Then we swung the boat round, and drifted through a wide, shallow stretch. Far ahead of us, someone poled across the river from Slovenia to Croatia in a punt, moving into then out of the narrow band of sunlight. We passed her house. Overhanging the water was an apple tree. I could see the red and green apples, turning slowly in the eddies along the bank, occasionally flaring in the light half a mile downstream. I scooped a few out of the river and we ate them as we lay in the boat.
After a few more weirs, which we crossed with a little more dignity, we drifted into a deep, narrow chasm, between limestone bluffs. I stared down into the water. Though it was some three fathoms deep here, the river was so clear that I could see the bottom, and the shadows of the fish which passed over it like unformed thoughts.
As we emerged from the gorge I noticed a creature unlike anything I had seen before. Sickly grey with large black spots, a big head with a hooked jaw, the cold yellow eyes of a wolf, as long and lean as a pike, it continued, unafraid of us, to patrol the bank, hunting. It was a huchen, the predatory landlocked salmon of the Danube catchment. At three or four pounds this one was still an infant; some reach sixty.
The rivers further north, which drain into the Adriatic, also contain monsters. The marbled trout which inhabit them, like the huchen, grow to sixty pounds. A fisherman I spoke to on the banks of the River Soča told me that sometimes when he had hooked a grayling and was bringing it to the net, a monstrous trout would loom out from behind a boulder, snatch it off the hook and swallow it whole. As the forests of Slovenia had recovered, so had the rivers. The soil was bound up by the roots of the trees and could no longer be stripped from the land, so they now ran clear. They were contaminated by neither pesticides nor fertilizers, and, because the woods slowly released the water that fell on them, they did not suffer the worst extremes of flood or drought.
Tomaž Hartmann drove for almost an hour along a forest track through Kočevski Rog. The woods of beech and silver fir towered over us, in places almost touching across the road. Their roots sprawled over mossy boulders. They rolled down into limestone sinkholes: karstic craters. Karst topography–weathered limestone landscapes of chasms and caves, sinkholes, shafts and pavements–is named after this region of Slovenia, which is sometimes called the Kras or Karst plateau. The word means barren land. When Karst landscapes are grazed they are rapidly denuded, but it was hard to connect the term with what I now saw.
Where the road clung to the edge of a hill, I could see for many miles across the Dinaric Mountains. The view was framed by the tops of the trees beneath us, through which the sunlight filtered. The mountains rambled across the former Yugoslavia, fading into ever fainter susurrations of blue. The entire range was furred with forest. Where the road sank into a pass, the darkness closed around us. Through the trunks I could see the air thicken, shade upon shade of green. A few yards from the road a fox sat watching us. Its copper fur glowed like a cinder in the shadows, which cooled to charcoal in the tips of its ears. It raised its black stockings and loped away into the depths. Woodpeckers swung along the track ahead of us.
The leaves of the beeches glittered in the silver light above our heads. The great firs grazed the sun, straight as lances. They looked as if they had been there for ever.
‘All this,’ Tomaž told us, ‘has grown since the 1930s.’
He parked the car and we set off up a forest trail. Mushrooms nosed through the leaf litter beside the path. Saffron milk caps, orange and sickly green, curled up at the edges like Japanese ceramics. Dryad’s saddle, sulphur tuft and cauliflower fungus accreted around rotting stumps. Russulas–scarlet, mauve and gold–brightened the forest floor.
Tomaž led us up a tumbled limestone slope towards a stand of virgin forest, the ancient core of the great woods which had regenerated over the past century. As we climbed, we stepped into a ragged fringe of cloud. Sounds were muffled. The trees loomed darkly out of the fog. Tomaž spoke as we walked about the dynamism of the forest system: how it never reached a point of stasis, but tumbled through a constant cycle of change. He had noticed some major shifts, and knew that, as the climate warmed, there would be plenty more. Though he described himself as both a forester and a conservationist, he had no wish to interrupt this cycle, or to seek to select and freeze a particular phase in the succession from one state to another. He sought only to protect the forests, as far as his job permitted, from destruction by people.
Now in his sixties, he had worked in these forests for most of his adult life. He was a gentle, engaging man, with a mild face and a white beard, who appeared to be at peace with his life. Working in the forests, he said, had, with his family, given him all the delight and purpose in life a man could wish for. When he was not working, he made ephemeral sculptures in the woods, from leaves and snow and fallen branches.
Ahead of us something dark and compact shot across the path in a blur and disappeared into the undergrowth: probably, Tomaž said, a young wild boar. Then, though it was not clear where the transition occurred, we found ourselves in the primeval core of the forest. The trees we had walked past until then were impressive, but these were built on a different scale. The beeches grew, unbranched for one hundred feet–smooth pillars wrapped in elephant skin–until they blossomed, like giant gardenias, into a leafy plateau in the forest canopy. Silver firs pushed past them, the biggest topping out at almost 150 feet. Only where they had fallen could you appreciate the scale of their trunks.
The forest had entered a cycle Tomaž had not seen before, in which many of the giants had perished. Some had died where they stood, and remained upright, reamed with beetle and woodpecker holes, sprouting hoof fungi and razorstrops. They looked as if a whisper of wind could blow them down. Others now stretched across the rocks and craters, sometimes blocking our path, sometimes suspended above our heads. Among the trunks lying on the ground, some were so thick that I could scarcely see over them. Where they had fallen, thickets of saplings crowded into the light. Seeing the profusion of fungus and insect life the dead wood harboured, I was reminded of the old ecologists’ aphorism: there is more life in dead trees than there is in living trees. The tidy-minded forestry so many nations practise deprives many species of their habitats.
On a large rotten log which had lost its bark and was now furry with green algae, Tomaž showed us two sets of four white marks: deep parallel scratches where a bear had sharpened its claws. He told us that he had seen plenty of bears in the forest, but–though they are abundant here–never a wolf or a lynx. Just knowing that they were there enriched and electrified every moment he spent in the forest. I felt it too, like a third beat of the heart. The forest seemed to bristle with possibility. Here, to mangle Auden, nature’s jungle growths were unabated, her exorbitant monsters unabashed.3 This great rewilding, Tomaž explained, was the accidental result of a series of hideous human tragedies.
Some 150 years ago, just 30 per cent of the Kočevje region, 95 per cent of which is now forested, was covered by trees. Much of the forest was preserved by the Princes of Auersperg as hunting estates. So obsessed by hunting were they, as princes often seem to be, that they and the other great lords of the Habsburg monarchy in Slovenia and Croatia drew up an official declaration of friendship with the bear, signed and stamped with their great seals, in which they agreed to sustain its numbers so that they could continue to pursue it. The role the bears played in this negotiation is unrecorded.
The revolutions of 1848 brought feudalism to an end in central Europe. Local farmers lost their rights to graze common land, but acquired their own private plots. At around the same time, imports of cheap wool from New Zealand began undermining the European industry. By the end of the nineteenth century, many peasant farmers had sold their land and either moved to the cities or emigrated to America. The Depression of the 1930s further extended the woods–to around 50 per cent of Kočevje–as more people departed. But the greatest expansion of the forest took place as a result of what happened in the following decade.
Most of the population of south-western Slovenia–around 33,000 people–was ethnic German. They kept sheep and goats in the hills and ran much of the trade in the towns. Under King Alexsander’s autocracy in the ten years before the Second World War, the Germans of Yugoslavia, around half a million in total, suffered discrimination and exclusion. In response, many of them joined German nationalist movements, some of which soon allied themselves to the Nazis. By 1941, when Hitler’s army suddenly invaded Yugoslavia, over 60 per cent of its ethnic Germans had joined an organization, the Kulturbund, which became absorbed into Himmler’s euphemistically titled Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle, or Ethnic Germans’ Welfare Office.*3
Hitler ceded south-western Slovenia to Italy and the Nazis forcibly relocated many of the Yugoslav Germans to the Third Reich, to preserve their ‘ethnic purity’ and protect them from attacks by partisans. Some of the Germans of Kočevje were transferred to eastern Slovenia, some removed to other lands under German rule.
The horrors of the 1990s in Yugoslavia were a faint echo of what happened there during the Second World War. Many ethnic and religious groups committed atrocities, conducting expulsions, massacres and genocidal cleansing which stand out even among the other disasters of war. Almost a million people died in the Yugoslavian civil strife triggered by the Nazi invasion. Some of these great crimes were committed by the Prinz Eugen Division of the SS, among whose members were Yugoslavian ethnic Germans. They massacred Jews, partisans and communists and people believed to sympathize with them.
After the Axis forces were routed, Marshall Tito’s communist government found it convenient to blame ethnic Germans for many of the horrors perpetrated by other people. This was, it seems, easier than facing the truth: that atrocities were committed by Croats, Serbs, Bosnians, Albanians, Hungarians, Nazis, communists, monarchists, Orthodox Christians, Catholics and Muslims. Almost all the Yugoslavian Germans who did not flee the country with the Axis armies were either expelled by Tito’s government or interned, often in forced labour camps. Some were taken by the Soviet Union’s Red Army to camps in the Ukraine. Within a few years of the end of the war in Yugoslavia, the German population had dropped by some 98 per cent.5
Many others who collaborated with the Third Reich were killed. The six battalions of the Slovenian Home Guard fled with the retreating German troops to Austria in May 1945.6 They were forcibly repatriated by the British. Driving with Tomaž through the forests of Kočevski Rog, I had seen beside the road great trunks like totem poles carved by the sculptor Stare Jarm into the tortured figures of Christian martyrs. They marked the sinkholes beside which some thousands of collaborators were lined up and machine-gunned. The partisans then used explosives to make the craters collapse, burying the corpses.
The barren lands of Kočevje, whose population had been relocated and dispersed first by the Nazis then by the socialist government and the Red Army, were never recolonized. When the farms were abandoned and the pastures no longer grazed by sheep and goats, the seed which rained into them from the neighbouring woods was allowed to sprout once more. The land has been repopulated by trees.
In the Soča valley, in north-western Slovenia, Jernej Stritih, a clever, laconic head of department in the Slovenian government, with a thick beard and splendid moustaches, whom we had befriended in Ljubljana, took us to a restaurant a friend of his ran in the front room of his farmhouse. The proprietor owned a small herd of sheep, which were kept for show and to make cheese to sell to tourists. We had seen them on display that morning in the Trenta Fair, massive beasts weighed down by trailing yellow coats. They had won first prize, and now a large gilt cup stood on a table, glimmering in the low brown light, while he, in a leather waistcoat and bushy side-whiskers, drank and talked with his friends. From time to time he would stop talking and, almost as if he were unaware that he was doing so, bend down to play the dulcimer on the table before him, while the other men continued their conversation.
As we ate, Jernej explained that our host was one of the last shepherds in the region. Because there was no longer any arable production in the valley, the few remaining sheep could stay in the lowlands and were never led into the mountains. Here, by contrast to Kočevje, there had been no mass dispossession of local people. A different social tragedy had been engineered. In the 1950s, he told us, Tito had banned the goat. The ostensible purpose was to protect the environment, but doubtless he also sought to drag the peasantry out of what Marx and Engels called its ‘rural idiocy’ and press it into the urban proletariat. (The peasants of eastern Europe had perversely failed to fulfil the Communist Manifesto’s prediction that they would ‘decay and finally disappear in the face of modern industry’.) Without goats, which browsed back the scrub, the pastures became unsuitable for sheep.
The rewilding of the western side of Slovenia, the rapid regrowth of forests there and the recovery of its populations of bears, wolves, lynx, wild boar, ibex, martens, giant owls and other remarkable creatures, took place at the expense of its human population. This is not to suggest that it continues to generate social tragedy. On the contrary, this region has become a lucrative destination for high-end tourism, which supports what was, when we visited, a buoyant local economy. Slovenia’s rivers are said to offer the best fly-fishing in Europe. I spent a day working my way up a few miles of the Soča, a glorious tumble of turquoise water winding through limestone gorges, watching a tiny dry fly bouncing down the glides and eddies. To get back to where I had begun, I hitched a lift along the valley road. I was picked up by a local van driver.
‘You’re fishing, when the water’s so high?’
‘It’s the only chance I have.’
‘It’s unfishable today. How did you do?’
‘I caught ten.’
‘Just as I said. Unfishable.’
The forests and their wildlife, the mountains, repopulated by ibex and chamois, the caves with their endemic species of blind salamander, known to locals as the human fish on account of its smooth pink skin, the rivers with their steady flow and excellent whitewater rafting, the extraordinary beauty of this regenerated land, draw people from the rest of Slovenia, from all over Europe and beyond. As I talked to many Slovenians, it became clear that the integrity of the natural environment was now a source of national pride.
The forests give rise to other industries too. We happened to pass through Ribnica, on the way to Kočevje, on the day of the annual wood market. We stopped for a few hours and walked among perhaps a hundred stalls, selling snaths and grass rakes, scratters and presses, besoms and brooms, trugs and baskets, stools and barrels, cradles and rocking horses, racks and rolling pins. Men sporting waistcoats, sugar-loaf hats and enormous moustaches eased their way through the crowds, playing their accordions. The market square had been set with tables, and we joined a municipal barbecue that fed hundreds. The woodwares being sold that day, we were told, were a small part of the output of a thriving cottage industry begun in the Middle Ages, when the Habsburg emperor granted the region’s population unlimited rights to sell its wares throughout the empire, in the hope of alleviating local poverty. No one would become a millionaire this way, but it kept people and their communities alive.
None of this is to deny a disquieting truth, however. Slovenia is just one example of a global phenomenon. Most of the rewilding that has taken place on earth so far has happened as a result of humanitarian disasters.
Throughout the Americas–North, Meso and South–the first Europeans to arrive in the sixteenth century reported dense settlement and large-scale farming. Some of them were simply not believed. Francisco de Orellana and Brother Gaspar de Carvajal, who travelled the length of the River Amazon in 1542, claimed that they had seen walled cities in which many thousands of people lived, raised highways and extensive farming along its banks.7 When later expeditions visited the river they found no trace of them, just dense forest to the water’s edge and small scattered bands of hunter-gatherers. Orellana and Carvajal’s reports were dismissed as the ravings of f
antasists, seeking to boost commercial interest in the lands they had explored.
It was not until the late twentieth century that investigations by archaeologists such as Anna Roosevelt8 and Michael Heckenberger9 suggested that his accounts were probably accurate. In parts of the Amazon previously believed to have been scarcely habited Heckenberger and his colleagues have found evidence of garden cities surrounded by major earthworks and wooden palisades, built on grids and transected by broad avenues. In some places they have unearthed causeways, bridges and canals. The towns were connected to their satellite villages by road networks which were planned and extensive. These were advanced agricultural civilizations, maintaining fish farms as well as arable fields and orchards.10 It appears that European diseases–smallpox, measles, diphtheria, the common cold–brought to the Caribbean coast of South America by explorers and early colonists, passed down indigenous trade routes into the heart of the continent, where they raged through densely peopled settlements before any other Europeans reached them. So ferocious is the vegetation of the Amazon that it would have obliterated all visible traces of the civilizations its people built within a few years of their dissolution. The great várzea (floodplain) forests, whose monstrous trees inspired such wonder among eighteenth- and nineteenth-century expeditions, were probably not the primordial ecosystems the explorers imagined them to be.
The same goes for the fauna and flora of the rest of the Americas. Early hunter gatherers wiped out most of the megafauna of the western hemisphere. Some Native American civilizations–such as the Maya in the Yucatán–destroyed large tracts of forest. Places which were later seen as terra nullius or informem terris,*4 virgin lands unshaped by man, turn out to have been densely populated before all but the very first explorers arrived. As the writer Ran Prieur observes in the journal Dark Mountain:
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