Avoid forest fires at all costs!

The town hall has produced a lovely photo for us. It is intended to show the leading characters at a tree-planting event. So, who do we see? The mayor, the chief of the fire brigade, the other elected representatives of the Monchique district council and members of the town hall staff – a total of eight people who had their photo taken in front of a sign bearing the words “#Construir o Futuro”. It is all intended to show that these ladies and gentlemen have just done something important for the future of the Monchique district: planting native trees…

But the photographer pressed the shutter at the wrong moment. Look at the protagonists’ hands. The young woman, second from the right, has one hand in her pocket. With her other hand on her thigh, she certainly wasn’t planting a tree. In fact, the people in the picture don’t know what to do with their hands. They’re either folding their arms over their chests or holding something in their hands. The person on the far left is Sonia Martinho, who on normal days is responsible for managing the nature portfolio at the town hall, i.e. she is responsible for looking after the forest. Does she have a hoe in her hand? No.

Then there’s a sum of money printed on the sign, namely, €149,980.39. What was that money spent on? It would have been better not to have written anything at all. Then no questions would have been asked. No one pays a six-figure sum for a few young trees. An oak tree like that can’t possibly cost more than five euros. So, what was the money spent on? More questions than answers.

Let’s go back to the protagonists’ hands for a moment. When someone plants a tree, you can tell what they have been doing by looking at their hands. They’ll be a bit dirty with soil. That person will have been digging in the earth with their hands. They will have just dug a hole in the ground with a spade, thrown in some mulch or manure, added some water, and then covered it with a bit more soil and mulched it again. Sometimes, depending on the age and size of the tree to be planted, you give the tree a wooden stake to help it grow, because it needs a support to lean on in windy and inclement weather. Nobody has planted a tree here. In this case, someone has held their face up to the camera for a photo; the photo was probably taken with a smartphone. That’s easier and quicker.

In the past, people used to be photographed at work. The press were invited to take a photo or two, or even to write a report. You could see the sweat that was produced and the effort involved in planting a tree after the many forest fires. We always had a watering can or a bucket of water to hand, and nowadays, when we plant trees, we install a sprinkler system to protect the tree from future forest fires. Someone presses a button, a tap is turned on, a powerful pump forces thousands of litres of rainwater into an underground pipe, and the sprinkler shoots a jet of water up to 20 metres in the air to extinguish the forest fire. Climate change very often ruins every tree planting operation in Portugal. Either the young tree dries out completely on hot summer days, or grazing goats eat the leaves off the young trees. In the first five years of their life, trees need something like a guardian to look after them. Sometimes they survive the next forest fire, but sometimes they don’t. It would be useful to give every young tree its own sponsor, that is, someone who will look after it, a carer. Then perhaps, after five years, one could put up a sign and print a sum of money on it. That is if one knows how much nature is worth. For then we would be able to appreciate the value of nature and would not allow any further forest fires. People should have their matches taken away from them when they try to light a fire. Or their cigarette butts.

And yes, there are shredder machines available these days too… but that’s a different story altogether. The CM Monchique hires out shredders free of charge for making mulch. Please ensure you avoid fires and forest fires at all costs!