Fire: a change of model
When fire shows its destructive power near a house or crops that are the result of the efforts of many generations rooted in that land, it is impossible not to be moved. It would be utterly insensitive to tell them that it is only a spark of what is happening on the planet.
How can we explain that fire is inherent to the forest and that humans have controlled its fury for millennia, perhaps without knowing it? From the forest, we obtained the energy needed to keep warm, to cook, and to power many horsepower when we learned to regulate the steam, because for a long time, what moved a good part of industry and the railroad were products extracted from the forest. There was no need for forest management plans, nor for protection experts to tell our ancestors that farmhouses should be built on sunny hills far from the forest, but that firewood had to be collected. All humans were like ants that collected fuel from the forests. The trunks of the trees we wanted to use for wood had to be large in diameter. The small sprouts that prevented the generous diameters of beech, oak, chestnut, and other trees that dominated the forest were used for everyday life with a naturalness we find hard to imagine now.
The emergence of more convenient fuels left vegetation that was previously useful to us in the forest, and it gradually became denser. Every spring, birch, alder, and pleasant climbers sprout, and for more than a century now, we have not gone there to look for fuel. Every year, we accumulate more possibilities of forest fires and greater fire fury.
Changes in the economic, energy, industrial, and social models have consequences that were previously corrected by the sum of individual actions. But this is no longer possible now, and those who act in the name of the general interest, that is, the administration, must find a different way to prevent the negative consequences of changes in the model.
Some woodlands, where excess fuel has continued to be removed and efforts have been made to secure mature, healthy trees, maintain the splendid complexity of this great green tapestry we call the forest.
It's difficult to talk about how we will uproot brambles and climbing plants; we must remove more than half the forest mass and break, with the presence of crops, the terrible continuity of the greenery that covers the ridges that will surely burn one day.
If the classic peasant family model cannot guarantee the recovery of fertile, cleared forests, we will have to consider a different type of agricultural exploitation, adapted to the new society. If we cannot and do not want to return to economical cooking, we must consider heating large buildings (prisons, educational institutes, hospitals) with forest-based biomass. On the other hand, the forest will eventually burn, and the high temperatures and terrible fuel buildup will lead to raging fires that will exceed the extinguishing capacity of even the best firefighting systems. The smoke from these large fires worsens the accumulation of carbon dioxide; however, if the removal and harvesting are done correctly, we can filter the smoke.
But when we see a dozen trees tightly packed near a housing development and the vines feasting on them, we dismiss it as plant heritage, without realizing that the forest has never been so dangerous and so inhabited. I also like to take photographs of the lush vegetation; it always gives a feeling of freshness, and it's a trap for our sense of protection. A fire that advances at over a thousand degrees will turn this tender, leafy vegetation into dry leaves that burn before the flames even reach it.
Fifteen years ago, we tried to start in Bages, with a forest biomass burning facility in the Lledoners prison, and some brigades of prisoners in reintegration programs who carried out forest management work on a small scale; the project was carried out on a large scale. Those who replaced us stopped it. It was just a drop in the ocean.