As the island begins its recovery operation after the apocalyptic scenes last week and the biggest evacuation in Greek history, islanders are turning their anger on the authorities.
Residents said that for years the island’s forests of pine, cypresses, myrtles and oaks have been poorly maintained, which experts said added fuel to the wildfires. Locals cannot cut trees on their own land without a permit, or they will risk a huge fine or even prison time.
Rewilding just is such a danger:
“Poor management of forests leads to increased fuel loads, vegetation of the most flammable type, and few or narrow firebreaks. This is unfortunate, because fire safety and ecology require determined and wise management of the forest,” he said.
Well, yes Tim. Oddly enough, you can’t have a fire without something to burn.
Isn’t it amazing that it’s necessary for the locals to tell the ‘experts’ what fuckwits they are.
What if rewilding was supposed to create forest fires, so we could have the scary pictures of fire on TV we see now, which do so much to convince the hard of thinking that they should glue themselves to bollards and pathetically beg the authorities to rule them harder?
Like the malicious compliance of the British and European authorities re: Brexit, which is aimed at making your life more unnecessarily difficult whilst ensuring you don’t get any of the benefits.
Uncontrolled regular forest fires are a deliberate policy choice, much like undefended borders.
You have a point Steve. If we just leave our wonderful, fossil-fuel-burning life style alone, we can loll around with nothing to worry about.
But TPTB don’t seem to like that. So they insist on whipping up some problems for us.
ISTR an Australian case a few years ago where a chap was fined a massive amount of money after keeping the firebreaks round his property clear – in contravention of the newly-introduced laws. In the next major fire in the area his was the only house to survive…
One would have thought that, what with all the deference to “original populations” rights and customs, the ancient art of pre-emptive burning might have been given a little attention?
’Uncontrolled regular forest fires are a deliberate policy choice, much like undefended borders.’
Do not want this upgrading of Smokey the Bear’s famous warning slogan, Steve…
Baron J
The only one I can find is a bloke who was fined $A999,780 for clearing firebreaks on his property in 2017.
‘Mr Marland has previously indicated that before Mr Baker commenced the clearing in question, he contacted 32 different Government employees seeking advice on the acceptable width of fire breaks.’
‘He said he received conflicting advice ranging from 1.5 metres wide to “1.5 times the height of the tallest tree”.’
‘Mr Baker advised the Department of his plan and his intention to commence the work.’
‘However, some two years after the work began, he was advised by the Department that his fire breaks were too wide, and legal action followed.’
As an Aussie bureaucrat, this seems all too plausible to me. Of course you Brits’d never do anything like that!!
Lots of chumps are already working themselves up about the ignition sources thus ignoring the most important matter, to wit the fuel. Always it’s the fuel that’s central. If you have lots of fuel an ignition source will present itself whether it’s a lightning strike, a discarded bottle or a fag end. If you have no fuel then a teenager with a cigarette lighter, or a bozo with a BBQ, can’t do much damage.
(I digress, but have you seen that the US F35 stealth fighter-bomber, aka the Lightning, turns out to be unsafe when there’s lightning about? The pilots are now instructed to give a wide berth to thunderstorms.
Mind you it’s also the plane that they are instructed not to fly supersonically at high altitude except in short bursts.)
“Of course you Brits’d never do anything like that!!” Since our broadleaf woodland isn’t combustible there would be no need.
(I’ve no idea what our rules are for conifer plantations, mind.)
You’d have trouble lighting a fire in the average UK forest at the moment with a flame thrower. Damp doesn’t quite cover it……
Isn’t the plastic in the sea problem caused by the green’s aversion to landfill? We now send our plastic to the third world to be recycled and they oblige by recycling it by throwing it in the nearest river.
Yes Stonyground. The latest news I’ve seen says that we’re going to send our plastic (again!!) to the third world to be ‘recycled.’
I of course feel that the best and simplest recycling system is simply to burn the stuff. The CO2, H2O, ash and all the rest of the crap is then dealt with by the systems Holy Mother Gaia developed to do the job billions of years ago.
Previous wildfires in Australia and Canada have resulted in indigenous groups complaining about being stopped doing traditional land management and offering advice, funnily enough this one piece of (practical) traditional indigenous knowledge seems to fall on deaf years despite the woke telling us we have to incorporate indigenous teachings into everything else in life
In the USA they solved this problem by letting the indigenous people chop down the tress and build casinos.
Dear Mr Worstall
All that extra carbon dioxide – also known as ‘plant food’ – helps too. Not only does it provide better crops for subsistence farmers, helping to lift them out of extreme poverty, it also helps ‘rewilding’, otherwise known as abandoning uneconomic farms.
The planet is about 173 years into the modern warm period, with approximately 327 years before the next cool period dampens the planet’s vegetative productivity and coupled with an extended cold season, the human race experiences famine and plague.
Warm periods are associated with the flourishing of civilisation, cool periods with dark ages.
It’s a bit ironic that our glorious leaders seem determined that the modern warm period will witness the collapse of western civilisation in a vain attempt to reverse a natural period of global warming.
The climate is going to do what the climate’s going to do.
DP