a firefighter trying to extinguish a wildfire in portugal

How to live with mega-fires? Portugal’s feral forests may hold the secret

The world's forests are getting drier and people are living closer to them, ushering in a dangerous new era—unless we can find a way to coexist with the flames.

A firefighter tries to extinguish a wildfire in the village of Casais de Sao Bento in Macao in central Portugal.
Photograph by Patricia de Melo Moreira, AFP/Getty Images
The Heinrich Boll Foundation and the Pulitzer Center provided grant support for this story.

When the speeding BMW emerged out of the smoke of burning eucalyptus trees, heading straight for her firetruck, Filipa Rodrigues had no time to react. “I had time only to think, ‘We’re going to crash,’” she says, massaging the burn marks on her arms, and then the car plowed into them, and the five volunteer firefighters stumbled out from their ruined truck into an inferno.

It was high summer in 2017, and they had just crossed into the outer bands of the worst firestorm to ever hit Portugal, a presage for a new age of mega-fire that would soon stalk across landscapes from Spain to Australia. Rodrigues, then 24, stepped outside and her safety goggles immediately melted to her face; as

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