came back? Yeah. This is what ecologists call succession.
Short Wave
Not All Nature Comebacks Are Equal
So she got some research grants to study, you know, the situation, the ecology of what's going on here. And she picked dozens of villages to study. So each one that's experiencing abandonment has a twin, like another village that's similar but isn't getting abandoned. So they can compare the two. And they're going to these study sites. They're counting the number of plant species.
Short Wave
Not All Nature Comebacks Are Equal
They have audio recorders in trees to identify the sounds of birds and bat species and
Short Wave
Not All Nature Comebacks Are Equal
I thought so too. And she took me to one of these villages, one where nobody lives anymore, up in the mountains. We went there. We're standing on this dirt road next to empty brick and stucco houses. But the places that used to be gardens or meadows, they were full of wild blackberries, so thick I could step right on top of them. And it was like I was standing on a trampoline.
Short Wave
Not All Nature Comebacks Are Equal
And Gargana said the consequence of that is there aren't nearly as many other things, you know, birds or wildflowers or butterflies, as there used to be when people were here tending the gardens or grazing the animals. She said there's less biodiversity in this place, fewer species in this abandoned land.
Short Wave
Not All Nature Comebacks Are Equal
Yeah, or at least she's saying it can be, and it is in lots of places. So here's where answering this question of the effects of land abandonment on biodiversity gets kind of philosophical and fascinating. In Europe especially, a lot of environmentalists really value these traditional farming landscapes. It's even written into the law.
Short Wave
Not All Nature Comebacks Are Equal
But the thing is, these landscapes only exist because farmers are there maintaining the fields and grazing animals on the pasture.
Short Wave
Not All Nature Comebacks Are Equal
Well, it depends on a lot of different things, like rainfall or what seeds are already in the soil before abandonment or what kind of species are living nearby. Some researchers in Poland have reported that abandoned farmland there has been taken over by invasive species, like goldenrod. That's a bush with bright yellow flowers, and it's preventing trees from growing. Wow.
Short Wave
Not All Nature Comebacks Are Equal
So this is the one view that land abandonment is a threat to nature. But there's another philosophical camp which says these cultural landscapes are not nature.
Short Wave
Not All Nature Comebacks Are Equal
They're museum pieces, artificial, kind of like open-air zoos or botanical gardens.
Short Wave
Not All Nature Comebacks Are Equal
And these ecologists are saying nature is something different. It's wilder, more dynamic, with species interacting, landscapes changing. And they say land abandonment really is an opportunity. It's a chance to set nature free.
Short Wave
Not All Nature Comebacks Are Equal
Yeah. Yeah. In parts of Northern Europe, Estonia, Sweden, there are wolves coming back in parts of Europe. And then there are efforts to kind of intervene a little bit to help this process along. There's a group called Rewilding Europe that's active in close to a dozen places where agriculture is retreating. They're
Short Wave
Not All Nature Comebacks Are Equal
Actually trying to bring back some animals of the type that used to be there, like big herbivores, like wild horses or bison. They'd like to see, in some cases, more carnivores too, like wolves and bears.
Short Wave
Not All Nature Comebacks Are Equal
That's what they're observing. Ecological change can be really slow and also unpredictable. Case in point, I talked to this researcher who spent a lot of time observing abandoned land in Kazakhstan. And he said, you know, nobody really knows the answer to this big question of whether land abandonment is a positive thing for biological diversity or a negative thing.
Short Wave
Not All Nature Comebacks Are Equal
He said, I've changed my mind over time. Every place is different. The answer seems to keep changing.
Short Wave
Not All Nature Comebacks Are Equal
Yeah, it is. Which is why Gargana is doing this other thing, too. Alongside her fieldwork, she's organizing an international group of scientists to pull together data that people have collected from places all over the world, looking for clues in that data to what produces each outcome in these places where land is being abandoned.
Short Wave
Not All Nature Comebacks Are Equal
You know, the whole concept of ecological succession, how one group of species replaces another one in a predictable way, it was partly based on scientists observing what happened to abandoned farmland in the United States. But this is not just history. People are still abandoning farmland today.
Short Wave
Not All Nature Comebacks Are Equal
It'll be a few years, actually, before they really have anything to report.
Short Wave
Not All Nature Comebacks Are Equal
Well, I think if land is being abandoned, you know, agriculture is retreating. I think it does kind of open up this space for creative sort of thinking about what could happen to this land. And maybe we try to manage it. Maybe we as humans sort of pull back and watch. But I think it's a really fascinating sort of opportunity.
Short Wave
Not All Nature Comebacks Are Equal
Villages in Eastern Europe, places in South Korea, mountainous parts of India, southern France, Spain, Portugal. These places were never ideal for farming in the first place because, you know, some places it's hilly or rocky or they don't get much rain. The amount of farmland that's been abandoned could be as much as half the area of Australia.