There was a time before them, of course. One of the earliest literary references
to them can be traced back to the late nineteenth century. In Eça de Queirós’ The City and the Mountains the main
character Jacinto, a Portuguese aristocrat living in Paris who had recently
discovered the charms of rural Portugal, complains about how slow the rhythms
of nature are. Realizing that during his whole princely life amidst the
comforts of civilization he had never planted a tree, he asks which one is the
fastest-growing, only to be appalled by the answer. “An oak tree!” - he whines -
“Thirty years before it turns into something beautiful… I falter. That’s good
for God, who can wait. (…) Thirty years! In thirty years, trees!... Only if it
were to cover my grave!” The alternative, the fastest-growing tree, is the
eucalyptus, “the horrible and ridiculous eucalyptus. In six years you get the
whole Tormes covered with them”. Jacinto doesn’t seem to have accepted the
suggestion as Tormes, the bend of the Douro river where the action takes
place, has so far remained fairly eucalyptus-free. Unfortunately, most of the
country has not been that lucky.
Eucalypti
are ugly indeed. Their bluish green colour is unattractive. Their shape is
uninteresting. The shade they throw is mostly uninviting and often dangerous,
as they like to drop branches on people’s heads. Only the bigger ones which can
sometimes be seen besides some inland faraway road deserve some respect, and
even so only because of their sheer size. Botanically speaking, they’re little
more than water-sucking rascals, their smell being the only positive thing
about them. That and obviously the money the paper industry makes from them (which, of course, doesn’t allow them the time to grow to a respectable size).
Their worth as sources of pulp is the obvious reason behind their being almost
everywhere in Portugal. That wouldn’t be strange in itself, being just another
example of landscape being destroyed for profit. However, there has been an odd
insistence on calling them forest,
the weirdest thing being that people have actually come to see idyllic woodlands
in the shabby agglomerations of eucalypti. This phenomenon illustrates an
inconvenient truth about today’s social life: in fact, the media can convince
an entire society of virtually anything nowadays.
This curious collective illusion reaches its
peak during the summer, being one of the essential markers of our cherished silly season. As everybody knows,
eucalypti burn. It’s in their nature. Besides drying up the land and covering
it in litter, they release highly combustible oils. Fire actually benefits
them: they easily survive it, getting rid of the competition in the process. Wildfires
in Portugal are then something quite epic, as areas bigger than Luxembourg
vanish in the blink of an eye. The media gather around the fires, and the whole
thing gains the appearance of a Hollywood super production (only, in version bad), with the firemen running and
yelling around, elderly people praying, locals carrying pointless water buckets
and reporters making live inventories of fire-fighting equipment, starting with
the firemen and ending in the aerial
means (they never say planes or helicopters). In the middle of all this
eucalypti are the big elephant in the room: they are never mentioned, disguised
behind the generic label of forest. People in positions of responsibility
diffusely talk about prevention (and how much it costs), campaigns on TV urge
people to be careful when they make picnics and for some weeks the whole
country repeats that something has definitely to be done to solve the problem.
But then, of course, nothing happens, and a revealing pattern goes largely
unnoticed: the fact that only eucalypti and large spots of pine trees (equally artificial)
burn. Everywhere where some faraway traces of our original and autochthonous
forest are still extant, wildfires are much rarer or outright absent. Nevertheless,
people naively carry on believing that every summer the country turns into a
postcard of hell simply because of driving smokers, another wonder of
contemporary media constructivism. Most people in Portugal actually believe
that the country has always been like this. They have no idea of what an actual
forest looks like, they are utterly ignorant of how spoilt the country really
is and, even if they weren’t, they just wouldn’t care. In the contemporary
Portuguese psyche trees, along with plants, vegetables, agriculture and nurturing
the land in general are reminders of a poorer time. A rapidly urbanizing people
has no time for such things.
In
fact, we’ve been following Jacinto’s footsteps... in both directions. We’ve
been commuting between civilization and nature, living in none. Believing
ourselves rich and too sophisticated for rural life, we have deserted for the
large towns. That’s where the shopping centers are; that’s where the wide
suburban motorways lead; that’s where all the excitement is; that’s where all
the jobs are, we thought. Alas, we were just eagerly consuming a second-hand
civilization, sent by parcels from Europe, as somewhere someone says in one of
Eça’s books… The fires, the abandoned land, the dying villages, the dams
forever sinking areas of outstanding natural beauty, the increasingly frequent
droughts had become mere echoes of a past world, while simultaneously the countryside
was gradually becoming the symbol of a lost identity. As the optimistic
certainties of modernity keep fading, many Portuguese are now looking back to
it in nostalgia. David Lowenthal says that “if the past is a foreign country,
nostalgia has made it the country with the healthiest tourist trade of all”. We
have thus every reason to believe that the Portuguese are returning to the
countryside not as the actual owners of the land, but as mere tourists: as
superficially and naïvely as tourists and equally ignorant of the ways of the
land. On the contrary an actual appropriation of the land would require the knowledge
to interpret its symbols: the Portuguese have willfully lost the common sense acquaintance
with the land they once had, and have never bothered acquiring the scientific,
contemporary and reflexive understanding of it. It is not to uncover the
meaning of the land that the Portuguese are returning to it: it is merely to quiet
the torments of post-modern living with a weekend escapade. In the meanwhile,
and since man can’t live without some level of interpretation of his
environment, the show must and will go
on. Eucalypti will keep on burning while we flee to the coast, thus providing the
distinctive smoky atmosphere we so much appreciate in our summers and the ultimate
symbol of the Portuguese man’s disconnectedness with his native land.
So,
there’s surely been a time before them, but now they seem to be here to stay. A
solution might be to fell them all outright, plant oaks in their place and wait
for some three decades. That seems impossible, however. We can only watch them
burn, only to be replanted, to burn again, to be replanted…
