Homeland No More:

Seeking the Biocultural Origins of Landscape Abandonment in the Mediterranean Basin

ABSTRACT
Olive landscapes around the Mediterranean sea were once havens of human inspiration and ecological complexity, part and parcel of lyrical odysseys and sustainability. Today, those olive populations that are not part of a swelling ocean of gridded, chemical-drenched clones, are increasingly abandoned. Cultural landscape abandonment is a rapidly growing category of landcover change and climate mobility around the world which leads to numerous unfavorable environmental outcomes including genetic erosion of irreplaceable species, decreased species richness, increased refuge for agricultural and forest pests and pathogens, and increased fuel load for wildfire. Any prospect of arresting this intensifying pattern is hampered by the fact that prevailing frames for explaining rural abandonment are narrowly based on the financial and lifestyle incentives inherent in rural to urban migration, international trade dynamics, and state incentivization of rewilding. These theories obscure the involuntary and hurtful loss of place, territory, heritage and sustainability experienced by many persons in the process, including the migrants themselves and those they leave behind. They also preclude the recognition and investigation of 'push' phenomena which fuel individual, family and community decisions to emigrate or deploy others to do so. The central hypothesis of the proposed cross-cultural investigation in Morocco and Turkey into the state of one of the most powerful tree-people bonds in history is simple: in confluence with conventionally accepted 'pull' explanations of rural outmigration, the decrease in environmental quality – perceived by local citizens in their own explicit terms – degrades place attachment and 'pushes' families and individuals to leave. This proposed research promises to create societally relevant impact in two critical areas. First, it addresses head on the glaring failure of academic and governmental efforts to problematize or even perceive rural abandonment. Second, through application of a novel, interdisciplinary and replicable field research methodology to a culturally, linguistically and historically diverse set of communities, this research will generate transferable practice and insights for better understanding, gauging and supporting the relationships between place attachment to environmental quality around the world. This biocultural inquiry also promises a new and impactful understanding of the relationships between global weirding and a number of extremely pressing global societal questions, including those around climate mobilities, the growth of slums, the authoritarian nationalist turn in agrarian politics, and the socioecological preconditions for wildfires and agricultural disease epidemics.

KEYWORDS: cultural landscapes, rural abandonment, traditional ecological value, folk valuation, cultural memory