Spain. Once again, wildfires are ravaging part of the country. This is not an “ecological disaster,” but the result of a criminal system.

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Once again, wildfires are ravaging part of the country. This is not an “ecological disaster,” but the result of a criminal system.

Since the beginning of this summer, the press, radio, and television have been reporting daily on wildfires that are spreading like some kind of biblical plague across the entire country. In early July, in Los Gallardos (Almería), 13 people died because they could not be evacuated via the designated routes before the fire reached them. A few days later, a fire broke out in Guadalajara—this time without any fatalities—and spread to the province of Soria, devastating part of La Mierla Natural Park in its path. In recent days, a fire in Madrid and Ávila has ravaged 50,000 hectares and forced 100,000 people to evacuate several villages in the region. Now, the press is once again reporting a high risk of similar situations in Catalonia and the Valencia region… None of this is a matter of chance or inevitable tragedy. It is the direct consequence of the management of a criminal system.

Every year, the area ravaged by fires continues to grow, as do the number of human casualties and the material damage—in the form of destroyed villages and vast swaths of scorched farmland… Added to this is the ecological damage they cause and their impact on the ecosystems of the affected areas. Some in the media, institutions, and political circles attribute these fires to terrible accidents, human carelessness, poor resource management, and so on. Others, who present themselves as much more “left-wing” and adopt a tone intended to make them appear “anti-capitalist,” attribute the root of all these ills to “climate change,” meaning by this an unexpected phenomenon of a vaguely “human” nature that would require the effort of every citizen—beyond any division between social classes—to address it. But the reality is that these terrible fires and the ongoing loss of human life have a much clearer and more defined origin than mere coincidence or an indeterminate “climate change”: the countryside is burning because capitalism creates the conditions that allow it, and even if the spark may ignite in one way or another, the fuel is always supplied by an irrational system in which human life and nature are regularly sacrificed to the god of economic profitability.

Fires are not triggered or fueled by broadly “human” causes, much less by some natural inevitability that repeats itself year after year. Fires occur because the development of the capitalist world does not follow a logic based on human needs and the demands dictated by nature for a harmonious life within it, but rather a capitalist logic that views both human life and nature as resources from which to extract the greatest possible profit; resources that are discarded without any scruples and without regard for the consequences this may have once they are no longer profitable. The fires of recent weeks have perfectly illustrated this criminal logic:

- First, the deadliest one, the Almería fire, which was a relatively common occurrence in that region of the country, where extreme summer drought, combined with highly flammable vegetation, causes fires that break out suddenly, spread very quickly, and die out just as fast. These fires occur every year and should not have consequences as severe as those we experienced this time: 13 deaths. But land use in Almería has changed considerably in recent years. Where there used to be only fields of esparto grass, broom, and a few scattered crops, intensive tourism has recently taken hold, leading to the development of houses, hamlets, and even entire villages. The deaths caused by the fire were mainly tourists who were unfamiliar with the evacuation routes, who got lost in the vast expanses of ravines and arid terrain, or who were trapped there by the fire, which first suffocated them before burning them to death. Emergency services could plan for the evacuation or rescue of local residents who knew the terrain and understood, to some extent, how to respond to a phenomenon that was not unfamiliar to them. But there was little they could do in the face of the chaos caused by a fluctuating population—such as that generated by tourism—which, in situations like this, perfectly illustrates the irrationality of capitalist commerce, which exploits every square centimeter of land to maximize profits, even when the potential risk was as high as it was in this particular case.

- Second, two cases that are better understood when examined together: Guadalajara and Madrid-Ávila. In the first case, the depopulation of a region with no industry—where farming generates almost no profit because it is at a clear disadvantage compared to other regions devoted to more profitable crops—allowed the fire to spread through areas that had been abandoned and where no maintenance work was being done. In the second case, overpopulation resulting from the construction of thousands of homes intended as second homes for Madrid residents or, once again, for tourism, has created what might be called “forest villages,” as the press has even called them—which are highly attractive due to their location in the heart of the central forest system, but which also entail a complete neglect of forest maintenance, leading to the forests eventually burning and the villages themselves being consumed by the flames.

In the capitalist world, the countryside, the forest, and the natural environment in general no longer constitute unspoiled nature, relegated, as it were, to the margins of normal economic activity. It is a resource that capitalism exploits—either directly, through agriculture, real estate development, and tourism, etc., or indirectly, by shifting the elements it needs (primarily labor) to the major metropolitan areas that require them, and by abandoning the rest to a fate of depopulation that is entirely artificial in the history of sedentary societies. Thus, the natural environment is prey to the same destructive and criminal dialectic that shapes human life. Entirely devoted to the production of value, it constantly oscillates between overproduction and under-employment.

In regions such as the Ávila-Madrid area, recently ravaged by wildfires, high land values—due in particular to their proximity to the capital—as well as the resulting profitability for the real estate sector, are leading to an increase in population density; villages are expanding to previously unimagined limits, and so on. At the same time, protective and preventive measures are being neglected: whereas they were once part of normal economic activity in villages dedicated to agriculture and livestock farming, they have now become an expense in the municipal budgets of the new service-oriented municipalities, where they no longer make sense in the eyes of the municipal councils. In regions such as Guadalajara, where the population has fled a countryside that offered no future, the abandonment of preventive measures has occurred in the opposite direction. Economic activities have disappeared due to population decline rather than growth, but the consequences have been the same.

Capitalism—which has given rise to megacities in the heart of deserts, which sends space probes beyond the solar system, and which has pushed the military-industrial complex’s destructive capacity to unimaginable levels—has still not found a way to solve a problem as common and recurring as wildfires. All the technological might of a system capable of unifying the world and transforming it into a single, vast market has failed to prevent fire from spreading through the forests. On the contrary, it has transformed what was once a minor danger—something that was even brought under control by societies far less technically and economically developed than our own—into a threat with terrible consequences, one that endangers the lives of hundreds of thousands of people every year and destroys property and equipment of inestimable value… Nature, harnessed for the production of commodities, has become a hostile and extremely dangerous place for human life. Forests dotted with tourist resorts are death traps that increase the risk of dying during vacations that advertising promises will be idyllic.

And all of this is the result of a criminal world in which human life and nature are placed, on the scale of values, far below production. A world in which the bourgeoisie’s appropriation of social wealth forces the extreme exploitation of any resource in which there remains even a glimmer of profitability.

That is why, for both nature and humankind, the only possible solution—the only rational path left—if we are to move beyond this system of death and destruction, is communism. The destruction of a society based on the exploitation of wage labor and on the bourgeoisie’s appropriation of the wealth produced by human labor. And, along with it, the establishment of a mode of production that would no longer be based on the pursuit of profit or the accumulation of alienated human value, but on the satisfaction of human needs.

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