Nature's reconquest of Europe

Newsweek is on my talking points again. A very interesting take on the European bed-death. After centuries of expansion, humans are retreating from Europe's wilderness. It seems that the latest wave of non-Muslim newcomers happen to be just as undemocratic: Wolves.

Germans are getting used to a new kind of immigrant. In 1998, a pack of wolves crossed the shallow Neisse River on the Polish-German border. In the empty landscape of Eastern Saxony, speckled with abandoned strip mines and declining villages, the wolves found plenty of deer and rarely encountered humans. They multiplied so quickly that a second pack has since split off, colonizing a second-growth pine forest 30 kilometers further west.
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A hundred years ago, a burgeoning, land-hungry population killed off the last of Germany's wolves. Today, it's the local humans whose numbers are under threat. Wolf-country villages like Boxberg and Weisswasser are emptying out, thanks to the region's ultralow birthrate and continued rural flight. Nearby Hoyerswerda is Germany's fastest-shrinking town, losing 25,000 of its 70,000 residents in the last 15 years. ...Home to 22 of the world's 25 lowest-birthrate countries, Europe will lose 41 million people by 2030 even with continued immigration, ...
As Italians, Spaniards, Germans and others produce barely half the children needed to maintain the status quo—and rural flight continues to suck people into Europe's suburbs and cities—the countryside will lose close to a third of its population, say both the United Nations and the EU. "It's a triple time bomb," says University of Lisbon demographer Nuno da Costa. "Too few children, too many old people and too many of the remaining young people still leaving the village."
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An ancient hill town in the eastern Peloponnese, Prastos once had 1,000 residents, most of them working the land. Now only a dozen are left, most in their 60s and 70s. With no children, the school has been closed since 1988. Sunday church bells no longer ring. "The old people here will die," says visiting ex-resident Petros Litrivis, 60. "Everything will be abandoned." Without farmers to tend the fields, rain has washed away the once fertile soil. Of the 50,000 goats that once grazed the hills, only a fraction remain. As in much of Greece, land that has been orchards and pasture for some 2,000 years is now covered with a parched scrub that, in the summer, frequently catches fire.
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In Italy, more than 60 percent of the country's 2.6 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 Italian farmland) that has already been abandoned.
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Santo Stefano di Sessanio in central Italy—down from 1,700 in the early 20th century to 124 mostly elderly people today...
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In the Swiss canton of Graubunden, where the number of children has sharply dropped, school authorities in the 1980s reintroduced one-room schoolhouses in hundreds of hamlets. "Now we're entering the next phase," says Dany Bazzell of the Graubunden schools department. "There are so few children that not even the one-room schools will survive."
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With the EU alone needing about 1.6 million immigrants a year above its current level to keep the working-age population stable between now and 2050, a much more likely source of migrants would be Europe's Muslim neighbors, whose young populations are set to almost double in that same time.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see where this is going.

"But for thousands of years we Europeans are used to having fields and orchards and pastures around our towns," says Michel Revaz, a Swiss Alpine biologist. "It's part of our genes."

What genes Michel? What genes are YOU leaving behind? The landscape, he says, is glued to the European identity, reflecting what the Germans call "Kulturlandschaft"—a landscape shaped by centuries of human care. Today's unprecedented population decline, amplified by the shifting economics of farming, puts the future of many of those Kulturlandschaften in doubt, just as pressure to cut the subsidies that fund them rises. Many Europeans are reluctant to just let nature do its thing. "We still cry when the woods close in," Revaz says. Unless, of course, you're a fan of the wolves.

Is that all you can do? Cry? Hey, I have a few million folks in Yemen that would love to have your valley. Remember, they only want peace. (apologies to Mel Brooks); a little piece of England, a little piece of France, a little piece of Holland, a little piece of Denmark - perchance.......

This isn't The 30 Years War. This isn't The Black Death. This is all a result of a conscience decision. A selfish, narcissistic population is so concerned with their extended adolescence; busy worried about their figures; wanting to have it all; and so polluted their wombs that they are infertile.

As a result, their world will be gone. They won't have a legacy to turn over to their non-existent children. If they don't control immigration from The Maghreb and Arabia the only legacy they will leave what few young others have is a Bosnia writ large. The tipping point is coming. Time is running out, but I forgot, you have your holiday in Spain to focus on.

Hat tip to Stanley Kurtz at The Corner.