A-Infos (en) France, UCL AL #330 - Ecology, Landes: Monoculture smells of fir (ca, de, it, fr, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Following the fires of this summer, the Landes forest has been disfigured for 
several decades. If the records of heat, drought and climate change are rightly 
pointed out, the capitalist exploitation of the pine forest in monoculture must 
not be forgotten. ---- On July 12, two outbreaks of fire were reported 
respectively in the areas of La Teste de Buch and Landiras in the Gironde 
department. Quickly, the pine forest caught fire and several dozen hectares went 
up in smoke. It will take more than 2,000 firefighters, six canadair planes, 
three dashes and more than ten days before a drop in temperatures can control and 
fix what will be recorded as one of the largest forest fires in France. has known 
so far: more than 21,000 hectares burned, more than 35,000 people evacuated, 
wildlife decimated, smoke as far as Paris and a forest massif disfigured for 
several decades.

By the very admission of the emergency command on site, the configuration, power 
and extent of these fires are unprecedented. We can hear that, on July 19, while 
the department recorded several temperature records, beyond 42°C, the fires 
"literally exploded".

Napoleon III imposes expropriation

Firefighters noted a front of flames several kilometers long, fire swings over 
more than 200 meters, 20-year-old pine trunks exploding under the heat of the 
fire and a fire that created its own wind system before to bury themselves in the 
peat of the moors to brood there for several more months, as evidenced by the 
resumption of this fire on August 9. If global warming is the most visible 
culprit, behind the scorching temperatures and record drought hides a purely 
capitalist logging operation devoid of any environmental logic.

Indeed, the Landes forest is made up of more than 80% of private plots of 
monoculture maritime pines and we have to go back to the time of Napoleon III to 
find its origin and justifications. Subjected to human activity from the late 
Neolithic, the primary and diversified forest of the moors gradually gives way to 
a vast marshy and unhealthy area. Despite several attempts to cultivate rice or 
tobacco, the moor remained a peasant land until the middle of the 19th century.

From the top of his emblematic stilts, the Landes shepherd practices sheep 
farming and cultivates millet or rye on small plots to produce bread. All this 
stops on June 19, 1857 when Napoleon III decides, by the so-called law relating 
to the sanitation and cultivation of the Landes de Gascogne, to massively 
afforest the whole of the moor with the only essence of pine. maritime. 
Officially, the objective is to improve the conditions of hygiene but, in 
reality, it is a question of contributing to the capitalist effort of the French 
colonial Empire. The latter needs wood, turpentine, rosin, everything that a pine 
forest can provide.

The law of 1857 privatizes the commons, expropriates the workers, the 
sharecroppers and auctions considerable areas of land which will be monopolized 
by a local bourgeoisie made up of liberal professions and rentiers. The first 
conflicts broke out and the breeders, supported by an entire population attached 
to the agro-pastoral model, set fire to the first pine plantations. From 200,000 
hectares of mainly natural forest or dunes reinforced at the beginning of the 
19th century, the Landes today is approaching one million hectares.

The consequences of several hundred thousand hectares of maritime pine 
monoculture exploitation have been known for a long time. The intensive and 
unique cultivation of resinous essence has the effect of increasing the acidity 
and favoring the podzolization of the soil. On an area as vast as Ile-de-France, 
apart from ferns and pine, almost nothing grows and almost nothing lives at a 
depth of one meter.

An ecosystem to reinvent
In this impoverished ecosystem, the maritime pine finds itself the target of 
diseases and insects, it is regularly treated with glyphosate by many foresters 
so that the departments of Landes and Gironde are among the most polluted in 
France. This softwood monoculture also represents an increased and known risk of 
fire spreading during fires, not to mention the geographical location of the 
Landes, which is dried up by the local climate and swept by the western ocean 
winds. Thus, it was not necessary to wait for the effects of global warming for 
this forest to burn on more than 60,000 hectares and claim 82 victims in 1949.

The firefighters observed a front of flames several kilometers long, fire swings 
over 200 meters, 20-year-old pine trunks exploding under the heat of the fire.
In the middle of this artificial ocean, the user forest of La Teste de Buch is an 
exception. But its particular statute resulting from XVe century being more and 
more undermined by the absence of maintenance and by the permanent conflicts 
between " holders-pines ", owners of plots, and the users and users, will not 
allow this thousand-year-old forest to escape the disaster of July 2022. Worse, 
this dramatic situation will be an opportunity for the reactionary right to 
target a so-called ready-made culprit : local elected environmentalists who 
allegedly opposed the development of dirt roads. access for firefighters. 
Conspirators of all stripes will try to establish a link between this event and a 
project to create a 1,000 hectare solar park... 20 km north of the burned area of 
Landiras.

The lessons of the disaster of August 19, 1949 have not been heard and are 
clearly no longer sufficient to contain the risk of a "megafire" threatening this 
territory. Multiplying the access routes for firefighters is derisory when a 
crown fire ravages 5,000 hectares in less than 12 hours, the equivalent of ten 
football pitches per minute. Respecting the width of the firebreaks fixed by law, 
the length of two lying pines, i.e. 60 meters, is no match for a fire jump 
capable of traveling 200 meters.

Multiplying the canadairs is no longer enough when trunks explode on a front 
several kilometers long and on heights of flames exceeding 60 meters. It is 
becoming urgent, even vital, to completely rethink the ecosystem of the Landes de 
Gascogne forest and its fire risk prevention, to allocate the means that the 
departmental fire and rescue services (SDIS) have been calling for for several 
years, to stop immediate monoculture of maritime pine, to promote the return to 
biodiversity and to expropriate the forestry owners who take advantage of this 
land by destroying it.

Gaelle (UCL Bordeaux)

 https://www.unioncommunistelibertaire.org/?Landes-La-monoculture-sent-le-sapin
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