Excerpt from monocle.com
There’s a question that sooner or later confronts those who grow up in a small community: do I stay, or do I go? The overwhelming number of people across Europe that stump for the latter are leaving large swaths of some countries completely hollowed out. Latvia has lost a third of its population in three decades, Bulgaria is on track to lose a fifth of its people by 2050 and some areas in the Scottish Highlands are now emptier than Lapland. It’s a challenge that’s far easier to acknowledge than to address: how do you create an environment that doesn’t just keep people in it but draws back those who have left? The Faroe Islands, a self-governing Danish territory of 18 islands and about 55,000 people in the North Atlantic, could provide an answer.