Dispatch #4: The Environment Edition

Read about forest fires in Patagonia, German colonists, and Europe's growing bear population.

Hello! For Translator’s fourth weekly Dispatch of stories from around the world we decided to do something a little different and focus on just one subject: the environment.

Dispatch #4 contains summaries of three articles related to the environment which have caught our eye recently: an article about forest fires in Patagonia and how they have played into local politics, a fascinating French piece on German ethnic nationalists infiltrating rural communities in east Germany, and an investigation into Europe’s growing bear population (which also resulted in a great documentary film you can watch here).

Over the next weeks and months we’ll be mixing it up more by interspersing our weekly Dispatches from around the world with a few themed editions, lining up stories about history, money, culture, fashion and more, to give you a comparative perspective on how these subjects are playing out around the world.

Tell us what you like and dislike, themes you’d like to see explored from the perspective of linguistic media landscapes. And, as ever, feel free to recommend specific pieces we should summarise for our Dispatches, or translate for the magazine.

Here’s what we’re looking for and how to let us know.

Happy reading in the meantime!

The fires we don’t see

While LA burned this January, fires at the other end of the Americas have fed a long-running political battle in Patagonia

In January 2025, the Anglosphere was transfixed by the personal tragedies and cinematic horror of the wildfires in Los Angeles and surrounding areas of California.

It’s easy to understand why. A televised apocalypse, covered 24/7 by the English-language media, taking place in a city embedded in the Anglosphere’s cultural consciousness, even for those who have never been there. The stories of tragedy on a human scale: the families forced to flee, then returning to burnt-out wrecks of places they once called home.

But then there’s the epic, larger-than-us, quality to an event that seems to pit humanity against nature, albeit one tinged with the inescapable thought: is humanity, in its reckless hunger to construct and consume, somehow to blame for nature’s revenge?

It’s a question as old as Noah’s Flood or the Epic of Gilgamesh: are natural disasters ever really just natural disasters? Alongside the victims of such disasters, do humans also need culprits – divine or earthly as the case may be – to make sense of them?

At the same time that storied LA neighbourhoods were being reduced to ash, forest fires were burning out of control at the other end of the Americas in Patagonia, thousands of miles to the south. (While these didn’t get the same wall-to-wall coverage as the fires in LA by the Anglophone media, there are some notable exceptions, including this article by Kristin Deasy for the LA Times).

In a fascinating piece for the Argentinian publication Revista Crisis – with lots of links for those who want to read more! – Hernán Schiaffini writes about the Patagonian fires from a local perspective. A “Patagonian by adoption” – so his bio says – Schiaffini places the fires in a rich local context. An anthropologist by training, he also identifies a universal human thread: the need to find someone to blame. “For whom does the earth burn?”, he asks. “The need to make sense of disaster feeds mutually antagonistic accusations”, he writes, “and rekindles old disputes”.

Fires are not new to Patagonia. What Schiaffini calls “possibly the largest forest fire in Argentinian history” took place in 2015, destroying 40,000 hectares. There was an extensive spate of fires in 2021, and others since. In 2025, fires have been concentrated around Epuyén in Chubut Province and El Bolsón in Río Negro Province. (When Translator looked at the at the area around El Bolsón on Google Maps in preparing this Dispatch, there was still an red flame icon indicating an ongoing forest fire and directing traffic towards the local government Facebook page for more information).

Forest fires are part of nature. But their dynamics and frequency are changing. Forestry engineer Hernán Colomb tells Schiaffini: “what might happen naturally every fifty or sixty years is today much more frequent than that, in part because of human impact”. At the same time, the spread of real estate developments into forested areas means that when a forest fire does take place, it is no longer over the horizon. Instead, something that previously happened out of sight and out of mind becomes a human problem.

The fires don’t just create victims. They generate wild, unsubstantiated rumours about who or what is to blame: whispers of drums of oil stocked in the forests, of nails being thrown onto the road to hamper fire response, or of a white Toyota Hilux said to have been seen driving off from a place where a fire began. It happened in 2021 too, Schiaffini recalls. An investigation into a car some linked to possible arson was eventually called off. The strongest hypothesis for how the fires started that year remains a faulty power line (under the responsibility of local government).

This time around the local governor of Chubut Province, Ignacio Torres, has blamed indigenous Mapuche – or “pseudomapuches” as he calls them. The forest fire issue has been folded into a wider ongoing confrontation between the Mapuche and the Argentine state about land rights. (Joe Lewis, the owner of Tottenham Hotspur football club, has been tangentially – and controversially – involved in this through his ownership of a Lago Escondido in Patagonia).

In mid-January, the Mapuche community of Lof Pailako was evicted by police and the Argentinian national flag raised above the land, partly on the pretext of their alleged involvement in forest fires. A week later Torres blamed the “usual criminals” for what looked like the revenge burning of trucks and machinery on a farm linked to the family of a political ally. Torres pointed to the Buenos Aires phone numbers of some Mapuche to discredit their claims of indigeneity, calling them chantas, Argentinian slang for swindlers.

Independent Chilean media later carried a claim of responsibility for the farm fire from a Mapuche liberation organisation, while disclaiming any part in starting the forest fires. “We only attack the machinery and material interests of the bourgeois winka [a term for non-Mapuche people]”, the statement read, “not nature, not our people, nor even poor winka, even if they are fascists”. Torres and other politicians responded with promises to lock up the criminals and defend the sanctity of property rights.

Within all this Schiaffini sees a growing polarisation, animated by the notion that the fires wouldn’t have happened at all were it not for the Other: either (a) the indigenous Mapuches or (b) real reckless estate speculators and the government. But is this really true? “There are many more fires than we hear about”, Schiaffini writes – it’s only when there are political or economic stakes that the media latches onto them, creating a false impression that this must always be the case.

More complex questions of causality or stewardship remain unanswered while the same cycles of rhetoric and behaviour are repeated from year to year. (One example: the fire brigade workers who are “the heroes of the summer and forgotten of the winter”.)There are two certainties left, Schiaffini writes. One is that “how the fires are understood maps onto power relations”. The second? That the fires will – eventually – go out.

The full original article in Spanish by Hernán Schiaffini is available here: Incendios en el sur: lo que crepita detrás de las llamas, Revista Crisis, 10 February 2025.

Revista Crisis is an Argentinian magazine of politics and culture.

Whitewashing the German countryside?

A French take on the rise of the ‘ecologically minded’ extreme-right in Germany

Evil doesn’t die; it reinvents itself.

Following the worrying results of last September’s local elections in Saxony—where the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) came second with 34 % of the vote —freelance journalist Adèle Cailleteau travelled to the sleepy town of Leisnig in central Saxony to report on a related phenomenon which has emerged over the last few years.

Far-right activists (not even necessarily members of the AfD) had been buying farms across Germany, inspired by their ethno-nationalist (the German word is Völkisch) ideology of ‘Blut und Boden’ (‘blood and soil’) a 19^th-century precursor to Nazism. “They want to spread their poison everywhere,” says a local resident of Leisnig who—like all other interviewees in this piece – preferred to remain anonymous. In the lead up to snap German elections on Sunday we revisit Cailleteau’s compelling piece for France’s Reporterre.

The goal of these activists, disguised as harmless stalwarts of the community and lovers of the German countryside, is to settle in “rural and white areas”, as Cailleteau describes them, so as to thereby “preserve the German ethnic substance.” There is a certain cosplay element to their activities. “They might buy up farms,” she notes, “but they don’t necessarily maintain them as such.”

The article quotes a 2021 government report: “Behind the harmless façade of organic farmers attached to tradition lies in reality a belief in the alleged superiority of the German people and a racist and Anti-Semitic worldview.” The German term used to describe such people is Völkische Siedler, which roughly translates as ethno-nationally motivated migrants.

Although present across all sixteen German states, Völkische Siedler have a particular affinity for those in the east, which used to be part of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). In these ever-aging villages, where, the journalist writes, “many abandoned farms and houses cost almost nothing”, their arrival has had superficially positive effects. They integrate seamlessly into local daily life, “attending funerals as a sign of solidarity, help out, volunteer in the local fire services”. As for their ideology, she adds, “it is not necessarily a problem in the country where the far-right party AfD scores the highest.” Here, the extreme-right activists can simply live out their “Germanic tradition”.

But how did it come to this? In Leisnig, everything shifted about a decade ago, writes Cailleteau, when the Strauch family opened a publishing house, selling books on the Second World War as well as Nazi paraphernalia, including maps of the German Empire before 1945 and posters with Waffen SS soldiers front and centre. Other new residents include Christian Fischer, the former executive of the now-banned youth association Heimattreue Deutsche Jugend (HDJ), who charmed the locals with his “perfect son-in-law” image.

Initally, these newcomers were discreet, demonstrating their overt political activism in larger, neighbouring cities like Chemnitz or Dresden. In Leisnig, they integrated into everyday activities at their children’s local nurseries and schools, as well as in associations and in charity work. Some collected donations for the 2021 floods in the not-so-local Ahrtal.

The restrictive Covid-19 guidelines brought these extreme-right activists more into the open. In 2021, they began organising regular demonstrations and, as Cailleteau reports, went to great lengths to create their own “independent news outlet, Leisnig.Info” for promotional purposes. As one local resident notes, their activities “are more subtle and smarter than the Neo-Nazis from the 1990s.” (One term used to describe these years in Germany is ‘Baseballschlägerjahre’ – the baseball bat years).

The Völkische Siedler have also sought political allies, approaching members of Freie Sachsen, a far-right party that aspires the state’s independence from Germany and bands together various diffuse groups of extremists and Neo-Nazis. Some entered the local government last year. Christian Fischer who now sits on the Stadtrat of Leisnig (city council).

“Their goal is to prevent the proper functioning of the city council, with the aim to slow down whatever they can,” notes another Leisnig resident. “They don’t want to win anything, only to destroy.” Other anti far-right residents have formed a Bürgerinitiative (citizen’s alliance) with a core team of ten that has made a number of small wins: for example, getting local real estate agents to look at prospective clients more closely.

Yet these efforts are insufficient says Kerstin Köditz an ex-MP for Die Linke in Saxony’s Parliament. “The German authorities don’t take get how serious the extreme-right issue is or they even minimise it,” she says. “As for us, in rural areas, it will become very complicated when our progressive-thinking inhabitants leave due to the arrival of these ethnic colonisers. We [are too rural to] attract people from immigrant backgrounds, but we need inhabitants to keep the countryside alive.”

What is her solution? “We are not going to solve the problem by leaving or hiding”, says one of the residents. The new wave of far-right activists left the West “because it was made uncomfortable for them. We must make sure that it is the same way here.”

Full original in French published on 7 September 2024 under the title: En Allemagne, des «colons ethniques» veulent blancher les campagnes.

Launched in 2007 by journalist Hervé Kempf, Reporterre is France’s oldest daily news site on matters of ecology.

Adèle Cailleteau is a freelance journalist based in the Île-de-France.

Stella Weiß is a Leipzig-based photographer.

Ursa major

An investigative report into Europe’s growing bear population and how it is being (mis)managed

Most Europeans – particularly in western Europe – have never seen a bear in the wild. But everyone has an idea of one.

As symbols, they are present in the daily lives of millions: in children’s books, in cartoons, in the names we give to the constellations in the night sky. There are bears in the coats of arms of three western European capitals (Bern, Berlin and Madrid) not to mention countless regions and towns – a legacy of the heraldic high point of the Middle Ages perhaps, when actual, real-life bears were far more prevalent across the continent than today.

“There was once a single bear population across Europe”, journalist Michael Bird reminds us in an article for the Romanian publication Scena9. Over many centuries, deforestation, hunting and the growth of human settlement, has fragmented the continent’s bear population into disparate islands defined mostly by geographic features (forests, mountains) rather than political boundaries. A long decline set in.

In some countries, that process is now going into reverse. (Bird lists France, Spain, Italy, Romania, Slovakia, Albania, Kosovo, Slovenia, Latvia, Belarus and Poland). As it does, the question of how humans should co-exist with their ursine cousins is being reformulated, often intersecting with conflicting attitudes, cultural shifts and deeper anxieties about climate change or rural human depopulation. The article is super interesting. Even better is the documentary which goes with it – available here.

The relationship between humans and bears is inescapable. The dynamics of one population affect the other. When houses are abandoned in depopulated rural areas, bears move into the ruins. Human settlement tends to come with things like beehives, domestic animals. Bears are happy to eat what humans leave behind. (Bird cites a study of bear excrement by biologist Laszlo Gal in the vicinity of the Romanian spa town of Băile Tușnad which found that five percent of what local bears eat is – plastic).

The factors which are now accentuating human-bear contact are myriad. Shorter winters – as a result of anthropogenic climate change – have reduced bear hibernation. Contrary to what one might imagine, forests subject to regular commercial logging are more attractive to bears than untouched forests because there tends to be more light between the young trees, and therefore greater coverage of the kinds of plants bears like to eat at ground level. New roads intersecting bear habitat make it more likely bears will have to cross them, and interact with humans in the process. For female bears with cubs, proximity to humans may represent a kind of protection from males (and a possible source of food) – but it also increases the possibility of inter-special conflict.

There has been an increase in bear-on-human violence, the article suggests. This is particularly acute in Romania, where most victims are shepherds or farmers. But there have been other cases too. The mayor of a village in the Italian Dolomites tells the story of a twenty-six year old killed while out hiking by a bear known as JJ4. Afterwards, Lorenzo Cicolini says, “people were terrified”. But locals were not allowed to kill JJ4 themselves. “We have the impression that bear management takes precedence over human life”, the mayor complains: “who will be next?”

But it’s hardly one way. Some bear advocates blame humans, pointing to instances where farmers have tried to kill bears to punish them for eating their livestock, and wound up as victims themselves. An Albanian source describes the problem of illegal hunting with guns (in the past surplus army strychnine was used to poison the bears). Aleksandër Trajçe, director of a local conservation charity, describes how mother bears would be killed to get at the cubs and sell them. (It’s unclear whether this is ongoing but a decade ago, a cub price was estimated at 300-800 to euros apiece).

Some worry that bans on bear hunting – these have been illegal in Romania since 2017 – have emboldened the bears. Bogdan Cotescu, a forestry worker in Râșnov, Romania notes that these days “instead of running away, they just stand there and smell you… it's not comfortable to have a bear sniffing you from half a meter away”. Scientific studies are inconclusive.

Even at the basic level of population management, does hunting work? Slovenia has an annual bear hunting quota equal to one quarter of the country’s bear population. Yet it is still growing. Some conservationists say bears are in effect being artificially fed for hunting by foreign tourists: “Slovenia has become a bear farm”.

As to the problem of bear-on-human violence, maybe it’s a case of a few bad apples. “The solution isn’t to shoot bears randomly and sporadically”, says Maša Cerjak Kastelic from the Ljubljana Society for the Protection of Animals, “but to kill the troublemakers”.

None of this stops the human fascination with bears, wanting to be near them or to photograph them, ideally from close up. In the Abruzzo national park in Italy, it’s illegal to come within 300 metres of a bear. On the Transfăgărășan highway in Romania it’s illegal to take photos of bears. The article has a picture of lines of slow-moving cars, with tourists happily snapping away and a few bears along the side.

In some parts of south-eastern Europe, bears were once kept as mascots for restaurants, even petrol stations, monasteries and factories. That’s no longer allowed in Kosovo the article notes, but it still happens in Romania, Slovenia and Albania. Instead, there are now bear sanctuaries, often housing former mascot bears. A sanctuary in Zărnești in Transylvania has 132 bears from around Europe, including seven from war-torn Ukraine. When the first bears arrived they had no idea what to do with the berries put out for them to eat. “They had been fed on bread or corn for twenty years”, Cristina Lapis of the Libearty Bear Sanctuary explains. They had to learn what to eat again, how to hibernate even. “Freedom is learned”, she says: “we too had to learn freedom after the revolution” (that is, the overthrow of Communism).

At the Pristina Bear Sanctuary in Kosovo, established by an Austrian NGO which has projects all over the world, Afrim Mahmuti tells the story of Stivi, a brown bear thought to have been born in the wild in 2013, then captured (mother presumed killed) and put on display in a restaurant. Living in a small cage with another bear, the two got in a fight, from resulted in Stivi losing his sight. (The bear is named after Stevie Wonder).

These days Stivi is described as a “really happy bear”. He loves watermelon.

The full original article in Romanian here. The associated film (and website) is here.

Unlike other articles Translator has summarised for our Dispatches, this article, though published in Romanian, is itself partially the product of translation itself. Bucharest-based British journalist Michael Bird is the author; Laura Sesovici is credited as translator. The article was written as part of a cross-border investigative journalism project.

Bears Uncovered. Tot ce-ai vrut să știi despre urși (și n-ai avut pe cine să întrebi), Scena9, 13 May 2024.

Scena 9 is a Romanian publication, mostly focussed on culture.

That’s all for now—keep an eye out for our next dispatch of translated summaries this time next week!

The Translator team