20.50: Second post of the day.

It’s an ill wind, they say, that blows absolutely no good. A slightly bizarre consequence of the fires is that their heat can accelerate the maturation of grapes and so bring forward the harvest by a week or two. So far, this is the only positive aspect I’ve read about.

Those who’ve been following my thoughts since the start of this tragedy won’t be surprised at me posting this translation of an article from today’s Voz de Galicia:-

We have a right to the truth

There are things which no one knows and so we must be patient with the investigators. But there are things which are known but not said and for this reason a crude and erroneous debate is developing which treats the fires as if they were one of the plagues of Egypt, without pointing the way towards operational conclusions relevant for next summer. The President of the Xunta, for example, stresses that the fires are on the edge of the cities, as if this simplistic insight supported the theory of an exceptional catastrophe, caused by Machiavellian plots. But what he doesn’t say is that 80% of the region’s eucalyptus trees – covering hundreds of thousands of hectares – are to be found along the coast, sharing the same space with 70% of the population, the most well-developed and supplied townships, the busiest communication networks and the largest industrial complexes and hotels. Need I say more?

They say that in Galicia - where ecological attitudes are not widespread – we have deep atavistic tendencies stemming from the rural and dispersed nature of the population. And that, for this reason, we live in a society interspersed with fires. But what they don’t say is that in those countries where they artificially expand woods – as we have done – and in those where they place their houses on the edge of forested areas, they suffer catastrophes worse than ours, without anyone managing to control them. The incendiary cycles in California carry away a million hectares and a thousand houses before they can be stopped and we’ve all seen on the TV enormous fire-fighting and police forces who only achieve success once it starts to rain.

They say the first priority is to replace what has been burnt. But they don’t say the Galician forests only replace themselves chaotically, on the basis of eucalyptus and undergrowth which fight for space with farmers, factories and houses. The fires function in Galicia like the sea in the [large bay] of La Lanzada – cycles of one large wave followed by six small ones. And one gigantic wave in every five cycles. And, nuances aside, this has never changed because of the unsustainable policy of favouring extinction over planning, which gives us false data to compute as successes in rainy years or at the start of the cycle.

Everyone knows things like this. And it does no good to hide them so as to construct a dialogue which, on the basis of terrorist sightings everywhere, tries to get us to the end of summer without recognising even an iota of bad management. Neither is it valid for the opposition, as they are clearly doing, to try to twist 180 degrees everything the Xunta says, as if the PP party had nothing at all to do with the chaotic forestry from which we suffer. What is needed is the complex truth of a region which for half a century has done things very badly. Only in this way can we make a beginning.