Herbivore and forest

Well, no. The forest fire problem is not to be solved by massive programs of cutting underbrush in winter at public expense, or by spending more money on putting the fires out once they start. The solution is a reasonable land and forest policy, in line with our climate and our ecosystems.

 When a dam breaks and devastates a valley we ask who the engineer was, and what he did wrong. The same might be asked of the agricultural engineers of a few decades ago who planted the extensive reforestations of pines that are now going up in smoke. They ignored the ecology of Spain, relentlessly planting pine and eucalyptus in dense, continuous masses, letting on that such monocultures were the natural forest of ancient Spain.

True, rural Spaniards have long been dendrophobes (tree-haters). So, too, the buyers of disentailed Church lands in the 19th century, who ruthlessly logged the hills clean. But the engineers who carried out Franco's reforestation program had the same Neolithic hatred of natural, mixed forest ecosystems. They substituted natural vegetation by orderly, dense, extensive monocultures of pine or eucalyptus.

They did not respect the natural or traditional "mosaic" pattern of alternating forest and clearing. Spain is a country that is naturally dry in summer, where some 700 lightning bolts start forest fires every year, not to mention the cigarette butts and barbecues (as inevitable as the lightning bolts). But in a natural ecosystem of alternation, the fires seldom go very far.

What they chiefly disregarded was the fact that, if you plant the hills with trees and fail to see to it that herbivores eat the vegetation in the clearings, the forest mass is more or less doomed to end its natural cycle consumed by fire. And not as occurs naturally, in scattered patches, but with vast tracts burning all at once.

The mosaic landscape that is unfriendly to great forest fires is maintained by herbivores that eat the underbrush as it grows on clear land. Now we come up against a problem. The 30 million domestic herbivores we have in this country no longer graze the land in its entirety. And the wild herbivores, which proliferate in spite of hunting, cannot control the underbrush, because they are too small. We have wild herbivores that fulfill, in part, the brush-clearing functions of goats and sheep - but not that of cows, horses, mules and asses.

Our forebears inherited the mosaic landscape from the action of natural fires combined with the brush-clearing action of the aurochs, the wild horse, the zebra and the bison - the four large European herbivores who not only eat vegetation, as do deer, boar and chamois, but also have the weight necessary to stamp on underbrush and prevent it from growing too large. But all these large herbivores have long been hunted to extinction.

The engineers who designed the "rain-catchment" forest some 40 years ago should have promoted a mixed cattle-raising activity combined with reforestation. And if the old extensive, migrant cattle herding had ceased to be economic and was displaced by fixed herds and feedlots, they should have seen to it that the Spanish woodlands had aurochs, wild horses, zebras and bison wandering in them.

To substitute these herbivores by crews who in winter "clean" the woods is not only an excess, practiced in the recent boom years at huge expense that nobody can now pay. It is inherently absurd, due to the sheer magnitude of the task.

Wild herbivores, combined with selective cutting of both planted and natural forests where excessive, to reduce them to suitably isolated tracts, would be a reasonable solution. In climate Spain is more like Africa than Europe. The wildlife-teeming savannah is more like a dehesa (sparsely wooded bull ranch) than a dense forest.