MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
We often hear about farmers clearing land to graze cattle or grow crops. Paradoxically, the opposite is also happening. Since 1950, farmers around the world have simply walked away from millions of acres, abandoning an area that could be as large as half of Australia. It provokes mixed reactions. Dan Charles has the story.
DAN CHARLES, BYLINE: In southern Bulgaria, in the village of Tyurkmen, brick houses are sitting empty. Their roofs are falling in. Gergana Daskalova points to a child's book lying amid the ruins.
GERGANA DASKALOVA: Somebody poured their heart and soul in creating a home, and now it's all collapsing.
CHARLES: Daskalova spent summers here as a child with her grandparents. Then she studied in Scotland, became an ecologist, but during the pandemic she moved back here, to her grandparents' house.
DASKALOVA: There were no windows when we moved in, and...
CHARLES: No windows?
DASKALOVA: Yeah. Yeah. The windows were broken, and a cat came in and gave birth on my rug.
CHARLES: A century ago, a thousand people lived in Tyurkmen. Today, there are only about 200. People left for jobs in Bulgaria's cities or abroad, and many of the fields around the village where they grew crops or grazed sheep just sit there unused. Shrubs and small trees are taking over.
DASKALOVA: 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.
CHARLES: This is a common situation in Bulgaria. Actually, in lots of places, wherever farmers can't make a good living because the land is hilly or rocky or water is scarce. It happened a century ago in upstate New York and in parts of New England. A lot of that abandoned farmland turned into forests. More recently, farmers have walked away from land in Eastern Europe, India, Central Asia, Japan, South Korea. Daskalova says it's having a profound effect on ecosystems, but doesn't get the attention it deserves. She's now a research fellow at the University of Gottingen in Germany, and she's trying to figure out whether abandoned land is an ecological tragedy or an opportunity.
DASKALOVA: It's happening out of sight, out of mind. That's why so many people don't even realize that a abandonment is happening, because it's out of their sight.
CHARLES: She's set up study sites in dozens of Bulgarian villages. She takes me to one up in the mountains.
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DASKALOVA: So here, you can see how the vegetation is taking over.
CHARLES: This is a ghost village. Nobody lives here anymore - at least not officially. Ivy and wild blackberries are climbing over the empty houses.
DASKALOVA: And basically, as far as we can see, it's just brambles.
CHARLES: Daskalova says the blackberries are suffocating the community of birds and plants that used to live here in gardens and orchards. It shows why many European environmentalists want old-style farmers to stay in business. Without people, cattle or sheep around, meadows filled with wildflowers and butterflies give way to shrubs and trees, which ecologists say are usually less diverse.
There's increasing debate about that, though. Henrique Pereira, a researcher with the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research, was living in northern Portugal a couple of decades ago. He saw people giving up on cattle grazing, and suddenly, wild creatures like roe deer and ibex and wild boar started to show up.
HENRIQUE PEREIRA: And then I thought, oh, this is kind of a cool opportunity.
CHARLES: He's been pushing European officials to embrace that opportunity. When farming pulls back, he says, it can create something rare in Europe - landscapes that are wilder, with room for creatures like wolves that farming once drove away.
PEREIRA: Can you start thinking about these landscapes differently? Can you start looking at the positive side of these changes? Yes, is what I would say.
CHARLES: There's a trendy new name for this - rewilding. An organization called Rewilding Europe is active in 10 different regions where humans are moving out. They're helping wildlife to move in.
For NPR News, I'm Dan Charles in Tyurkmen, Bulgaria.
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