The role of citizens, local communities and the state in forest protection

After last year's bitter first place for Greece, which recorded 962,016 acres of burnt land in Evros, the largest fire in the European Union since the recording of relevant data began in 2000, we were wondering what other ecological disaster could have shaken us more. And that was none other than the floods in the Thessalian plain, which tore apart the country’s most productive region – much of which continues to this day, March 2024, to remain flooded north of the lake Karla. Two successive, unspeakable environmental, economic and social disasters, which demonstrated the abandonment of the Greek producer, as well as the people who chose to live, invest and create in the province, at the mercy of the climate crisis. Thus, one of the best studied and protected perennial pine forests of the eastern Mediterranean, the Forest of Dadia, has now become a thing of the past – just as those of Northern Evia, as well as the multiple suffered Parnitha National Park and the royal palaces, which for decades had been the most important lung of oxygen for Athens.

Fire departments with dozens of expensive aerial assets, as well as the new Ministry of Climate Change and Civil Protection, set up in September 2021 to prevent such incidents, seem to look on helplessly, often urging firefighters not to operate at night inside forests as they try to save – and rightly so – human lives and properties. We have seen similar images of state inefficiency in the cases of flooding, which is not a rare phenomenon in Greece, as torrents are an integral part of the country's mountainous terrain. So where were the competent authorities designated to protect citizens and to implement projects to prevent such disasters?

The Forestry Service and its multifaceted contribution

The Forestry Service, however, which for decades treated and foresaw all these (e.g. flood prevention works and regulation of mountain torrents, prevention and suppression of forest fires, etc.), is now essentially disbanded and is a shadow of its past, as the last recruitment of permanent staff took place 28 years ago. Completely weakened, discredited and aged, entangled in the cogs of bureaucracy and apathy – with the exceptions of a few dutiful people –, with responsibilities in dozens of areas beyond forest management, it continues to be the guardian of the public property of the countryside, as defined historically. It is thus involved in legal opinions, authorizations, encroachments, mapping, lawsuits and court appearances, as well as in the implementation of projects such as forest roads, dams, culverts, bridges, reservoirs, watering stations, etc. However, it is mostly known for the surveillance of every activity within forests, woodlands and rural areas (!), having “investigative powers” in more than 90% of the Greek territory, and it even incorporated the rural police fifteen years ago. Although today it has about 3,000 employees, it is 'mandated' to carry out all the above tasks with two to three forest guards in each mountain mass of Greece, which has 413 mountains over 1000m high! So, can an “executive” state function this way?

The first phase of the Forestry Service’s history begins with its foundation in 1836 and is characterized by continuous backsliding until its dissolution in 1877 with the dismissal of all forestry staff. Initially it was an arm of the police and the police state, as the Bavarian school of thought that undertook to help restore the forests of the newly established Greek state saw a 'ruined Eden', reminiscing about the sacred groves of ancient times1 (an example of the same mentality was later exemplified by the drastic ban on goat herding by the dictator Metaxas, which led to the slaughter of 5 million goats and the collapse of the local mountain economy - goats were reintroduced from Turkey a few years later)2.

Finally, it took almost a century after the Revolution for the forests to be entrusted entirely to the Forestry Service3. Since then, almost every mountain road, thousands of kilometers of forest network that later became communal, was cut and constructed by the Forestry Services. This network, together with other engineering works – bridges, culverts, retaining walls and thousands of small flood barriers on almost every torrent – connected but also protected hundreds of settlements and their surrounding infrastructure. Extensive mountain hydrology4 and pasture improvement projects were also implemented, with the construction of water reservoirs, drainage systems, spring development and tap construction and even mountain accommodation for stock breeders. Plant nurseries and nursery work were carried out by reforestation in almost every bare vegetation area, while logging was organized on the basis of ten-year management plans drawn up using scientific methods of biomass estimation and timber factories were established, providing work for hundreds of mountain inhabitants. One of the main concerns of its staff has always been fire prevention and the prosecution of environmental crime (e.g. encroachment, land clearings, illegal logging, poaching, etc.).

The historical evolution of the Greek forest landscape

In addition to the above state efforts, we should not overlook the historical evolution of the forest landscape of our country. This landscape, a product of long-standing cultural processes, reflects land use and perceptions that changed radically throughout Europe after the industrial revolution. However, as Greece did not manage to restructure its agroforestry system accordingly due to socio-economic and structural issues, but also due to its intense bas-relief and insularity, it inherited wonderful pre-industrial landscapes, 60% of which were in the form of “open” agroforestry mosaics –  i.e. meadows, shrublands, forests and crops, in a unique amalgam of inseparable land uses. Nevertheless, this ‘palimpsest’ and generally this ‘bare’ Greek landscape, as we have learned it from writers, painters, photographers, and filmmakers, resembles almost nothing like the vast, dense forest ecosystems of the country today. These young forests and thickets, with the most characteristic species being the pine and kermes oak that we see almost everywhere in the Greek countryside today, are the result of the recent abandonment of extensive stock breeding and wood burning in particular – as wood is no longer the only source of energy, mainly for heating and cooking, as it has been for centuries.

The abandonment of these activities, combined with the ban on the use of fire (even the use of low-intensity, controlled, low-severity fire for the ‘traditional’ clearing of forest understorey and shrublands), was the cause of the rapid increase in fuel. Thus, ancient cultural landscapes, worked for centuries by human toil, have changed form by accumulating flammable material that is bound to burn: if it does not burn for a whole year because we manage to put out the fire quickly, it will certainly burn with much greater intensity the next year or the year after – a characteristic of Mediterranean ecosystems that has been described as the “fire paradox”.

Modern environmental challenges and ways to protect

So at a time when climate crisis has shown the extent of the disasters it can bring, and in a state full of long-standing structural problems and endogenous inefficiencies, one wonders what the modern role of the Forestry Service and citizens can be. As Greek forests do not seem to offer much to the national economy in terms of “accounting” (apart from the ecosystem services that have not yet been included in the “account”), new and at first sight “radical” views are now being expressed by government officials, such as the utilisation of forests in the context of the carbon stock exchange with a system for creating carbon credits, “subsidizing the extraction of certified forest biomass” and its use by “new hybrid cooperative schemes” involving partnerships between forestry cooperatives and companies.5 Is this a form of covert neo-extractivism, as it happens with the old-growth forests of Romania, where Western European companies are deforesting the ‘Amazon of Europe’?6 And why should these rights be taken and traded by polluting industries (mainly oil companies) and not by rural people, such as the stock breeders who, through extensive breeding, keep ancient and fire-resistant agroforestry ecosystems intact?

Mediterranean forests have been and will be fire-resistant only through their multifunctional use, i.e. through the recovery of the palette of human activities with economic benefits: from grazing to industrial-scale utilization of their combustible biomass, with the mobilization of private capital in innovative “green transition” investments. This framework is described as “Mediterranean Forestry” and became official by the signing of the “National Forest Strategy 2018-2037”,7 which was drafted by dozens of renowned scientists and was subject to extensive public consultation with the participation of all social stakeholders. Unfortunately, however, it remained in the drawer, as it was replaced by the “National Reforestation Plan”, a classic case of a pseudo-green policy, which, although it aimed at a quick money absorption from the Recovery Fund, is still ignored...8

Greek forests will have much more to offer than the firewood of the energy crisis. First of all, wood, in the context of the low-emission and carbon capture circular economy, is projected to be the material of the future in the construction industry, replacing other polluting building materials in the building sector.9 In addition, forests can provide the honey on which thousands of new producers rely, the mushrooms that are increasingly in demand in restaurants, certified large-scale timber, and the resin whose use is being revived in Mediterranean countries, livestock products, headed by the much-troubled Greek feta cheese (which, although it is included in agricultural products, is produced in forested areas as it is by definition a product of extensive stock raising), but also spring water – the “gold of the future” which is captured by the forested mountain masses and provided free of charge to the communities that protect them. Therefore, in the context of the current “Decade of Nature Restoration” established by the European Union, the gradual revival of productive agroforestry landscapes10 is not a setback but a viable future prospect, one that presupposes strong local communities, that are now technologically networked as well, a strengthened public Forestry Service and solutions that are there waiting for a little water to bloom.