The Way Forward

Cork oak trees and woodlands have been managed and cherished by generations of people of many different Mediterranean cultures and in many different ways. Their resilience in a sometimes hostile environment, their economic importance, and their nonmonetary, or nonmarket, aesthetic and cultural values make these cultural woodland systems an outstanding example of the kind of mutually beneficial relationship that is possible between people and the rest of nature. Today, the fate of the cork oak tree and of the ecosystems and landscapes where it thrives depend in large part on pragmatic issues of land use and economic tradeoffs. But the way people think and feel about the tree and the landscapes is important too. Here as everywhere, ethics, cultural values, and identity play a big role in the way people act, along with short-term economic considerations. Before the twentieth century, there was no single-purpose silviculture for cork oak, but rather multipurpose, multiuse management was carried out under conditions of local self-sufficiency. There was an embeddedness that now seems lost and far away to most of us in our urbanized societies. This cultural and socioecological integration made cork oak woodlands less vulnerable to fluctuating market values. Changes in the demand for cork or other specific products, discussed at various points in this book, are now leading to rapid changes in management and land value. Yet those multiple uses, adapted over time in a wide range of regional and local contexts, explain why we still see such a large variety of cork oak woodland systems and landscapes today. That multiplicity of socioecological contexts and long-nurtured management systems can provide clues, strategies, and tools for future management scenarios in a rapidly and radically changing world. In this final chapter we