By Cain O’Mahony
The current forest fires raging around Bordeaux and large areas of Spain demonstrate the madness of capitalism. Even the saner end of global capitalism (Present Trump excluded) accept that the increasing regularity of huge wildfires is the result of climate change.
This is irrefutable. For example, Natural Resources Canada estimates that climate change will mean wildfires claim twice as much of Canada’s forests by the next century, than they do at present.
Yet as the politicians wring their hands in anguish in front of the TV cameras, they are still exacerbating the threat of wildfires through continual cutbacks and planning deregulation.
Climate change has meant that the ‘Fire Season’ – the period woodland is susceptible to combustion – has extended. Cassandra Moseley of the University of Oregon, said 2018: “Fire Seasons are growing longer in the United States and worldwide. According to the US Forest Service, climate change has expanded the wildfire season by an average of 78 days per year since 1970.” (Scientific American, 2018)
So that’s the reality. Therefore, should we not be recruiting more firefighters? No, quite the reverse. Across capitalism globally, fire services are being slashed as governments bring in austerity measures to grease the public palm with tax cuts at election time, especially for the rich. To do that, they cut pubic services, including the fire service.
Areas destroyed by wildfire
In France, areas destroyed by wildfire increased by 10 percent between 2023-24. Yet the percentage of the French national budget spent on firefighting continues to flatline at a mere 0.5 percent.
Last year, the European Public Service Union (EPSU) (August 28) said it was the same across Europe in other countries prone to forest fires. Cyprus has seen a 6 percent cut in firefighting services, 4 percent in Portugal, and 3 percent in Croatia. Similarly in the USA, the wildfire reserve fund, the ‘Flame Act’, has remained static since the 2010s.
It is not just the ability to fight fires that has suffered, but also the need to prevent them in the first place. That is why forests need active woodland management to carry out preventative work, clearing dead undergrowth and planning fire breaks.
Yet in the USA, the US Forest Service has shed over 20,000 jobs since 1980. Similarly in France, the EPSU reports, the National Forestry Office has seen its former workforce of 15,000 at the beginning of the 2020s, reduced to the current 8,000 workers.
The other consequence of capitalism is the lack of regulation and forward thinking, which only increases the risk of fire. Population growth across the world has seen urban developments encroach into wild areas, such as the affluent ‘leafy’ housing developments in North America. In California, for example, one study has estimated that by 2050, 645,000 houses in the State will be built in “very high” wildfire severity zones.
Obviously, more humans near wildland prone to fire means a greater risk of ignition, human beings being the number one cause of wildfires, whether discarded cigarettes or downed power lines.
Encroaching human development
Encroaching human developments also removes the tactic of containing fires by letting them burn out in desired areas, rather than a massive fire-fighting operation. Fire services have to shift their priorities to trying to keep fire from reaching houses and other physical infrastructure, coming under enormous pressure from politicians to ‘do something!’ and end up throwing less effective but extremely expensive resources at it, such as airborne water bombs.
A further impact is building and planning deregulation, and reduced resources for the agencies that are meant to enforce existing regulations with regular inspection. In Greece after their major wildfires in 2018, the authorities discovered that buildings and fences built without permits were a major contributing factor to the conflagration, and had to forcibly remove illegal structures in the wider Athens region.
Capitalism internationally has its blinkers on when it comes to climate change, because they are only interested in immediate profits, and damn the long term consequences. This determines their ‘drill, baby, drill’ mentality. With climate change, they should adopt the new mantra of ‘burn, baby, burn’.
[Feature picture credit: Alexandre P. Junior, Pexels Public Domain]
