Where Have All the People Gone？ Germans are getting used to a new kind of immigrant. In 19

Where Have All the People Gone？

Germans are getting used to a new kind of immigrant. In 1998, a pack of wolves crossed the Neisse River on the Polish-German border. In the empty landscape of eastern Saxony, dotted with abandoned mines and declining villages, the wolves found plenty of deer and few humans. Five years later, a second pack split from the original, so there're now two families of wolves in the region. A hundred years ago, a growing land-hungry population killed off the last of Germany's wolves. Today, it's the local humans whose numbers are under threat.

Villages are empty, thanks to the region's low birth rate and rural flight. Home to 22 of the world's 25 lowest fertility rate countries, Europe will lose 30 million people by 2030, even with continued immigration. The biggest population decline will hit rural Europe. As Italians, Spaniards, Germans and others produce barely three-fifths of children needed to maintain status quo, and as rural flight sucks people into Europe's suburbs and cities, the countryside will lose a quarter of its population. The implications of this demographic (人口的) change will be far-reaching.

Environmental Changes

The postcard view of Europe is of a continent where every scrap of land has long been farmed, fenced off and settled. But the continent of the future may look rather different. Big parts of Europe will renaturalize. Bears are back in Austria. In Swiss Alpine valleys, farms have been receding and forests are growing back. In parts of France and Germany, wildcats and wolves have re-established their ranges.

The shrub and forest that grows on abandoned land might be good for deer and wolves, but is vastly less species-rich than traditional farming, with its pastures, ponds and hedges. Once shrub covers everything, you lose the meadow habitat. All the flowers, herbs, birds, and butterflies disappear. A new forest doesn't get diverse until a couple of hundred years old.

All this is not necessarily an environmentalist's dream it might seem. Take the Greek village of Prastos. An ancient hill town, Prastos once had 1,000 residents, most of them working the land. Now only a dozen left, most in their 60s and 70s. The school has been closed since 1988. Sunday church bells no longer ting. Without farmers to tend the fields, rain has washed away the once fertile soil. As in much of Greece, land that has been orchards and pasture for some 2,000 years is now covered with dry shrub that, in summer, frequently catches fire.

Varied Pictures of Rural Depopulation

Rural depopulation is not new. Thousands of villages like Prastos dot Europe, the result of a century or more of emigration, industrialization, and agricultural mechanization. But this time it's different because never has the rural birth rate so low. In the past, a farmer could usually find at least one of his offspring to take over the land. Today, the chances are that he has only a single son or daughter, usually working in the city and rarely willing to return. In Italy, more than 40% of the country's 1.9 million farmers are at least 65 years old. Once they die out, many of their farms will join the 6 million hectares — one third of Italy's farmland — that has already been abandoned.

Rising economic pressures, especially from reduced government subsidies, will amplify the trend. One third of Europe's farmland is marginal, from the cold northern plains to the dry Mediterranean (地中海) hills. Most of these farmers rely on EU subsides, since it's cheaper to import food from abroad. Without subsidies, some of the most scenic European landscapes wouldn't survive. In the Austrian or Swiss Alps, defined for centuries by orchards, cows, high mountain pastures, the steep valleys are labor-intensive to farm, with subsidies paying up to 90% of the cost. Across the border in France and Italy, subsidies have been reduced for mountain far

A．Y

B．N

C．NG