THE FIERY TRUTH

The thirsty fledg­ling black­bird sit­ting on my water bucket fi­nally plucks up the courage to fly, just in the nick of time as the two farm cats home in on it. It in­stinc­tively heads from the shade of the fig tree to the higher branches of the pines to the south and I watch it set­tle be­yond reach of fe­line claws. Hoopoes, golden ori­oles, swifts, swal­lows, bee eaters and oth­ers fill the morn­ing air with their music and calls.

My eyes look fur­ther and up, through the build­ing heat haze to the be­guil­ing, pro­tected nat­ural cliffs, peaks and for­est of the Serra de Llaberia. My smile slides from my face. It will be near­ing 40 de­grees in a few hours. Hot air will once again come bar­relling down the val­ley, de­void of hu­mid­ity. Every­where is al­ready tin­der dry.

“Dwell in pos­si­bil­ity” is one of my pos­i­tive mantras to fam­ily and friends. This is dif­fer­ent. At times like these we have an over­whelm­ing sense of in­evitabil­ity.

The mas­sif has had its fair share of wild­fires, in­clud­ing one six kilo­me­tres east of our farm at the end of the val­ley, but not in our two decades here have the stun­ning fea­tures of cliff and crowded green in front of us and which we ap­pre­ci­ate so much been turned to ash. When it is bak­ing and blow­ing like this I can’t help won­der­ing when not if.

A light­ning strike more than 10 years ago hit a tree just out of sight up be­yond the lip of the ridge. The storm passed, the core of the tree smoul­dered and then, a few clear days later, the trunk top­pled. Whoosh. The fire crews and he­li­copters were on it within min­utes. We and the vil­lage were saved from what could have been a des­per­ate or­deal. As I write, the brave front­line fight­ers are out there again, the other side of the com­mu­nity, damp­ing down hav­ing to tackle an­other blaze deep in a dense, highly com­bustible gully. So much – lives, liveli­hoods, Mother Na­ture and all she en­cap­su­lates and sus­tains – are in­creas­ingly on the line across the world. Cat­alo­nia, so dense with growth, a lung, is no ex­cep­tion.

Birds can flee, per­haps boar, deer, foxes etc. can out­run a blaze if it is not fanned, but the sala­man­ders, the frogs, snakes, lizards, ro­dents, red squir­rels, tor­toises, in­sects - the plethora of rarely seen, vital life, can­not. Per­haps the trees and other growth will re­gen­er­ate. They should. Fire is part of the cycle of life. But por­tents re­gard­ing the in­creas­ing in­ten­sity and fre­quency with the onset of cli­mate up­heaval begin to eat into hope. We have to change, to learn, and we can.

Ecol­o­gists have for some time now un­der­stood how im­por­tant fire is to the nat­ural pat­terns of ecosys­tems. This “fire regime” serves to up­hold health, de­spite the ini­tial gross and de­pres­sive scar­ring of the ter­rain. It is a reset. Root sys­tems store nu­tri­ents and can sur­vive, seeds need fire to end their dor­mancy and after the cleans­ing the glo­ri­ous cycle can begin again... un­less the blazes are un­nat­u­rally se­vere. Forests that are adapted to fires can be de­stroyed. And I have not men­tioned, of course, how this fe­roc­ity, fu­elled by height­en­ing tem­per­a­tures, can and will break past pat­terns and in­creas­ingly threaten human life in the years ahead. Don’t we al­ready know it?

If the data are to be be­lieved, more than half the wild fires in Cat­alo­nia are caused by human error. In an in­valu­able nut­shell we have a fact that de­fines our fun­da­men­tal col­lec­tive re­spon­si­bil­ity in the face of this grow­ing threat to our en­vi­ron­ment, and to the peo­ple who put their lives on the line to pro­tect us and our homes. I thank them.

Take great care dur­ing what is left of this blis­ter­ing year, what­ever the sea­son.