EUCALIPTALIA
Eucaliptalia, a land where the eucaliptus become part of a dystopian story and benefits for a private part of the Galician society.
The eucalyptus and the forest policy of the Galician government have destroyed the native forest mass over time by allowing the planting of foreign species for the paper industry. From the time of the Franco dictatorship, the eucalyptus implantation model in Galician smallholdings has led to an almost total destruction of the forest landscape and ecosystems.
The eucalyptus, an invasive species, imported from Australia, is used to obtain paper pulp, has led the fight of environmental activism, protests, demonstrations, and created a great controversy about its indiscriminate use for private benefits, destroying ecosystems, due to its need to consume water and soil materials.
But the most horrifying thing since its creation is the contamination with mercury and other chemicals in the Ría de Pontevedra with its ENCE cellulose, whose concession has ended, but has been politically renewed to continue its operation. Shellfishing, a trade that generates thousands of jobs and is the livelihood of thousands of families, has disappeared from the estuary. For the Galician government policy, factory jobs predominate more than the original way of life for the locals.
This aberrational system that does not preserve the country's own species and that burns easily with forest fires has been the fight of activists for many years.
A video clip with aerial images of an area of eucalyptus trees in the province of Pontevedra, in some areas devastated by fire. The photos are from a day with one of the so-called de-eucalyptus brigades, made up of environmental activists who uproot eucalyptus trees that are beginning to sprout on land where eucalyptus will no longer be planted. Other invasive species are acacias and mimosas in spread of acacias throughout Galicia. Specifically, mimosas and black acacia are two invasive plants that pose a threat both to native species, due to their "aggressiveness", and to humans, because they play a fundamental role in the new fire regime.
The eucalyptus likes fire, it is a species considered to be pyrophytic or pyrophile. They like fire basically because they are able to withstand a fire and despite the fact that it is forbidden to plant them again until 2025, there are thousands of hectares throughout Galicia where they continue to grow on private land, many of them with or without owners, for various reasons. , such as the diaspora that immigrated to the Americas.
There are eucalyptus trees that grow in the wild that measure tens of meters, posing a danger to other species, the ecosystem and the lives and properties of people.