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Along with this loss of human capital, Barbu said, the abandonment of grazing meadows and pastures has brought the loss of vital habitats and their biodiversity. (This may seem counterintuitive, but ancient farming methods meant that rare wildflowers, reptiles, and amphibians were able to thrive on this land.) This is happening in areas such as Transylvania and the Carpathians, which the E.U. itself has designated "high nature-value farmland." A 2004 report by the European Environment Agency found that abandonment of small farms was a prime cause of biodiversity decline and that "current policy measures appear insufficient to prevent further decline."
Under E.U. legislation, an umbrella organization called Natura 2000 oversees a large number of natural habitats designated for protection. In Romania, and in Transylvania in particular, this has provided a nascent environmental movement with a mechanism for challenging plans for government and private development.
At the streamside dacha of dentist/naturalist/activist Alex Gota (who served up local ham, cheese, and homemade schnapps), an enthusiastic group of local biologists and conservationists peppered a Natura 2000 official with questions in Romanian and English about how to deal with proposed highways and tourist developments, how to keep foresters from clear-cutting, how to control strip-mining, and how to fund their own projects and research.
Erika Stanciu, the local Natura 2000 director, explained to me afterward just how new this all is. Not only is it a novelty to be able to question development plans, but it is also unprecedented for the government to have its plans questioned.
"The government is overwhelmed by all the changes. It is overwhelmed by this transition. We are all overwhelmed."
Over the next days I did see several projects that gave me some tenuous hope. In the village of Nemsa, Julius Comisa, a Roma farmer, heads an association of villagers that received 150 goats three years ago from the Center for Research and Ethnic Relations, a Roma organization in Cluj, with the stipulation that the goats not be slaughtered or sold but raised to produce milk and cheese. Since then the association has expanded to include 30 families, both Roma and non-Roma. The group has broadened its efforts into community development, applied for funds to supply the village school with indoor toilets, and received 15,000 euros ($21,700) to build a milk collection center.
Just south of Crit, British landowners have built up a herd of 350 water buffalo, grass-fed and organically raised for milk production. Although water buffalo are generally considered too ornery for anything but hand milking, the owners have set up a successful machine-milking operation that they will soon expand.
To the north of Crit I visited a model farm managed by World Vision, a California-based Christian organization that has been working for several years in Eastern Europe. Farm manager Maria Todea told me that farmers who complete the World Vision course in small-farm management receive a diploma that allows them to apply for financial assistance from the government.
In the village of Malancrav, on a rise above a restored church, I walked up a terraced hillside among hundreds of apple trees in blossom. The air was fragrant and humming with bees. The orchard was purchased by the Eminescu Trust and has begun producing and bottling its own organic apple juice.
The Suciu family, at whose home I dined each night, has taken an entrepreneurial approach to all the organizations working in Transylvania. They opened their home to the trust's tourists. They accepted a pig from World Vision. Their son and daughter-in-law worked on the water buffalo farm and would be leaving for Bucharest the next morning to display their artisanal Transylvanian cheeses at a slow-food festival in the capital.
Given enough time and money, such projects might sustain the traditions of this lost world as it makes its transition into a new world economy. But the realities of poverty, the very evident missing generation that has already moved on, and the intransigence of both the E.U. and the Romanian bureaucracies have made the circumstances seem dire and intractable. The shepherds tending their flocks on emerald meadows, the herders guiding their cows along ancient paths, seemed destined to become anachronisms in the service of tourist nostalgia.
Even so, Lucian Holban told me in his office in the citadel of Sighisoara, "I am not pessimistic."
A short, slight, balding man with a trim mustache and goatee, Holban is a geochemical engineer whose former employer, GeoMed, asked him to come out of retirement and catalyze sustainable development efforts in 16 localities and two towns, an area of some 310 square miles with a population of 56,000. His territory is what the E.U. calls a Local Action Group Initiative. As its director, he says, his job is "to create conditions for projects that will build infrastructures for future development." When he sees likely opportunities, his challenge is to get them funding.
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