A heatwave is rolling in Europe, people here may have noticed, there was also a diary by Pakalolo. There will be more.
Fires are raging now through large parts of the Iberian Peninsula, that is Portugal and Spain, and southern France. Les Landes, Cevennes. It is a relatively early start on this severity. It has been seen coming and noone can do anything about it. It is known that in the later part of the summer, the 40-45 C heat tends to displace to the East mediterranean, now it’s the West’s turn. Practically each year in the last years has been marked by a catastrophic fire somewhere. When fires ravaged the US West in the Camp fire, that same year and nearly the same time happened the Mati fire catastrophe in Greece. 103 people died there.
Just last year, it was Algeria’s turn with the horrific wildfires in Kabylia, where an entire group of soldiers burnt up in Irathen — where an innocent volunteer who had come to help neighboring villages, Djamel Bensmail, was mistaken for arsonist and lynched by a mob. These fires brought Algeria and Marokko (Morocco in US lingo) to a diplomatic breakdown because it is still easier for people to accuse each other than to cooperate to face a crisis for who all share the guilt.
Now it is fires in the Iberian peninsula and so far, no catastrophe on that scale has yet happened but it is early in the season. The heatwave alone will lead to thousands of extra deaths. It is know this will happen and its happening already. In Spain, one of the jewles of its natural parks is directly threatened — the Parc of Monfrague, a unique breeding place for the black vultures.
Thirty fires in Spain alone, half of them out of control. At the same time, Italy is drying out completely, moving into a water emergency. It is a yearly repetition now. “What used to be a hundred or five hundred years event, now is becoming a yearly event”, said my newspaper in an article which I have mislaid the link to.
About the fires, El Pais ran an interesting interview with a pastoralist who has spent his life working in ans safeguarding the Monfrague Park, as a shepherder. I wont translate it in full but an excerpt may be allowed. Thanks Google translator.
Q. Are we making the wrong strategy with the fires?
A. In Spain there have always been fires, but there was a population that occupied the territory in a stable way and knew how to handle firewood, grazing. This removed all the leftover fuels and the fire was more easily controlled. When I was young, when there was a fire, the bells rang and we all went out with tools, with shovels, with whatever was needed. Then came the phase of abandonment of the field since the seventies and from then on the subject of fires began to be professionalized, which became a big business, with heavy machinery, trucks, forest tracks that sometimes caused much more damage than the fire itself. And we see that this solution is not viable, that the fires are acquiring a larger and larger dimension and that the risk of the whole of Spain burning is increasing.
Q. With more shepherds, would there be fewer fires?
R. In general, where there are shepherds there are no fires and, if there are, they are quickly controlled. If there are people in the field, you can react. But, in addition, each sheep or each goat consumes daily from six to eight kilos of combustible matter. A herd of 1,000 sheep consumes four or five tons of grass daily, for free, moving from the valleys to the peaks, clearing brush, making firebreaks.
P. Is it necessary to recover traditional (ways of) livestock raising?
A. It is essential. In Spain we have lost more than 10 million sheep and goats in 10 years, and with them, 20,000 jobs, of professionals who were people who knew the land. Grazing is an absolutely fundamental weapon, not only to fight fires, but also to produce food and for climate change adaptation and mitigation. If investment were made in traditional, extensive grazing, with native breeds, employment would be generated in rural areas. Spain, for the last 7,000 years, has been a country of shepherds.
[Interjection by me — instead of that, livestock has moved into massive Concentrated Animal Feedlot Operations, which is a disaster outright — worse for the animals, extremely pollutant, dependent on fertility mining in vast areas, lower quality — but — lower consumer end prices. There’s not less meat being made, Its being made in a worse way.]
P. But do you think that the new generations [the young] want to be shepherders?
R. Right now, in Spain we have 50% youth unemployment of boys and girls, between 20 and 30 years old, perfectly trained and with a high ecological sensitivity. This alternative is to return to the rural world in a modern way, not with sandals, the donkey and the cart, but with mobile phones, GPS and all kinds of comforts to maintain a decent social and family life in the countryside. Today, with a solar panel, with an alternative energy system and with the electric pens that we shepherds use, it is very comfortable. It is a very calm, very comfortable and very independent life, where you are your own businessman and decide what to do at all times.
We would so desperately need a change in landholding practices like he advocates, but humanity is concentrating in cities and the consumers in the cities look at the shelf prices in the supermarkets. That is where the fate of the lands is being decided, unfortunately.
One half of France’s peasants is on the threshold of retirement due old age. Noone stands waiting to replace them. The predictable result is that large scale landholdings in corporate hand will develop whose entire mode of production is driven by this end product price minimization. Costs that can be offloaded — to others, to the environment, to the state, anyone — will be offloaded. The forests will burn, the grasslands will dry out and lose their carbon and the end result is far more desertification than would have had to be. Even with climate change — even with all the growth of carbon in the atmosphere — a better stewardship of the land could preserve and slow down the changes and allow us to maintain more resilience for longer. But people will throw up their hands and say, it’s climate change, what can you do?