Page 282 - Changing Living Spaces

Aleksander Panjek and Gregor Kovačič

history of the Karst forests, which largely coincides with the question of
their degradation and their later artificial reforestation. The tradition-
al interpretation is based on a degradationist narrative rooted in eight-
eenth- and nineteenth-century policies and forestry science. Particularly
in nineteenth-century sources, we read that the Karst was bare and stony
and that this was the result of unsustainable exploitation through de-
forestation and overgrazing. In contrast, the forest and pasture land use
system of early modern peasants shows how the inhabitants did not de-
stroy the forests and trees, but instead used them. Each individual tree
was there for a specific purpose. Peasants determined their use based on
the characteristics of the karstic terrain, climatic conditions, and their
experiments with the capacity of vegetative species. They felt that a ‘real
forest’ was not economically justified in the Classical Karst, and so only
those trees necessary to meet domestic and agricultural needs were al-
lowed to grow. Coppice was the preferred form. It has also been demon-
strated that there is no real evidence that the Karst was ever covered with
forests in historical times, at least not since Roman times or even earli-
er. Nevertheless, it can be noted that forest cover decreased and became
sparser in the period from the early sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth cen-
tury (Panjek 2018), when artificial reforestation began. This is also true
for our case study. Although we do not have precise microlocal evidence
for Štanjel, we can assume that in the period between the regulatory
works on the ‘Lake’ (around 1600) and those on the hill above the lake in
the first decades of the nineteenth century, the tree coverage decreased.
Could this serve as a starting point for understanding the partial decay
of the system?
In conclusion, we can put forward two hypotheses about the rea-
sons for the disintegration of the regulatory system at the ‘Lake’. First,
the climatic conditions or, more simply, the precipitation regime, had
changed, which means that in the early modern period there was more
precipitation and it was more evenly distributed throughout the year. We
know that this was not the case in the nineteenth century thanks to the
Franciscean Cadastre, which speaks of heavy and short-lived seasonal
rains that washed the soil away from cultivated land. The existing knowl-
edge of the climatic history of this area does not provide sufficient ba-
sis for this hypothesis. Second, the reduction in tree density opened up
more and more land that was not protected from rainfall-induced ero-
sion, making it more exposed to erosional processes. In the first phase,
this resulted in more eluvium being washed away from the slopes of the

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