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 rightlypointed out, the capitalist exploitation of the pine forest in monoculture mustnot be forgotten. ---- On July 12, two outbreaks of fire were reportedrespectively in the areas of La Teste de Buch and Landiras in the Girondedepartment. Quickly, the pine forest caught fire and several dozen hectares wentup 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 andfix what will be recorded as one of the largest forest fires in France. has knownso 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 forseveral decades.By the very admission of the emergency command on site, the configuration, powerand extent of these fires are unprecedented. We can hear that, on July 19, whilethe department recorded several temperature records, beyond 42°C, the fires"literally exploded".Napoleon III imposes expropriationFirefighters noted a front of flames several kilometers long, fire swings overmore than 200 meters, 20-year-old pine trunks exploding under the heat of thefire and a fire that created its own wind system before to bury themselves in thepeat of the moors to brood there for several more months, as evidenced by theresumption of this fire on August 9. If global warming is the most visibleculprit, behind the scorching temperatures and record drought hides a purelycapitalist logging operation devoid of any environmental logic.Indeed, the Landes forest is made up of more than 80% of private plots ofmonoculture maritime pines and we have to go back to the time of Napoleon III tofind its origin and justifications. Subjected to human activity from the lateNeolithic, the primary and diversified forest of the moors gradually gives way toa vast marshy and unhealthy area. Despite several attempts to cultivate rice ortobacco, the moor remained a peasant land until the middle of the 19th century. From the top of his emblematic stilts, the Landes shepherd practices sheepfarming and cultivates millet or rye on small plots to produce bread. All thisstops on June 19, 1857 when Napoleon III decides, by the so-called law relatingto the sanitation and cultivation of the Landes de Gascogne, to massivelyafforest the whole of the moor with the only essence of pine. maritime.Officially, the objective is to improve the conditions of hygiene but, inreality, it is a question of contributing to the capitalist effort of the Frenchcolonial Empire. The latter needs wood, turpentine, rosin, everything that a pineforest can provide.The law of 1857 privatizes the commons, expropriates the workers, thesharecroppers and auctions considerable areas of land which will be monopolizedby a local bourgeoisie made up of liberal professions and rentiers. The firstconflicts broke out and the breeders, supported by an entire population attachedto the agro-pastoral model, set fire to the first pine plantations. From 200,000hectares of mainly natural forest or dunes reinforced at the beginning of the19th century, the Landes today is approaching one million hectares.The consequences of several hundred thousand hectares of maritime pinemonoculture exploitation have been known for a long time. The intensive andunique cultivation of resinous essence has the effect of increasing the acidityand 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 adepth of one meter.An ecosystem to reinventIn this impoverished ecosystem, the maritime pine finds itself the target ofdiseases and insects, it is regularly treated with glyphosate by many forestersso that the departments of Landes and Gironde are among the most polluted inFrance. This softwood monoculture also represents an increased and known risk offire spreading during fires, not to mention the geographical location of theLandes, which is dried up by the local climate and swept by the western oceanwinds. Thus, it was not necessary to wait for the effects of global warming forthis 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 swingsover 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 anexception. But its particular statute resulting from XVe century being more andmore undermined by the absence of maintenance and by the permanent conflictsbetween " holders-pines ", owners of plots, and the users and users, will notallow this thousand-year-old forest to escape the disaster of July 2022. Worse,this dramatic situation will be an opportunity for the reactionary right totarget a so-called ready-made culprit : local elected environmentalists whoallegedly opposed the development of dirt roads. access for firefighters.Conspirators of all stripes will try to establish a link between this event and aproject to create a 1,000 hectare solar park... 20 km north of the burned area ofLandiras.The lessons of the disaster of August 19, 1949 have not been heard and areclearly no longer sufficient to contain the risk of a "megafire" threatening thisterritory. Multiplying the access routes for firefighters is derisory when acrown fire ravages 5,000 hectares in less than 12 hours, the equivalent of tenfootball 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 jumpcapable of traveling 200 meters.Multiplying the canadairs is no longer enough when trunks explode on a frontseveral kilometers long and on heights of flames exceeding 60 meters. It isbecoming urgent, even vital, to completely rethink the ecosystem of the Landes deGascogne forest and its fire risk prevention, to allocate the means that thedepartmental fire and rescue services (SDIS) have been calling for for severalyears, to stop immediate monoculture of maritime pine, to promote the return tobiodiversity and to expropriate the forestry owners who take advantage of thisland by destroying it.Gaelle (UCL Bordeaux) https://www.unioncommunistelibertaire.org/?Landes-La-monoculture-sent-le-sapin_________________________________________A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C EBy, For, and About AnarchistsSend news reports to A-infos-en mailing listA-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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