27/07/2026
https://gofund.me/11ff84836
For anyone who has picked up on what's happening on the continent right now, you will have had a stark insight into just how tough the prolonged heatwaves and drought have been for so many across France and south-western Europe.
As is often the case with weather and climate related issues and events, especially those extreme in nature. it is people connected to the land and more particularly, the beings that depend on it for not only their well being but for their very survival, everything from ants and crickets to wild boar and the poor old mole, who suffer the most.
I've recently seen roe deer in very poor condition, mere shadows of their former selves. Solitary male wild boar, youngsters ejected from the family group, have come so close to the house in the dead of night that I can almost reach out and touch them. In their desperation for food and water, they overcome their habitual fear and mistrust of mankind. I've been throwing kilo after kilo of courgettes [we have SO many this year] into the meadows below the house, a nocturnal ritual in which the wild piggies joyously partake. Their grunting and groaning is actually a kind of ecstatic expression of their contentment, the moaning a token of their unbridled happiness as they eat their insatiable fill.
The cows...they are already resigned to eating hay. They know the score, have smelled the smoke on the wind, carried across hundreds of kilometres of Pyrenean wasteland. So far, the forest fires are far from the farm. We are fortunate to have minimal scrub in the area. The landscape is characterised by beech and oak woodland, not the Mediterranean-coloured swathes of green oak and broom and gorse, juniper and all manner of flammable brush that is locally called garrigue.
The cows would normally begin their hay season anytime from the end of November. Until then, they finish off what browse and graze is available, profit from the abundance of rose hips, acorns and even chestnuts that litter the forest floor in early Autumn.
The meadows here are so scorched by the relentless power of the sun that local gossip says that's it until next Spring. It's hay all the way from here on in.
So, to cut to the chase, I'm reaching out for a little help. Never done this before but it's too far gone for embarrassment or repetetive internal voices that insist that I just get on with it.
I am asking for donations or the sharing of the link found below, in order to secure enough hay to see the beauties right the way through till next March or April.
There is a very real risk that there isn't enough fodder in all its versions to go round. It's time to act. It's probable that those who leave it too late will be faced with the soul-destroying dilemma of slaughtering animals who otherwise may starve. Yes, it is that serious, that is the reality of the situation right here in modern-day France.
In quiet moments, I'm convinced that such extreme climatic phenomenon are Life's way of weaning us off a method of farming and food production that is at the very least highly unsustainable and more often than not, deeply destructive. It's a very harsh and unspeakably difficult way of potentially wiping the slate clean, of crying out for nature-based systems that can't include million-acre mono-crop pine forests in any part of their agenda.
In the Gironde region of south-western France, over 100 000 acres of mainly cash-crop pine plantation have gone up in smoke over the course of the last few turbulent days. Firefighters are giving their lives in what amounts to a flammable paradise for flame and arsonist alike.
Wildfires are a crucial feature of living landscapes, as natural as snow-melt torrents or swirling banks of fog. What isn't so natural are such vast areas of a single species or very limited variety of tree[s]. Sooner or later, it's simply asking for trouble and that is exactly what we now have.
Please never forget that nature knows best.
Thank you
https://gofund.me/11ff84836
