填空题

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 farming. Since then, across the southern Alps, villages have emptied and forests have grown back in. Outside the range of subsidies, in Bulgaria, Romania and Ukraine, big tracts of land are returning to wild.
Big Challenges
The truth is varied and interesting. While many rural regions of Europe are emptying out, others will experience something of a renaissance. Already, attractive areas within driving distance of prosperous cities are seeing robust revivals, driven by urban flight and an in-flooding of childless retirees. Contrast that with less-favored areas, from the Spanish interior to eastern Europe. These face dying villages, abandoned farms and changes in the land not seen for generations. Both types of regions will have to cope with steeply ageing population and its accompanying health and service needs. Rural Europe is the laboratory of demographic changes.
For governments, the challenge has been to develop policies that slow the demographic decline or attract new residents. In some places such as Britain and France, large parts of countryside are reviving as increasingly wealthy urban middle class in search of second homes recolonises villages and farms. Villages in central Italy are counting on tourism to revive their town, turning farmhouses into hostels for tourists and hikers.
But once baby boomers start dying out around 2020, populations will start to decline so sharply that there simply won’t be enough people to reinvent itself. It’s simply unclear how long current government policies can put off the inevitable.
"We are now talking about civilized depopulation. We just have to make sure that old people we leave behind are taken care of." Says Mats Johansson of Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. The biggest challenge is finding creative ways to keep up services for the rising proportion of seniors. When the Austrian village of Klans, thinly spread over the Alpine foothills, decided it could no longer afford a regular public bus service, the community set up a public taxi-on-demand service for the aged. In thinly populated Lapland where doctors are few and far between, tech-savvy Finns the rising demand for specialized health care with a service that uses videoconferencing and the Internet for remote medical examination.
Another pioneer is the village of Aguaviva, one of rapidly depopulating areas in Spain. In 2000, Mayor Manznanares began offering free air-fares and housing for foreign families to settle in Aguaviva. Now the mud-brown town of about 600 has 130 Argentine and Romanian immigrants, and the town’s only school has 54 pupils. Immigration was one solution to the problem. But most foreign immigrants continue to prefer cities. And within Europe migration only exports the problem. Western European look towards eastern Europe as a source for migrants, yet those countries have ultra-low birth rates of their own.
Now the increasingly worried European governments are developing policies to make people have more children, from better childcare to monthly stipends (津贴) linked to family size. But while these measures might raise the birth rate slightly, across the much of the ageing continent there are just too few potential parents around.
(1,150 words)
Some attractive rural regions not far from the cities are witnessing a certain ______ , as more and more childless seniors move towards cities.