Breaking Green

The Battle Against Eucalyptus in Galicia with Joam Evans Pim

• Global Justice Ecology Project / Host Steve Taylor • Season 4 • Episode 3

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Terrible forest fires that are the result of eucalyptus plantations are becoming an increasing threat. Known as green deserts, these monoculture eucalyptus tree plantations are becoming more numerous as they are built to feed ever larger pulp and paper mills. They sapwater from the environment and destroy biodiversity. But there are those who are fighting the spread of this invasive species.

On this episode of Breaking Green, we will talk with Joam Evans Pim. Pim is a commoner at the Froxan Community, located in Galicia, Spain, where he lives with his family. He is an activist in political, environmental, cultural and human rights issues, particularly focused on reinvigorating rural direct assembly democracy, defending and restoring common lands and confronting destructive mining and other environmentally degrading projects.

He serves as director of the Montescola Foundation and is adjunct professor of peace and conflict research at Abo Akademi University, Finland, where he seasonally lectures on civil disobedience and non-violent action at the master's program on peace, mediation and conflict research.

This podcast is produced by Global Justice Ecology Project.

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Steve Taylor:

Welcome to Breaking Green, a podcast by Global Justice Ecology Project. On Breaking Green, we will talk with activists and experts to examine the intertwined issues of social, ecological and economic injustice. We will also explore some of the more outrageous proposals to address climate and environmental crises that are falsely being sold as green. I am your host, steve Taylor. Terrible forest fires that are the result of eucalyptus plantations are becoming an increasing threat. Known as green deserts, these monoculture eucalyptus tree plantations are becoming more numerous as they are built to feed ever larger pulp and paper mills. They sapped water from the environment and destroy biodiversity. But there are those who are fighting the spread of this invasive species. In this episode of Breaking Green, we will talk with Dwaam Evans Pym.

Steve Taylor:

Joam Evans Pim is a commoner at the Froschan community, located in Glacier, spain, where he lives with his family. He is an activist in political, environmental, cultural and human rights issues, particularly focused on revigorating rural direct assembly democracy, defending and restoring common lands and confronting destructive mining and other environmentally degrading projects. He serves as director of the Montescola Foundation and is adjunct professor of peace and conflict research at Abo Akademu University, Finland, where he seasonally lectures on civil disobedience and non-violent action at the master's program on peace, mediation and conflict research. Joam Evans Pim, welcome to Breaking Green. thank you. So, Joam, you live in Galicia, an independent region in northwest Spain or in the Iberian Peninsula. Could you introduce our listeners to the region? What is it like and who lives there?

Joam Evans Pim:

So Galicia, as you say, is in the northwest corner of the Iberian Peninsula, so by the Atlantic coast. When people hear about Spain, in many places they have this idea of a sunny paradise. Galicia is rainy, it has mountains, it's relatively cold, with lots of rain, or used to have a lot of rain, and it's a bit different. It's green and the shades of green have changed. And that's, I think, one of the things we could maybe discuss about today, which is the arrival, since a few decades back, of eucalyptus plantations which have really filled out the whole region.

Steve Taylor:

Yes, we want to definitely talk to you about your work regarding eucalyptus plantations, but I kind of wanted to fill out some of the history. So it's my understanding that around World War II a little bit before, I think, under the Franco dictatorship commonly owned land in the area was seized by the state, and so it was transformed for commercial purposes, such as mining and planting monocultural tree plantations. Could you tell us a little bit about that history?

Joam Evans Pim:

So people?

Joam Evans Pim:

I don't usually know about this, but Galicia is one of the very few places around Spain, and definitely around Europe, where a lot of land is still communally owned.

Joam Evans Pim:

I mean, it's owned by the people that live in the villages, not by the state but by the communities themselves, so it's a form of community lands and in fact today two-thirds oh sorry, one-third of all land in Galicia, two-thirds of kind of forest lands, but one-third of all the land in Galicia is still owned by communities and this was a very important pillar of traditional economy, which was silbo agro-pastoral, so a lot of pastoralism, and that had also a big importance on how traditional agriculture functioned. But this all came to a stop with the dictatorship after the Spanish Civil War, when Franco decided to take over all of these common lands owned by the communities and that were a basic pillar of their survival and then forcibly planted them initially with pine monocultures and then, from the 60s onward, increasingly with eucalyptus, because at this point pulp, industrial, pulp factories were introduced to the region. So they wanted to have this abundant and cheap eucalyptus for feeding these pulp mills.

Steve Taylor:

So eucalyptus is not indigenous to the territory, or is it?

Joam Evans Pim:

No, no, eucalyptus comes from Australia. There's different species of eucalyptus there's at least a dozen present in Galicia at the moment, mainly two, but that are used for commercial pulp mills. And the first trees came very long ago as ornamental trees and you would see them in some parks or whatever. But then really the invasion of eucalyptus, initially as part of planned industrial monocultures, started in the 60s, but then increasingly over the past few decades, because of forest fires and the invasive character of this species, we've seen it spread out in many places. Where it was, it wasn't ever planted, so from nearby areas or seedlings it starts to invade very large areas in addition to the already very large area where it's planted, and currently this is about half a million hectares, so a very large part of lands in Galicia.

Steve Taylor:

Global Justice Ecology Project and I was on this trip went to Brazil recently to look at eucalyptus monoculture plantations and there they're called green deserts. You know they're green, they're growing, but they sap a lot of water from the region and it really reduces biodiversity. What's your observation? Not only as an invasive species, but do you have an opinion about eucalyptus plantations and monoculture overall?

Joam Evans Pim:

So there's a lot of a lot that can be said about this.

Joam Evans Pim:

Some elements have to do, as you mentioned, with the way it extracts so much water, also because of the plant itself, and it has some toxic elements that then get into the soil and reduce a lot of biodiversity, even at the microscopic level.

Joam Evans Pim:

But a lot also has to do with the management because, for example, many of these plantations for decades have been managed through chemical weeding, so through herbicides, agrochemicals that, of course, destroy everything but the eucalyptus, just like in industrial agricultural lands.

Joam Evans Pim:

So this in turn, there's a lot of studies that have been published over the past decade that show drastic reduction, for example, of birds pieces in the areas, drastic reduction of wildlife basically nearly non-existent and this also leads then to conflicts even outside of the plantations, for example with boars or the wild animals that would have the natural habitats in dense oak forests where they would have enough food to survive. But because of the rise of monocultures and these green deserts, as you mentioned, they end up creating conflicts in agricultural lands and being in places where they have never been before. So it's extremely disruptive, both locally, but then also in a broader perspective, in a landscape perspective and even in a from a security perspective, because the other side of these plantations is, of course, the risk, the increasing risk of forest fire, which are basically unstoppable when it comes to dealing with very large areas with eucalyptus monocultures.

Steve Taylor:

Right, you live in a village I think it's Froshan that experienced a fire in 2016. Could you tell us a bit about that and the role eucalyptus played?

Joam Evans Pim:

So this is a very usual story in Galicia, because eucalyptus plantations have been planted just right up to homes where people lived and this, of course, creates very dangerous conditions, particularly in the drier months in the summer, which many years are a bit drier and this creates conditions for fireballs, as I mentioned, that are kind of unstoppable if you have strong winds, and the way eucalyptus burns they kind of catapult pieces even hundreds and hundreds of meters away, so it's very difficult for firefighters and communities trying to stop fires from stopping at one point. So the traditional ways of stopping these fires doesn't work. Froshan experienced many fires. The largest one was in 2006 and then a decade later, in 2016, there was another one, and in both cases they started just in the place, by the boundary of our common lands, with the same kind of northeastern wind and which was kind of driving the fire towards the community, and in both cases the 2006 one was especially, you know, heavy and dangerous.

Joam Evans Pim:

In both cases the fire didn't reach the community because there was a kind of a green fire break close to the village that was dominated by by native species that keep the moisture in the ground, that have a microclimate, and that doesn't mean they cannot burn down, but they definitely stop the. They're able to stop the fire and retain it and eventually allow it to for it to be extinguished. Other places that had pine and eucalyptus, which are pyrophytic species, meaning species that tend to do deal better with fire, both because they regenerate quicker but also because then the way they spread the seeds and the seeds open up after the fires, they outgrow any of the other native species. So this is the, that invasive character, which is facilitated basically through through fire.

Steve Taylor:

So under the, the dictatorship, the Franco regime, land was taken away and monocultures were planted. I was reading that Froschan gained back its land not too long ago. Is that? Is that true?

Joam Evans Pim:

Most, most common lands in Galicia were recovered in the 80s, late 70s, 80s, some in the 90s. Some are still in the process today of getting their lands back from the government. So it's been a very slow and complicated process. Also because maybe a bit like indigenous title in some other jurisdictions, documents for common lands sometimes do not exist. These are lands that have been on the community tenure for literally thousands of years and even in the case of our community we have documents from the 16th century, the 15th century, that already talk about our commons, and this is true for many other similar communities.

Joam Evans Pim:

In Galicia there are 3,500 common land communities which are roughly some 700,000 hectares under this kind of community management and ownership. So it's a very large area and it's been a complicated process. Of course one thing is the ownership, and in fact many communities managed, as for Shang managed to regain ownership in the 80s. But then the other thing is management and for Shang was basically under government management, even if the ownership had been regained, until up to the early 2000s, and it was only after 2002 that the community started to directly manage the lands 100 hectares, not very big. There are some communities are much bigger, thousands of hectares, but still since then, mistakes, but also successes, have been the responsibility of the community.

Steve Taylor:

So in 2017, I believe you started or were part of at least a very critical part of starting volunteers to take out eucalyptus trees to de-ucalyptalize the land, and so could you tell us about that?

Joam Evans Pim:

So, as we talked, we had experience, fire after fire and every summer. Every summer, you would be in one of these nights with very strong wind, wondering if it is going to be tonight that we'd all have to go outside and, in the middle of the night, start to deal with this fire coming towards us. So we thought that was not really the way to go about things and after the 2016 fire, we said we need to do something about it. Now, if you think about it, our village is very small, and when I say very small, it's just six families, six houses. There are many villages of this kind of size. Others are bigger, but it's a big issue. It's a big challenge for a small community, lots of elderly people to deal with. What do we do to get rid of all these invasive species? Restore native woodlands? How do we do it?

Joam Evans Pim:

One of the ideas we had back then, after that fire, was well, we know that people are frustrated. We know people are angry because of the fires we have every summer after summer, and there's not really much to do about it. People blame the government, or blame communities themselves, or blame whoever. But we thought it was important to create spaces where people could help and make the change happen. And this is what we started At first, very slowly. So in 2017, we started to create these days of action with volunteers and we have maybe a dozen people coming basically to uproot the eucalyptus that was starting to grow back in the whole area that had been burnt down in 2016. And over that year and a half until 2018, we basically managed to get rid of the eucalyptus in the whole area that was burnt down the year before and started to restore the native forest in that whole area.

Joam Evans Pim:

And as we were doing it, we said, well, this is something very interesting, we should be able to do it in more places, not just here in our community. And it was kind of a way of doing things where we revived two traditional concepts. One is calling Galicia roga, which is a word that means a call for community action, so when community would come together to fix a road or make a wall or build a house to help other neighbors. So there's the roga, which is that call for communal work to happen. And then the other one is albaroque, which would be a kind of a feast, a celebration, a meal that would be done after that communal work. So we kind of did those two. We brought those two ideas together and we started bringing volunteers, working together, celebrating together and, of course, also planning together. You know how we could get this done in other places.

Steve Taylor:

Well, that was about five years ago. You started. What is it looking like now? You started with about 20 people in 2017, I think. So what does it look like now?

Joam Evans Pim:

So, as I was mentioning, we wanted to do something at a larger scale that could benefit more communities that were facing similar problems and in April 2018, in collaboration with Berdegay, a very small environmental nonprofit, we set up a wider initiative so people could sign up from anywhere to become volunteers and also so that people in other communities could also, kind of you know, make themselves available to organize work on their own lands to advance with this EU-colliptication initiative.

Joam Evans Pim:

So, in April 2018, we started the first of these calls for action with the wider initiative. We were about 40 people that day and now it's 1,400 people registered and getting those calls every month, and maybe we're doing two or three of these actions every month in different locations, most of them common lands, but some even some private lands, but mostly common lands. And so not just cutting down eucalyptus, but also planting native trees, also acacia, which is another very complicated species that, while not being a monoculture because it has no or very little commercial interest it's also an invasive species that comes from Australia and that is really a very, very difficult to eradicate and has taken over thousands and thousands of hectares, even if nobody is planting it. So that shows how you know the definition itself of invasive species and how they can create problems at enormous scales and that really threaten not only biodiversity but even community safety because of fires, because of many other issues 50 years ago there was about 28,000 hectares of eucalyptus In.

Steve Taylor:

some sources are saying there's about half a million now. How are your efforts going? Is it making a difference? Are you seeing progress?

Joam Evans Pim:

So the answer would be depends, and that's how we in Galicia mostly answer to every single question. It depends how you look at it. So if you consider it from the perspective of the communities where we work, the change is amazing. So, for example, in our community it's 100 hectares. We, you know, from five years back to now we have seasons again. You look at I'm looking out of the window now and you know I see an oak forest with no leaves now, but in a month or so leaves will start to come out. In the autumn they will start to fall again, and just a few years ago all this area I'm looking out of the window was basically the pine or eucalyptus. So in places like Froschang it's made an amazing change and people that have been coming to work with us and visiting us for years have seen that change. Sometimes it's difficult to see it when you've just arrived and you didn't know what was it like just a few years ago. But even looking at pictures you can see that. So it really makes a change in those places where we've been working.

Joam Evans Pim:

Now, if you look at the broader picture, of course it's grim.

Joam Evans Pim:

You know, eucalyptus plantations, as you mentioned, are more than half a million hectares at this moment and, in spite of claims by government that they're doing something about it, these numbers are growing.

Joam Evans Pim:

So in one decade from now we likely see even a larger number. And not only that, but we see plantations happening in places where they never should happen, where it's even illegal for them to happen. We're seeing them in peatlands that are being destroyed, in wetlands, by rivers. We see a lot of native areas and habitats that should be protected or should be within protected areas just being devastated with new plantations. So in that sense, of course, the overall picture is not good, but we at least are showing that, where there is will, we can make that change happen in a relatively short time, even though landscape transformation is course and the fight against invasive species is really a multi-generational project, particularly with summer species like acacia trees, where the seeds that remain in the ground are latent for up to 60 years. So in 60 years you can still have one of those trees popping up. Once many of us will already be gone. So it's going to take a multi-generational struggle to really change things and keeping what we're achieving now in the long term.

Steve Taylor:

I believe there's some fires going on in Chile right now. Do you communicate with any communities in Chile, brazil or other areas where there's these eucalyptus plantations and this invasive species?

Joam Evans Pim:

So we've heard a lot about how what happened to us some decades ago is not really spreading across other countries in Latin America, but also in Africa, in Asia. So the typical story goes like a new pulp mill, every time being bigger and bigger, being set up and within a radius of a hundred miles or 200 miles from those new factories, monocultures eucalyptus monocultures just start to pop up everywhere, displacing agriculture, displacing other activities and kind of bringing this activity and these plantations everywhere. A couple of years ago we had colleagues from Chile coming to visit us and actually do a. I think they were working on a documentary but also some journalist pieces to show how you know this.

Joam Evans Pim:

Eucalyptus-ation brigades were being organized and also trying to set up something similar where in Chile, where this is already is a very big problem. We also had last year a wonderful experience where people in Portugal set up a kind of a sister initiative, because it's a very similar situation, particularly in the northern half of Portugal, both with the fires and, of course, with the monocultures, and now there's an initiative going on, very similar, to do this kind of activity. So we also see how this is something that can catch on and, of course, particularly because the way we've been organized is very, let's say, no frills, very basic, very no staff and just a lot of energy, a lot of volunteers and, you know, a lot of fun also that goes with it.

Steve Taylor:

So these paper mills aren't just ecological problems. It seems to be a community social problem as well.

Joam Evans Pim:

Well, they create local problems because, of course, these are industries that are extremely intensive in the use of water, both in the intake of fresh, clean water but also in terms of pollution of atmospheric emissions. So the main factory that was established here in the 50s basically annihilated the whole coastal area that was previously rich in shellfish production and other sustainable you know, economical activities.

Joam Evans Pim:

Now that has already has gone, there's basically no space for that. But then beyond that local area, it's the kind of change it creates and the dynamics it creates in the whole, you know, the whole country in this case.

Joam Evans Pim:

So it's very devastating in terms of biodiversity, in terms of cultural heritage. And the most recent development is that many of these companies are not satisfied with just buying eucalyptus from private owners or from common land communities that have these plantations in their forests. Now they want to be managing the land themselves. So there's a massive issue with land grabbing at a scale that has never been seen before and that even kind of outgrows what the dictatorship did in its day. There's a massive process at the moment going on, with many communities signing 30 year contracts with the paper companies themselves, not only the Spanish ones, but also navigator, for example, a Portuguese company. So this will essentially mean not just lots of eucalyptus everywhere, of course, but also breaking for a second time, you know, in one century the connection that people have with their communal lands. This already happened with the dictatorship and now it's happening again because these communities that are signing these contracts with the companies basically will have no say, no management for the next couple of generations.

Joam Evans Pim:

And of course, you can argue these are decisions communities are making on their own. True, they're being decided as such in assemblies where commoners participate, but of course it's also in a context where people are being deprived of alternatives, of alternative uses, and where, of course, the whole system and the whole public policies around forest management in Galicia have been geared towards basically providing this pulp for the factories. That's the main thing. We're supposed to be producing that and everything else is just secondary. Our health, our security in the face of bigger and more dangerous forest fire, our cultural heritage, our water supply everything else doesn't seem to matter, in contrast with just the need for more and more produce for these paper mills.

Steve Taylor:

So when we went last May to Brazil, one of the reasons the stop GE tree campaign and global justice ecology project was there was that Brazil is considering licensing genetically engineered eucalyptus. Have you heard of attempts to genetically engineer eucalyptus to grow faster and do you have any thoughts about that?

Joam Evans Pim:

So, from what we know, g trees or eucalyptus in particular have not been introduced here. One of the reasons maybe has to do with the fact that, because of our climate and conditions, this is probably one of the best places in the world in terms of having eucalyptus grow quickly. However, it's also true that so mainly selection has been done through other methods, both trying out different species, different varieties, not so much through using genetically modified trees. However, there's growing challenges. Some of these have to do with the depletion of soils by successive waves and afterwaves, afterwaves of plantations, many of which have used chemical weeding practices which are basically destroying soils as such, creating basically dead soils, and within these. And then there's, of course, problems with certain insects that are problematic for these plantations. So it wouldn't be surprising that eventually, if a solution for these perceived problems would come up which would involve genetically modified organisms, I'm sure they would consider it. But I'm aware of also the legal implications if this would be possible on the current European laws or not. That's something which I'm not really knowledgeable about.

Steve Taylor:

They're working on genetically engineered varieties which are resistant to herbicides, so I guess they could do more herbicidal spraying without harming their so-called crop. Is there anything that I have not asked you about eucalyptus and the regrades you have working in Galicia?

Joam Evans Pim:

You know, this is, I guess, the future. I mean, it's something. This is a project that is constantly growing. Every week we get new people signing up and it has really been a game changer For us anytime we need to do work in our lands. In the last few weeks we've been planting. We've also been getting eucalyptus out of the wood. We've been doing all sorts of work and the fact that you can put out a call and then, 24 hours later or less, you have people signing up to come and again, once, again and again, it's amazing. We have actions with 50, 60, 90 people showing up and the amount of work you are able to do in one day is amazing.

Joam Evans Pim:

People sometimes arrive at a spot full of eucalyptus and, because these are not, most of the areas where we are working are not originally plantations, are areas where eucalyptus took over these lands after the fires.

Joam Evans Pim:

Under the eucalyptus there's a lot of native trees, so the fact that we're taking them down one by one and in a way where we try not to damage some of the native trees and bushes and other species that are on the kind of on the forest. It's amazing because when you finish work by two o'clock and you go and have lunch, you already see the change. So it's already visible what you achieved. And although it takes a lot of work because they will be popping up again and again, you still have to go four or five times maybe to cut out the growth of the eucalyptus until the stumps dry out. You see the change very quickly. It will take decades for those oak trees, for example, that we're kind of trying to survive under the eucalyptus, to become a forest again and to become big oaks that will be there and will stay there for a very long time. But it's. You start to see that change with every action and I think that's one of the reasons why people come back again and again.

Steve Taylor:

Well, Joam, thank you for joining us at Breaking Green. Thank you, it was a pleasure you have been listening to Breaking Green a global Justice Ecology project podcast. To learn more about Global Justice Ecology project, visit globaljusticeecologyorg. When Green is made possible by tax deductible donations by people like you, please help us lift up the voices of those working to protect forests, defend human rights and expose false solutions. Simply text GIVE G-I-V-E-2, 1-716-257-4187. That's 1-716-257-4187.