DEFORESTATION AROUND THE WORLD - India Environment Portal

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5. Conclusions
Deforestation Around the World
Defforestation, degradation and in some cases desertification even of Dinaric Karst started
early in prehistoric times. They reached the peak in the second half of the 18 th and in the first
half of the 19 th century. In any case, the reason was human factor, the economy with no
attitude to sustainability at all. During the last thousand years it is possible to see the
attempts to prevent the forest or even to meliorate, to reforest degraded lands. By the
middle of the 19 th century such attempts were mainly unsuccessful, but from that time on
the situation started to change rapidly. At the beginning, reforestation was a sort of massactivity
while nowadays other factors join it. The general perception of the importance of a
forest and of the sustainability helped a lot, but also the change of economy and activity of
the population of the Dinaric Karst, the decline of the agriculture emphasized. Maybe the
Dinaric Karst is turning to the other extreme – to be overgrown (Fig. 19). In Slovenia, on the
Kras particularly specialists as well as laymen started to ask: how to prevent the Kras from
becoming overgrown? “How to reasonably stop the overgrowing of Kras” is the title of a
round table organized by the review “Kras” at Nova Gorica in 1997. The discussion also
showed that foresters suggested replacing slowly black pine with oak (Mlinšek 1993).
The foresters also suggested that Kras should be a field experimental laboratory of
international importance to study the revitalization of a completely degraded landscape.
Especially important should be the study of the revitalization of thermophile associations,
which are the most affected and at the same time the most suppressed and neglected by the
World’s public (Mlinšek, 1993).
6. References
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Evliya, Ç. (1957). Putopis, odlomci o Jugoslovenskim zemljama. Svjetlost, Sarajevo
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