When the trees reveal the forest

This text belongs to ‘Peninsulas’, the newsletter that Enric Juliana sends to readers of ‘La Vanguardia’ every Tuesday. If you want to receive it, sign up here.

When a traveller approaches Madrid by plane, he or she has the sensation of visiting a very flat, very dry country with few trees. “Africa begins in the Pyrenees.” This phrase, with a French ring, was attributed to Alexandre Dumas and was certainly inspired by Stendhal in his notes on the life of Napoleon, in which he wrote that in Spain everything was African except religion. North Africa begins south of the Pyrenees, may be thought by the traveller looking out of the window as the plane approaches Barajas airport. If the visitor travels by train or car from Barcelona to Madrid, he or she will have the same impression when crossing the Monegros desert.

Spain, a dry country with shrinking forests, increasingly affected by forest fires and climate change. Beaches full of tourists and an arid and unpopulated interior, with a gigantic cosmopolitan camp in the centre of the peninsula, closely connected to Latin America. This could be a geographical caricature of today’s Spain. A caricature very far from reality, as far as forest mass is concerned. Pay attention: Spain is currently the second country with the largest forest mass in Europe, behind Sweden. It is the country with the highest proportion of forest mass in relation to its surface area, behind Sweden, Finland, Slovenia, Estonia and Lithuania, surpassing Norway and Switzerland, and far ahead of Germany and France. In Spain there are 7.8 billion trees. 160 trees per inhabitant.

A few months ago, the geographer Santiago Fernández Muñoz put the subject of trees on the table and surprised me. We had met in Madrid to have a coffee and talk about geography and politics. Fernández Muñoz is a professor of Human Geography at the Carlos III University, has worked at the AIReF (Independent Authority for Fiscal Responsibility) in the control of public policies, and until a year ago he directed the Recovery Plan monitoring unit in the office of the Presidency of the Government. He has the maps in his head, he knows the weak points of public policies and he knows what the European recovery funds are about and how they are negotiated in Brussels. It was very interesting to meet him. He liked the approach of Peninsulas and he proposed a series of topics, the kind of topics that are apparently disconnected from the hectic current events and that explain things of a certain importance. Based on that conversation, Santiago Fernández collaborates with this newsletter by providing ideas and data. “You probably don’t imagine that Spain is one of the countries with the largest forest mass in Europe,” he told me. “We have been building the image of a dry country, a country at serious risk of desertification, severely affected by forest fires; I am not going to deny this risk, but the reality is that in Spain the forests have become larger,” he added. I was very interested in the subject of trees. All those approaches that refute stereotypes are especially attractive. Therefore, today we will talk about trees with the help of Santiago Fernández.

Maps, maps, maps. Statistics say that forests began to grow in Spain in 1975. We could say that after Franco’s death, trees began to grow. We did not see this coming. The growth of forests was not included in the programme of the Democratic Junta, nor in the Moncloa pacts. Forests began to expand in 1975 as a consequence of a constant reduction in the rural population and in farmland. Experts agree that 1940 was the worst year for forests in Spain. The misery of the post-war period forced thousands of families to live on the outskirts of forests. People looked for more firewood and cleared small fields to be able to eat. That situation began to change between the 1960s and 1970s as the effects of the Stabilisation Plan began to unfold: the influx of foreign capital, new industries, tourism, mass migration from the countryside to the city, definitive mechanisation of agricultural work and a slow reduction in the area under cultivation. Experts say that 1975 was the turning point. On the day Franco died, the forests were already growing.

Since then, Spain has gained more than seven million hectares of trees. This means that the surface area occupied by forests has grown by 63%. A similar process has been recorded in most European countries, although at a lesser rate. Demographic changes and reforestation policies explain the phenomenon. As the population concentrates in cities, forests tend to grow if there are policies that favour it. When the rural population decreases, crops decrease, less firewood is collected, bushes advance and, later, trees. In recent years, as environmental protection has become more prevalent in society, many large companies have wanted to improve their public image by financing important reforestation campaigns. Never before in Spain have there been so many trees as now.

The country currently has 28 million hectares of forest, which occupies 56% of the total surface area. 18.5 million hectares of this forest are forests and another 10 million correspond to areas of bush and scrub, with scattered trees. In the last decade, one million hectares of cultivated land have been lost, with the consequent decrease in the number of people employed in agriculture. After 37 consecutive months of decline, agricultural employment is for the first time below one million people and does not reach 5% of the total number of Social Security affiliates. These are very recent data, which Jaume Masdeu reported on in The Vanguard This past Monday. A century ago, this was not the landscape. There are statistics on forest cover from 1861. Travelers who wrote about 19th century Spain spoke of desolate, treeless landscapes, as if the Spanish hated trees or had gone on a massive hunt for firewood. Between 1860 and 1960, there was intense deforestation as a combined result of the confiscation of public forests and ecclesiastical properties, and the increase in small plots of land for the subsistence of the impoverished Spanish peasantry.

A recently published book, Revolutionary Springby the British historian Christopher Clark, explains the importance of the privatisation of communal meadows and forests in the germination of the social revolts that converged in almost all of Europe in 1848. Plagues, famines (terrible in Ireland), prohibition of extracting firewood and grazing on the former communal lands, plus the misery and overcrowding of the peasants transformed into industrial workers, fermented the revolutionary wave that swept through Europe in the middle of the 19th century. A wave that in Spain, in a further example of its historical singularity, catalysed Carlism: the traditionalist cause of the Infante Carlos Isidro de Borbón. Carlism is one of the deep furrows of modern Spanish history. Another Carlos, Karl Marx, wrote his first article in the press criticising the implementation of a new forestry law in the Rhineland. His father, Heinrich, was the lawyer for the peasants who were suing against the new Forestry Code.

We return to the enchanted forest. The Stabilization Plan of 1959 began to change deforested Spain. I highly recommend a film shot in 1951, Groovesdirected by José Antonio Nieves Conde, with a script stylized by the writer Gonzalo Torrente Ballester. A commission from Falange to discourage rural exodus. The big city is a trap for the noble Spanish peasantry. That was the message. It is not a minor film. It is an appreciable adaptation of Italian neorealism to Spanish circumstances. “The suggestions of the city reach even the last villages, inviting the farmers to desert their homeland with promises of easy riches. These peasants are trees without roots, splinters of suburbia that life destroys and corrupts. This constitutes the most painful problem of our time,” said the initial text of the film, signed by the Falangist writer Eugenio Montes.

The Stabilization Plan of 1959, promoted by the technocrats of Opus Dei, with the notable intellectual contribution of the Catalan economist Joan Sardà Dexeus, former collaborator of Josep Tarradellas in the Republican Generalitat, overturned the script of Montes and Torrente Ballester, opened the Spanish economy to the outside with growth rates of 7%, and stimulated a great exodus from the countryside to the city. After recovering Grooves you have to go see The 47a recently released film directed by Marcel Barrena, which tells the story of the struggle of the Barcelona neighbourhood of Torre Baró, built by emigrants from Extremadura, to get a bus line to reach its steep streets in 1978. Manuel Vital, a driver for the municipal transport company, a member of the PSUC and Comisiones Obreras, and a resident of Torre Baró, hijacked a bus to show that the route was possible. That year, according to statistics, the forests had already begun to grow.

There are more trees than ever before, and this fact clashes with the dark predictions of desertification. There are more trees than ever before, for now. The population employed in agriculture is falling below a million for the first time, and depopulation continues to grow in many provinces. The metropolitan region of Madrid wants to reach ten million inhabitants in the next decade, while oak trees are growing in the old furrows. The recent election results of the extreme right in the former East Germany bring with them different messages. Not everything is the fault of immigration. Thuringia and Saxony are the states with the highest rates of depopulation in all of Germany. The 150-kilometre-long Thuringian Forest is magnificent.