AGDINES, Greece (AP) – For generations, residents of the northern Greek island of Evia have earned their living from the dense pine forests surrounding their villages. Leveraging the ubiquitous Aleppo pines to obtain their resin, the viscous, sticky substance that trees use to protect themselves from insects and disease, provided a key source of income for hundreds of families.
But now, there is virtually no forest left. A devastating forest fire, one of the most destructive fires in Greece in decades, swept through northern Evia for days earlier this month, engulfing forests, homes and businesses and sending thousands fleeing.
The damage will not only affect this year’s harvest, resin collectors and beekeepers say, but for future generations.
“It’s all over. Everything has turned to ashes, ”said Christos Livas, a 48-year-old resin collector and father of four.
The resin has been used by humans since ancient times and is currently found in a dizzying range of products, from paint and solvents to pharmaceuticals, plastics and cosmetics. North Evia, the second largest island in Greece, accounted for about 80% of the pine resin produced in Greece and about 70% of the pine honey, according to locals.
Satellite images show that the fire destroyed most of the north of the island. The devastation is impressive. Tens of thousands of acres of forests and farmland were reduced to a dystopian landscape of skeletal, blackened trees looming against a smoky sky.
The trees will grow back to the point where resin can be extracted will take more than two decades and probably twice as long for pine honey production.
“In ten years, the forest will be green again,” Livas said. “But to take advantage, it will take 20, 25 years. For me, it’s all over. Even for a 30-year-old: what will he do, find a job and come back when he’s 50, 60 to touch pines? His legs won’t even hold him. ”
Livas walked through the still-burning remnants of the forest on the outskirts of his mountain village of Agdines, with blows of white and gray ash rising from under his boots as he studied the damage.
“This one, I remember from a young age, 15 years old,” he said, pointing to a blackened pine, the strip of peeled bark where resin still visible had been extracted. “It must have been taken advantage of for 32, 33 years.”
Most of their livelihoods have literally fallen into smoke, lost in a horrible roar as the giant fire sets fire to the village.
“You could hear a rumble … It was like an earthquake,” Livas said.
The flames moved quickly, leaving no time to collect the thousands of plastic bags attached to the trees to collect the precious resin. Instead, local residents turned their attention to the village, ignoring an evacuation order and staying to save their homes.
They got it. But they could not save the forest. And the anger of the villagers (against the government for not sending more firefighters earlier, for ordering evacuations when they say the locals could have helped fight the flames) is palpable.
Livas had been extracting resin from about 3,000 trees, producing about 9-10 tons a year at 27 cents (32 cents) per kilogram. Of all the trees he touched, only one survived.
He supplemented his income by cultivating olive trees, raising animals, and cutting from time to time. But now there are no trees to register and most of the olive trees have also disappeared.
“It simply came to our notice then. Everywhere I’ve been, everything is burned, “he said.
With four young children to support, the eldest only 13, Livas said she would look for new types of work. But with only a primary education and an inability to read or write, he seemed overwhelmed by thought. Forestry, agriculture and resin harvesting, which he has been doing for 15 years, is all he has known.
“What am I going to do now?” he said, stumbling over the words. “I will look for work. What will I do? Do I know what to do now? “
Others were even worse, he said. Some had several family members collecting resin, gathering about 30 to 40 tons a year. There were entire villages north of Evia that worked almost exclusively on resin collection.
The villager Antonis Natsios himself felt the same. He began collecting resin at the age of 12, learning the technique from his father, who had learned it from his father before him.
He is now 51 years old and has three children, two of them in college, Natsios does not know how he will get to the end. Some of his fig trees were sung, but they would probably survive and produce a new harvest, he said, and about 20 percent of his olive trees were kept. But of the pines, its main source of income, “zero. Not even a branch.
See few options. “Or the state, or God, if it helps. Or migration, ”Natsios said.
The government has pledged to compensate all those affected by the fire. But nothing can make up for the loss of the source of their livelihoods over the next few decades, say residents of northern Evia.
“We’ve lost everything over the next 30-40 years,” said beekeeper Makis Balalas, 44, who each year relied on Evia’s forests to get pine honey. He said the destruction of the forest was much worse than the loss of hives.
“I can create new hives,” he said. “But that which has been lost, cannot be re-created.”
For Natsios, it is the loss of the forest where he grew up that hurts him the most.
“It’s not the future, it’s what we see. When you have been living something for 50 years and now you see this thing, this charcoal … ”he leaves behind. “Now I, who was born in this forest, must breathe this blackness.”
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