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Chapter 7 Environmental Heritage of a Past Cultural Landscape Alder Woods in the Upper Aveto Valley of the Northwestern Apennines Roberta Cevasco Recently, a good deal of attention has been paid to “cultural landscapes ” in European geographic and environmental studies. Much of this attention is due to the adoption of an administrative act called the European Landscape Convention, signed at Florence on 20 October 2000. This act reflects a number of European Union (EU) research projects devoted to cultural landscapes, as shown by such initiatives as the European Thematic Network on Cultural Landscapes and Their Ecosystems (PAN) and the European Cultural Landscapes, Our Common European Cultural Landscape Heritage (ECL). It is in the context of heritage management and valorization policy rather than scientific circles that this late nineteenthcentury concept of human geography has been readopted. In its original meaning, a “cultural” landscape implicitly assumed the existence of a“natural”landscape. Generally, this distinction reflected a misunderstanding of the dynamic nature of most European rural landscapes since the late 1960s. For instance, the establishment of regional natural parks across Italy in the 1970s was premised on the concept of naturalization, Environmental Heritage of a Past Cultural Landscape: Alder Woods |  that is, the spontaneous regrowth that follows abandonment of agrosylvo -pastoral landscapes. Geographic spaces once devoted to production have been converted to leisure and renamed nature, becoming, in fact, postcultural landscapes. In southern Europe, especially in mountainous areas, various traditional ways of working the land disappeared during the twentieth century. In Italy’s northwestern Apennines, the disappearance of pastoral systems began as early as the 1850s, when older land uses were abruptly replaced by forestry practices in Italy’s preunified states.1 Many postcultural, pastoral landscapes became a type of wilderness and were unsustainable, as shown by the failures of recent naturalization policy.2 Studying these cultural landscapes with regressive methods and topographic sensitivities (the two main tools available for analyzing historical fluxes in very small areas) allows us to develop a remarkably clear portrayal of the social and environmental processes involved.3 This study presents a new understanding of former cultural systems by focusing on their environmental, technical, and social heritage. I argue that an understanding of cultural landscapes will enable us to better evaluate an area’s environmental and cultural benefits. The Alnocoltura Cycle “Le One sono nei Runkètti” (as heard in Roncolongo, springtime 2006) The origins of cultural landscapes arise from former cultural environments through heritage and the processes of transmission, continuity, and discontinuity. Every single cultural landscape has been born from another cultural landscape. In other words, the geographic-historical qualities of a place,although invisible,have stamped an identity into its current landscape. Through what can be called a microanalytic approach, one can reveal and decode evidence of living organic material and energy flows in carefully circumscribed social and environmental systems.4 Such evidence can be found, for example, as anomalies in the vegetation or in the soil stratigraphies. The environmental heritage I discuss in the following case study is the current cover of white alder (Alnus incana Moench) in the upper Aveto Valley, within the larger Trebbia watershed of the northwestern Apennines. From these alder stands, which attract little attention from naturalists, one can re-create a vanished cultural landscape that depended on this single alder species as the system’s central productive and reproductive element.5 The white alder in these mountains is outside its typical geographic and topographic range. Alnus incana occupies a northern-continental-Alpine  | Roberta Cevasco distribution in Europe, and it forms only locally abundant populations in the northern Apennines. In the Aveto Valley (and within fragmented locations of the upper Trebbia watershed), this tree forms small, discontinuous plots in woodlands dominated by beech (Fagus sylvatica) and turkey oak (Quercus cerris), lying between eight hundred and twelve hundred meters above sea level. From the perspective of the network “Rete Natura 2000,”6 which identifies ecological sites of European importance (SICs), current alder stands are viewed as relicts of former alluvial forests because most biogeographers explain their distribution in purely physiographic terms.7 Even though this tree reaches its southern limit in the Casentinesi Forests of Tuscany, the possibility of diffusion or enlargement of its range during historical times is not taken into account, meaning that social and political dimensions of its distribution are not considered. Nonetheless, the western limits of Alnus incana, as in Germany’s Westphalia, has been explained as a legacy of earlier cultivation practices.8 Thanks to a...

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