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Success Stories. Just imagine that you are responsible for equipping a spaceship that is leaving Earth next year and heading for Mars, and will only return in 100 years time. What would you put on board the spaceship and give the crew to take with them so that they and the next generations would be able to travel back to …

A Test by Uwe Heitkamp Waiting for the bus. I count the passing cars; one/one, two/one, three/one, four/one, five/one, six/one, seven/one, eight/one, nine/one, ten/one, eleven/one, twelve/two. That was it, the first car with two people inside. I walk 1.1 km to the nearest bus stop. On the way there, my neighbour asks me why I’m walking? Has your car broken …

According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, in 2013 and similar to each and every year, a third of all food produced around the world ended up being thrown away (1). To Hunter Halder, an American now resident in Portugal for a number of years, that is not a fact but an error he seeks to redress through …

Generally, sharing is an instantaneous act of contact and when not physical then at least virtual. To this end, ‘‘BookCrossing’’ takes on the characteristics of both sharing and of playing. In reality, this is a form of sharing but it does also involve, to a large extent, the factor of surprise with this sensual component simultaneously recalling the universe of …

ECO123, in collaboration with Agrobio, is presenting a list of places where you can purchase and/or consume quality organic products, many of which are produced locally. Look after your health and contribute to your community.

Over half of all foodstuffs produced end up going to waste. The agricultural industry devours great quantities of energy, water, fertilisers and pesticides. Tropical forests get felled to make way whether for pasture lands or soya and palm oil industrial farming. Over a third of greenhouse gases may be traced to the agricultural sector and the global transport of foodstuffs. …

The developments in the food business are absurd. Why do we buy German milk, German butter, German cheese and yoghurt, French carrots and potatoes at foreign discount shops like Lidl, Aldi, Jumbo & Co., and so many other foreign foodstuffs (including drinks) packed in plastic (made from oil), which are transported thousands of kilometres in planes and trucks throughout Europe …

Portugal, throughout all of its extent – rural, urban, inland, coastal – confronts the marks of its recent past. The option favouring property and construction (especially of residential properties) and the tertiary economic sector has left a deep legacy. One of the clearest and most serious involves the effective abandoning and subsequent degradation of a huge quantity of spaces and …

Case 1 From pizzas to slow-travel We wander the streets in which the traditional white of the facades throws back the light and the heat of a January day managing to conjure early spring. We pass a resident and various visiting international tourists, who without exception all greet us with a smile and a “Bom dia” almost as warm as …

Case 2 Funchal’s Old Town 28 years ago work began on restoring part of the 500 years of history of the first residential settlement in Funchal, a city symbolic of Portugal’s Era of Exploration. Throughout the previous decades, the city had expanded westwards, leaving behind to continued degradation part of its history: the Santa Maria neighbourhood. Or as it is …