Ecologist Gergana Daskalova moved back to the small Bulgarian town of her childhood. It's a place many people have abandoned — and that's the very reason she returned. At the same time as land is being cleared around the world to make room for agriculture, elsewhere farmland is being abandoned for nature to reclaim. But what happens when people let the land return to nature? This episode, science reporter Dan Charles explains why abandoned land has conservationists and researchers asking: If we love nature, do we tend it or set it free?Read more of Dan's reporting for Science Magazine and NPR.Want us to cover other about ecology, biodiversity or land science stories? Let us know by emailing [email protected]! Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
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You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, Shortwavers, Emily Kwong here. So have you ever been on a hike, maybe in a forest in New England, and all of a sudden you see a perfectly laid row of stones and you think to yourself, what is that?
This is a very specific scene you have painted, Emily.
Well, I did grow up in Connecticut. And Dan, you recently wrote about this for Science Magazine. What are these random stone walls dotting so many northeastern forests?
They are remnants of fences. They are like ghosts of vanished ecosystems.
It's intriguing. OK, what do you mean?
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.
Not the TV show, which I don't like. But I love the ecological concept of forests taking over.
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.
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.
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