The Tree with a Thousand Faces

Eucalyptus: a socionatural history

  • Prologue

    This blog is the digital home of a project that began as a thought that arose as I was collecting firewood in a small patch of feral eucalyptus forest, beside the farmstead I was staying at in central Portugal. The thought: what the hell is all this flammable, nonnative eucalyptus doing here in the hills of central Portugal countryside – a place otherwise known as the wildfire capital of Europe – and so close to the farm, at that?

    I first noticed the strips of thin, orange-hued bark, which peeled in motley clusters around the bases of spindly trees I couldn’t name. They formed a strict grid-like structure, which gave this desolate tract of forest an eeriness I couldn’t put my finger on: where were the calls of birds, or the flutter of winged insects? These tracts surrounded the farmstead I had arrived at not long ago, and on which I would volunteer for the next few weeks. What kind of trees these strange figures were was unknown to me back then. Indeed, back then, forests were forests, the trees its residents – and this bark, I was told, made for perfect kindling once the winter damp had been expunged. There was little else on the forest floor but for a matting of the long strips of bark – some a metre-long or more – and weepy, lanceolate leaves, breaking down into a sodden mulch; here and there lay large pinecones, dropped by the rougher-barked conifers set amongst the unknown trees, which I packed along with the bark into the reusable supermarket bag on my shoulder. Warmth came from the small log burner in the farmhouse. The fire would be lit sometime in the afternoon, its heat warming us through the evening, and travelling upwards into the long, narrow attic where we volunteers slept.

    Over the next few days, I became transfixed by these strange, peeling figures. I learnt that they were eucalypts, native to Australia; that they were Portugal’s most common species of tree; that most of it was grown for pulp, which was processed into paper, much of it toilet paper, and nearly all for export to Northern Europe. I heard about their oily, flammable leaves; their unquenchable, river-slowing thirst and their predilection for fire as a means of propagation. I heard about their prodigious growth, their less-than-friendly (allelopathic) relations with other species, and their penchant for popping up where they shouldn’t, particularly after a fire. And I heard about the fires – a normal part of the hottest, driest months here – but which in 2017 raged through this part of central Portugal, on land not far from here, like never before. Scientists even gave these fires a new name: megafires.

    Forest fire had already been on my mind. A few weeks before, on the road to a small coastal town, I had passed through what remained of the Pinhal de Leiria (the Pine Forest of Leiria), still a partially burnt-out ghost of its former self. Over 80% of it had burnt in one of the infamous 2017 fires, which three years before I had watched on the blazing news reports with astonishment, feeling that all-too-familiar sense of mixed-up awe and sadness that seem to hum as the affective soundtrack to our age of planetary unravelling. That year some half-million hectares of land burnt, and over a hundred lives were lost. The planted ‘forests’ that had fuelled the development dreams of 20th century Portugal were increasingly going feral, themselves fuelling other forms of flammable and feral proliferation. Progress was proving flammable, and the kinds of extractive and highly intensive forms of exploitation it had driven were turning out to be not only unthinkable, but increasingly unliveable.

    That was in the winter of 2019. Since then, my fascination with eucalyptus in Portugal has snowballed into being the subject of my recently completed Environmental Anthropology MSc thesis, based on two months of ethnographic fieldwork in that same region. You can read that here.

  • What tree?

    Eucalyptus globulus Labill.

    Native to south-eastern Australia and a few surrounding islands, eucalyptus is a genus of some 700 different species of flowering tree and shrub. Eucalyptus globulus Labill. (hereafter eucalyptus) is the genus’s most prolific, and most cosmopolitan, pioneer, with a wider area of cultivation than any other. It is known globally as one of the major “tree immigrants” of the postwar period1, and is amongst the most widely planted . Despite neither being the tallest, nor offering the best quality timber, it was the prodigious growth [1][2] of this particular eucalypt that would soon make it one of the foremost plantation species2. It’s also one of the most invasive, a designation it has been given in 7 out of 15 of its cultivated regions3.

    Many know eucalyptus for their citrusy scent, their blue-green leaves and colourful, peeling bark. But they are equally known for their love of fire. In plant science, they are referred to as pyrophytes, meaning phytos (plants) that have adapted to tolerate pyros (fire), or indeed need it for reproduction4. Their leaves, which court fire through the production of flammable oils, are known to literally explode upon contact with fire. The same oil gives rise to their “selfish” reputation, which lend the tree an allelopathic quality when they cover the forest floor, inhibiting the growth of other species.

    The first Eucalyptus seeds to depart their native Australia are said to have been carried by Sir Joseph Banks, the botanist charged with populating the King’s Royal Gardens at Kew with a collection of exotic plants from around the world. In 1768 he had set off on the maiden voyage of the infamous Captain Cook’s HMS Endeavour5, landing on the shores of what would come to be known as Botany Bay, in New South Wales, in 1770. Seeds collected by local Aboriginal folk left a newly-‘discovered’ Australia in 1771 on the return voyage of Captain Cook’s infamous HMS Endeavour. Banks brought back the first specimens of Eucalyptus to Europe, which were planted at Kew 1774, though it was not until 1788 that Eucalyptus was named as such by French botanist Charles-Louis L’Heritier de Brutelle6. Thence began the deterritorialisation of one Land7, and the reterritorialisation of another. The Land that bore Eucalyptus was a meshwork of entangled relations, between wind and wildfire, Dreams and memories, alongside plants, animals, spirits and people.

    Before long, living plants were being shipped back to the metropole at quantity, and in specially-designed boats resembling ‘floating gardens’8, to the gardens at Kew, where they were studied, categorised and disseminated around Europe and the colonial world. The dissemination of exotic seeds and seedlings these voyages facilitated marked the emergence of a new imperial botany, within which the categorisation and transportation of newly discovered organisms was drawn into an increasingly globalised project of modernisation9, which would further fuel the geographical rearrangements of organisms catalysed by the earlier Columbian exchange.

    These early voyages were about mapping natural resources so as to be able to tap them for wealth accumulation. However, they were also about understanding how plants originated and grew in different environments, in order to grow them elsewhere, at scale (and, of course, for profit). As with cartography in the century that followed, imperial botanical science played a key role in the colonial enterprises of the long 18th, prefiguring in vital ways the proliferation of plantations, and processes of plantation unworlding, that would soon follow apace. The exchange of seeds these voyages facilitated marked the emergence of a new imperial botany, within which the categorisation and transportation of newly discovered organisms was drawn into an increasingly globalised project of modernisation10, which would further fuel the geographical rearrangements of organisms catalysed by the earlier Columbian exchange. And as with this earlier exchange, the consequences of such a project could not always be predicted or foreseen by the scientific and technological frameworks that guided these changes.

    Spurred on by outbreaks of dysentery and scurvy on the fetid ships, the Irish-born surgeon Dennis Considen who, some 22 years after Banks, sailed with the First Fleet – those 11 initial British ships, carrying convicts and colonists to from Portsmouth to Botany Bay in New South Wales – was the first to distill the plant’s leaves.

    Considen would later become famous for his distillation of eucalyptus leaves to treat the settlers of the newly founded penal colonies. The kinnotannic acid of the Red Gum, known locally as ‘kino,’ was mixed in an alcohol solution and used to treat wounds of both colonists and convicts alike11. Such medicinal usage of eucalyptus was preceded, of course, by indigenous folk, for whom kino, as well as the inhalation of the smoke emitted from burning its leaves had long been, and indeed continues to be12, a remedy for cold and flu. A sample of the oil was soon sent to Banks13, and who had also been in communication with Considen.

    It is likely that the ship that, seeds and living specimens in tow, brought Considen back to England had, on its outbound journey, carried with them a different kind of seed, one whose germination would herald the birth of a nation, and the slow and often gruesome death of another.

    Eucalyptus, like coffee, palm oil and sugarcane, would become part of an imperial army that would aid settlers in colonising far away lands. In this early period, the species’ biological traits – prodigious growth, it’s ability to resprout after cutting, adapatibility to different environments – became entangled with the symbolism and ideology of the ruling power, entrained to the development projects of the times. In India, plantations of eucalyptus would be used as a political technology to proletarianise indigenous folk (ref), while in Ireland, eucalyptus’ insatiable thirst had led to it being used to drain boggy areas, priming land for development. Similarly, in California, this trait led to its designation as the “miracle tree” by settlers for its role in reducing the incidence of malaria14. Like the sylvan contingent of an imperial army, the tree was lauded for its ability to make “the environment more habitable for settler colonists”15. Elsewhere, in Spain, globulus became known as “the tree of the future,” embodying the aspirations of a nation on a path to Progress.

    [1] A study of its growth in a plantation over a 6 year period back in the late 19th century found globulus 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 by the 19th century, with “spontaneous” growth already having been observed.

    1. Kardell et al., 1986 ↩︎
    2. Warren, 1962 ↩︎
    3. Deus et al., 2019 ↩︎
    4. Oele, 2020 ↩︎
    5. Warren, 1962, p. 38 ↩︎
    6. Clarke & Tsing, 2022 ↩︎
    7. Rathore & Nollet, 2017 ↩︎
    8. Silva-Pando & Pino-Pérez, 2016 ↩︎
    9. Goodman, 2016 ↩︎
    10. Sharrad, 2007, p. 36 ↩︎
    11. Sharrad, 2007, p. 36 ↩︎
    12. Brasier, 2010 ↩︎
    13. Vuong, Chalmers, Jyoti Bhuyan, Bowyer, & Scarlett, 2015 ↩︎
    14. Davis, 2002 ↩︎
    15. Clarke & Tsing, 2022 ↩︎

  • The Tree as Nature

    “The Tree with a Thousand Faces” started out as the title of an interlude in my thesis, one that allowed me to branch out from eucalyptus in Portugal to the genus’ more global, and globe-trotting history as one of the foremost tree plantation species of the last 250 years or so.

    The title drew inspiration from Joseph Campbell’s famous 1949 book ‘The Hero with a Thousand Faces’. The book was an exercise in comparative mythology, wherein Campbell distills the myriad mythological stories of societies the world over into a grand and universal ‘monomyth’. Campbell’s claim to have found the ultimate ‘monomyth’ which can explain away the myriad diversity of human cultural and religious life was typical of his time, but today sits rather awkwardly in the philosophical space opened up by postmodernism and other schools of thought which look on at claims for universality with a heavy dose of suspicion.

    For all the title’s anachronism, there was something about the way it posed a singular, universal figure against the multiplicity of its cultural expression that felt ripe for its own figuration. that rather apt in itself figuring some of the themes which continue to preoccupy environmental anthropology and other kindred disciplines.

    To be continued…

  • Emerging ferality

    “You plant cork for your grandchildren, pine for your children, and eucalyptus for yourself.”

    A local proverb

    When, in the terrifying openness of my first few days ‘in the field,’ Paul told me this, sat on the terrace of the quinta, I thought I’d struck gold. It felt like a circuit board had lit up in my brain: this pithy aphorism seemed to be the stuff of ethnographic dreams. The succession from native to exotic, or from community values to the myopia of the economically rational individual resonated with many of themes we’d been covering in class the past year. The descent into individualism that the proverb conveyed felt depressingly neoliberal. I parked it in the back of my mind.

    The eucalyptus solution

    With pine’s rapid devaluation in the 1950s, eucalyptus quickly emerged as the timely “solution” to the country’s economic and social woes (Nunes et al., 2019). An innovation in the pulp and paper industry suddenly made it possible to turn the particular fibres of eucalyptus into pulp, the raw material used in various kinds of paper. This was a major boon for the industry: not only did eucalyptus yield double the pulp of pine, but it grew considerably faster and could be cut multiple times (Kardell, Steen, & Fabiao, 1986). They became like “cash machines” for the industry, as a 2015 company report announced (M. N. M. P. d. Silva, 2015). The innovation ushered in a new commodity frontier and a concomitant wave of planting, a wave the industry rode to a new place on the international market[1], eventually making Portugal a world-leader in the production of paper.

    In the 1960s over a million people left in search of work – part of an exodus that some think was exacerbated by the failed pine project (Nunes et al., 2019) – leaving huge swathes of the land abandoned, ripe for invasion. In just two generations the municipality lost 50% of its population. My friend Vanessa, who was born not far from here, told me that back then, lifestyles had changed little for centuries: few had running water, electricity or indoor toilets; illiteracy was high, and only a minority had access to education. Progress meant moving to the cities, or to richer nations like France. For those who stayed, Progress was embodied in the fast growth of planted eucalyptus, which they hoped would offer a different kind of ‘way out’. To believe in Progress was to believe in eucalyptus.

    The rise of pulp

    At the time of the innovation in 1957, Portugal’s economy was primarily agrarian, with a focus on protectionist industry, and significant budget allocations for African colonial wars (Graham, Linz, & Makler, 1979, p. xvi). To fund these conflicts, the regime actively sought foreign investment, aligning Portugal with the postwar capitalist economy (ibid). Foreign investments surged tenfold in the decade leading to 1970, promoting legislation favouring eucalyptus plantation expansion (McGuire, 2013), often with foreign capital (Celbi, n.d.). Economic pressures drove the regime to embrace external investments, fuelling growth in transformative industries like pulp and the burgeoning tourism sector. Relishing the abundance of cheap land (and Cheap Nature (Moore, 2017)), multinational pulp companies, including Celbi, majority-owned by Swedish firm Billerud from 1967-2006, and national entities like Portucel (now The Navigator Company), began converting agricultural land into plantations, backed by funding from the World Bank and later the EU.[2]

    As the weeks passed, and I spoke with more and more people about eucalyptus and their problematic place in Portugal, I’d think back to that proverb. It began to feel more and more out of place – too crude, even malign – in the picture that was emerging, and I was weary of falling into the trap of the ‘profligate native’. Sure, the succession of cash crop tree species was chronologically accurate, as was its placement in the symbolic order of trees. So too was the foreclosing of the future it expressed, and the shift toward more immediate economic gain. Yet time and again, when I asked who it was that owned eucalyptus, I was told in no uncertain terms: “everyone”. This wasn’t meant literally, but rather served to emphasise how incredibly ordinary it was: it was merely the current vogue cash-crop.

    Escaping from the state

    The fascist state had been pivotal in facilitating the early development of the industry. Already by 1945, new industrial policy had designated the industry as a “basic” industry, entitling it to government support; Marshall Plan financing was used to develop it, with investment into researching suitable types of wood (Gutiérrez-Poch, p. 222). However, Domingos told me that as the industry ballooned following the pulp innovation, it became increasingly difficult for the government to control their activities, such was their predominance in an export-led economy. Yet more pressingly for those against the onslaught, it also became near-impossible to differentiate between the two. Actors of the state and the pulp industry shuttled back and forth between a revolving door which blurred the boundaries between the public and private spheres. Many ministers of state held prominent positions in pulp companies, presenting huge conflicts of interest. Until 10 years ago, for instance, the general director of Biond, the industry’s association of pulp and paper companies, was the same man who, as Secretary of State for Forestry, approved a law to expand the area of eucalyptus plantations[3].

    In the 1980s, the negative effects of eucalyptus plantations were beginning to rear their heads; villagers complained of wells drying up and rivers slowing down (Kardell, Steen, & Fabiao, 1986). Wildfires started getting bigger, and lasting longer, and people began to notice eucalyptusand their disregard for property rights. Paul, who has taken quite the interest in his alien neighbours, told me about their intensive management regime, but also about how their biological characteristics lend themselves to the different kinds of ferality.

    Growing eucalyptus, cultivating ferality

    Seedlings, most of which are cultivated in the Navigator Company’s nurseries from selectively-bred clones – they are the world’s biggest producer of eucalyptus seedlings (The Navigator Company, n.d.) – are planted in evenly-aged, single stand monocultures. They can then be coppiced three times, usually at intervals of between 8 and 12 years. The intensity of this management regime is nearly unrivalled in Europe and is a huge contrast from the “extensive” management of pine noted in the previous chapter.[4]

    Each time they are coppiced (or burnt by fire), the trees re-sprout from basal buds in their trunk, producing new shoots of growth leading to multiple thinner trunks (Cerasoli et al., 2016). And each time they do so, the quality of the yield is reduced. (Growers are supposed ensure there is only one trunk, chopping off any extras, but this is rarely followed.) After three rotations, they need replanting. This involves removing the roots – a costly (often prohibitively so for nonindustrial owners) procedure.

    Before arriving, I had read of eucalyptus’ labelling in the 1980s as the “fascist” and “capitalist” tree for its association with the regime and large landowning industrialists (Kardell et al., 1986). However, in the 1980s eucalyptus plantations covered just a third of their present extent (Kardell, Steen, & Fabiao, 1986). The association of eucalyptus with fascists and capitalists no longer seemed to have any bearing on who owned eucalyptus today. Eucalyptus plantations are now so widespread that the category of “eucalyptus plantation owner” no longer makes any sense. What’s more, it felt hard to square the warmth and friendliness of my elderly neighbours, with the selfish, greedy and short-sighted characterisation of people who planted eucalyptus. Often busy at work in their meticulously tended market gardens, these are not ornamental gardens: on the measly 400-euro pension of elderly folk in Portugal, these gardens provide much of their nutritional needs.

    What I was being told was not matching the characteristics of eucalyptus planters as selfish, individualistic and short sighted. My Portuguese friends and interlocutors were often quick to point out the role of the pulp and paper industry, something the expats were often unaware of. I had to start looking further ‘upstream’.

    Exploiting producers

    My introduction to both the power and nasty tactics of the industry came by way of Domingos, who, in his activist capacity, has keenly followed their exploits. Domingos informed me that around 20 years ago, the industry decided to import pulp from South America. They claimed there was a domestic supply shortage – a claim that producers avidly refuted. The result: cheaper pulp, produced in different labour/regulatory setting, flooded the market, lowering the price and devaluing the investments of many of the producers. Because of the monopoly the industry has on pulp and other raw materials, they had no option but to sell short-changed. Unsurprisingly, when it came to replanting the trees, or indeed the trees were burnt by forest fire, there was no longer a sufficient financial interest to do so.

    Salvage accumulation

    Today, the pulp industry own and manage just 20% of eucalyptus plantations (J. S. Silva & Tomé, 2016). The remaining 80% are owned by many of the country’s 400,000 “small forest owners,” mostly in tracts of a hectare or less. Since 1983, the area covered by eucalyptus plantations has tripled, yet the pulp industry’s share in this remains largely unchanged. Similarly, the production of pulp grew from around 7 million tons to over 27 million (Branco, 2010). Clearly, accumulation by dispossession (Harvey, 2005) – the original modus operandi of the plantation – is not at work. So, what happened?

    In the early days, pulp firms offered to lease smallholders’ land, loaning them the money required to cover the initial planting costs (Nunes et al., 2019, p. 4). They would then manage the plantations themselves, paying the landowners a small income for their trouble (Brouwer, 1995). When the trees were ready to harvest, someone had to do the harvesting, another the transporting. Thus the economic benefit of the plantations seeped out into the local community, to the benefit of the many small, family-owned wood processing and transportation firms (J. S. Silva & Tomé, 2016).[5] The kinds of social relations that arise here are not really very capitalist at all: as many of my interlocutors noted, many draw on the labour of friends or family to maintain their plantations (if they do so at all); for harvesting and transportation, too, it is small family owned firms called in, who themselves are likely motivated by things beyond simply profit – this, after all, is hardly a guarantee.

    At some point along the line – it’s unclear exactly when – pulp firms changed tack. As eucalyptus fever took hold through the 70s and 80s, and smallholders realised they could make a fast profit from the tree, pulp firms no longer thought it necessary to lease the land or lend money; the lure of the market and the buzz of eucalyptus fever was enough to entice smallholders into planting, and the pulp firms would be there to buy it all up (at a price of their choosing).

    Thus smallholders were positioned as “ostensibly independent” (Tsing & Group, 2009, p. 347) subcontractors in a supply chain led by the pulp firms, to whom pulp production was increasingly outsourced. Such production is so cheap that it’s practically free: costs – economic as well as environmental – are kept ‘off the books’ (Moore, 2017), so the industry need only pay for the ready-to-pulp timber itself. And because it has a monopoly, it needn’t pay much. Such externalisation has long been central to how capitalism functions: it always needs a new “away” to exploit, but in today’s Portugal, there are no colonies left[6]. The outside of outsourcing – where things are outsourced to – then appears less as an externality and more as an insideoutside: it doesn’t need an overseas colony (distance), just an unregulated or noncapitalist island within (difference). There aren’t any regulations for how you manage your plantations in the pulp chain’s insideoutside, the kind that, as supposedly upright and environmentally sustainable corporations, they would otherwise be subject to (and to which their own managed plantations are held).

    The pulp industry’s managed plantations are thus little more than a neatly-pruned veneer for a form of accumulation exacted through what Tsing has called “salvage”. Salvage accumulation enables us to describe the process through which this ‘insideoutside’ is transformed into capitalist wealth (Tsing, 2015a, 2015b). It enables the pulp industry to feed on both managed and un- or poorly managed plantations (which pose higher fire risks), making small meals of such binary oppositions. This means that when The Navigator Company claims that the fires happen outside their managed plantations, as they do in a recent promotional video, they are technically telling the truth. It’s just that the technology of supply chain capitalism serves their interests by obfuscating the commodity or accumulation processes in the insideoutside, connecting the precarity of smallholders with the prosperity of pulp (Tsing, 2011).

    Salvage enabled the pulp industry to integrate a great deal (a recent survey in the nearby parish of Macão found 64% of respondents to be forest owners (Valente et al., 2015)) of the country’s many small forest owners into a supply chain, on hugely uneven, and often out right exploitative (i.e. importing foreign eucalyptus to lower prices here), terms. The ability of supply chains to link up the local, regional and global scales also means that pulp prices are “indexed to the global level,” and thus have little bearing on the actual costs borne by producers, not to mention the environment and its non-producing inhabitants. Domingos lamented that this makes it near impossible to compete with pulp producers in the global South. Domingos’ father planted eucalyptus when the fever took hold. When, about 20 years ago the pulp industry artificially deflated domestic pulp prices by importing cheaper pulp from abroad, there was little smallholders like his father could do. Here in the precarious insideoutside of the supply chain, there are no wages or any of the benefits, securities or rights which come with waged work. As independent subcontractors, smallholders’ position is outside the core operations of the industry, and thus its own corporate standards.

    Offsetting risk

    Alongside shirking regulations, pulp firms can also outsource risk. Investing in eucalyptus plantations comes with risk: the seedlings might not root successfully, or the trees might succumb to disease, an event that the monocultural arrangement of plantations actively foments (Brightman & Lewis, 2017). The pine plantations in front of the quinta are a case in point: having been plagued by the processionary pine caterpillar, which can be fatal to dogs, these ghostly relics of failed development dreams take on an altogether more monstrous quality for Paul and Julia, and their cherished canine companions[7]. The biggest risk of all, however, is that they are burnt by forest fire: on average, 3% of the country burns each year (Fernandes, Guiomar, & Rossa, 2019), and in these parts the risk is much higher (see chapter 6).

    Supply chains enable the pulp industry to outsource these, and other, risks onto to smallholders, such that the industry can only win. For firms operating under the aegis of supply chain capitalism – and in an age dominated by finance, rather than production (or where power has shifted from producers to financiers) – outsourcing has become “the global standard” (Tsing, 2012, p. 52). From the recruitment and training of labour to the act of polluting or chance of catastrophe striking (ibid): firms must relinquish themselves of any unnecessary elements which may, through the inevitable risk they pose, get in the way of shareholder profits. This is vital to how corporations court finance: in a ‘race to the bottom’, only the most dressed-down of firms can find their way to the top of the outsourcing chain, which is almost invariably located somewhere in the global (qua European) North.

    Abandonment and (corporate) ferality is just an “ordinary catastrophe”

    The dirty tactics of the pulp industry also have ecological consequences.

    As Domingos admits, for many smallholders losing their plantation to fire is not necessarily a catastrophe; “many smallholdings are half an hectare or less. If it burns, ok, I have a loss.” Few smallholders are reliant on the plantations for their livelihoods. The vast majority are retired, living on a small plantation, and engaging in semi-subsistence agriculture. That is, for the duration of the growing season, many smallholders are growing much of the produce they need to survive. “The bigger problem,” Domingos informed me, “is about what to do next: to replant it… that might cost thousands of euros.” Indeed, some have calculated that replanting eucalyptus after its three rotations can exceed the total income gained (Serra et al., 2017). The answer to all is glaringly obvious: if producers were paid better, they’d be managed better. But eucalyptus prices have been stagnant for a decade and have now begun to decrease. “Now, since 2017, I see many abandoned eucalyptus plantations – until 10 years ago, people replanted, they believed in it – now they don’t, they don’t replant, they abandon.” Without human management, their proliferous nature sees them form the “feral” forests which are visible in the landscape surrounding the quinta.

    Abandoned plantations go feral, and it these feral stands that represent the highest fire risk among all forest types (Tomé et al., 2021). Feral plantations are unregulated, and complicate boundaries of ownership, responsibility, and accountability. Eucalyptus, alongside pine, increasingly went feral, breaching the bounds of their smallholdings to form vast tracts of wild, ‘zombie’ forest.[8] Such forest accounts for 77% of all forest burned (Mateus & Fernandes, 2014). Many of the small forest owners – most of whom own multiple patches, often in different locations – have long since moved abroad (Almeida, 2020) or to the cities following successive waves of (still ongoing) migration – a point frequently emphasised by my interlocutors. But perhaps a greater proportion simply can’t afford to manage them properly. In terms of forest management, nearly a quarter of owners do not actively manage their holdings, while nearly all the rest do so alone (Valente et al., 2015). The feral forests that form from abandonment, which then fuel wildfires, are an example of what Tsing calls “ordinary catastrophe”: “the planned devastation and makeshift, rubble economies that form an expectable feature of global supply chains“ (Tsing, 2012, p. 52). The ferality abandonment spawns is thus an “absolutely expectable” feature of the landscape of the insideoutside of pulp production which supply chains make possible (ibid).

    Due to the fire risks posed by high levels of abandoned land, the government recently established a GPS land registration scheme (BUPI), in order to determine ownership, and reclaim or resell land where they see fit. But take up has so far been low amongst the Portuguese, in part over fears that reclaimed land would flood the market, lowering house and land prices. Expats, on the other hand, have avidly taken up the registration scheme, and the poor take-up amongst the Portuguese is a source of frustration. However, none of the expats I spoke to relied on plantation-forests as a source of income, and thus have less to lose by having their land reclaimed. The current cost of removing eucalyptus to replant it with something else prohibits most from doing so, but most owners still want to keep hold of what are usually ancestral forest lands.

    “The belief is gone”

    And it’s not just land that is being abandoned; as Fabio lamented, “the belief is gone,” too. For nearly a century, that belief – in the Progress plantations stood for (von Hellermann, 2016) – guided the widescale establishment of plantations of cash-crop species. The belief in what eucalyptus symbolised for local people has gone – the dreams of Progress and prosperity gone with them. Yet though the symbolism may be gone, the flammable, proliferous materiality of eucalyptus plantations remains, left as a constant remind of the failures and fatal consequences of the regime’s cultivation project.

    [1] They had previously been pulping Maritime pine on a much smaller scale, but the innovation allowed them to scale production up, and produce krakt pulp, giving the sector a place on the international market.

    [2] World Bank-funded afforestation with both pine and eucalyptus, mostly on land owned by the pulp companies, continued until well into the 1980s (A. M. C. Mendes, 2007), while EU funded projects continued until relatively recently (Veiras and Soto, 2011)

    [3] Similarly, after the 2017 fires a new state agency, AGIF, was formed, helmed by a man who had formerly been a technician for The Navigator Company.

    [4] Pulp industry figures think this kind of intensity is key to efficiently using the land, and so not using more than is needed, but more intensive production inevitably means the harm inflicted on the surrounding environment is necessarily more intense (Freer-Smith et al., 2019); after all, “everyone knows that segregating environmental spaces to cordon off danger does not work; “contamination slips through every barrier” (Tsing, 2012). And besides, given eucalyptus covers 9% of the country’s land area, there is little evidence for the kinds of restrain implied in such an argument.

    [5] This no doubt added to the general excitement that surrounded this new, fast-growing cash-crop, as it spread into abandoned farmland and pine plantations.

    [6] The pulp industry’s current expansion into Lusophone Africa complicates the picture

    [7] There are growing fears of a similar situation happening with Portuguese eucalyptus plantations (Diogo et al., 2023; M. Silva, Machado, & Phillips, 2009)

    [8] Even by 2005, an estimated 47% of eucalyptus in Portugal were in mixed or irregular stands resulting from ferality (Fernandes et al., 2019). Today the figure is likely much higher.

  • Introduction

    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).

    1. Pyne, 2019, p. 188 ↩︎
    2. Serra, Rodrigues, & García-Barrios, 2017 ↩︎