The Biobío Region is Not Burning, It's Being Set on Fire

By Dr. Roberto Ipinza, Director of Araucanía and Los Ríos, National Forestry Society A.G.

Imagine for a second that your skin cracks under an unbearable heat you never asked for. That is what small and medium-sized forest owners and agri-forestry SMEs feel, as they see how human malice burns their forests, their homes, and their agricultural crops, cultivated for so many decades. Even worse, how the fire claims a large number of human lives.

It is a traumatic situation, affecting life, health, the economy, and daily well-being.

Considering that new government and parliamentary authorities mainly take office in March, the question that the association of small and medium-sized forestry companies is asking itself at this very difficult time is, how can we work together to stop this crisis and protect the most vulnerable? Especially the neighbors in our rural towns who lose everything due to forest fires.

Forests cultivated for over 20 years that are reduced to ashes when these intentional disasters sweep through, this reflection is not a lament. In Biobío, trees do not die by accident; they are victims of a hand that decides to wound us all. More than 90% of the fires here are intentional, turning our ecosystem into a subject that suffers, breathes, and bleeds ashes.

It is air that suffocates with smoke, it is soil that loses its fertility forever, it is a home left exposed and destroyed, it is lost loved ones.

Arson is not a prank; it is a scar on the living skin of our resilient community, and it affects the development of its territories.

Source:Austral de Valdivia