Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
general socioeconomic development. Conditions and characteristics of underde-
velopment vary widely across the European Mediterranean region. Nonetheless,
according to EU policy, Less Favoured Areas are generally considered either
marginal/peripheral - isolated, and thus problematic - areas, or simply areas with
a development deficit, either in terms of economic productivity (including un-
favourable terms of competition and supply-demand correlations) or in terms of
more general resource availability (Sophoulis and Spilanis, 1993; Spilanis
et al.,
2004). These resources, in the case of Mediterranean mountainous areas, may
encompass environmental/natural resources (often susceptible to technological or
physical inaccessibility) or human resources (depopulation or cultural peripherality
and isolation).
As already mentioned, the Mediterranean mountains, as in most mountain cases
around the world - at least of the developed world - represent some of the last re-
treats from the advance and spread of newer ways of life from the more populated
and urbanized lowlands. Thus, they represent 'other' places, of 'other' times and
'other' cultures, increasingly threatened by extinction. Before the Second World
War, the mountains of Greece still preserved ways of life inherited from the long
Ottoman occupation. Whereas plains and cities were dominated and governed by
the Turks and their Greek and other collaborators and allies, mountains remained
hotbeds of Greek insurgence and political resistance. According to Elefantis (2002),
these populations had developed thriving markets and ways of life, based on agri-
culture and animal husbandry, as well as wood, masonry and wool industries. Very
specific cultural systems grew out of these activities and ways of life, such as stone
and wood architecture, nomadism and brigandage. In fact, this is where nomads
started settling; where education and scholarship flourished in their schools; where
their unique local gastronomy revolved around pies, meat, rusks and wild greens;
where typical song and dance, as well as endogamy patterns, dominated (Elefan-
tis, 2002). As already mentioned, for these few communities holed up in natural
mountain fortresses - such as the Mani, the Souli and the Agrafa - life, however
hard, poor and compromised it might be, nevertheless allowed for and symbolized
a precious modicum of liberty (Stathatos, 1996, p. 23).
This mountain
modus vivendi
and widespread imaginary changed only gradu-
ally through the political upheaval of the Civil War (1944-1949). The major part of
transformation of mountain ways of life into a simple extension of city life occurred
with the definitive linkage of mountain areas with the country's larger road system,
in the 1950s (Louloudis
et al.,
2004, p. 237; Sotiropoulou, 2007, p. 51). This trans-
formation represents the irrevocable end of an era and its particular ways of life,
moulded through the 'longue duree' of Greek mountain history (Braudel, 1995) -
a history replicated in various locations around the Mediterranean (Pungetti
et al.,
2008; Rackham, 2008, p. 58).
One vestige of these older Greek ways of life may be found in the patterns of
animal husbandry, most of which - now of extensive and near-organic form - is
concentrated in mountainous and 'less favoured areas' (75%) (Louloudis
et al.,
2004). Across the Mediterranean, mountain people's lives bear a series of observed
