23/08/2025
With huge wildfires still raging, we are safe. First off thanks so much for your messages and comments and offers of help and or places to stay THANKS SO MUCH 🙏 the love you have shown us is touching and very appreciated.
For many though they have lost their farms, houses and lands to the fires. Climate change is blamed and arson (very common cause) but there is a darker more financially motivated cause:
One comment reads: "Eucalyptus is native to Australia, not Europe. In Portugal, f.i. it was planted back in Salazar's day, much to the delight of the paper industry.
The problem is that eucalyptus trees MUST burn from time to time because their leaves and bark hardly rot.
In Australia, no one would think of planting it as a monoculture near settlements and agricultural areas. In Portugal, they do.
In combination with pine monocultures, it forms the ideal tinder that is almost impossible to extinguish.
At the same time, it has deep roots and lowers the water table. In times of prolonged and, as is to be feared, increasingly severe droughts, this is an additional problem.
Furthermore, these monocultures are characterised by a lack of biodiversity. No insects, no other forest dwellers. Nothing grows there except ferns and blackberries.
In the past – before the eucalyptus was imported – there were forests, healthy mixed forests, no monocultures. Farmers could graze their goats there, for example. This was a small but important source of additional income for many people.
How many firefighters will have to risk their lives, how many villages will have to burn down or be evacuated before the ladies and gentlemen in Lisbon realise that more and more firefighting planes are not the solution, but rather a comprehensive reform of forest management?
Source:
https://www.politico.eu/article/wildfire-prevention-iberian-peninsula-spain-portugal-climate-change/
It's also NOT just a conspiracy theory that often these fires are where lithium mines have been proposed or plantations of pine or eucalyptus in areas of national parks. Yet again these mono cultures are about human greed, bribes, arson and corruption. Money has been chosen over safety and nature's magical diversity.
