Due to acute climate change impacts and historical land-use changes, wildfires are becoming more and more frequent and severe in the Mediterranean area, disrupting long-established socio-economic and ecological cycles. The Mediterranean agroforestry landscapes, historically and culturally shaped by traditional subsistence and labour activities, combining patches of forest, small agricultural plots, olive groves, vineyards and grazing fields are greatly affected by these wildfires. Through a human geography and political ecology lens, in this paper, I explore the interconnections between rural depopulation, altering agroforestry landscapes and wildfires in the Greek island of Evia, that was severely affected by wildfires in the summer of 2021. With almost 50.000 hectares of coniferous forest and agricultural land burnt, they were the most extended wildfires in the country, up until that moment, affecting life-sustaining activities and infrastructure.
Despite a highly fragmented property system, comprising of several different forms and sizes of forest and land property (communal, public, associations, privately owned forests, agricultural plots etc), the burnt areas used to function largely as commons grounds, where beekeepers, resin cultivators, shepherds, farmers and recreational mushroom hunters seasonally accessed the forest and agricultural land, harvesting and at the same time ‘taking care’ of the landscape. Those mosaic landscapes, when preserved and worked, used to affect fire behavior in different ways and at the same time offered a certain kind of fire management knowledge to the local people. Following ethnographic fieldwork of 9 months in the area and 68 semi-structured interviews with forest producers, farmers, shepherds, fire and forest services actors, in this paper I explore local narratives on two interrelated topics: 1) how the loss of subsistence/multi-job lifestyles affects and is affected by fires and 2) how co-existence with fire is changing, related to: land use changes, rural desertification and forest re-wilding (in the absence of humans and traditional activities).
