It Is Not Just the Spark: Wildfires and the Relationship We Refuse to Change
These thoughts were prompted by the images of major wildfires breaking out almost simultaneously across different parts of Europe and the Mediterranean.
Spain, France, Italy, Greece. Different countries, different fire fronts, different state mechanisms, yet a picture that becomes more familiar with every passing summer: vast areas burning, communities being evacuated, firefighters battling conditions that at some point appear impossible to contain—and immediately afterwards, the same discussion begins.
Who started the fire? Was it arson? Was it negligence? Was the electricity grid responsible? Why did the aircraft not arrive sooner? Why had the forest not been cleared? Is climate change really to blame, or is it being used as a convenient excuse?
These are all reasonable questions. None of them, however, is sufficient on its own.
Watching the same scenes repeat themselves year after year, I wonder whether we are still treating wildfires as a series of isolated emergencies when, in reality, they have become the visible expression of a much deeper problem.
This is not only a firefighting problem. It is not only a matter of climate change, forest management or human negligence.
It is a problem rooted in the relationship we have created with the space around us.
The spark—and everything we have placed around it
Climate change does not hold a lighter, throw away a cigarette or cause a fault in the electricity grid. Most wildfires are started by human activity: deliberately, through negligence, because of technical failures, agricultural work, machinery, illegal burning or other causes.
But that is only the spark.
Whether that spark dies out a few metres away or develops into a massive wildfire depends on everything surrounding it: temperature, drought, vegetation moisture, wind, available fuel, the condition of the forest, the terrain, access for firefighters and the distance separating homes from vegetation.
This is why I consider the choice between “arsonists or climate change” to be a false one.
Arson, negligence or a technical failure may explain how a particular fire started. Climate change—and the way we have managed the land—helps explain why that fire encountered such favourable conditions in which to spread.
Science does not claim that every individual wildfire is caused by climate change. It does show, however, that rising temperatures, greater evaporation, increasingly dry vegetation and longer fire seasons create more days during which an ignition can develop into an extreme event. Southern Europe and the Mediterranean are among the regions expected to face particularly severe increases in wildfire risk. Copernicus Climate Change Service
It is not merely the probability of fire that is increasing. It is the probability that a fire will behave in ways that make immediate containment extremely difficult—or even impossible.
This year’s conditions in France and Spain are a characteristic example of how climate pressure, changes in land use and human expansion towards forested areas work together. There is no single cause. There is a combination of factors that turns an ignition into a disaster. World Weather Attribution
Fire has always been part of nature
There is, of course, the argument that wildfires are part of the natural cycle. And that is true.
Fire existed long before modern humanity, and in many Mediterranean ecosystems it functions as a mechanism of renewal. Some plants have adapted to it, some seeds are activated by heat, and forests can, under the right conditions, regenerate after a fire.
But not every wildfire is natural, and not every burned area marks the beginning of healthy regeneration.
The difference lies in frequency, intensity, timing, scale and the amount of time that passes before the next fire. An ecosystem may recover after one wildfire. But if the same area burns repeatedly before young trees have had time to mature and reproduce, that natural cycle is interrupted.
At that point, we are no longer talking about natural renewal. We are talking about soil degradation, erosion, loss of forest cover and the possible transformation of a forest into a poorer landscape dominated by low vegetation.
Fire is part of nature. Today’s megafires, however, are not simply nature continuing its ancient cycle undisturbed. They are a natural hazard intensified by a warmer climate and by decades of human choices.
The land we abandoned
For years, we discussed the abandonment of the countryside mainly as an economic and social problem. Today, its environmental dimension is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.
Land that was once cultivated has been abandoned. Livestock farming has declined. Grass is no longer grazed, branches and agricultural residues are no longer removed, and fields that once acted as natural breaks between forested areas have become covered by continuous vegetation.
One could say that nature is returning. But it does not always return in the form of a healthy, mature forest. More often, a continuous layer of combustible material develops—one capable of carrying fire over much greater distances and at much greater speed.
Land abandonment in the Mediterranean has been associated with the accumulation and continuity of fuel, increasing the risk of large wildfires. This is not an abstract theoretical connection. It is a physical transformation of the landscape in which fires occur. OECD
At the same time, we are moving in the opposite direction.
We build homes, tourism facilities and entire communities ever closer to forested areas. We construct roads, expand electricity networks and place human activity inside landscapes where fire has always been a possible natural event.
There is nothing inherently unreasonable about people living close to nature. It becomes extremely dangerous, however, when they do so without different building standards, defensible zones, clear evacuation routes and systematic vegetation management.
We behave as though the presence of a road and a few houses is enough to abolish the natural cycles of the surrounding landscape. And when those cycles reappear, we speak of nature invading our lives.
But what if the opposite is true?
The illusion of the technological solution
In May 2026, four Greek thermal microsatellites were placed into orbit as part of the National Microsatellite Programme. This is an important technological infrastructure that can strengthen the near-real-time detection and monitoring of wildfires and improve the operational picture available to Civil Protection. Hellenic Space Center
We must, however, be precise about what this technology can actually solve.
Satellites provide earlier detection and better data. They do not prevent ignition. They do not clear an abandoned field, maintain an electricity grid, create firebreaks or open evacuation routes. Nor can they guarantee that, when several wildfires break out simultaneously, sufficient resources will be available to intervene everywhere in time.
They can tell us sooner that a fire has started. They cannot repair within a few minutes everything we failed to do over the previous ten or twenty years.
This does not diminish their value. On the contrary, it places that value in its proper context.
We often treat technology as a substitute for organisation. We invest in surveillance and suppression because presenting a new system, an aircraft or a satellite is easier than implementing a long-term and politically difficult policy of land management.
Prevention rarely produces impressive images. It consists of thousands of small, persistent and frequently invisible actions: clearing vegetation, maintaining infrastructure, controlling land use, supporting grazing, managing forests, enforcing building standards, educating residents and developing evacuation plans that can actually work.
Precisely because prevention is not spectacular, it often remains less politically attractive. But fire does not care which investment looks better at a press conference.
Some fires cannot be extinguished in time
We also find it difficult to accept that, under certain conditions, a wildfire can exceed the capabilities of even a strong and well-equipped firefighting system.
Firefighting aircraft cannot fly everywhere at all times. Strong winds, dense smoke, poor visibility, difficult terrain and multiple simultaneous fires impose real operational limits.
An extreme wildfire may advance faster than ground forces can be deployed, generate its own local weather conditions and produce levels of heat that make any direct approach impossible. Even aerial firefighting resources have specific safety and operational limits.
This does not mean that every failure is unavoidable or that responsibility should not be investigated. Nor does it mean that state services always perform as they should.
It does mean, however, that no number of aircraft can, by itself, constitute a complete wildfire policy.
As long as we wait for the fire to start before beginning the fight, we will increasingly encounter conditions in which that fight cannot be won quickly.
The real battle must have been fought long before the first flame appears.
When consequences feel like revenge
We often use the phrase “nature’s revenge.” Obviously, nature has no consciousness. It does not become angry or decide to punish us. In that narrow sense, nature cannot take revenge.
But I am not convinced that the expression is as mistaken as we often claim.
Nature may have no intention, but it does have limits, balances and mechanisms that do not stop operating simply because we have chosen to ignore them.
When we place these mechanisms under pressure for years, when we expand into forests, abandon the management of rural land, allow combustible material to accumulate and design communities as though the climate and the landscape will remain unchanged, the consequences eventually return.
Not as deliberate punishment, but in a way that, from our perspective, looks remarkably similar to it.
Perhaps what we call “nature’s revenge” is the violent restoration of a balance we believed we could disrupt without consequence. It is the moment when reality crosses the boundaries we drew for it and reminds us that we do not exist outside the natural system—or above it.
We are part of it.
Technology has accustomed us to the belief that every problem has a solution: a system, an algorithm or a more powerful tool. And because we have genuinely managed to solve extraordinarily complex problems, we may have started to believe that the natural environment can also be brought under our complete control.
Nature, however, is not a technical system that will obey simply because we possess better tools.
Progress does not mean that we have acquired the power to abolish natural cycles. It means—or at least it should mean—that we have acquired the knowledge to live within them more safely.
This is no longer an emergency
Nature did not suddenly invade our cities and our homes.
We built our cities and homes inside nature’s cycles and behaved as though those cycles had ceased to exist.
Every summer, fire reminds us that they have not. And if that reminder sometimes feels like revenge, perhaps it is because the consequences of our actions eventually find their way back to us.
Of course, we must establish who caused each wildfire. We must investigate responsibility, evaluate the performance of the firefighting system and invest in better technology, more data and faster response.
But if we limit ourselves to these things, we will continue discussing every summer’s disaster in precisely the same terms.
The real question is not only how we can extinguish the next fire more quickly.
It is how we can organise the land, our communities, our infrastructure and our lives differently, so that the next spark does not find everything it needs around it to become a catastrophe.
Because the spark may be accidental.
The conditions we have created around it are not.