I live in Spain, and both of these countries have similarities in the type of climates, rainfall, and so on.
What I’ve seen in my region in the north of Spain (La Rioja, in an area of temperate beech and oak tree forest interspersed with wild pine trees) is the following:
Forest management usually involves significant cuts of trees over several years. They cut selected ones and not all at once, of course. It seems a good thing, right?
But the little detail is “how” they do it.
Instead of cutting them down and pulling them out to the track one by one without affecting the hillside, they open up fresh new trenches to carry them out, destroying in the process the first layer of humus coverage and soil with bulldozers while leaving behind hundreds of tons of unusable wood in the form of cut branches (instead of crushing it in splinters for quicker decay).
This situation is what I call the perfect bonfire preparation.
Suppression and lack of controlled burns is making things so much worse. Even if we magically stopped climate change, wildfires will continue to be a huge problem until we realize fire is a natural part of many ecosystems .... and we shouldn't build in them.
Very interesting analysis, thank you.
The subject of wildfires is a critical issue.
I live in Spain, and both of these countries have similarities in the type of climates, rainfall, and so on.
What I’ve seen in my region in the north of Spain (La Rioja, in an area of temperate beech and oak tree forest interspersed with wild pine trees) is the following:
Forest management usually involves significant cuts of trees over several years. They cut selected ones and not all at once, of course. It seems a good thing, right?
But the little detail is “how” they do it.
Instead of cutting them down and pulling them out to the track one by one without affecting the hillside, they open up fresh new trenches to carry them out, destroying in the process the first layer of humus coverage and soil with bulldozers while leaving behind hundreds of tons of unusable wood in the form of cut branches (instead of crushing it in splinters for quicker decay).
This situation is what I call the perfect bonfire preparation.
Thanks for your post Hannah.
Jose
Suppression and lack of controlled burns is making things so much worse. Even if we magically stopped climate change, wildfires will continue to be a huge problem until we realize fire is a natural part of many ecosystems .... and we shouldn't build in them.
I think you should revise your analysis and discuss the impact of arson on wildfires in Greece.