AMY GOODMAN: In France and Spain, devastating wildfires have forced more then 350,000 people to evacuate their homes. It’s among the largest peacetime evacuations in France since World War II. At least 4,600 emergency personnel have been deployed to the southwest of France, where the fires began Wednesday before spreading to Spain. Earlier this summer, Western Europe experienced its hottest June on record. Meanwhile, conditions are expected to worsen later this week as another heat wave could surge temperatures to 40 degrees Celsius — that’s 104 degrees Fahrenheit — or more.

Speaking Sunday, Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez warned of complicated hours ahead as Spain battles to control the blazes.

PRIME MINISTER PEDRO SÁNCHEZ: [translated] I think the scale of the disaster we are experiencing, unfortunately, once again in our country, is very difficult to comprehend. Yesterday, we reported that 130,000 hectares had been affected and burned so far this year. Today, less than 24 hours later, that figure has already risen to more than 150,000 hectares.

AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined by two guests. Joining us from Spain, professor Angel Luis Lara, sociologist and associate professor of Ibero-American cultural studies at SUNY Old Westbury. He and his family have just evacuated from a municipality west of Madrid. He will join us from the province of Toledo in the Castilla-La Mancha region. And joining us from Vancouver is John Vaillant, award-winning journalist, author of several books, including, most recently, Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Let’s begin with professor Ángel Luis Lara. Can you describe the scene on the ground? I mean, in France, I think this is the biggest evacuation since World War II, the fires spreading to Spain. What it meant to be uprooted from your home, the devastation of communities as they burn to the ground, Professor Angel Luis Lara?

ÁNGEL LUIS LARA: Hello, Amy. And thank you for having me.

Yeah, my family and I were evacuated three days ago from Chapinería, which is a small town in the west area of the region of Madrid, 30 miles out from the city. And the fire was just getting way too close to our village, and the air quality was starting to get really dangerous for our health, so the local authorities decided to evacuate all the people there. However, we consider ourselves incredibly lucky — right? — because even though the flames made it right into our street and the house right across from ours was burned to the ground, our place took just some minor damage. So, we are lucky.

Just to give you an idea of how severe the situation is, you’ve got to consider that around 30,000 of us have been directly evacuated across the region of Madrid, and 20,000 more have been placed under lockdown orders because of these out-of-control fires. If you include, you know, neighboring regions impacted by the same series of blazes, like Ávila, the region of Ávila, for example, the number of evacuations exceeds 60,000 people, with overall affected residents reaching over 95,000 people.

And some of these people have lost absolutely everything — their homes, their animals. So many families are sleeping in sports centers or emergency tents right now. And for the folks who make a living off the land, you know, especially for them, losing their crops and livestock is just devastating. So, I would say that as crazy as these past few days have been for my family, I consider ourselves very lucky, because we are safe.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor, can you talk about the firefighters’ strike in Madrid? They had been warning for years about being underresourced, had been going without a contract for years. And they are in, as are many of the autonomous regions, this one Madrid, a conservative-controlled area where the head of the region talks about, oh, climate change as being propaganda.

ÁNGEL LUIS LARA: Yeah, I’m afraid that it is just not enough to blame the weather for the situation regarding the wildfires we are dealing with in Spain and also, I would say, in southern Europe now. I think we have to dig deeper, because we are dealing with a deeply political issue, driven by what I consider three main factors.

The first, obviously, is the undeniable reality of climate change, right? The extreme temperatures and severe drought conditions have created a new category of sixth-generation wildfires. And these are not normal fires. They are so intense that they create their own weather systems — right? — and making them virtually impossible to extinguish until the weather recedes.

But there is a second factor related to this strike you told before, which is decades of neoliberal policies that have diminished public services in the region of Madrid especially and in all the regions all around Spain. Spain is a decentralized country made of 17 autonomous regions with significant self-governing powers, and 11 of those regions are run by conservative and far-right parties, pushing aggressively to dismantle public services. So, in fact, as you said before, right when these wildfires broke out, some of Madrid’s wildland firefighters had been on a strike for 40 days straight protesting precarious working conditions and a severe lack of resources.

So, as I said before — and this situation with the firefighters in the region of Madrid shows up — you know, this is not just about weather. This has to do with a political issue which is going on in regions like Madrid — right? — based on these neoliberal policies that are diminishing dramatically public services.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to bring John Vaillant into the conversation, award-winning journalist and author of several books, most recently Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World. Here in New York, we experienced the smoke from the Canadian fire wildfires, and, of course, all over the United States, they did. To say the least, this is an intensification in Spain in fire. Can you talk about what’s causing this fire weather? What does it mean to be, as we are hearing a description, on the frontlines of a burning world? And what can be done about it, John?

JOHN VAILLANT: Yeah. Thanks, Amy.

When that subtitle was conceived, it sounded like hyperbole, “the frontlines of a burning world.” But we’re really seeing that right now. Oregon and Washington state are also burning ferociously right now, in addition to British Columbia and Ontario and southern Europe and North Africa, massive fires everywhere. And we’re seeing this accumulation of decades of intensifying heat, which promotes drought. And so, these conditions have been slowly building and worsening for decades, basically vindicating, unfortunately, the warnings of climate scientists and firefighters, who have been fearing these kind of collaborative events, where, as we’ve heard, large fires are merging together, creating megafires that are then — create conditions that are impossible for humans to respond to meaningfully.

So, what we’re seeing in Spain and France now are flames exceeding a hundred meters, so these are 30-story-tall flames. These are — you can’t respond to these in a meaningful way with water. French pilots are describing water bomber drops of thousands and thousands of gallons that are evaporating in the heat before they even touch the flames. So, we’ve created a kind of chimera of fire that is impossible to respond to in a meaningful way. And really, now the weather and the wind are determining our collective fate in these situations.

AMY GOODMAN: One firefighter speaking to Agence France-Presse, AFP, reported seeing a pyrocumulonimbus, a fire-generated thunderstorm. Now, this is common in Australia and Canada, but can you talk about the significance of this being seen in France? I mean, there’s, it seems like — maybe you knew this word; I sure didn’t — there are new words now.

JOHN VAILLANT: [inaudible] and I had to learn it to write Fire Weather. Pyrocumulonimbus clouds are fire-generated thunderstorms. They can puncture the stratosphere. These fire systems that turn the — they rotate the same way hurricanes do. They can be 45,000 feet tall. They generate their own lightning. They produce black hail. And these lightning strikes can strike 30 or 40 miles away from the center of the fire, starting new fires. So, it becomes, essentially, a self-perpetuation machine of fire that is literally unstoppable.

And in Redding, California, in 2018, one of these systems generated an actual EF3 tornado, 165-mile-an-hour winds that tore houses from their foundations and lifted F-150 pickup trucks and threw them through the air, killing and burning and crushing their occupants. It’s extraordinary, kind of end times-class energy that is being released by these systems now.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you respond to President Trump accusing Canada of poisoning the air in the United States, even threatening to impose new tariffs on Canada over the recent levels of hazardous air? Yet, you know, one of his mantras as he ran for president again, and continues, is “burn, baby, burn” — is “drill, baby, drill,” I should say.

JOHN VAILLANT: Yeah. And “drill, baby, drill” corresponds to “burn, baby, burn.” And the more fuel we burn as human beings, the more fuel wildfires will burn across our landscapes.

You know, Trump is a cynical, self-serving guy with no concept of how natural systems work or even how smoke behaves. Right now the bulk of the smoke sweeping across the northern American states right now is coming from Washington and Oregon. Smoke and pollution and climate change know no boundaries. If anyone is really at fault here, it would be the major emitters of CO2 and methane, and that would be, in North America, the United States.

So, I think if we want to reduce our temperature, if we want to reduce our fire risk, the first thing we have to do is reduce our emissions. And that is something that the U.S. has steadfastly refused to do — its current administration, in any case. And unfortunately, Canada is following suit, actively expanding its fossil fuel operations, proposing new pipelines to the West Coast and into the United States, so thereby digging us deeper and deeper into this CO2 debt and methane debt that is causing these fires.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Professor Ángel Luis Lara, you, yourself, again, have been evacuated. Can you talk about the prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, renewing calls for a climate pact for all the political parties of Spain?

ÁNGEL LUIS LARA: I mean, the current government, the central government of Spain, has been, you know, calling the rest of the political parties for a national agreement regarding, you know, the climate change and the situation we are dealing with related to climate. But there is this permanent refusal of the conservative and the far-right parties to participate in a general and common agreement. So, Spain now is dealing with a real, I would say, deep, you know, tension between the conservative and the far-right parties and the government, and the situation is very complicated.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you both for being with us. Of course, we’ll continue to cover the fire weather. Ángel Luis Lara, sociologist and associate professor of Ibero-American cultural studies at SUNY Old Westbury, just evacuated from his home near Madrid, and John Vaillant, award-winning journalist and author, his latest book, Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World.

Coming up, Massachusetts Democratic Congressmember Jim McGovern of Massachusetts on Iran to Cuba. Stay with us.

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AMY GOODMAN: “Memories of the Alhambra” by Harry Verey.