Not All Nature Comebacks Are Equal

Ecologist Gergana Daskalova https://gndaskalova.com/ 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 https://www.science.org/content/author/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 https://www.science.org/content/article/farmers-are-abandoning-land-worldwide-what-should-happen-it and NPR https://www.npr.org/2025/01/03/nx-s1-5246186/farmers-are-abandoning-their-land-is-that-good-for-nature. Want us to cover other about ecology, biodiversity or land science stories? Let us know by emailing [email protected] mailto:[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 http://plus.npr.org/shortwave. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:15Emily Kwong?

  You're listening to Short Wave from NPR. Hey, Short Wavers, 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?

• 0:30Speaker 02

  This is a very specific scene you have painted, Emily.

• 0:32Emily Kwong?

  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?

• 0:42Speaker 02

  They are remnants of fences. They are like ghosts of vanished ecosystems.

• 0:48Emily Kwong?

  Intriguing. OK, what do you mean?

• 0:50Speaker 02

  Well, you see, a lot of the forests in the eastern US 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.

• 1:07Emily Kwong?

  And I guess a forest came back?

• 1:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. This is what ecologists call succession.

• 1:12Emily Kwong?

  Not the TV show, which I don't like. But I love the ecological concept of forests taking over.

• 1:19Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:59Emily Kwong?

  Wow, I thought that farmers were clearing more land and growing more crops to feed more people.

• 2:03Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:17Emily Kwong?

  OK, 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?

• 2:28Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:42Speaker 03

  Look, this was a road once.

• 2:44Speaker 02

  Through here?

• 2:45Speaker 03

  Yes, yeah.

• 2:46Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:58Speaker 03

  Do we let nature take over? And then what kind of nature is taking over is what I'm trying to figure out.

• 3:06Speaker 02

  And I'll tell you, Emily, these questions are not just scientific ones. For her, they are very personal.

• 3:12Emily Kwong?

  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.

• 3:22Speaker 02

  And I'm Dan Charles.

• 3:23Emily Kwong?

  And you are listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

• 3:35Speaker 00

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• 4:59Emily Kwong?

  Dan, you just said that this phenomenon of abandoned land is personal for Gergana. Why is that?

• 5:05Speaker 02

  Gergana has an interesting story. When she was growing up, she spent summers with her grandparents in this village called Chirkman.

• 5:13Speaker 03

  My clock revolved around the animals going to pasture and coming back from pastures.

• 5:18Speaker 02

  It was a place with just a few hundred people. More cows and goats, actually.

• 5:23Speaker 03

  It would be very cool if you can wake up before the animals go to pasture from 6:00 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.

• 5:36Emily Kwong?

  That sounds so idyllic.

• 5:37Speaker 02

  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 Chirkman 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.

• 6:07Emily Kwong?

  Oh, so somebody still owns the land. They just aren't doing anything with it.

• 6:10Speaker 02

  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 Gergana, actually.

• 6:22Speaker 03

  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.

• 6:35Emily Kwong?

  Wow, what an inheritance to not know about.

• 6:38Speaker 02

  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 Gergana was part of this.

• 6:50Speaker 03

  One day I became one of those people who left.

• 6:52Speaker 02

  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.

• 7:13Emily Kwong?

  And who better to study it than someone who knew it firsthand and kind of was a part of it?

• 7:18Speaker 02

  Right. So as part of her research, she moved back to Chirikma.

• 7:22Speaker 03

  There were no windows when I originally moved in.

• 7:24Speaker 02

  No windows?

• 7:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, 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.

• 7:32Emily Kwong?

  The great cat delivery system. Okay, so what did Gergana want to figure out? Like, what'd she want to research upon her return?

• 7:41Speaker 02

  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. They have audio recorders in trees to identify the sounds of birds and bat species.

• 8:12Emily Kwong?

  That is so cool.

• 8:14Speaker 02

  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.

• 8:42Speaker 03

  The blackberries are suppressing the growth of anything else, though.

• 8:48Speaker 02

  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.

• 9:06Emily Kwong?

  Oh, this finding surprises me. So she believes that when humans disappear, at least according to her research, it's actually bad for biodiversity.

• 9:15Speaker 02

  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.

• 9:42Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, right. And without them, it becomes, I don't know, like BlackBerry Central, or I don't know, what happens?

• 9:47Speaker 02

  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 golden bra. 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 these cultural landscapes are not nature.

• 10:19Emily Kwong?

  Oh.

• 10:20Speaker 02

  They're museum pieces, artificial, kind of like open-air zoos or botanical gardens.

• 10:26Emily Kwong?

  Yeah. So this, this other point of view is saying, listen, the land is being shaped, has been shaped by farmers, there's been human influence.

• 10:33Speaker 02

  And, 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.

• 10:50Emily Kwong?

  And it reminds me of the forest of my childhood in New England. Have forests been set free in other parts of the world?

• 10:56Speaker 02

  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.

• 11:31Emily Kwong?

  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.

• 11:43Speaker 02

  That's what they're observing. Ecological change can be really slow and also unpredictable. Case in point, I talked to this researcher who's 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.

• 12:13Emily Kwong?

  Yeah, which is why it's such a great thing for scientists to study.

• 12:16Speaker 02

  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.

• 12:39Emily Kwong?

  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?

• 12:50Speaker 02

  Well, I think if land is being abandoned, 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.

• 13:17Emily Kwong?

  Dan Charles, science reporter. Thank you so much for bringing us this story.

• 13:20Speaker 02

  Thank you, Emily.

• 13:22Emily Kwong?

  Shortwaivers, 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 [email protected]. This episode was produced by Burley McCoy. It was edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez, and fact-checked by Tyler Jones. Jimmy Keely was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director, and Colin Campbell is our senior vice president of podcasting strategy. I'm Emily Kwong. Thank you for listening to this episode of Short Wave from NPR.

• 14:02Speaker 04

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