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As a researcher working on the governance of energy transitions in 2016, I was fascinated by the relatively slow growth of solar energy in Portugal despite the amazing potential. I crafted a research project to explore this with a focus on accountability relations, and successfully competed for a position at the Centre for Climate and Energy Transformation in Norway, where I feel fortunate to explore this and similar issues with some fantastic colleagues. Between 2017 and 2019, I have spent about five months in Portugal, studying the multi-sited and multi-scalar geographies of solar energy uptake, from the capital Lisbon to …

Covas do Barroso, Chaves. Over the past few years, a teacher living in England from Covas do Barroso, Trás-os-Montes, has swapped Portuguese and English books for the Mining Journal, lithium market reports and the minutes of international mining conferences. Catarina Scarrott, a mother of two children aged 2 and 7, fights passionately for the land on which her family has lived for more than ten generations. This is the land to which she would like to return, were it not for the lack of access and services. This is the land that British company Savannah Resources wants to gut in …

High meat consumption causes many CO2 emissions: Why is it urgent to reduce our ecological footprint? What would it be like if human beings didn’t walk on two legs, but on all fours? And what if the meaning of life for the human being was just to be slaughtered by a two-legged pig and turned into sausages? We would be fattened with a cocktail of Brazilian soya-beans and artificial hormones and kept in a confined space, so that, after a year, we would be fat and overfed. Then we would be sent to an abattoir, where we would be anaesthetised …

Reducing meat consumption is a challenge, a positive or a negative thing? The food in Monchique is based on pork… I think it’s more a change in habits. For me, it’s actually more pleasant. It seems that natural things look better … Vegetarian food looks attractive and it tastes better. Do you have your own vegetable garden? Yes, we have a little vegetable garden. And the citrus fruits all come from Lagos. We use them here at Óchálá. And from there we also get all the herbal infusions and plants with which we make the teas. We spend some time …

In reviewing this year, I see that dealing well with fires has nothing to do with heroism or cowardice, but with responsible attitudes. Let’s put our emotions to one side in the discussion about the fires and let’s deal with the subject in a level-headed way. Be careful, don’t play with fire, my grandparents warned me. At the age of five, I had found a box of matches in the kitchen cupboard and started burning leaves in the back garden. Today, two generations have passed and I agree with the advice they gave me. In the countryside, in the forest …

Forests connect the soil to the sky. Trees are not only composed of their visible parts: trunk, branches, flowers and leaves, but they also have a root system that is complex and full of life. After the fires in Monchique, we decided to start a new botanical garden on a plot of 1.5 hectares that we had just purchased and which burned in the fire. Now we challenge the reader. You can participate, passively or actively, in this ECO123 project, choosing to plant a tree, or asking to have one planted in your name, in the new botanical garden. Become …

The photos are clear. Two employees of the municipality of Monchique are spraying herbicides onto public pavements. The two men suspect perhaps that they are doing something they shouldn’t, because otherwise they wouldn’t be wearing white full-body suits, mouth protection or gloves. They are protecting themselves – but who is protecting the people, plants and animals? When I ask them why they’re doing that and if they know what they’re doing, they wave me away angrily. Clear off! they shout. But I stay. Less than 15 minutes later, a mother pushes her pram over just these cobblestones. A cat, a …

Droughts, desertification, heat waves, floods: the consequences of climate change are intensified by a water balance that is out of equilibrium globally. In some parts of the earth, farmers, different initiatives and landowners are meeting this challenge with simple, local measures – and successfully. The principle they follow is always the same: rain should seep into the ground where it falls. Decentralisation instead of centralisation. One successful example of this is Tamera, in the municipality of Odemira in the Alentejo. Every organism needs water. Whether an area has sufficient water or not determines its value for everything that lives there, …

Tamera at the lake There is a community living in Tamera, in the municipality of Odemira in the Alentejo that now totals 200 people. With the assistance of the nature-friendly Austrian farmer Sepp Holzer, they created a model that demonstrates how productive agriculture based purely on rainwater retention is possible in a region that is dry in summer. In March 2007, I was invited to Tamera for a consultation. The question was whether it would be possible to create a model site for the production of healthy food for 300 people in an area of 130 hectares of dry landscape …