Editorial Online

Let’s prepare for them NOW. Against the backdrop of the Australian and Brazilian disasters, we must ensure NOW that such an Apocalypse Now in the coming summer months in Portugal cannot catch us unprepared, that we are avoiding such a disaster. Because mega-fire knows no bounds, winds blow them everywhere and destroy everything. Everyone of us can do something to preserve our land and that of our neighbours and protect Portugal. We extinguish fires with water. Years of drought are caused by slow, insidious climatic changes, which we all share the responsibility for through our so-called modern lifestyle. On the …

It was exactly five weeks. The self-experiment lasted from Sunday, December 1, 2019, to Saturday, January 4, 2020, during which time two people tried to leave no rubbish for posterity. To put it bluntly: they failed. I have failed, for now. Two people have left their footprints here and there, reducing them enormously, but, as I said, not to ZERO. We did not buy shampoo and liquid soap, we made it ourselves or washed it with hair soap. We did the same with our laundry. We have been using ivy leaves growing on our walls in Monchique for months. I …

The other day, the butcher asked us in astonishment if we vegetarians would ever eat meat again. I answered his question with a counter question: who is man’s best friend? The dog, he said. No – the cat, my wife answered. No – the dog, I replied. Either way, we avoid quarrelling, accepting our different opinions and taking each other as we are. In any case, we no longer buy dog and cat food in cans or plastic packaging. We agree on that. This reduces our garbage at least by a quarter. So what do we do instead? The poor …

I heard that sentence almost 40 years ago at the very beginning of my journalistic life. My editor-in-chief sent me to a big city where a woman who wasn’t willing to pay for the municipal services to empty weekly the garbage can. In Germany at that time, the citizens of a city had to buy stamps for their garbage cans from the respective city administration, so that their garbage cans were emptied once a week. And so it should be with this woman: she claimed not to produce any garbage at all and refused to buy the fee stamp. She …

Who does the planet belong to? Does it belong to the hundreds of tourists who last week terrorised the region where I live with their all-terrain motorbikes? I am deeply upset when I picture the natural treasures of this planet and its diversity and then see what came about at the end of the day. Are we, the humans, the owners of this planet and can we do whatever we want with it, or are we just a part of this planet and have the responsibility of taking good care of it? During all these years that I have traveled …

This year, Christmas will be coming to Monchique two weeks earlier than usual. For one simple reason. The crowdfunding campaign of the association Monchique Alerta – Serra livre de Incêndios (Monchique Alert – Mountains free from Fire), which you can find out all about at https://ppl.pt/monchique-com-futuro, ends at 6 pm on Monday 9 December. The presents will be delivered straight afterwards. After last year’s catastrophic forest fires, ECO123 decided to support the association in its crowdfunding campaign. For each donation of ten euros (10€) invested in the building of four large cisterns to improve the conditions for fighting fires in Monchique, ECO123 …