“While patrolling
on a recent cold night, environmentalist Grigoris Gourdomichalis caught a young
man illegally chopping down a tree on public land in the mountains above
Athens. When confronted, the man broke down in tears, saying he was unemployed
and needed the wood to warm the home he shares with his wife and four small
children, because he could no longer afford heating oil. ‘It was a tough
choice, but I decided just to let him go’ with the wood, said Mr.
Gourdomichalis, head of the locally financed Environmental Association of
Municipalities of Athens, which works to protect forests around Egaleo, a
western suburb of the capital.”[1] Tens of thousands of trees had disappeared from
parks and forests in Greece during the first half of the winter of 2013 alone
as unemployed Greeks had to contend with the loss of the home heating-oil
subsidy as part of the austerity program demanded by the state’s creditors. As
impoverished residents too broke to pay for electricity or fuel turned to
fireplaces and wood stoves for heat, smog was just one of the manifestations—the
potential loss of forests being another. On Christmas Day, for example,
pollution over Maroussi was more than two times the E.U.’s standard. Furthermore,
many schools, especially in the north part of Greece, had to face hard choices
for lack of money to heat classrooms.
Essentially,
austerity was bringing many people back to pre-modern living, perhaps including a resurgence in vegetable gardens during
the preceding summer. At least in respect to the wood, the problem was that the
population was too big—and too concentrated in Athens—for the
primitive ways to return, given the environment's capacity.
The full essay is at "Greek Austerity and the Environment."
The full essay is at "Greek Austerity and the Environment."
1. Nektaria Stamouli and Stelios Bouras, “Greeks
Raid Forests in Search of Wood to Heat Homes,” The New York Times, January 11, 2013.
2. Skip Worden, God's Gold, available at Amazon.
2. Skip Worden, God's Gold, available at Amazon.