Fighting Mediterranean Flames

The management of fire has been central to human existence in the Mediterranean for many centuries. The lands north and south of the inland sea are by their nature subject to an endless cycle of fire. Their trees and plants are conditioned to survive it, and modes of human settlement were historically planned both to use fire and to protect against it. Men set fires to clear land or enrich it, and they made use of land changed by naturally occurring fires.

The Mediterranean region, like similar areas in California, Australia, and South Africa, is not only fire-prone but fire-dependent. It needs fires for many reasons, including the need to prevent worse ones. The evidence of the last decade, however, shows that managing fire is becoming more and more difficult. Intense heat waves appear to be occurring more often at precisely the time when a larger and more mobile population increases the risk of fires starting. The heat waves prepare the tinder and people supply the spark. It does not have to be arsonists who are the villains of the piece in the Greek fires. A piece of broken glass from a discarded bottle can be the lens for a blaze engulfing large tracts of land. The other important general cause is that people in these areas have come to see fire as unnatural. In effect they want fire outlawed, and politicians react accordingly. Small fires are suppressed or contained, with the result that stocks of flammable material increase, making huge outbreaks like that from which Greece is now suffering more likely.

None of this is news to scientists, firemen and planners in the countries concerned, and it would be wrong to say that nothing has been done to prevent such big fires or to handle them better when they do occur. Greece is the scene now, for instance, of unprecedented European cooperation against fire. Firemen from 16 countries, four of them contributing planes, are fighting the Greek blazes. As for arson, the Greek government has pledged to revise the country's laws so that the fire-damaged forest land can never in future be taken for development. More fundamentally, it may be hoped that terrible blazes of this kind will stiffen the general resolve to take measures to limit global warming.

But, just as with flooding in northern countries, the key to coping now is for society as a whole to stop acting as if nature can be ignored. In Greece, the obsession with the possibility of arson and the readiness to blame politicians suggests that people are still shying away from that fact that the way they collectively want to live, what they want to buy, what they want to build, and how they treat their countryside has a great deal to do with the problem.