Great swaths of Europe are surrendering
to nature as human birthrates plunge and
unemployment draws people into the big
industrial hubs.
Stefan Kronert, a researcher at the
Berlin Institute of Population and
Development, said: “There is a kind of
suction towards the metropolitan centres.
People are leaving behind the old mines
and quarries, farmland that can no longer
be profitably harvested, and they forage
for work.”
Europe will lose 41 million people by
2030 if today’s birthrates continue to
languish at the present level. About 22 of
the 25 countries with the lowest birthrate
in the world are in Europe. Poor but
rapidly changing countries such as Romania
and Bulgaria are undergoing a quiet social
revolution. And in its wake comes the
wildlife.
Wolves disappeared from eastern Germany
around 1850. Suddenly they are back. They
started moving westwards, probably from
the Carpathian Mountains, over the Neisse
River, which divides Poland from Germany.
The animals moved into the overgrown acres
of artillery ranges and exercise grounds
abandoned by the Soviet forces in Saxony.
The wolves feed off deer and are
flourishing; two packs have already formed
and biologists say that a third is taking
shape.
The human population of eastern
Germany, by contrast, is dwindling. Almost
one million have left for western Germany
since unification. Villages are dying out.
One community, Horno, has been reduced to
two people. They are hanging on, resisting
an electricity company’s attempts to
bulldoze their home in the search for
coal.
Frank Mörschel, of the German branch of
the World Wide Fund for Nature, said: “In
the long run, we can count on wolves
repopulating much of eastern Germany — as
long as humans let it happen.”
Wolves are on the move throughout
Europe and the reason is always the same:
they sense a change in human behaviour. It
became clear last year that Italian wolves
were moving across the Alps to the French
side. The mountainside sheep farmers in
France were allowing their flocks to graze
without protection. There was no choice;
the young were leaving the villages and
farming dynasties were dying out. The
wolves saw their chance and crossed the
border.
Across Europe, and across species, it
is a similar story.
The Polish migrants arriving in
Victoria bus station come mainly from
eastern Poland, from tiny villages
scattered along the Ukrainian frontier.
They send money home to support their
elderly relatives but ultimately the
communities are doomed and are already
shrinking. The wildlife, searching for
food and minimal contact with humans,
fills the vacated space.
In Slovenia, the brown bear population
has risen to 700 — the second-largest
after Romania — and they prowl the dense
forest land of the Alpine republic. But
the country is small and there are
frequent confrontations with humans.
“The situation is so critical that in
some villages kids need a bus to take them
to a school only a kilometre or so away
because they run into a bear virtually
every day,” a senior official at the
Slovene Agriculture Ministry said.
The bears are, almost certainly, more
frightened than the pupils and so they
have begun a migration into the Austrian
province of Carinthia. There they have
more space to roam and better chances to
steal livestock. Most of the brown bears
have come northwards from war-plagued
Bosnia and Croatia in the 1990s. Now
instead of fleeing war they are fleeing
rapidly modernising Slovenia for the most
depressed region of Austria.
Wildcats and ospreys are reasserting
themselves across eastern Germany.
Domestic cats left by families who have
moved westwards are even crossbreeding
with wildcats.
However, Dr Kronert said: “Don’t count
on a major return to nature in western
Germany. Even if the birthrate is going
down there too, it is still too densely
populated. The key areas are not even
necessarily those on the borders with
Eastern Europe. Look at the Prignitz, half
way between Hamburg and Berlin — people
are leaving in droves and the region is
becoming more and more like a nature
reserve.”
