Climate Change Destroyed A Way Of Life On The Once-Idyllic Greek Island Of Evia
EVIA, Greece — Long before the fire, Giorgos Anagnostou could see the pine trees were vulnerable.
He spent 20 years tapping those trees in the thyme-scented mountains above his village for resin — his livelihood. Each year, this forest on Greece's second-largest island got drier. Pine needles piled up on that dry earth, creating kindling for summer wildfires that are sometimes set intentionally, to clear land for development.
"I'm not a fancy scientist but I'm not blind, I can see what climate change has done to my own backyard," Anagnostou says. "I worried all the time that we lived in a tinderbox. Yet [the Greek state] managed the forest as if nothing was changing. And now our trees have burned down."
Evia was the epicenter of catastrophic summer wildfires in the Mediterranean basin this summer that destroyed forests amid record heat waves that scientists say are fueled by global warming. In Greece, fires razed the thick, old-growth forest in Evia's north, where Anagnostou lives and works, as
