Dear Martin.
I can't anymore.
Many of us can't anymore.
Of that form.
Please explain it.
I genuinely believe many share your concern about the fires. I do. Large wildfires are almost always a tragedy.
Even though one could - rightly and with great seriousness in this time - object that forests are hardly the culture and history Europe should be most concerned about preserving, defending and protecting.
But that aside - one of your sentences is truer than you yourself make it. So let's take them from the end.
'It is man who sets fire to the planet.'
Yes. Literally. Because the climate starts no fires - it can't, ignition is required, and nature itself almost never provides that. Lightning accounts for a vanishingly small fraction of Europe's fires. The rest is people. France has arrested over 160 for arson in July alone, and carelessness, according to the country's own prime minister, fills more than intent. That means, in plain language, that every single one of the fires your heart bleeds over, with overwhelming probability, was lit by a hand.
The climate sits in third position - in the fire weather that determines whether a spark becomes a catastrophe.
But you skip the second position ENTIRELY, and it is not accounted for with a single sentence in a text that is otherwise written to ignite... feelings in its readers - which seen through an ordinary citizen's eyes is a bit odd, since it is the only thing a government and politicians themselves have in hand and can handle - the fuel?
Did you catch that?
Decades of depopulation of Southern Europe's rural districts have removed the grazed meadows and maintained forests that historically functioned as firebreaks, preventing fires from spreading.
The shepherds and farmers disappeared, the maintenance disappeared with them, and the forests have grown together into unbroken fuel corridors. From the 1980s to 2018, Southern Europe's fires fell markedly precisely because of better management - that handle demonstrably works, and your post doesn't mention it with a single word.
Why not, when it is THAT handle that has demonstrably worked before, and the only one you can grasp from today - even relatively cheaply?
Forest management works tomorrow!
Your solution, reduction of CO2, works at earliest in 50 years.
Don't you find that a bit of a, shall we call it, ridiculous prioritisation?
Finally, what I find most concerning - you answer the criticism before anyone has made it, by categorising it in advance as "the right wing's mockery". I belong to no wing, but that's exactly how you make a factual conversation impossible before it begins.
Millions of Europeans see the same images as you, you're right about that. Everyone finds it unfortunate regardless of wing, unless you have a screw loose. And they deserve action in relation to the fires. Yes.
But MORE THAN ANYTHING ELSE - they deserve politicians who respond to the ENTIRE chain of causation - ignition, fuel, weather - and not only to the link that fits into an agenda they already had.
Don't they? Don't you agree with that?
If not - then you must explain to all adults in the country why on earth not.
Surely no Europeans wish for political action taken on a severely deficient basis - or only on the basis that serves the politicians' feelings, sensations and agenda?
Happy weekend.
