Portugal has a shortage of goats, that’s why the country has been aflame. That might sound flip, even flippant, given the serious wildfires that are killing firemen. But for all that there’s a great deal of truth to it and we’re not going to understand events without grasping the point.

Climate change could certainly be a part of it. Heat itself not so much — the difference between 35 degrees centigrade and 38 (entirely normal temperatures for here) has a minimal impact on flammability. But possibly changes in rainfall and so on have counted. 

Still, that operates the other way around to how most of us think about it. 

In a Mediterranean environment — and yes, Portugal, Atlantic, but still — the rains come in the winter. By May this year’s vegetation is dying back and by August/September it is little more than kindling awaiting a lightning strike, careless barbeque or even a droplet of dew with the sun shining through it. Thus, fire season — and this is as true of California as it is Portugal, Greece and the rest. 

One corollary of this is that it isn’t how hot the summer is that matters for fire season — the summer’s always hot enough for fires, always dry enough. The wetter the winter then the more kindling there is to go up. If climate change produces more winter rains, and some models say it will, then that’s where the impact of it will be on the Southern European fire season. More to burn, not more likely to burn, that is.   

It’s also true that decades of planting eucalyptus doesn’t help. The government realises this and there’s a — possibly temporary — ban on new plantations as a result. 

But the big issue here is the lack of goats, which I’m using as the catch-all for the emptying out of Portugal’s rural areas. It’s necessary to recall how poor Portugal was until just recently. By the usual economists’ numbers the country was, in 1966, about as poor as Britain was in 1888. True, catching up has been done. By 1990 it was at about our 1970 level. (Today it is perhaps at our 1997 level.) But this very catching up also means going through the sort of changes that we did rather earlier.

No people also means no care and attention to the landscape and vegetation

One of these is moving from a substantial number of people living as peasants — real, honest to God peasants — out in the countryside to nearly no one living that way. That’s what happens when a place gets rich — people no longer have to try and scrape a living from a half or acre of land out in the boonies. So, they don’t. Of course, it’s not the old who move to the big cities — Greater Lisbon is now about 25 per cent of the country’s population — but the young. The old wither and die by their vines. What this means is that vast areas are becoming depopulated. It’s possible to buy entire — and empty — villages up in the north for the price of a London flat. 

No people also means no care and attention to the landscape and vegetation and, crucially for my argument, no goats to eat that tinder and kindling. This, as Portuguese academic and government studies keep pointing out, is the actual problem:

In turn, the abandonment of the agricultural-forestry-pastoral activity led to an accumulation of large amounts of fuel in the forest which, when weather conditions are favorable, feed forest fires. 

One thing to point out — “forest” here doesn’t necessarily mean thickets of big trees. It can and does mean areas of grass and scrub with a few oaks dotted around. It’s a wider definition. And: 

However, the widespread abandonment of rural landscape, the decrease of the agricultural activities around the villages and the ageing population, lead to villages no longer naturally protected…

I’ve lived in a village where one local shepherd used to go out with a scythe and a wheelbarrow by July, cutting the verges to feed his goats. When it’s possible to make a better living by doing digital in the Big City that just doesn’t happen. Which is what is not happening.

Portugal got rich. Hurrah and huzzah! But this does mean — which is definitional about getting rich — no one trying to live on half an acre and a few goats. This, in turn, means that the fireable vegetation builds up as it used not to and fires happen more often over larger areas. 

It’s not climate change causing all of this — it’s a result of economic development. It’s also not a problem really solvable — not unless we can find enough manic hippies to replace the rural population.

But there is one more thing here. Precisely because of all of the above, the environment here is built to burn often enough. If those boonies do go up, well, that’s how the vegetation is designed to work. Which is how the firefighting is done too. Work is indeed done to make sure a fire definitely doesn’t take out a town and probably a village. An isolated cottage is going to have to take its chances along with the thousands of acres of boonies that everyone will just watch go up.

Yes, it is wholly true that there are big fires right now. Yes, firefighters die every year protecting that which must be protected. But the existence of wildfires here is normal and the reason they’re getting worse is not climate change at all, it’s that Portugal ran out of goats. Or, perhaps, goat herders.