The Fires of Hell

The barber himself can be relied upon to supply copious quantities of gloom. Even his smile is doom-laden. He suggested that this dampening down of the wildfires was merely a short truce. The worst is yet to come, he said. In recent years, September has been the burniest month. He might be right. Sadly, he often is.

All sorts of fiery records are being broken in Portugal this year - none of them the kind of achievements we were aiming for. Most of them are summed up with the statistic that, by the end of August, an area larger than Luxembourg has been razed. That's 3% of the entire continental landmass. (For reference, 3% of the English landmass would be slightly more than the entire county of Suffolk). The valiant bombeiros report unusual fire behaviour, which those who have studied recent wildfires in Canada and California might recognise. The fires are becoming even more unpredictable and burning at higher and higher temperatures. None of it looks good.

A mixture of luck, fine judgement, and sheer devilry has meant that the death toll is much lower than we might have expected. But this is so far. The authorities warn us that in previous years of 'high burn', such as the dreadful year of 2017, two-thirds of the areas burned occurred in the autumn and that September can be the worst month of all, all of which underscores what my gloomy barber says.

While people's lives have been miraculously saved, we cannot say the same about the animals. Countless wild animals and thousands of farmed animals have perished. One of the sadder stories involves the shepherds and goatherds who manage to save their flocks and bring them down from the mountains safely, only to then discover that all their pastures are burned and that there is nothing left for them to eat. The animals face a slow death by starvation rather than the quicker death by burning.

The bombeiros are, rightly, national heroes in Portugal. This isn't just during the fire season, either, and extends throughout the year. I once had tears in my eyes when we watched a local marching band, which had been parading up and down the streets of the little town of Mondim, stop outside the local fire station. The firemen were expecting it and had poked the noses of their freshly polished machines out into the street and they all lined up smartly and saluted as the band drew up in front of them. It was an emotional moment because this wasn't just some shallow ritual but a keenly felt and expressed moment of gratitude and I wasn't the only one with eyes glistening in the crowd.

As an aside, my glum barber muttered quietly in my ear as he snipped that much of the fault lies in the hands of selfish people and that the heat spikes caused by global warming are the fault of everyone who glibly switches on the air conditioning or drives their car just for pleasure, or any one of a number of what he considers self-indulgences.

I wonder how much of the valiant work of our heroic firefighters could have been avoided in the first place. I don't mean the arsonists (who apparently account for about a quarter of all fires) but of planners and, dare I say it, the business community. For 'business' read 'mafia'. I read an article recently reminding me of the defiance of a group of trasmontanas around Valpaços who, in the 1990s, faced off a concerted governmental push to replant the largely olive tree-studded valley with eucalyptus (the government at the time was a classic neo-liberal outfit who deemed that every national asset be stripped). The locals were outraged and they protested that eucalyptus was a terrible thing to introduce – they suck all the water from the ground and other plants can't survive near them and, what is worse, they burn far too easily. They don't call them eucalipto. They prefer to refer to the trees as fósforos – matches. The authorities sent hundreds of police to prevent these villagers from protesting but they were overwhelmed by the locals. To cut a long story short, the locals succeeded and the pulp industry was beaten back (in this one isolated instance) and the Valpaços area remains eucalyptus-free. As a result, there have been no forest fires in the valley over the past thirty years, while wildfires have raged on either side of them. It is worth mentioning that the national park of Peneda-Gerês is dedicated to nurturing indigenous plant life and, as a result, eucalyptus is severely limited and the absence of serious wildfires in the park is duly noted. According to Alejandro Pedregal of Aalto University, Finland, the wildfires throughout Europe are 'expressions of a system in combustion, accelerated by climate change induced by our socioeconomic order and aggravated by land-use policies subordinated to accumulation, profit and growth.'

About 15 years ago, I made sure that the eucalyptus that grew on some of our land was cut down. This was met with puzzlement by many locals who saw the tree simply as a cash crop: they'd become the kind of people who didn't see a forest but a money bank. Yes, quick bucks can be got from growing these monsters – they grow faster than any other tree, some grow up to three metres in a year (which is why all the water disappears from around them) and they need no attention from the landowner: quick cash for little effort; win:win. Except it isn't. They are big losers.

Eucalyptus were first introduced to Portugal in the late 19th century, and they now account for about a quarter of all forests in the country, covering around 10% of the territory (800,000 hectares). That means that there is a heck of a lot of forest just sitting there waiting to burst into flames at the slightest provocation. The biggest supporter for the continuation, indeed the expansion of the eucalyptus forests, comes from the paper industry. The timber from these trees is, as stated, quick and easy to grow and it produces high-quality paper. Companies such as The Navigator Company, Altri, and Renova are the main paper suppliers and exporters in the country and as such have a firm grip on policy-making in government circles. It is this kind of coercion from industry that Professor Pedregal is referring to in the brief quote above.

The cost of the destruction caused by wildfires exceeds a billion euros a year but according to Quercus, effective fire prevention would cost some 165 million euros a year. Companies like The Navigator Company make very significant profits from paper and wood pulp (accounting for over 1% of the entire national income) so it would seem only right and fair that if this company, and others like them, insist on maintaining the huge eucalipt/giant match forests then they should at least pay for 1) the cost of fire prevention and 2) the cost of damage caused by wild fires. This would fit perfectly into the doughnut economics model as recommended by leading economists like Kate Raworth, as fire prevention and management would be considered one of the economic liabilities incurred within an embedded economy.

We might, on the other hand, point out the benefits of wildfires that rage among the eucalyptus forests. Actually, I can only think of one, a benefit known to anyone who has passed through an area affected by forest fires and whose nasal passages are blocked. Bingo! Within ten minutes of inhaling eucalyptus smoke, your sinuses are shining clean and clear. OK, as my barber might point out, you will probably develop a lung infection from the benzene, acrolein and dioxins carried in the smoke, but, hey, you can't win 'em all.