F e r l: having become wild from a state of cultivation or domestication
a – Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species
The landscape of low, pine- and eucalypt-covered hills and shallow valleys around the quinta (farmstead) in Portugal’s central region, where I returned for my two months of fieldwork, bears witness to the unintended effects of broadscale capitalist environmental transformation. This is ferality – that is, one instance of it. The region produces much of the nation’s eucalyptus pulp – and a good part of the worlds’. Not bad for a slither of a country on the southwesterly edge of Europe. The fibres grown here mostly end up being thrown down the loos of people in richer, northern Europe. The plantations in and round Sertã are an example of the ecological “away”: out of sight and out of mind to consumers (and disposers) of the end product. Supply chains mean such consumers can’t feel the heat of the fires which rip through these parts with increasing ferocity.
Since the mid 19th century, the cultivated plantation ecologies – first of Maritime pine (hereafter pine), and then eucalyptus – which were a central tenet in the fascist Estado Novo’s modernisation and development schemes, have increasingly escaped from human control, proliferating into feral ecologies which lend themselves to new, or perhaps “returned”, forms of “feral fire”1, long thought banished to (Holocene) history. This is the history that rural folk must inherit today. But it is not one of their making.
This is a story in three parts. The parts themselves are both thematic and chronological: cultivated pine gives way to feral eucalypts which roar into feral megafires. To tell each part properly, some historical background is required. I have tried to avoid any unnecessary repetitions that may result from this, but some back-and-forthery has proved unavoidable.
Ferality emerged early on in my fieldwork as both a way of describing the kinds of environmental transformations which have taken place, but also in how my interlocutors viewed the landscape in which they lived. It therefore acts as a kind of narrative arc for the whole story. Eucalyptus, the key figure of this kind of ferality, have spread rapidly through the country in the last few decades. Hot on the trails of pine, their plantation predecessor (and fellow-escapee from human control), and with whom they increasingly entangle in flammable, undead “zombie” forests2 – a reputation they gain from their ability to resprout after either harvesting or fire, their trunks proliferating in number each time. These feral figures both proliferate and are proliferated by other forms of ferality – corporate alongside fire itself.
Often, ferality presented itself through ideas surrounding forest ‘hygiene’: the distinction between managed (‘clean’) and unmanaged (‘unclean’) plantations, one that ultimately hinges on fire risk. Discussions about management sometimes anticipated allusions to the age-old myth of the profligate native, an enduring stereotype amongst urban – and expat – groups that has long tarred rural farming folk (or ‘peasantry’), the traditional inhabitants of this part of central Portugal. This is a trope I have determinedly tried to avoid. The pulp industry, however, is a great purveyor of this distinction: most fires take place in unmanaged plantations, which absolve the industry of responsibility.
You see, ferality isn’t always a foe. For the pulp industry, it’s a friend. As I will show, the pulp industry cultivates the ferality which for practically everyone else poses a threat not only to livelihoods but to life itself. Cultivating ferality in this way is thus the industry’s modus operandi.
1.1 Eucalyptus globulus labill
Native to south-eastern Australia and a few surrounding islands, eucalypts are a genus of some 700 different species of flowering tree and shrub. Eucalyptus globulus labill (hereafter eucalyptus/eucalypt) is the genus’s most prolific, and most cosmopolitan, pioneer, with a wider area of cultivation than any other. It is known as one of the major “tree immigrants” of the postwar period (Kardell et al., 1986). Despite neither being the tallest, nor offering the best quality timber, it was the prodigious growth[1] of this particular eucalypt that would soon make it one of the foremost plantation species (Warren, 1962). It’s also one of the most invasive, a designation it has been given in 7 out of 15 of its cultivated regions (Deus et al., 2019).[2]
1.2 Commercial plantation forests globally
Commercial forest plantations are a globally important source of employment and income, and source of forestry products circulated worldwide. They account for 7% of the world’s forested land. A quarter of these plantations consist of non-native or alien species (Catry et al., 2015).
Maritime pine and eucalyptus, the first native to the Western Mediterranean Basin, the second to south-eastern Australia, are two of the most important and widely planted commercial plantation species worldwide. Intensively managed in mostly even-aged, monocultural stands, their high growth rates and short rotation cycles (McEwan et al., 2020) contribute to their being widely viewed as a panacea for matters both economic and environmental. That is, they promise to meet the growing demand for timber products globally—one estimate suggests that by 2050 they will meet all timber demand (Pra et al., 2019)—and provide income for local communities, whilst also promising to reduce rates of deforestation and a truckload of other environmental problems, from biodiversity loss to flooding and pollution, all the while fighting climate change with their carbon sequestration. As von Hellermann (2016) notes, plantations “stand for progress” (p. 374).
Since the 1980s, such plantations have been expanding globally, despite widespread consensus about their negative socioeconomic impacts on local communities, particularly in terms of (multispecies) displacement in the process of acquiring land for planting, the disruption of existing ecological relations, the loss of customary forms of land use, and the loss of livelihood and income through reduced labour requirements of often-mechanised plantation agriculture (Malkamäki et al., 2018).
1.3 Eucalyptus plantations and the pulp and paper industry in Portugal
Introduced to Portugal in the 19th century but proliferated in the 60s under fascist dictator Antonio Salazar, plantations of fast-growing but non-nativeeucalyptus – known locally as the ‘fascist’ and later ‘capitalist’ tree (Kardell, Steen, & Fabiao, 1986) – swept the country to fuel its burgeoning pulp and paper industry (Catry et al., 2015). Portugal’s socioeconomic standing at this time made it a ripe target: low incomes and poor living standards made it an outlier in Western Europe. Its development was hitched to the success of the industry, and thus to the establishment of plantations. These commercial plantations have arguably left the most evident mark on Portugal’s landscapes since the introduction of agrarianism by the Romans. The spread of plantations rearranged age-old geographies of plants and people as they assembled land, labour and capital in novel, more “productive” configurations, and has wreaked havoc on biodiversity, water and soil resources (Richardson, 1998), and alienated local communities from the land.
Their proliferation as the cash crop of choice for many of the predominantly small-scale landowners (Tomé et al., 2021) has made the Iberian peninsula the site of the highest concentration of the species worldwide (Catry et al., 2015). In relative terms, Portugal currently has the largest planted area of eucalyptus in the world (Jornal de Leiria, 2017), while its planted area as a proportion of its land area is nearly 7 times higher than the global average (Pra et al., 2019). It is also the most common species of tree, covering 26% of its forested area (INCF 2013), alongside accounting for 57% of forest exports (Silva and Tomé, 2016).
Portugal is the 10th largest producer of chemical pulp in the world (Gutiérrez-Poch, 2012), with its pulp and paper sector accounting for 4.4% of the national GDP (J. S. Silva & Tomé, 2016). Over 95% of the pulp is exported to predominantly wealthier, northern European countries.
1.4 The emergence of megafires
Mixed stands ofpine and eucalyptus, which occur often because of abandonment of commercial plots, represent the highest fire risk of all forest types in Portugal (Tomé et al., 2021). As President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen stated, Portugal is at the forefront of climate change in Europe. In 2017, the BBC published a report stating that Portugal’s “wildfire season” would likely increase from 2 to 5 months because of climate change. That same year, the worst fires in the nation’s history swept through 500,000 hectares of forest, killing more than a hundred people (Schleussner et al., 2019). Since then, new laws have been passed that have sought to limit the further expansion of eucalyptus plantations. These have so far been ineffective (Collins, de Neufville, Claro, Oliveira, & Pacheco, 2013), and fail to address the estimated 900,000 hectares of extant plantations, alongside the effects of feral proliferation beyond human control.
[1] A study of its growth in a plantation over a 6-year period back in the late 19th century found Eucalyptus to grow an average of 49.5 feet, versus the 17 feet of maritime pine (Kinney, 1895, p. 15).
[2] The proliferous nature of eucalyptus had already been noted in Portugal by the 19th century, with “spontaneous” growth already having been observed (Von Mueller, 1879).
The Tree with a Thousand Faces 