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
Chapter 1: What happens when land is abandoned?
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?
Chapter 2: Why are stone walls significant in northeastern forests?
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?
Chapter 3: How does ecological succession work?
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.
Chapter 4: What is the current state of farmland abandonment worldwide?
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.
Wow. I thought that farmers were clearing more land and growing more crops to feed more people.
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.
Okay. So focusing on abandoned land, when farmers walk away and the wilderness takes over, what happens? Like, is that good for the environment, for land to just be left alone?
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.
Look, this was a road once.
Through here?
Yes, yeah.
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.
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Chapter 5: Why is land abandonment a personal issue for Gergana Daskalova?
So today on the show, what happens when humans disappear from the landscape? If we love nature, do we tend it? Or set it free. I'm Emily Kwong.
And I'm Dan Charles.
And you are listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. Dan, you just said that this phenomenon of abandoned land is personal for Gargana. Why is that?
Gargana has an interesting story. When she was growing up, she spent summers with her grandparents in this village called Turkmen.
My clock revolved around the animals going to pasture and coming back from pastures.
It was a place with just a few hundred people. More cows and goats, actually.
It would be very cool if you can wake up before the animals go to pasture from 6 a.m. and they would wave the animals goodbye and then we would play on the streets all day. And then you just had to be back home before the buffaloes came. That sounds so idyllic.
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.
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.
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Chapter 6: What does the future hold for abandoned land?
My family has fields that we inherited from my grandparents that I don't know where they are. If I look across the landscape, I broadly know that they're that way, but I don't know where they actually are. Wow. What an inheritance to not know about.
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.
One day I became one of those people who left.
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.
And who better to study it than someone who knew it firsthand and kind of was a part of it?
Right. So as part of her research, she moved back to Turkmen.
There were no windows when I originally moved in.
No windows?
Yeah, the windows were broken and a cat came in and gave birth on my rug. And that's how I have my cats now.
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