From fire to fire, Portugal will end a garden – Observer
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“I want me and nature / that nature is me / and the forces of nature / no one has ever conquered them”
(António Gedeão, 1958)
In response to the last major fire, we heard Minister Mariana Vieira da Silva announce a plan to make the Serra da Estrela Natural Park better than it was. Reactions vary between the cry of someone who was offended by the lack of sensitivity and the joke of someone who sees here the same kind of inconsequential promises made in the aftermath of scorched earth, from Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa to Américo Tomás, passing through António Costa or Marcelo Caetano.
But… would it be so difficult to make the Park better? With 300% of the area burned since birth, not even 50 years ago (some with tragic contours, cases of deaths in 2017, 2006, 1990…)? With animals that the popular imagination associates with Serra da Estrela (the case of Lobo), disappeared with an area protected by the State? With herdsmen and herds and dogs, cheese and wool on the brink of extinction? After the promises, with the creation of the Park, of rural development, revitalization of the pastoral economy, support for traditional commerce, regulation of tourism, ecomuseums, botanical gardens of high altitude species, etc. (Fernando Pessoa, Natural Parks Collection, 1978), The realization of the current reality of the continuous loss of the human population and its traditional activities Or, if it weren’t for any rogue, was everything perfect?
Was not. For what we will go back 7 thousand years ago, from the now megalithic settlement of the Mongo Valley, attracted by a star, supposedly Aldebaran, a shepherd following his flock to the Serra… da Estrela (archeo-astronomical hypothesis by Fábio Silva), 2013). Myth or reality, what is certain is that the works by Connor et al (2012) with coals, by Almeida et al (2012), with pollens, or by Carvalho et al (2017) by archaeological, point to the same time period the birth of of the pastoral landscape that, for millennia, dominated the mountains. And there was no shortage of fire, lots of fire and devastating fires of the last few decades.
The big fires occurred with consequences of human activity, since no one has escaped from pisa for years and the lack of fire. Stephen Pyne et al (1996) explains how: fire creates a pattern of mosaics of the same landscape in the landscape and its subsequent behavior will largely be determined by this pattern. However, in the last decades, given the misunderstanding and importance, we have ended up with this mosaic by producing the occurrence of fire and investing in its occurrence of general fire. The result of the loss of the mosaic in which there was no lack of areas and/or masses, is an extension out of sight of chemical bushes, where a fire becomes highly unstoppable and destructive.
I return to Simon Connor’s 2012 work and its results: Serra da Estrela was covered with ice in the last glacial age and only at 15,000 years old did its vegetation cover begin to develop, and the aforementioned work analyzes the series of 14,000 years found in Charca da Candeeira, concluding that these 14 thousand years were 14 thousand years of fire. Adapting to that, to nature, is possible. So much so that it is possible that this has happened in the last 7 millennia! Already wanting to defeat nature, as Gideon said, is a losing fight.
So, yes, it would not be necessary to invent the wheel to have a better Natural Park. Rather, the nature of the mountains would be necessary, fire as an element of nature, man and his traditional activities as the model of coexistence. But we are a long way from that. There are still days the ICN envies a press release to Lusa about the impact of fires on Fauna and Flora and, full of certainties, paints a catastrophic scenario based on the work of a technician who, sitting in front of a computer in Lisbon, limits himself to crossing the burned area with the list of relevant species that was marked. Of the species17 favored by it, several species are directly favored by fire, and most of the non-forest species, which end up in contracts favored by it, to which are added the Yew, which is yet to be evaluated, and the White-tailed Cat that there Haven’t seen it for many years…
Does the ICN not know? Or don’t you want to know? And the government really wants to know how other saviors are doing, in case of Leiria or Monchique? Do you really want to know how the why policies work? What interests does the new plan reflect, those of those elected who live and can contribute to the solutions or those of the thick dorado that wants to take a walk through these interior gardens? Or are these questions also for an advertisement whose purpose was only to calm the people?