News

Saturday 18th january 2025. The pictures and films we are currently seeing from California are disturbing. At this very same moment in time, we are installing the tenth high-power sprinkler in our own forest, while we receive the news that the forest and mountains near Los Angeles are ablaze and the winds are mutating into storms and fuelling the fires that are now destroying entire communities. This distinctly reminds us of what happened in the Monchique mountains during the week of 3-10 August 2018, when, according to police reports, a high-voltage E-Redes power line was repeatedly touching against a eucalyptus …

Saturday 11th January 2025. A Happy New Year to all our readers in 2025! As guardians (or rather graveyard keepers) of the language, neither the German nor the Portuguese publishing houses could bring themselves to give the Italian writer, doctor, painter and politician Carlo Levi, born in Turin in 1902, a permanent place in their literary programmes. The fear of the political disease of fascism was, and still is, very real, and not only in Munich. “Do we want to seize the opportunity now?” an editor at C.H. Beck in the Bavarian metropolis must have asked himself, “before the fascists …

Saturday 14th December 2024. According to the Copernicus Climate Change Service, the EU’s Earth Observation Programme, this current year is set to be the warmest since records began. I couldn’t look away, for I have always kept a close eye on things, so that I also treat trees if I have to and am allowed to. When the bark beetle invaded my pine trees (pinheiro bravo) and this type of insect threatened to destroy my beautiful mixed forest, I spent a few days looking for ways to outwit the bark beetle so that it wouldn’t eat my hundred-year-old pine trees …

Saturday 3rd August 2024. I imagine a friend of mine is celebrating his birthday and invites his 20 best friends to his birthday party. He prepares a cold buffet and provides enough food and drink for 20 people: a few crates of beer, some bottles of good wine and, of course, non-alcoholic drinks. His birthday gradually draws nearer, and, on the evening of the party, he suddenly finds there are lots of people at his door: instead of his 20 friends, 500 people have turned up. He is overwhelmed. In a very short time, all the drinks are finished, and …

Saturday, the 13th of July 2024. It’s obvious that the Algarve and its inhabitants are faced with a serious problem. Until now, everyone had assumed that the supply of water available on our planet was unlimited. Now, however, this misconception that all resources are unlimited for all sectors of the economy is being shattered. So, the solution that is being proposed is to desalinise sea water. Aren’t there any other solutions? A desalination plant must be regarded as a last resort. The Algarve is going through difficult times. The legal battle being waged by more than 20 environmental and professional …

Saturday 22 June 2024. Continuation of last week’s interview: Eco123: There are still people who don’t care about their ecological footprint. LR: People who really don’t care at all… Eco123: They’re going to eat meat seven days a week, drive diesel cars, fly to Brazil on holiday… and they don’t want to plant trees. What do you do with the opponents who reject your climate plan? LR: Our investment in young people is very important. And there are many thousands of them who are impacted year after year by our work at the Environmental Education Centre and in schools. We …

Saturday 16th March 2024. The people’s sovereign voice has spoken. That’s the way it is in a democracy: the Socialist Party took a bit of a beating and emerged with a couple of black eyes. But the AD alliance of conservative parties didn’t win anything either. The democratic parties lost in these elections. Those who haven’t realised this yet will certainly find out soon enough. Sometimes a disease takes a while to spread; sometimes the patient dies slowly and agonisingly. Once it’s over, everyone says, “if only he had lived honestly, admitted the truth and refused the money; if the …

Saturday 7th October 2023. The world is heading for a turning point – slowly, in slow-motion nearly. Every year things are becoming a bit hotter, every year there is a little less rain. Then there’s rain once more, all of a sudden, all at once and in huge quantities. Fertile soil, so important for agriculture, is flushed away. What remains is debris, stones, rocks, waste. In between the rare periods of rain, the industrial forests made up of eucalyptus and other species are burning, igniting in the process native forests, houses, cars, and so on, with some of the forest …

Saturday 30th September 2023. In the year 2020, every Portuguese citizen produced on average some 40 kg of plastic packaging waste. Across the EU, this places Portugal at the top of this particular ranking. If you look at an infographics published by Statista, only Ireland produces more waste per inhabitant (62 kg), followed by Hungary (47 kg), Germany (40 kg) and Estonia (40 kg), at a par with Portugal. According to the Eurostat data, Greece, Cyprus and Croatia produce the least plastic waste. On a global scale, dealing with waste is one of the most important environmental issues – and …

Saturday 23rd September 2023. For the first time, an international research team has quantified all nine planetary stress limits, which, taken together, define humanity’s safe margin of manoeuvre. In doing so, the scientists are providing a detailed overview of the dwindling resilience of our planet. Global warming, biosphere, deforestation, pollutants such as plastics, nitrogen cycles and freshwater: six out of the nine planetary limits have already been exceeded as we speak. At the same time, the pressure exerted by global processes is mounting. This is shown by a new study published in the journal Science Advances by scientists working with …