The Future is Present by Yiannis Makridakis

Every morning I open my eyes and the first thing I feel is an indeterminate sadness. In a few seconds as it passes from sleep to life, the mind begins to work and "scan" my being to identify the cause of sorrow. I get up from the bed with a heart as black as Chios.

I do not know when it will get over all this. I'm not a commoner who would go to the closed cage of the city and will not see, you forget. I live in nature and have daily contact with her.

The fire still burns. Fifth day. And travels only over the living parts. I cross burning pine forest whenever I decide to go down to the town of Chios. The dense smoke of fate takes us south along the Aegean.

Chios burned. By civilized capitalists who care about green building and green energy. By technocrats and every class of politicians, who chatter about development.

The future of Greece is present on the island. Whoever has the slightest doubt need only wait. The country will be completely destroyed as my island will be. Will build hotel complexes everywhere, settle everywhere with solar mirrors and giant wind turbines. I had long heard tell of it, but could not imagine it would go so far.

Chios annihilated, by "civilized" people who care about the future of the economy alone. The civilized criminals with connections, who on top of their crimes sold us stories about the environment and pretended to care about the future of the planet.

We are told that firefighting operations have already cost four million euros. Soon we will be told it is not good to fight fire since it is not good for the "wind strategy," and so they guard their villages and lands only and let the rest turn to charcoal. Already TV and newspapers spread the message that the mastic trees of Chios have burned, the precious trees that are the source of 80% of exports that strongly affect by the national economy. But about the pine and the real wealth of the island, silence.

We were also told that tomorrow, shamelessly, will come the task force's Pasha Reichenbach, sent by Berlin to prepare a scorched-earth development plan.

We were even told that the Forestry Services will leave the Ministry of Environment and the Ministry of Rural Development to become more "flexible" and to the development and not the stagnation caused by adherence to the protection of forest species. In a few months we will belong to the Ministry of Development, or such measures will be simply abolished as expensive and useless.

This is our homeland, dear readers. The last days have seen this website literally flooded and we are very touched by your mail.

People; strangers who feel the pain of others. Thank you again and I'm writing all this to keep in mind what will happen the next time.

Chios was a paradise that had been spared from the plague of tourism development over the past decades because Chios's people had the resources of the sea, now turned to tourism. This paradise has become a hell with the change of the use of the land; sold out. This is the policy followed in Greece today. We will soon be able to live nowhere but in cages in the cities where we are guarded by cops on every block, where we are slaves for cheap labor. Have no doubt about it. Already half of Greece lives so. There will be no one left able to feel even a moment of freedom.

Personally I live just like the ant. And yet they even bother me. And destroy my place, my habitat -- not for anyone's livelihood, but in order to exploit everything. The "civilized" people, the bourgeois capitalists who care about the environment, about "green growth" for the future of the planet on which they bring up their children" These days I feel like a wild animal whose habitat is being destroyed and whose existence human stupidity threatens, without the hapless understanding of why it is done.

Friends predicted a gloomy future. Nothing can stop the descent of man, and Greece is leading it. Wielding the Olympic flag for the decline of humanity.

In a few days the elite of society will go to the North Aegean Regional Council and vote positively on the environmental impact assessment to be submitted shortly by the multinationals, on turbines off Chios. With the heat of its burning alive, the island will be prey to multinational green growth.