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Paper short abstract:

The 1930s saw a concerted effort by the Portuguese New State to transform the rural landscape through a massive afforestation plan. This paper argues that political and scientific discourses about fire as an enemy of forests are key to understanding the expansion of state power over the territory.

Paper long abstract:

In 1938 the Portuguese dictatorship of the New State ushered in an Afforestation Plan that sought to completely reshape the country’s rural landscape while imposing an ideological corporative vision for the nation. A new political, economic, scientific, and aesthetic discourse encouraged Portugal to become again a “country of forests”. Affirming that once pristine woodlands had been destroyed by the “carelessness and ignorance of local populations”, the Plan proposed that more than 400.000 ha of commons should be turned into state forests. This was a key aspect of the expansion of state power over the territory in the early to mid-20th century.

Fire was a key theme in this process. Drawing on transnational discourses about “degraded” Mediterranean landscapes, fire became “the most terrible enemy” of afforestation efforts, capable of destroying “in a mere instant” what nature took centuries to grow. Consequently, an ever-increasing array of restrictions on fire uses led to the exclusion of local people from what were once common lands. The new forest imagined by the Afforestation Plan was to be a forest without fire.

This paper investigates the twin stories of state-sponsored afforestation and the exclusion of fire from the forests, to analyse the emergence of a political, legislative and scientific consensus about fire as an enemy from the 1930s until the early-1970s, when the increasing incidence of wildfires led to a reassessment of the role of fire in forest management.