MSNBC

In six hot, windy days of uncontrolled blazes, Greece lost more of its rapidly dwindling forestland than in any single year on record.

The massive fires, several still raging Wednesday, have killed at least 64 people and gutted hundreds of homes in scores of southern villages.

The inferno also destroyed fragile mountain ecosystems — that will require decades to revive — and an entire rural way of life, threatening to turn thousands of villagers into environmental refugees.

The fire department has not announced an overall damage assessment, but independent estimates say around 495,000 acres of forest, olive groves and scrub may have been consumed — the largest amount since official records started in the 1950s.

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Arson has been widely blamed, and 11 people charged with deliberately setting fires. Arson suspects are rarely convicted.

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Haralambidis said the massive fires ravaged fragile ecosystems in the Peloponnese peninsula and caused ecological damage in the mountains, now facing the threat of floods and landslides in inhabited areas.

“Mount Taygetos in the southern Peloponnese, particularly as far as plant life is concerned, is Greece’s diamond where many species grow that do not exist anywhere else in the world,” he said.

“Mount Parnon (to the east) is — or rather was — a paradise, while the Kaiafas forest was one of the last remaining vestiges of a huge forest of stone pines that once covered all of the western Peloponnese.”

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Haralambidis said these forests will take decades to revive naturally, “provided we leave them alone.”

Outside the forests, in low-lying land and plateaus, entire ecosystems — birds, reptiles and small mammals — in burnt fields and olive groves have vanished altogether.

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Greenpeace’s Haralambidis warned that mountain populations could end up as internally displaced “environmental refugees.”

“There will be several thousand people faced with the choice of staying in a burnt land or moving to the cities,” he said.

“And if they are to stay, the conditions must be created to ensure them a decent livelihood. Their main source of income was olive oil production … and new olive saplings need at least 15 years before they can yield a proper crop.”