# Macron Says France Will Rebuild a Different Kind of Forest, Which Is a Bigger Commitment Than It Sounds > In Bordeaux the president called for unity, warned that the coming weeks would be hard, and made a pledge about replanting that reaches into an industry worth billions. - Source: France 247 - Canonical URL: https://france247.news/article/macron-bordeaux-rebuild-different-forest - Author: Margot Lefevre - Section: Business - Published: 2026-07-28T10:15:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-07-28T10:15:00.000Z - Tags: Wildfires, Forestry, Gironde, Emmanuel Macron --- Emmanuel Macron went to Bordeaux as the fire west of the city was still burning, sat through the situation briefing at the departmental fire and rescue operations centre with the interior minister, and made two statements. One was the expected call for unity and a warning that the weeks ahead would be tough. The other was a promise to rebuild a different kind of forest, and that is the sentence with consequences. The fire has run through tens of thousands of hectares of pine and destroyed hundreds of homes, in one of the largest blazes the country has seen since the Second World War. The forest it is burning is not wilderness. The Landes massif is a cultivated industrial plantation, laid out in the 19th century to drain and fix the sands of a poor coastal region, planted overwhelmingly with maritime pine, and run since as a timber crop. It is the largest forest of its kind in western Europe and it supports sawmills, paper, panel manufacture and thousands of jobs. That is why a monoculture of resinous pine exists in the first place, and also why it burns the way it does. Even-aged stands of a single flammable species, planted in continuous blocks with a shared road network, are close to ideal fuel once the ground is dry enough. Every property that makes the plantation efficient to harvest also makes it efficient to burn. Rebuilding a different forest therefore means arguing with the economics that built this one. A mixed, uneven-aged stand with broadleaf breaks is more fire resistant and slower and less profitable to work. Somebody has to carry the difference, and the forest is overwhelmingly in private hands, held by a large number of owners with modest holdings rather than by the state. A replanting policy that ignores that ownership structure is a press line rather than a plan. There is a further complication in the timing. Insurers, mills and owners all have to make decisions within a season or two, because burnt pine loses value quickly and salvage logging is a race. The pressure will be to replant what was there, quickly, with a species that is known, financed and already in the nurseries. Doing something else requires the subsidy, the seedling supply and the rule change to be ready at the same time as the chainsaws. So the pledge is testable, which is more than most disaster commitments are. Within about two years it will be visible in the ground what proportion of the burnt area went back into maritime pine. That number, rather than the speech in Bordeaux, is the measure of whether a different forest was actually the plan. --- Originally published by France 247. Free to cite with attribution and a link to https://france247.news/article/macron-bordeaux-rebuild-different-forest.