Задание №16470 ЕГЭ по Английскому языку

The Revival of a Historic Journey across Spain

As late May approached, the animals were growing restless. In little more than a day, the heat from the southerly desert winds had turned the grass dry, leaving Jesús Garzón's herd of 1,100 sheep and goats little to eat. Garzón knew — and the animals, nervous and bleating, knew as well — it was time to head north, where cool weather and fresh pastures awaited them.

Every spring and autumn, Garzón and his herd make this seasonal migration, called transhumance — from the Latin trans for “across” and humus for “earth” — a form of pastoralism where animals typically move to and from summer highlands and winter lowlands to take advantage of seasonal peaks in pastures and avoid extreme temperatures.
 
After being abandoned for half a century, the recovery of transhumance in Spain demonstrates how pastoralism, a livelihood suited to coping with uncertainty and sustainable food systems, can help preserve biodiversity, while breathing life into depopulated rural areas.

Practised by 200 to 500 million people across the world's rangelands — grasslands, savannahs, mountain pastures, tundra and steppe covering half the earth's land surface — pastoralism is significant socially, environmentally and economically.

As a herder who has also been at the forefront of efforts to revive this ancient practice and raise awareness of its importance, Garzón understands its potential, and its challenges, well.

The end of transhumance in Spain had severe ecological impacts. Abandoned mountain pastures experienced biodiversity loss and heightened wildfire risk; lowlands suffered overgrazing and trees stopped regenerating.

It was the lack of new trees that brought Garzón, who previously worked in conservation, to transhumance. It was a turning point for him. At the time, he recalls, re-establishing transhumance was considered “totally impossible”, but he persevered and in 1993 assisted Spain’s first transhumance in more than half a century. Shortly after, Garzón founded the Association for Transhumance and Nature, which supports transhumant herders who face legal or logistical obstacles.

From the start, Garzón's objective was to recover Spain’s drove roads, etched over centuries into the land, measuring 125,000 km in length. Although pastoralism is practised in 75 % of countries, Spain is the only country worldwide with a network of legally protected drove roads for the movement of herds. But Garzón’s vision for transhumance extends well beyond the country's borders. "We're trying to transfer the Spanish example of a network of livestock trails, that herders can use freely, to the rest of the world," says Garzón. The project will also repair water points and shelters. “We have hope that if we can solve some of these main problems, people will continue to do the transhumance, or other can join in the future,” says Garzón.

Through grazing, pastoralism provides further benefits to the ecosystem. So long as a threshold of overgrazing is not crossed — which seasonal migration helps avoid — grazing stimulates plant growth, increases productivity, reduces soil erosion and facilitates water retention.

Grazing also helps reduce wildfire risk and lessen the intensity of fires that do break out, says Elisa Oteros-Rozas, a researcher at the Open University of Catalonia. “When pastoralism disappears, biomass accumulates,” she says. “And that makes ecosystems more vulnerable to large-scale wildfires.” In areas prone to wildfires, like the Mediterranean, grazing could be a cost-effective prevention method — especially as more and bigger wildfires are predicted due to climate change.

“Pastoralism is this way of life attuned to making efficient use of the available resources and adapting to what’s there in a way that doesn't harm the system and often enhances it,” says Garzón. “Rather than trying to get rid of it, we need to learn from it, because those lessons are going to be ever more important under a changing climate and changing environment.”