Ideas - Transhumance: An Ancient Practice at Risk

Episode Date: August 29, 2024

For millennia, human beings along with their domesticated animals have travelled to bring sheep, goats, cattle, and other animals to better grazing areas. The ancient practice, known as transhumance, has been dismissed as an outdated mode of animal husbandry. Yet the practice holds promise for a sustainable future. *This episode originally aired on Nov. 25, 2022.

Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goltar and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. For millennia, animals around the world, sheep, goats, cows, buffalo, reindeer,

have been setting out twice a year on a journey that can take days or months. They cross fields and climb mountain paths, push through villages and towns, all driven by herders with their dogs and sometimes horses. This biannual passage is one of the most ancient of human-animal practices, stretching back at least 10,000 years. at least 10,000 years. Its name, transhumans, comes from the Latin trans, meaning across, and humus, the earth or ground. It's largely forgotten, and when it is remembered, it's often dismissed as primitive.

People are just moving around with animals. They don't have a fixed base. It's unpredictable. The land isn't enclosed. It's kind of open and people are just wandering. So this is kind of a narrative that emerges. Yet transhumance has survived throughout Europe, Africa, South America and beyond. Those who practice it and study its history say it has a lot to teach us. Transhumanism is something that conserves, safeguards environment, a practice, a knowledge system, a huge world of traditions, but at the same time something that can represent the future of human-animal relations and the future of a sustainable production of products.

CBC's Rome correspondent and ideas contributor Megan Williams takes us through pastures, along country roads and up into the snow-covered peaks of the Alps, revealing its ancient secrets and, as we face the urgent need to rethink and reshape our relationship with the earth, how transhumans may offer a path forward. It's three o'clock in the morning. My husband and some friends and I have just arrived in a valley in Molise, this rural, mountainous and sparsely populated region of Italy's south. It's pitch black, the only light coming from the open door of a barn where local people are gathered. Livestock farmers, their neighbors, even a couple of Carabinieri police officers to help with traffic.

One guy is handing out little plastic cups of espresso and cornetti. The Italian croissant. Daniele Berlingeri, a chain-smoking, weather-faced man in his 50s, wearing old plastic slip-on shoes, is the one in charge here. And there's this sense of excitement, because we're all about to head out with a flock of about 250 sheep to a cooler, higher pasture. But no one's more excited than the sheep. It sounds strange, but the kind of energy, this readiness, urgency to push out into the world,

feels like a kind of birth is about to take place. When we were trying to nail down a date to do this walk, Daniele kept saying it's the animals who decide. When the sheep start to get agitated from the seasonal and weather change and whatever else they pick up on, that's the sign it's time to go. We all stand back from the gates while Daniele and the herders open them. We all stand back from the gates while Daniele and the herders open them and out charge the Off down a country road. Up into the hills.

A short drive from where we set out with the sheep, the day before, I'm visiting one of the oldest sites in Italy related to transhumance, the ruins of the town Altilio Cepino, or Cepinum in Latin. It was founded in the 4th century BCE by the pre-Roman Samnites, who were pastoralists. Under a hot late May sun, school kids parade past a half-crumbled amphitheater and stone pillars holding up nothing but the sky. I'm here to meet Nicola Di Niro. He's a rural development promoter and played a key role in getting transhumans

put on UNESCO's list of intangible cultural heritage in 2019. Nicola and I stop at the edge of town, at this massive arched entrance along a Roman road. Tino Cepino, he tells me, is one of the first places in ancient Rome where transhumansance as an economic activity became official, in other words, taxed. The Romans took the money. The Romans built up Altilia Sepino after they defeated the Samnite people, and the first thing they did was establish rules to govern the transhumance that passed through this gate.

Taxing the shepherds for each sheep. And there were tens of thousands. The shepherds were among the richest inhabitants. They would cross through this town from near the coast in Puglia, the heel of Italy's boot, on their way to mountains in the north, the Apennines, a range that runs down the center of Italy. The trip could last months, and the pathways those journeys forged could stretch wider than a soccer field, creating its very own ecosystem. creating its very own ecosystem. The transhuman's root represents an enormous ecological structure.

These are the only paths that remain exactly as they were 2,000 years ago. Bringing the animals to the best grass resulted in the best milk and meat, but it also provided a corridor of biodiversity. The animals munch on grass and bushes and leave behind manure filled with seeds, which would spring to life further up the path, creating a wide beltway of biodiversity, with herbs, grasses and flowers that shielded against invasive species and provided food rich in vitamins that kept, still keep, the animals healthy. And the diversity along the routes isn't just biological. It's also a dynamic cultural platform in constant evolution starting with the Romans.

The transhumans brought an exchange of customs, language, stories and traditions and shaped the built environment. The early shelters shepherds built when they stopped to rest their flocks, eventually became hamlets, then towns, and their routes and main avenues in cities. When the Romans conquered and colonized, they imposed a standard grid form of urban planning on towns, called decardo e decumanus. The decumanus means east-west running streets,

decardo, north-south. But the Romans made one exception. If there was a transhuman's route passing through the area, they'd line up the town streets with the route. That's how important it was to the economy. The earliest herders were barterers. They did not use money, but exchanged ricotta cheese for wine or wool for knives. Then these early routes were everything from food and clothing to leather and tools were bartered, eventually became the dominant trade routes. It became the real trade routes. Including the wool trade, with dyeing, spinning and weaving industries popping up.

The pastoral routes that crisscrossed Italy were also used for goats and cows. Carmelina Colantuono is a cattle herder who lives half the year in Molise and the other part of the year, in the winter months, she's with her cows in Puglia. Colantuono is one of the 25% or so of livestock farmers in Italy who still bring their animals to higher pasture in the summer, and part of the fewer than 10% who continue to make the passage on foot. With urban spread, transhumance has become complicated, even in rural areas, and requires endless permits to cross main roads and railways.

So most have given up walking it. But Colantuano's family doesn't want to. And each year, they make a week-long trip on horseback from Pulia to here in Molise, and then back, sleeping out in the open to keep an eye on the cows. In these parts a woman never did the transhumance, so it was always terribly sad to see my father leave because he'd stay with the animals for six months of the year in the

Molise Highlands. I missed him so much. Then my brothers and male cousins would return, telling stories and laughing about this tough adventure, and I would think to myself, if it's so tough, why do they always come back laughing? So as soon as I could, I got my driver's license and offered to help bring them food and coffee on the journey, which they said yes to. But she ran into trouble when they sent her to check out the route. It was a nightmare because I had to go ahead in the car to see if the path was clear. But I couldn't see the path because it takes experience to perceive a transhuman's root in the grass.

It's a subtle difference, with different plants and texture, but it takes a certain expertise to spot it. Sheik has that expertise now and leads the journey, or has until recently. During the pandemic, transhumance was suspended, so Colantuono had to load the animals onto trucks and taxi them to the higher pasture, and then six months later, drive them back down again. Then, in the spring of 2022, she faced a different and growing problem. Disease. In Puglia, cases of brucellosis and tuberculosis broke out among the cattle.

Colentuanos were healthy, but authorities banned the movement of cows from one region to another. They introduced a protocol which is keeping the animals in Puglia, but it's been 40 degrees since the start of May, with the cows out in the open and the grass dry. The animals are suffering and have already stopped producing much milk. I'm worried some will die. Eventually, she was allowed to transport the cattle by truck, but by then five of her cows had died, and many more had stopped producing milk altogether.

It's five o'clock. The sun's not up yet, but almost. But it's no longer dark. And I think what I didn't expect is just how fast these animals move. I mean, you really have to walk at a clip. And every time I stop to take a picture or slow down a little bit then you kind of have to hustle to catch up. I'm curious if this pace is going to keep up the whole way we'll see. Our walk with the sheep curves along a narrow country road with blankets of yellow wildflowers spreading out all around us to the green mountains rising in the distance. There's a rhythm that's kicked in, a purposeful, deeply

satisfying forward march. It's hard to explain. I mean, it's just a walk uphill with a bunch of sheep, but there's also something thrilling in taking part in a practice that's so basic and so ancient. And it's also a kind of happening, a livestock giro d'Italia, with townspeople coming out to watch and even little moments of drama. One sheep collapses from exhaustion, too old to make the track. They hoist her up onto one of those comically small Italian trucks and drive her the rest of the way. Another takes off in a side pasture and this slapstick scene unfolds with two of the shepherds trying and mostly failing to hook the escapee with their staff. We take a sharp turn off the road and

head up a steep path when this heavy clang of bells rings out and cattle charge towards us. Thankfully an electric fence keeps them back, but they're clearly not happy about this flock of sheep showing up near their turf. Domenica, a friend of the family, says one year the fence was broken and the cows charged them. As we walk along, Daniele, with a cigarette still dangling out of his mouth, holds a tablet. Pulling up information he shares with Véronique Ancet. She's a French transhumanist research scientist from the Food and Agricultural Organization in Rome. She's peppering him with questions about breeding. Daniele tells her he has a vast data bank of information about each and every sheep,

who their parents were, when they were born, how much milk they produce, so he can constantly improve the quality of the offspring through breeding. He also constantly hones what the sheep eat to supplement the grazing, with climate change affecting pastures and, more recently, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, forcing up the price of animal feed. Daniele's meticulous data keeping isn't just a charming example of a sheep geek. It's what pastoralists have always done,

adapted and improved. And today, with prices set by a market that often doesn't recognize the benefits of what they produce, it's become a question of survival. Well, what attracted me to transhumance was, I suppose, its kind of peculiarity in the modern times. Archaeologist Eugene Costello is a fellow at Uppsala University in Sweden, and starting in 2023, a lecturer in environmental history at University College Cork in Ireland. Costello grew up on a cattle farm in Ireland, yet he didn't come across the concept of transhumance until he was an undergraduate student in an archaeology class.

But even there, it was only really a side note in lectures, this practice, the idea that people would have in the past moved or migrated with cattle. So he read more and discovered a whole new take on the economy of the past. The practices people had in uplands fit into the growth of capitalist markets. So for example people would have been making butter and cheese in many of these places in the mountains and that cheese and butter was actually valued for its taste in many cases especially in the Alps and this of course then would have helped to feed the cities that were growing in lowland areas there was a demand for more food be it for meat or for dairy and of course upland areas which were very focused on pastoralism were well suited to pivot towards

those new markets if you like but historians have kind of seen these rural areas, especially in mountains, as marginal places, which simply danced to the tune of cities and of so-called core areas. In a way, that's because these places are more difficult to study. There aren't as many detailed written records about what was happening in some of these places. But in actual fact, as we know know today there's an interdependence the cities actually depend on rural areas for food and it just appears that rural areas are peripheral because there's all these stories about people being backward and traditional and um you know more conservative so those things have kind of tainted our view of the past a little bit, I think, and we're inclined to project back onto the past and say that, oh, rural areas in pre-modern times were also very peripheral and forgotten about. Ancient rural practices began to be seen as inefficient.

People just moving around with animals. They don't have a fixed base. It's unpredictable. The land isn't enclosed. It's kind of open and people are just wandering. And one of the reasons it was seen as inefficient use of land was, of course, that it was difficult for the state to track. It was more difficult to find out where people were. It was difficult to tax them. So this is kind of a narrative that emerges and it's evident in Ireland, at least in the early modern period during the English conquest. That narrative picked up steam in the late 1700s during the Enlightenment which ushered in modern agriculture and its drive to intensify production. Transhumance was first in the line of fire. Upland pastures were deemed as rough pasture which could be fertilized and as they thought improved

by dividing this land making small farms and making people use the land more intensively. When the industrial revolution began less than a century later many of the young people who tended the animals moved away to the city. In many places it would have actually been young people who were herding the livestock in upland areas, young boys and also girls and the cash that people would have got in the past from selling surplus butter or surplus cheese was now often superseded by the cash they might get if they immigrated and started working, you know, in America or in cities and sending cash back to their families. So that was the choice that a lot of people made. And you can see an increasing number of rural families making that choice as you get into the 20th

century. So that scuppers a lot of transhumanist practices in parts of Europe. human's practices in parts of Europe. About eight hours after we left the valley, we finally reached the high pasture. The sheep collapse on a vibrant spread of green grass behind the Berlingeri homestead, barely able to lift their heads to chew the slender blades that sway in the breeze. A shepherd dozes off nearby. Clouds slip past above us. Nearby tables are pulled out, an awning erected, food prepared, then served. Pecorino, sheep cheese, some lamb stew, the local red wine.

I sit near Vittoria Scassera, Daniele and his brother Giuseppe's 80-year-old mother. She's lived most of her life at the endpoints of a transhuman's route that stretch from the coast of nearby Abruzzo to here in the heart of Molise. At one point, she and her husband had as many as 2,000 sheep. Scassera recalls fondly her life in two places, with always enough to eat, but also long days of hard work, tending the sheep, milking, making cheese, and sleepless nights, worrying about livestock thieves who were a real and constant threat, and also worrying about witches.

The witches came at night through a hole in the door they had for cats. They would try to suck the blood out of babies. It happened to me and my husband one night, she tells me. A witch that entered in the form of a cat and came on our bed and tried to bite our newborn. Giuseppe listens respectfully. He doesn't roll his eyes or nudge me. I realize what I'm hearing is what Nicola Di Niro spoke about when he said transhumance is also a passageway of culture and stories, and that this story about witches

is probably a version of hundreds of others that have traveled up through the centuries. Well, so in medieval stories and also in more recent folklore about mountains and forests that were used in grazing we can see that there is a little bit of a question mark over these places are they fully safe and there's a sense that they're a bit liminal if you like so what i mean by that is that they're kind of located between two worlds and that in these places, strange things are a little bit more likely to happen.

Costello has long studied these stories of liminal places and says many are cautionary tales, using magical figures to warn about the dangers related to the isolation and insecurity of the pastoral life. In Ireland, wolves died out by the mid-1700s, but continued to appear in transhuman stories. Warnings, says Costello, about sexual violence. In some cases, actually, the wolf was a young man, it turned out. Of course, there's kind of a message in there that you need to be careful, especially because in much of the north of Europe,

it would have been adolescent girls and young women who would have had the task of looking after cows and milking cows up in these landscapes in Scandinavia, in Iceland, and also in Ireland and much of Scotland. Where pastures were closer to villages than in Southern Europe. The stories often offered survival strategies, like one about strange men who break into the hut of a female herder. She distracts them by playing her fiddle, a secret way to signal for help. In this story, the tune that she plays has no words

you know she doesn't sing along to it because she's she's playing her fiddle or whatever instrument she has but her little brother you know who may only be five or six or seven is often in the hut with her you know maybe hiding in the corner and he does know the words to this tune they would translate as go home little sean and get help there are men with dogs coming with trouble so it would be a little kind of verse like that and he would understand what was going on and he'd jump out a little window run down get help and usually the story ends with the community coming up and beating up the strange men and sending them on their way. And witches are everywhere in transhuman's folktales. Shapeshifting, often older women who turn into hares or other animals and steal precious milk.

The 1952 Finnish film The White Reindeer tells the story of a lonely and frustrated young married woman in a Sami reindeer herding community who, with the help of a shaman, transforms into a white reindeer that lures between herders and their animals, and their love of a life outside the village and free of its constraints. love of a life outside the village and free of its constraints. Like this 18th century song about a young Irish herder who was married off that archaeologist Eugene Costello recites in Old Irish. She's saying that she has got married and she's basically reminiscing about her days when she was younger up in the mountains,

looking after calves, looking after cattle. Ó, veram sé ma bhaileacht da'n Togairn. And that this is really when she had freedom as a woman. She actually curses the priest that married her to the guy and she curses the guy himself and says that they were not the ones who taught me when I was younger when I was up in the summer pastures

dancing with the calves as she said. You're listening to the documentary Transhumance by contributor Megan Williams. Ideas is heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. You can also hear ideas on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed. Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goldtar and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all, true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more.

I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. For millennia, herders and animals have been making long biannual treks together, a journey called transhumance, the seasonal migration between summer and winter pastures,

one that maximizes resources through grazing rather than feeding, avoiding the exploitation of animals and the degradation of the environment while enhancing biodiversity. Yet the ancient practice of transhumans is at risk, just at a time when it's needed most. it's needed most. So it's around five in the morning. We're walking up the side of the mountain

just a few hours from the border of Austria. Beautiful clear night sky with a local man who's the father of a friend, and my friend Cindy who's taking pictures. It's late October, six months after the sheep transhumance in the Apennine hills of south-central Italy, and I'm heading out on my second one, this time with cows,

Italy, and I'm heading out on my second one, this time with cows on their way back down from the summer pasture just over the Italian Alps in Austria. We set off from the northernmost part of Italy, an area that before the First World War was part of Austria. It's a three-hour steep hike to the top, the final hour through deep snow, on our way to meet the herd of cattle coming up and over the Alps from the other side. At the peak we squeeze through a craggy passage and then a faint clanging of bells reaches us and we catch sight of a magical scene. In the half sunlit, snow-covered Austrian side,

a long winding single file of cows, big brown and white Pinskowers, slowly struggling up through the snow with the help of herders. The men and boys wearing greyish-green Tyrolean felt hats, the kind with the help of herders. The men and boys wearing grayish green Tyrolean felt hats, the kind with the feathers sticking out, stomp on the snow or shovel it out of the way to create a path for the cattle. And when a cow goes rogue and gets stuck, they gather around and push and prod the animal back on track. The owner of the herd, Josef Obermeerhof, and his 11-year-old son lead the charge. Their family has been doing this very same route with the cattle since the early 1800s. We slept on the nighter.

He tells me they slept in the pasture last night, got up at midnight, milked the cows, and then left around 1. He's been doing this since he was a boy. And what really moves me is the delight of the boys, Yosef's son and two or three others. As they walk with the cows, they call out to them with confidence and affection, patting them along the way. There's an attitude towards the animals that's as striking as it is unmistakable.

Respect. Letizia Bindi is an anthropologist at the University of Molise who began focusing on transhumans through an initial interest in animal-human relations. through an initial interest in animal-human relations. This interest almost naturally drives me to look at the most important human activity in which people deal every day with animals since the beginning. Which, she says, is transhumance. People and animals doing the same effort, both struggling together, paradoxically for the same objective, I mean, to reach the grassland and to reach rest, fighting against the same weather conditions

and the same difficulties. In this kind of doing things together, another kind of relationship is developed. things together, another kind of relationship is developed. According to Letizia Bindi, the two dominant forms of animal-people relationships today are like photographic negatives of each other. On the one side, the industrialization of animals for consumption, an exploitative system based on maximizing the growth of the animal in often unhealthy conditions for early slaughter. And the other, what Bindi calls petification, companion animals that people treat essentially like children. The petification is the sweet side of the word that use animals in a very consumeristic way. On one hand, we consume animals, we use animals,

we ignore even all the things that are on the shoulder of the process of consuming animals. On the other side, we have this wheat kind of relationship in the houses with only some kind of animals. In pastoralism and the practice of transhumance, the animal's product, milk, is consumed, and so are many of the animals themselves. Yet, she points out, without the inherent cruelties of industrialized farming. she points out, without the inherent cruelties of industrialized farming. Animals in extensive pastoralism live longer than an animal in agro-industrial systems.

And even a quality of life that is absolutely more sustainable is sweeter, because they live free, enjoy the weather. In part, that's a result of what she calls the gaze or eye of the shepherds, their intimate awareness of each sheep and their ability to spot if one is about to give birth or having trouble walking. And the dogs, too, are kind of guardians, keepers of the flock, who add to the network of observation and response. Yet, despite the flexible interconnectedness of transhumance, it's a practice that is still largely seen as primitive, even by anthropologists. Hunter-gatherer societies and pastoral societies are considered at the beginning of civilization somehow. So hunter-gatherers, pastoral communities, and agricultural communities, industrials. Somehow it's true in terms of people at the beginning were nomads. They were not immediately linked to a property, a territory, because they follow the

grassland. With pastoralism, following the grassland avoids the disconnection of meat production from the land and environment around it. Many of the problems that presently we have with environmental issues is linked to the fact that we need to exploit earth and territories too much. And the idea that is embedded in the logic of extensive pastoralism is that we need to be respectful for different territories because we have to go and to come back every time. So we need to care because when we come back, we need to find this territory in a good state for our animals. find this territory in a good state for our animals. And this principle of conservation, of safeguard, of respect, I think is the right approach.

The recognition of what transhumance has to offer is now finally making some headway. There was the UNESCO listing of transhumance as an intangible cultural heritage in 2019, and the upcoming UN year of rangelands and pastoralists in 2026. And throughout Europe, it's also proving to be a new draw in a growing commercial sector, rural tourism. But Bindi worries that its newfound heritage status presents a newer kind of problem, something she calls heritization. The real consistency of the practice becoming simply the memory of the phenomenon, which is typical of the process of heritization, simply transforming something in a poetic walk. Another great problem we have right now in pastoralism is the relationship between the flocks and the herd, the sheep, and the wild animals protected by parks and protected areas. Programs supported by the EU and national governments

have helped bring back wolves and bears, which has led to an explosion in their numbers. And they're attacking the sheep and cattle that pass through these newly wilded areas. Domesticated animals before were beasts of burden. And now they are less important of the wild. On the contrary, we need to think in a systematic way, all the relations. We are living in sectors, tourist sector, breeding sector.

We are not considering all the questions in an organic way. We are not considering all the questions in an organic way. She and others believe that what's really needed is more support for the preservation and access to pasture, informed by local people who actually use the land, and financial subsidies that all farmers get in Europe anyway, but ones that lend special help to pastoralists and recognize the higher quality and environmental value of the milk and cheese they produce. While pastoralists in Europe often face misguided public policy, those throughout Africa are grappling with a very different set of problems.

I'm Véronique Ancet. I'm doing research in sociology about pastoralism, and I'm now working as a visiting scientist at the FAO. That's the Food and Agricultural Organization here in Rome. Ancet and I sit in her Rome apartment with the fan going full blast on a sweltering day a few weeks after the Molise sheep transhumance. She was the researcher asking shepherd Daniele about his breeding techniques. Anse has spent more than a decade living and working in West Africa, mostly in Senegal and

the Sahel region, starting in the 80s. She studied the cross-border movements of transhumans and how the herders were affected by the post-colonialist economic model. Essentially one country, like the Ivory Coast, producing one product, cocoa, for export. The consequences of that was no diversification at all and a dangerous dependency of the commodities. A dependency that left entire national economies at the mercy of the volatile market price of one good. Ancet says there was no shortage of theoretical schools and development trends to supposedly help those economies, almost always with conditions that benefited richer countries. But inspired by Afrocentric historians like Senegalese Cheikh Anto Diop,

Anse decided to pass on so-called development. Instead, she focused on the real exchanges in the region, meat and crops being traded among West Africans. And that meant spending a lot of time talking to herders and counting their livestock as they crossed the colonial drawn borders and comparing those numbers with the ones custom agents gave. So I was able to show there was a gap between the official statistics on which policies were grounded and the real economic life. So I came back from this thinking that I had understood maybe five percent of what I had seen but that was what I wanted to do next. In West Africa official estimates put regional trade amounting to about 3% of the whole economy.

But Ancet believes that's a gross underestimation, simply because no one was paying attention to the pastoralists. And that meant there were no policies in place to support their way of life. Pastoralists were often represented as just a source of meat, abundant meat, but not as rational or efficient producers and not at all as citizens. So from the market, I went progressively into the history of these people and their geography and their representation, their own representation. It was a society with fragilities, rupture, breakthrough, and fissures and inequalities, and so on. That was what I was interested in. The same view of pastoralism as primitive,

an evolutionary cobblestone that arose in 18th century Europe still permeates development schools in Africa. Contrarily to what has been believed before, there is no linear evolution between nomads, transhumans, and then farmers. But these ideas are so deeply rooted that you can find it in many, many fields of research, included in the most recent science and policies. Policies designed to civilize people by encouraging them to stay in one place with their livestock and intensify production. In the mid-1950s, the global development plan of sedentarization was imposed. Pastoralists started farming as well, planting trees,

which provides a legal claim to land. This is a very narrow, specific view rooted in a part of European industrialized history. So it's rooted in some history. Nothing wrong with that, except that it has been sold as a must, as a rational way of doing these things. For a while, the combining of farming with pastoralism worked. But over the years, it's gone from complementary to competitive, with scarcer resources resulting from climate change and more, with less access to grazing land. Anse recalls a conversation she had 15 years ago with a herder in Niger,

how they dealt with a drought before the UN arrived with emergency food. He said some people were coming from areas where there were no pockets of grass anymore. So everything was dried and eaten and they came to us. And what could we do? We had to welcome them because next year we may be in the same situation and we could be the ones going to them and they will become you in that way. Dealing with that uncertainty and knowing that you can move, the difference with crop farmers, they cannot move. But when you are a pastoralist, you know that you have to or you can move in the search of the resources. This creates a very essential link between you and the others. Reciprocity.

That reciprocity extends to lending a cow for three years so another herder can use it to have a calf. And other traditions regarding animals going to newborn and to women when they get married, as well as governing pastures. It's shared access, but it's not common access. It's shared with the different layers of rights. Meaning, just as in every society, there are hierarchies and competition. Ancet relays a conversation with another herder

who explained how he'd go out to scout good pastors for his family and fellow pastoralists. And then he told me, then he comes back, and sometimes he said to the others, the neighbors, the war, there is nothing there. to the others, the neighbors, the walls, there is nothing there. And then by night, and you go there without saying to

anybody. It's like that. And it reminded me my grandfather and some old men were doing in that village in the mountain with the mushrooms in the forest where there is no fence. Saying, well, did you see some mushrooms this year?

Ball, little, hardly, no, nothing. And then... Unlike modern farming, the pastoralist approach never seeks intensification of production, or even to be so-called resilient, a word Ancet bristles at, because it implies just getting by, not prospering. The pastoral way of life, she tells me, should be recognized for what it is.

Not a coping strategy, but a rational, responsive, sophisticated, and highly effective way to care for the earth and animals, and people too. earth and animals and people too. This help is fundamental in a society where you cannot lean on social protection, on public protection. You have to have this tie and these relations between you to mitigate the risks and it does exist everywhere I suppose But based on something living on the cow, it has a degree of complexity that is maybe different because you can, it's like a living capital. Cattle and capital, they are from the same root. The final day of the cattle transhumance from over the Austrian Alps. After the steep descent from the mountain peak, the cows spent the night in this barn nestled into the valley. Now the men and boys place colorful decorative bands around the cows' necks,

preparing them for the final festive walk, about six hours long, following the valley road and home. Just like with the sheep, townspeople line the road to watch and wave and take pictures. And then, at last, the cows come home, flopping on the grass behind the Obermeerhof barn, the jagged, snow-crested mountains shimmering in the distance. And the final celebratory meal.

This one's starting with a shot of schnapps. To put everyone in a happy mood, Yosef's wife, Tanya, tells me. Butter, cheese, bread and wine are placed on long tables that we crowd around. The cows lulling in the pasture beside us, a spiky church steeple towering above. It's a beautiful bucolic scene, like something from another age, yet it's one that also belies the threats to the tradition of transhumance, even here, tucked away in this alpine valley and hanging over the tradition here with receding mountain snow and all over the

world is climate change Letizia Bindi the first real problem that we are facing right now is that pastures are uncertain as many other things in the environment. We are increasingly facing drylands in the area that before were completely dominated by the pastoral activities. Africa for example, all the society based on pastoralism, I mean, Ethiopia, Central Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, and so on. But even South America. I work since many, many years

in Patagonian area, Argentina, and there are many, many areas where the drought is increasing and the level of sustainability in the summertime for sheep is unsustainable. But relying on the alternative, industrial meat and milk production, is unsustainable for the future. Human beings need to both eat less meat and milk products and produce more of it through pastoralism. Pastoralism can't be the only solution, but according to Bindi, it should be at least sustained as a perspective. Pastures can be rationally managed. A thing that ancient shepherds knew very well, pasture continuously regenerated.

On the contrary, industrial production is not regenerative. So it's exactly a question of durability. The extensive pastoralism is durable. Industrial is extractive and no longer durable. So maybe this can represent a hope. Véronique Ancet agrees. I don't believe, I don't say that it's ideal and that it will last in every part of the world.

It's jeopardized and compromised and put under pressure in many parts of the world. But it deserves our interest, our system living with nature and with some basic principle, optimizing the resources. But she says if we lose it entirely... but part of biodiversity of the nature. And it is important not only for the grasslands and for the pastoralists, but also for the rest of humanity.

Carmelina Colantuono has faced a lot of adversity as a shepherd, but she can't imagine her life or the world without transhumance. Transhumance is a marvelous voyage, something almost out of time, like a fairy tale. You travel together with the animals in symbiosis, a journey where you, humans, don't lead the animals, but follow them. And then after, to hear the mooing of the cows for days on end, the bells, that ringing in your head for days after,

it's marvelous. that ringing in your head for days after. It's marvelous. You were listening to Transhumance by contributor Megan Williams in Rome. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer of Ideas. Technical production, Danielle Duval, with help from Nick Bonin. Nikola Lukšić is the senior producer. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly, and I'm Nala Ayyad.