55. Climate Change and Pollution

No this is not a photo of a bush fire in Australia.
Just a glorious red sky one recent winter evening from my back garden.

Some time ago, I hoped that, with a bit of luck, the much-vaunted climate change might somehow benefit us on the Island. No such luck! Since then the factors I described have become a bit more extreme here: we’ve had very little rain for a very long time, almost a year in fact, and the thermometer and hygrometer have gone crazy. Like most other places, according to the news. What hasn’t changed is our freedom from pollution.

In this we are indeed fortunate. We have no polluting industry. In 2019 just over 50% of our electricity was generated by five windmills. Our three towns are little more than large villages, in which, even if most families own more than one vehicle, you would have to put your nose to the exhaust pipe of a car in order to smell traffic fumes. The burnt-out bulldozers and other heavy machinery that used to rot beside roads and civil engineering sites seem to have disappeared. Spent fridges, fused and outdated electronics, paper, plastic and glass are collected and separated at collection points. The sea around us is surprisingly clean, presumably because the Cold Canary Current does not hug the European coast. The only pollution I can think of is the use of phytosanitary products in the intensive production of bananas and pineapples around Frontera. Even this has been reduced drastically in the last few years and to notice it you would have to live in a greenhouse.

Like most modern European societies, we export our carbon footprint. Most things we consume, including the very unecological batteries of our electric cars, are produced elsewhere. So is the fuel for our diesel and petrol vehicles. And until we are fortunate enough to have a wind-propelled transport system to the island, we continue to use planes and ferries to get here.

So, despite the very real climate change, which on the island we can do very little to mitigate, El Hierro is still an exceptionally good, healthy and eco-friendly place to visit or to live in.

3. First Impressions 2015

Today there is no longer the sensation of adventure in travelling to the island, no feeling that you are going somewhere different, far away. Communications by plane and ferry are rapid and “twenty-first-century” comfortable. Once on the island there are real roads, not the dusty old tracks of fifty years ago, and even tunnels through the mountains. And, of course, we have all the services a modern society expects: electricity, municipal water, a modern hospital, maritime cable and satellite telecommunications connections with the rest of the world ... When you come out of the airport you’ll see one of those monolithic advertisements informing us this is the first “wifi free” island in the world. Ignore it! What it means is that there is a free wifi service at different points on the island. Of course, it doesn’t usually work! So perhaps after all “wifi free” is more correct than “free wifi”.

Fortunately, not much else has changed, really. The villages are much the same, a bit tidier and cleaner. One or two on the coast near the port and airport have grown considerably and become dormitories for people working in Valverde. The forests, recently hit by several fires, are better attended. What always strikes me, and I suppose many other people, when I return from somewhere else is the air. It is simply clean. You feel it in your lungs, especially as you go higher into the mountains. It also affects your vision: you can see things more clearly and further away. Another curiosity is that things don’t smell. You have to stick your nose right into a flower to smell it; on the plateau in the centre of the island you cannot smell the fields of grass and hay and you can only rarely smell the pines in the forest. Perhaps our air, constantly on the move, does not have time to absorb odours.

People talk of the climate change. Our weather hasn’t changed much though, I don’t think. You may still freeze in August at Jinama or have Christmas dinner in the garden in Frontera or even in El Pinar. Don't think that because it's a sunny day in Valverde, it will be sunny in Frontera, too. Or that you know all about it because you've been to the Canaries before. El Hierro will not let you do that. El Hierro must be approached without assumptions. El Hierro dictates the rules.

El Golfo, looking northeast. Jinama is above the cloud at top right.