The Forest of the Future – A New Reality
Understanding the ecosystem
by Hans Jürgen Böhmer
What happened with forest dieback? The predictions of the 1980s that forests would be in decline across Europe have not come true. Currently, attention again focuses on the doom scenarios of the loss of entire forests and cultural landscapes in an emotional and sometimes hysterical debate. Biogeographer Hans Jürgen Böhmer refers to updated case studies and his 30 years of research experience on global ecosystems to demonstrate extremely complex interrelations of the natural world that various actors monitor in contrasting ways and characterized by different times and ideologies. Böhmer advocates to embed the sustainability debate more strongly in the living environment, rather than relying exclusively on model calculations.