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This message comes from Fred Hutch Cancer Center, whose discovery of bone marrow transplants has saved over a million lives worldwide. Learn how this and other breakthroughs impact the world at fredhutch.org slash look beyond. 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. Intriguing. Okay, 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.
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? Yeah.
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. Do we let nature take over? And then what kind of nature is taking over is what I'm trying to figure out. And I'll tell you, Emily, these questions are not just scientific ones. For her, they are very personal.
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. This message comes from Carvana. Discover your car's worth with Carvana Value Tracker. Stay up to date when your car's value changes. Always know your car's worth with Carvana Value Tracker.
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 Chirkman. 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 come. 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. Oh, so somebody still owns the land. They just aren't doing anything with it. 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. Yeah.
Like my family has fields that we inherited from my grandparents that I don't know where they are. Like if I look across the landscape, I like 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. What?
The great cat delivery system. Okay, so what did Gargana want to figure out? Like, what'd she want to research upon her return? 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. Right.
And they're going to these study sites. They're counting the number of plant species. They have audio recorders in trees to identify the sounds of birds and bat species. That is so cool. 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. The blackberries are suppressing the growth of anything else, though.
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. Oh, this finding surprises me. So she believes that when humans disappear, at least according to her research, it's actually bad for biodiversity. 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. But the thing is, these landscapes only exist because farmers are there maintaining the fields and grazing animals on the pasture. Yeah, right. And without them, it becomes, I don't know, like Blackberry Central or I don't know what happens. 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. Right.
Some researchers in Poland have reported that abandoned farmland there has been taken over by invasive species, like goldnod. That's a bush with bright yellow flowers, and it's preventing trees from growing. So this is the one view that land abandonment is a threat to nature. But there's another philosophical camp which says that
These cultural landscapes are not nature. Oh. They're museum pieces, artificial, kind of like open-air zoos or botanical gardens. Yeah. So this other point of view is saying, listen, the land has been shaped by farmers. There's been human influence. And these ecologists are saying nature is something different. It's wilder, more dynamic, with species interacting, landscapes changing. Yeah.
And they say land abandonment really is an opportunity. It's a chance to set nature free. And it reminds me of the forest of my childhood in New England. Have forests been set free in other parts of the world? 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
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. I love how even in the let nature live school of thought, humans are still having a hand in bringing back some of their favorite species. Even though, ultimately, shaping an ecosystem is a slow process.
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. He said, I've changed my mind over time. Every place is different. The answer seems to keep changing.
Yeah, which is why it's such a great thing for scientists to study. 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. It'll be a few years, actually, before they really have anything to report. Dan, when you think about the end result of this research, how do you hope it will be used in shaping environmental stewardship in the future of land? Well, I think if land is being abandoned, you know, agriculture is retreating. I think it does kind of open up this space
the 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. Dan Charles, science reporter. Thank you so much for bringing us this story. Thank you, Emily.
Shortwavers, thank you for listening. Make sure you never miss a new episode by following us on whichever podcast platform you're listening to. And if you have a science question, send us an email at shortwave at npr.org.
This episode was produced by Burleigh McCoy. It was edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez, and fact-checked by Tyler Jones. Jimmy Keeley was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director. And Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I am Emily Kwong. Thank you for listening to this episode of Shortwave from NPR. This is Ira Glass of This American Life. Each week on our show, we choose a theme, tell different stories on that theme, and
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