Rejuvenating fields can prevent fires
Rejuvenating fields can prevent fires
In October 2017, the central coast was also devastated by another violent fire.
This Dantesque spectacle is not exclusive of the desertified interior areas .
In the tragic fires of 2017, the fire even entered the center of Vila of Mira, surrounded villages, bordered backyards, burned gardens, firewood and other stored products, animals and some houses.
The Greenside family, like all the others, had to face the fire with what they had, to defend houses, animals and property …
The founder of this house – Greenside – even fighting the cancer that would victimize him a year later, did not lower his arms and, with the tractor and cistern, went around distributing water to the neighbor’s houses and protecting the farm animals.
There was almost no greater tragedy on that hellish night …
Although the central coast does not suffer from the human desertification that haunts the interior…
There is the desertification of small farmers, some of whom naturally age, but not only.
Those who took care of small parcels, even though part-time and could continue to do so, stopped doing it:
– Because it is hard and thankless work, without schedules or rest.
– Because since 30 – 40 years, they no longer had anyone to buy the small quantities of what they produced (corn, beans, potatoes, milk, calves, pigs and piglets, rabbits, chickens and eggs, pine resin) and, without entry of money, even if it was little, subsistence became impossible.
Globalization, normalization, large stores, blind consumerism, our comfort and letting ourselves be led to buy what they wanted to impose on us, without realizing the consequences … also for our health …
It helped to bring traditional subsistence agriculture to near extinction, and to small farmers joining those who could not win … and started buying everything at the supermarket, because it is cheaper …
But… what does that mean for rural landscaping?
What are the “immaterial costs” of this change?
When something changes in an ecosystem, which has remained in balance for decades…
Imbalance and vulnerability are inevitable …
Vulnerable, first to fire … that would not have entered people’s lives, if the fields had been dawned, cared for and occupied with traditional agriculture that also kept the surrounding forest clean.
Vulnerable now to cyclonic winds from successive storms that plague the country
The image shows how the fire stopped when finding cultivated fields. If everyone were like that, around the villages, the panic would not have happened in October 2017.
Our Local Accommodation – Greenside of Sea Hostel, emanates from the hope that tourism in rural areas, with the help of the Atlantic component, can provide an alternative to motivate and establish a new generation of weekend farmers and to revive those who are inactive, thus contributing to streamline the local economy, complementing the return to modern vegetable garden agriculture, for self-consumption – the natural solution for those who live in the countryside, in response to the global (justified) concern with Food / Health.
Growing a small vegetable garden to supply the family with fresh vegetables and adapting to our day, what our grandparents taught us, can be a viable alternative.
