Greek people were abandoning their family homes and escaping the forest fires raging out of control on the outskirts of Athens. The fires consumed all the forested lands around the old city in a space of three days.
Late on Sunday the Greek government declared a state of emergency and mobilised the army to save the capital. The gale force winds that fan the flames and stopped all firefighting efforts for a second day as the flames reached the city’s suburbs. An evacuation followed and most people were evacuated from the most affected areas.
The Greek government appealed for help from the EU and Italy, France and Cyprus responded. Many hospitals and institutions, including the children’s hospital in Pendeli, were abandoned as the flames spread. Greek prime minister Karamanlis offered a pythian nonsense: “A massive effort by authorities is taking place to deal with this very difficult challenge.” he said as the king of understatement. Opposition leader Papandreou sympathizes with the burned out homeowners but says little. All collectively blame the weather. High winds, heat blazes and adverse conditions are thought to have been in effect. Adversely the local Environmentalists said that the blazes were set by people in the affected areas and were economic in origin and had caused “biblical damage” to an estimated 250,000 hectares of variant coniferous forests of fir and practically all the prime forest in the area; the last vegetation around the ancient city. Scores of homes in wealthy north east suburbs of Athens were burned to the ground, devastating the failed communities. In the similar fires of 2007, up to 70 people were killed, but nobody knows the death toll of this Greek tragedy.
Simple people now are asking how they could still be so unprepared for a similar disaster. The desertification of Attica and Athens is advancing so much, that the city has now more in common with Cairo than any European city. It’s a tragedy and total chaos, for the already severely strained Greek environment. Already the most polluted European country and the least ecologically aware, Greece now pays the piper.
The people of the burned out suburbs had “no doubt” that most of the fires now afflicting Athens were the work of arsonists determined to clear land for developers. In essence the citizens burning up their own homeland and their very own homes. Even if your home is spared, What is the value of a home in the dessert? The development in forest park lands is the shortermism and short sighted approach to life by the Greek state, successive governments and people behaving like their own worst enemies. Same as the large picture everywhere on the planet, only Greeks with their flair for the Dramatic, they play for us a unique Greek tragedy. A Greek tragedy with educational didactic overtones for the rest of us.
A destruction of their homeland as a way to offer us a gift lesson…
The great dramatist, offers the tragedy’s end in a fire consuming all of the homeland. The people are bereft, but duly warned for the future that awaits them… awaiting all of us really.
Self immolation is not exclusively reserved for Buddhist monks. Greeks do it better.
It is just an extreme way of the Greeks offering us another gift horse. And all of us, we are the Trojans; all of us welcoming this horse in our lives and in our cities. Only this time the message hidden inside the belly is one of foreboding and awakening. The warming ecosystem is fragile and the economic activities spare none of us.
Whether it’s oil we burn or the forest or the other fluorocarbons, on top or underneath the surface of the eart, the effect is the same….
Keep that in mind next time you have sympathy for the people afflicted by environmental catastrophes anywhere;
while you drive up to the gas pump to fill up.
Greece leads the way. It is a failed state as far as the environment is concerned. It sits squarely at the bottom of the lists ecologically in Europe and marches further south fast…
If things persist in this way for the ecology of Greece, it will be a failed state … period.
But where it leads others follow fast too.
Is a bit of a red herring.
Or is the canary in the coal mine?
Either way the people have already started moving away.
Environment refugees anyone ?
Inside Europe ?
