I have to sit a moment when I hear "Mom, why is everything burning?". The question is asked by a child who cannot understand what he sees on television, what he hears us talking to adults. A child He can't understand why the mountain burns, the countryside, the forests, the houses ...
And I have to sit down to think about how to explain it to him so that he knows what is happening and so that he understands it. It is not easy, but it is one of those questions that I prefer not to let go and that maybe we should never let go, even when we ask them ourselves.
The images are painfully spectacular. In recent days we have seen Funchal, the capital of Madeira, burn on all four sides. As the island of La Palma burned, as Galicia burned, as Portugal burned and no, I don't have a reason why this is happening, nor can I understand it myself.
Why is everything burning?
It's not about scaring or cheating on you, it's about finding precisely the middle ground between those two extremes, it's about telling you the truth but in a way that you understand it.
The mountain burns in summer because there are people who set it on fire yes, because there are accidents too but not only because of that.
You see, the mountain has to be taken care of all year round, it is like a huge garden that we have to take care of each other every time we go for a walk and also, those responsible for the country, the community, the province, the town, they They also have to take care of it and demand that their superiors take care of it.
If you leave the forest during the year, the trees fall off the branches and stay there, in the middle of a path that could perhaps be used as a firewall in a fire but of course, if it is full of dry branches it works just the opposite.
"Of course, you have to clean it like when the trees of the schoolyard come to prune the town hall lords."Exact! You have to clean it during the winter, you have to take care of it, you have to look for native species that may grow more slowly but are more resistant to fire and drought.
And above all we must convince everyone that the mountain is not our mountain, the forests are not ours, of the adults who manage them or go through them, the mountain and the forest are yours, of the children who have lent them to us until you grow up and ask us for accounts for not having taken good care of what is yours.
“Mom… I have not quite understood this, I think, but the other one. The next time we go for a walk we can take a bag to collect the cans or bottles that we meet, right? ”
Sure! That would be perfect! It will be as if we had a mission! And then at home we count to see who is the one who has completed the mission with more success, do you think?
But we also have to learn to take care of what belongs to everyone and to ask that everyone take care of them too, and we can participate in some repopulation action of the burned areas that catch us closer to home and so we avoid that where there was a forest a desert grows? you think? (sadly there are many more areas nearby where we can plant trees after a fire than we imagine… )
I do not know if he will have managed to understand my explanation or if I will have managed to make myself understood, the truth is that explaining realities like this that are repeated painfully every year, it also costs me ... it will be because I cannot understand them either.
Photos | unsplash.com
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