March 28, 2023

I’ve been in Portugal for the last week, visiting Lisbon, Porto, going to listen to Fado music — made world-famous by Fado singer Amália Rodrigues — and visiting the Douro port-wine growing region.

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Thank goodness I am a racist-sexist-homophobe insurrectionist and not in the least worried about the end of the world from climate change and environmental degradation.

Once you get out of Lisbon and Porto and their crazy winding streets there are only three things going on. There are endless forests of eucalyptus, used for papermaking; there are terraced vineyards and olive orchards on every hillside; and there are cork trees.

I had a major revelation on the cork tree front. I have never understood how they removed the bark from cork trees without killing the tree. No problem. You can strip the bark off the trunk all the way up past the first branches, and the cork tree just grows the bark back in seven years or so.

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So much for cork trees. Now let’s get serious. When people view the Portuguese vineyards growing good British port, they ooh and aah at the pretty landscape: the terraces, the vines, the villages, and the olive orchards in-between.

But I was shocked.

These vineyards typically sit on hillsides that were terraced eons ago for the convenience of the vines and the humans exploiting them. In the old days the terraces were held up by dry stone walls, which was fine unless the wall was breached by a flood of water during a thunderstorm. Today, the terraces are excavated by construction excavators with a steep slope between terraces. OMG.

Do you see what I see? A natural landscape of pine forest has been ravaged by greedy British port-wine corporations: brands like Taylor, Blackett, Symington. And people come to visit and think it is cute!

And the Douro River! Back in the day, the Douro was home to migratory salmon, and barcos rabelos — sailing cargo boats — brought the port wine barrels down the fast-flowing Douro to  Porto. Gangs of men warped os barcos rabelos back up the river for the next batch of barrels.

Today the Douro is dammed, and the salmon can forget it. But there is hope, as  “Scientists uncover new information on the Douro river ecosystem” and “the threats to freshwater biodiversity stemming from hydropower dams and obstacles in the Douro river.” Anyway, who needs hydropower when Portugal is already saturated in climate-saving wind turbines along every ridge?