On fire and rewilding

While fur farms are finally disappearing

Author

Gaia Solaris
August 29, 2025

Dear ash-bearers,

I live in Galicia, Spain. This summer, the land burned again. Not just in forests and valleys, but in the air we breathe, in the silence of emptied nests, in the knowledge that we all saw this coming. A fire isn’t only smoke and flames, it’s a message. One we’ve ignored for decades, hidden behind excuses and short-term gains.

I remember when I was a kid, and 100 hectares in ashes was called massive. This month alone, we have lost 95,000. Entire landscapes gone in days. Countless animals trapped, forests turned to skeletons, ecosystems collapsing before our eyes. Galicia is scarred, but so is every place that thought it had time.

Fires have always been part of the earth’s cycle, nature’s way of clearing and renewing. But now, in a heating world, they are angrier, faster, and relentless. They don’t just burn trees, they burn futures. Of farmers, of wildlife, of children who may never know the shade of an old oak. From Portugal to Canada to Australia, the story is the same: fuelled by drought, neglect, and denial, the flames return stronger each year.

This week’s fire-story is about more than hectares and headlines. It’s about listening to what the land is telling us. That resilience is not just rebuilding homes, but restoring forests. That adaptation is not just counting losses, but rethinking how we live with the soil, with the seasons, with each other.

Let fire be more than breaking news. Let it be a turning point, away from complacency, and toward a way of living that doesn’t feed the flames.

With earth,

Helena Constela, Head of Content

🗞️ In Climate News

  • 🇪🇸 Spain and Portugal wildfires drive worst EU season on record

    • A record one million hectares - equivalent to about half the land area of Wales - have burned across the European Union so far this year, making it the worst wildfire season since records began in 2006.

  • 🌊 Collapse of critical Atlantic current is no longer low-likelihood, study finds

    • The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc) is a major part of the global climate system. It brings sun-warmed tropical water to Europe and the Arctic, where it cools and sinks to form a deep return current. The Amoc was already known to be at its weakest in 1,600 years as a result of the climate crisis.

  • 🌳 Deforestation has killed half a million people in past 20 years, study finds

    • Land clearance is raising the temperature in the rainforests of the Amazon, Congo and south-east Asia because it reduces shade, diminishes rainfall and increases the risk of fire, the authors of the paper found.

      Deforestation is responsible for more than a third of the warming experienced by people living in the affected regions, which is on top of the effect of global climate disruption.

  • 🇵🇰 Pakistan evacuates a million people as farming belt hit by worst floods in decades

    • Torrential monsoon rain and neighbouring India's release of excess water from its dams swelled three rivers that flow into the eastern province, forcing authorities to breach river banks in some places - causing flooding in more than 1,400 villages, Punjab's disaster management authority said.

  • 🇺🇸 Fema staff warn Trump’s cuts risk exposing US to another Hurricane Katrina

    • Donald Trump’s attacks on the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) risk exposing the US to another Hurricane Katrina, staff at the agency have warned Congress in a withering critique that also takes aim at its current leadership.

  • 🚜 ‘We cannot do it the way our fathers did’: farmers across Europe struggle to adapt to the climate crisis

    • I’m not ready to change jobs,” says Stellios Boutaris, a wine producer with vineyards in Naoussa and Amyndeon in northern Greece, as well as on the island of Santorini. But, he adds, “we cannot do it the way our fathers did.”

      Boutaris is determined to keep producing in the region and keep the family business going but says “the curve is not looking good” as the climate crisis puts pressure on producers across the Mediterranean.

  • 🇲🇽 NGOs launch novel community projects to conserve Mexico’s ocelots

    • Esteban Dominguez has lived for more than 20 years close to one of the biggest conservation areas in southeastern Mexico — Calakmul Biosphere Reserve on the Yucatán Peninsula. He’s used to spotting monkeys, coatis, eagles, tapirs, deer, wild turkeys, owls, and even pumas and jaguars. But he recalls only a couple times when an ocelot (Leopardus pardalis) briefly crossed his path.

  • 🇸🇸 In South Sudan's Tambura region, displaced women battle uncertainty and insecurity

    • Since violence erupted in Tambura, Western Equatoria, in 2021, thousands of civilians have been forced to flee their homes and seek sanctuary in displacement camps, where women still face a fragile security situation and uncertainty for the future of their children and families.

  • 🇬🇲 Gambian fishermen are fighting trawlers

    • Gambian crews on international trawlers fishing on the country's shores have become the accidental targets of local fishermen's anger, whose livelihoods are threatened by the foreign vessels' aggressive fishing strategies.

📈 Cool Trends

♾️ eco-story

Some 30,000 years ago, Stone Age people decorated a cave, today known as Cueva de los Casares, in central Spain with pictures of mating humans (most famously), geometric shapes, and animals. The most popular carved animal is the wild horse.

Cueva de los Casares sports at least two dozen images of wild horses. Eventually, these Pleistocene-epoch horses vanished — likely slaughtered for food or domesticated. But some 10,000 years later, wild horses have again returned to central Spain — this time to help with out-of-control fires and bring economic opportunity to a struggling region.

In 2023, Rewilding Spain, a branch of Rewilding Europe, brought in the first 16 Przewalski’s horses (Equus ferus przewalskii) from France to the highlands of Spain’s Guadalajara province, one of the least populated parts of the country. Once extinct in the wild, Przewalski’s horse is the last fully wild horse in the world, genetically distinct from all domesticated horses. Originally from Mongolia, they’ve been rewilded to a number of countries in Europe.

“It was an amazing feeling … to bring these animals here,” says Pablo Schapira, team leader with Rewilding Spain. Before returning to his home country, Schapira spent a dozen years in Africa working with the NGO African Parks, including on species reintroductions.

He says doing reintroductions in his home country “was amazing because I didn’t think it was possible.”

Today, the project has 35 Przewalski’s horses.

Przewalski’s foal nursing. Since the beginning of the project, four foals have been born. Image by Juan Maza.

🌏 The Culture Column

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