EL PAÍS offers the América Futura section openly for its daily and global information contribution on sustainable development. If you want to support our journalism, subscribe here.
I had written a lot about him, without knowing him: in my second novel and in several chronicles, fire has a leading importance. I did not expect to find it so close when visiting the Sierra de San Pedro Mártir National Park, in Baja California, where I went to interview members of the California Condor Reintroduction Program, an extraordinary bird whose story of extinction and return deserves to be told.
“Now you’re going to have something to write about,” Juan Vargas Velazco, the program’s field manager, told me as we all got ready, with the haste of firefighters, to leave the station. They had just been called to request support in fighting a forest fire that was getting worse on a ranch near the Park.
There was no time to have breakfast. Catalina Porras Peña, the Program coordinator, packed groceries and radios while the members of her team—José Hiram Licona Hernández, Alejandra Argüelles Castañeda and Gustavo Ramón Lara—carried hoses, shovels, helmets, fire extinguisher backpacks and a pressurized water pump that It would be crucial in the following hours. Thanks to Juan’s foresight, the Condor Program has all the necessary accessories to confront fire. Taking advantage of my background as a writer, they asked me for an indelible marker to mark things with the word “Condor” and prevent them from getting mixed up with those of the park rangers, soldiers and brigade members of the National Forestry Commission (Conafor).
The smoke guided us to the site that had been burning since the previous day. As we got out of the vehicles, the fire greeted us with an intimidating spectacle of gigantic orange flames and thunderous roars.
Since I couldn’t interview the condor’s guardians on that occasion, I decided to ask the fire some questions. He explained to me that it had started in a neglected campfire and had thrived thanks to the thick carpet of leaf litter that covered the surrounding area. He also told me that he was not used to the cold of late October because most natural fires happened during thunderstorm times, not in the middle of autumn. However, he was optimistic: the Santa Ana winds and the enormous size of the oak trees of the ranch predicted a bright future for him.
I could no longer continue interrogating him because the condor’s protectors chased him away with a powerful jet of water obtained from a tank used to water vegetables. Even though the big flames were extinguished, there were small fires burning everywhere, so we dedicated ourselves to burying them and compacting the earth to suffocate them. The embers hissed in frustration every time we watered them. Juan showed me how to use the rake to open gaps in the undergrowth and cut off the underground advance of wild combustion. The floor was a spit where the soles of my shoes began to melt. You had to be careful not to fall into the tunnels opened by the burned roots.
Around four in the afternoon, when the fire in that area had already been controlled—Juan, Hiram and Gustavo were always on the front line of combat—we gathered to eat around the open pots in the bed of a truck. A neighbor of the ranch had cooked food for everyone. Due to her age and the fact that she was undergoing chemotherapy, she could not lift shovels or machetes, but she could handle knives and ladles, so she had decided to cooperate in that essential way.
The feast concluded hastily: the park rangers warned us that the fire had escalated to the east and was already destroying the chaparral next to the road. If the fire managed to cross that asphalt barrier, it would be impossible to stop it before it reached the extraordinary coniferous forest that inspired the creation of the Sierra de San Pedro Mártir National Park in 1947.
When we arrived in the area, the Conafor brigade members and the pipes from the National Astronomical Observatory, administered by the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) were already there in the peaks west of the Sierra. The panorama was much more terrifying than in the grove where we had been working. The manzanita bushes were burning furiously and thick smoke covered everything around us. The worst had already happened: a spark had jumped on the road. While the others prepared a water tank to attack this metastasis with the hoses, I had to fill a backpack with water and blindly climb the road to soak the flames by hand.
I felt ridiculous throwing discontinuous gossip into a bush that was burning with biblical eloquence. The fire spoke, like a mad prophet, about the advent of the Pyrocene, an era of enormous fires sponsored by climate change. He was proud of the extensive territories that were currently burning in the northern australia. In Canada, records for the area burned in 2023 had been shattered: more than 18 million hectares, around 5% of all the country’s forests. In Bolivia, the figure was more modest (2.7 million hectares), but no less commendable. Inspired by agricultural deforestation and industrial burning of fossil fuels, the fires wanted to cut down forests and fill the atmosphere with smoke. The many red tongues of the bush were exalted, reciting the victories of their tribe this year: the destruction of the Hawaiian city of Lahaina in February, the New York sky poisoned by the smoke of the devastated forests, and the mass evacuation of the Greek island of Rhodes in July.
While I suffered the itching of the smoke in my throat, the burning apple sang the superhit with a devilish voice. flowersin which Miley Cyrus evokes the destruction of the house she built with her ex-husband during the 2018 California fire season:
– We were good, we were gold,
Kinda dream that can’t be sold.
We were right ’til we weren’t,
Built a home and watched it burn…
Once again, the Condor Program extinguishing team silenced the nightmare with its hoses. From that moment on, while the brigade members chased the devil among the hills, we dedicated ourselves to soaking the edges of the road. The smoke began to clear. The landscape had a catastrophic beauty. In the distance you could see the Pacific Ocean. The sun doubled over the water. We seemed to be contemplating the sunset of another planet. If it hadn’t been for the burning in my scratched hands and the cold in my wet feet (they were soaked with water dripping from the fire extinguisher backpack), I would have thought it was a dream.
We took some photos to record the event. Catalina, Alejandra and I smiled for the camera with the battlefield in the background. The fight had not ended (the next day it would start again and it would be very arduous), but that day we had successfully defended the San Pedro Mártir forest. I photographed Juan Vargas against the light. Although it is not a very good image, I hope it serves as a testimony to the heroic work that condor protectors have been carrying out for more than twenty years. Juan and Catalina have dedicated their lives to this arduous and dangerous mission. For them this fire was an episode without major significance. For me it was a baptism of heat and fear. If I was so unhelpful with the pen (I didn’t even manage to mark all the equipment!), I hope to be useful with the pen. Will I one day be able to persuade a public official to allocate more resources to the care of our natural wealth? What will I have to do to make them listen? Will words be of any use to put out the fire of the world? I already know that instead of publishing columns it would be more striking if I uploaded videos of the fire to TikTok, but I trust in the strength of what is written to go further and deeper.
#Interview #fire #testimony #forest #fire