There are words that, like fashion shows, reveal trends and dictate linguistic fashion. Nouns, verbs and adverbs, neologisms and anglicisms, enter and leave the lexicon according to the fashions and seasons of the year.
There is a tendency to focus on the form of words, without questioning their content or meaning, as if they were just a package or ornament devoid of substance. We like the words bright and organized in well-polished, immaculate and punchy sentences, forgetting that the use of words may or may not have consequences.
They can intoxicate, when they line up in sublime poems and prose, they can teach and reveal the secrets of things, when they transmit scientific thought and the philosophy of concerns, or they can manipulate when nothing else exists beyond form.
In this last category, there are some of the terms of the jargon of Fogo, where the content and meaning of the words used to talk about it are not questioned, namely, fuel e forest.
In fire jargon, shrub and sub-shrub vegetation is classified as “fuel”, as if it were a pile of dry things without life, without diversity, without relevance or function and their simple existence, by itself, potentiated the fire.
It is classified as “forest” the entire territory of the Portuguese mainland, amalgam of predatory monoculture areas, woods, bushes, immense patches of invasive species, uncultivated, degraded areas, quarries, dumps, infrastructure, warehouses and scattered houses that, in order to be a forest, must be imagined.
Like Laurissilva or small Amazon, very green, with magnificent trees and in different stages of evolution - some very old and others emerging from the ground - expanses as far as the eye can see, untouched vegetation strata, from lichens and fungi to large shrubs, a lot of freshness , shade, abundant biodiversity and rich ecosystems. Are there forests like this in mainland Portugal? Do we have temperate forests? Atlantic? Boreals and tropicals we don't have, for sure. Does the Mediterranean climate, which characterizes most of our continental territory, support forests? Or will they be forests (Mediterranean forests of sclerophytic species), bushes (maquis and garrigue) and some forest stands, in the exclusive sense of wood production?
The weak scientific culture of those who “manage the fires” left the Zêzere glacier valley and extensive areas of the Serra da Estrela Natural Park on fire. Everything was fuel, everything was grass that was not cleaned…biodiversity and landscape did not weigh in on the “combat strategy”.
The integration of forests into the Institute for Nature Conservation (ICN) has proved to be a disaster, which must be recognized. The little that still existed in terms of knowledge and rational management of protected areas, nature conservation and biodiversity at the ICN was compromised, despite the State's continued disinvestment, and the schizophrenia of concepts, "strategies" and plans was promoted. disorient and confuse, of the ICN-F.
Protected areas and Portuguese classified sites, due to their uniqueness and importance, at all levels, should once again have their own management (without “forests”), resuming the spirit of their creation as spaces to promote Nature, its conservation, innovation and scientific culture in balance with human activities.
The “forest” must be managed in association with agriculture, as indivisible parts of our production and protection landscape, responding in a rational way to the orographic, climatic, ecological and economic variety of our territory.
The Romans, on the other hand, understanding the specificity of the Mediterranean territories, transformed and built our landscape, organizing the “field” into three main areas or systems: the “ager”, to which the most intensively cultivated areas corresponded; the “saltus”, or the area occupied by pasture, livestock and less intensive agriculture; and the “silva”, or forests for protection and production, where firewood and other important by-products came from.
This classification was obviously related to the adaptation of use to relief characteristics, soil fertility and water availability. These basic principles of organization of the rural space, of matching the use to the circumstances of the environment (aptitude/adaptation) should not be contradicted.
Only with the organization of the rural space based on the ecological matrix of the landscape, the process of adaptation to climate change and the fight against “rural fires” begins.
The realization of this organization needs people to do it. For this, policies and concrete measures are needed to fix the population that promote, in an organized, sustainable and rational way, agriculture, pastoralism, forestry and other complementary activities.
Are financial incentives needed to generate a robust and organized rural economy that guarantees the preservation and continuity of our fundamental natural resources (air, water, soil and vegetation)? Clear. Our heavy taxes (too) should be directed towards this duty of the State.
How are people convinced to stay and look after the countryside? With policies that allow and promote it. Planning, acting in advance, paying, exempting, rewarding, improving, cooperating, leading by example.
Do we need more plans to fight rural fires, commissions and groups of experts on fires, speeches and words without content, lawsuits, courts and fines for lack of cleaning the fuel strips that no one understands?
Or do we need a national purpose that prevents our territory, year after year, from becoming a monstrous, self-feeding hell?
Because, fireworks, there will always be them.
Author: Amélia Santos is a landscape architect (guest professor at FCT/UAlg). The author writes in the old spelling.
Note: All photos are by Manuel Lagoa and were made in Samelas, Manteigas, last August
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