It has become a tradition that throughout the month of August my family retreats just across the border and I drive the 400 km back and forth to the office. The silence in Portugal's capital and on its motorways dramatically contrasts with the equally traditional vast amount of forest fires I see along the way and on the news, every summer.
Evening news headlines villages normally never heard of, detailing the exact number of firemen, airborn vehicles and the origins of firebrigades on site and updating the number of arrests of suspected incendiators, as if to any common citizen like me those data would be sufficient to gain some perspective on what has exactly been happening. We get to see desperate civilians with tree-branches, shovels and garden hoses and interviews with firebrigade chiefs too often in too clean uniforms in their moment of fame and ocasional politicians forced to break away from their summer holidays publicly affirming total governmental support.
This particular August sees extra drama with the loss of life in combat by 8 firefighters, portrayed as experienced by fellow combatents even though most of them hardly turned 20 years of age.
It is an equal annual tradition that gradually a debate heats up on the cause and effect of so many wildfires wherein various local authorities point to various central authorities who in turn tend to be courteously evasive if they are in government at present on whether we are all doing a proper job in firefighting and prevention and cry out policy failure if they sit in opposition chairs. Basic data such as the amount of acres held by the state, the number of fines raised against negligent land owners, the effectively imprisonments of incendiators then become a matter of opinion rather than fact.
The central government has now secured the settlement of firebrigades's gasoline bills and with immediate effect any civil servant who is on call as voluntary fire fighter will no longer need to file for an authorised absence of their normal day job. That should get things going. One potentially meaningful measure that has finally set foot is the involvement of military surveillance and I am still awaiting some nationwide video demonstrating how soldiers can shoot terrorist pyromaniacs in their foot from a long distance without a warning, but instead the mayor of Lisbon chose to call upon firefighters to organize a commemorating imitation of the great Chiado fire 25 years ago.
The villagers I meet in and around our holiday retreat, many of them farmers for life, convincently point out how this level of forest fires is a phenomenon of the last 30 years only, and are fairly clear that the principal cause is the abandoning of land previously used for agricultural purposes.
What surprises me is that in none of the media reported political tuned debates I have heard a single person of authority or otherwise pinpointing this, not to mention an economic viable connection with Portugal's comparative advantages in agriculture, wine and many other crops and live stock produce so uniquely mixable with tourism, especially relevant in present times wherein I can even appreciate that environmental sustainability is less of a priority for the time being.
Whilst summer heat evaporates and private and political life returns to business as usual, unfortunately I cannot avoid drawing a straight line with so many other inconclusive nationwide issues which appear to keep on returning in a scaringly similar form than before the last debate, election, state budget, academic year, court case or summer. Too many people expressing opinions on what someone else should be doing or have done but little, very little, genuine constructive action and all together we hide behind the inevitability of some supranatural disaster.
So unless Portugal turns accessibly flat and forestless and next summer will be extremely humid but without winds, I can already see what August 2014 will look like. Until then let's discuss second bailouts ..........
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