University of Gastronomic Sciences, Piazza Vittorio Emanuele 9, 12060, Bra/Pollenzo, Italy.
Department of Anthropology, Durham University, Durham, DH1 3LE, UK.
J Ethnobiol Ethnomed. 2022 Jun 1;18(1):42. doi: 10.1186/s13002-022-00535-7.
The abandonment of mountain areas in Europe is a process that started during industrialisation and whose traces are still present nowadays. Initiatives aimed at stopping this decline and preserving the local biological and cultural diversities reflect the crucial issue of fostering sustainable rural development. This article contributes to the ongoing debate in assessing and preserving local ecological knowledge (LEK) in a highly marginalised mountain community in the Piedmontese Apennines to support local development. In so doing, it continues a larger project assessing how local botanical knowledge and landscapes evolve over time, in order to understand in more depth which factors affect how LEK is shaped, eroded, and re-created, and how this could be revitalised.
We compared information about the current gathering and use of local wild plants in the upper Borbera Valley (Carrega Ligure municipality, NW Italy), elicited via 34 in-depth open and semi-structured interviews, with the findings of a field study conducted in the same location, most likely carried out at the end of the 1970s and published in 1981.
There were remarkable quantitative and qualitative differences between the two ethnobotanies. The gathering and use of some wild medicinal plants growing in meadows, woodlands, and higher mountain environments (Achillea, Centaurea, Dianthus, Ostrya, Picea, Polygonum, Potentilla, and Thymus) seems to have disappeared, whereas the collection of plants growing in more anthropogenic environments, or possibly promoted via contacts with the "reference" city of Genoa (the largest city close to Carrega and historically the economic and cultural centre to which the valley was mostly connected), has been introduced (i.e. ramsons, safflower, bitter oranges, black trumpets) or reinvigorated (rose petals). This trend corresponds to the remarkable changes in the local landscape ecology and agro-silvo-pastoral system that took place from the first half of the twentieth century, dramatically increasing woodland and secondary vegetation, and decreasing coppices, plantations, grasslands and segregating cultivated land.
The findings show a very difficult rearrangement of the LEK, as most of the areas the local actors still know are within their villages, and they no longer have daily experience in the rest of the abandoned woodland landscape (except for mushrooming and gathering chestnuts). This situation can be interpreted in two ways: as the start of the complete abandonment of the valley, or as a starting residual resilience lynchpin, which could possibly inspire new residents if the larger political-economic framework would promote measures for making the survival of the mountain settlements of this municipality possible, and not just a chimera.
欧洲山区的废弃是一个始于工业化时期的过程，其痕迹至今仍存在。旨在阻止这种衰落和保护当地生物和文化多样性的举措反映了促进可持续农村发展的关键问题。本文通过评估和保护皮埃蒙特亚平宁山脉一个高度边缘化山区社区的当地生态知识 (LEK) 来支持当地发展，为正在进行的辩论做出了贡献。在这样做的过程中，它延续了一个更大的项目，该项目评估了随着时间的推移，当地植物学知识和景观如何演变，以便更深入地了解哪些因素影响 LEK 的形成、侵蚀和再创造，以及如何使其恢复活力。
我们通过 34 次深入的开放式和半结构化访谈，比较了上博尔贝拉山谷（意大利西北部卡雷加利古雷市）当前采集和使用当地野生植物的信息，这些信息是通过访谈获得的，而访谈是在同一地点进行的，很可能是在 20 世纪 70 年代末进行的，并于 1981 年发表。
两种民族植物学之间存在显著的数量和质量差异。在草地、林地和更高的山地环境中生长的一些野生药用植物的采集和使用似乎已经消失（如蓍草、矢车菊、石竹、山毛榉、云杉、蓼属植物、委陵菜、百里香），而在更具人为环境中生长的植物的采集，或者可能通过与“参考”城市热那亚（离卡雷加最近的最大城市，历史上是山谷连接的经济和文化中心）的联系而引入（即龙蒿、藏红花、苦橙、黑喇叭）或复兴（玫瑰花瓣）。这种趋势与 20 世纪上半叶当地景观生态和农林牧系统发生的显著变化相对应，林地和次生植被显著增加，而灌丛、人工林、草地和隔离耕地减少。
研究结果表明，LEK 的调整非常困难，因为当地居民仍然了解的大部分地区都在他们的村庄内，而他们在其余废弃的林地景观中不再有日常经验（除了采蘑菇和采集栗子）。这种情况可以从两个方面来解释：一是山谷完全废弃的开始，二是可能激发新居民的残余弹性关键，这可能会激发新居民的兴趣，如果更大的政治经济框架促进了使该市山区定居点生存的措施，而不仅仅是一个幻想。
