Eucalypti

                

                   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…