OK, this is kind of unnerving. Rural Europe is depopulating at a faintly terrifying rate - like the High Plains abandonments, except we're talking about Central Europe. The American High Plains was always something of a wilderness - one of the last places to be settled, and never all that heavily. That article has European "environmentalists" fighting *against* reforestation. And the aging of the rural population... it echoes like one of Steven Vincent Benet's apocalyptic poems, like something in the Burning City. The one where the children stop being born...

Link from the Corner. I think Fred's head will explode when he finds out that Jonah Goldberg would agree with him on the wonderfulness of the re-introduction of wolf packs to returning wildernesses. Personally, I have too many generations of European peasantry in my past to relish the idea of wolves howling in the darkness outside my door...