John Dennis Liu was born in Tennessee in 1953, and raised in Bloomington, Indiana, but for over thirty years he has lived in China, where he is an intuitive educator. He also works as a documentary maker, researcher and ecologist, who has happened upon a solution to rehabilitate large-scale ecosystems. His insight began in around 1995 in China when researching the greening of the Loess plateau. He later made a film, “Hope in a changing climate,” which documents some of the transformation of a barren land into a green and fertile one. He has explored land restoration in Jordan and South …

When I was still a child, at the age of eight, I learnt in geography that there were still under three billion people living on the planet. The amount of life concealed by this number meant nothing to me. Now I’m 50 years older and, in that time, the world’s population is supposed to have almost trebled. Is that right? Do you understand what I have written there, and am myself trying to understand? There are now seven and a half billion people living on our beautiful blue planet EARTH. And the number isn’t falling. I have another look at …

For 17 years, David Littlewood has been walking the back roads of the Algarve. Sometimes alone and other times with the Algarve Wednesday Walkers (AWW). ECO123 met him in São Brás de Alportel under a smoky sky and asked him whether it is a meditative process that motivates him to walk. His reply was grounded in the nature of the man, “No, it is just one foot in front of the other, and if I am with a group, there is a lot of chatter.” He explained, when he started walking in the Algarve, there was only one main guide …

Sensory herb walks add a focus to walking in the Algarve this autumn. Two field trips have been arranged to enhance awareness of flowers and herbs on clifftop paths but also in the cooler springwater-fed Mountains of Monchique. Maureen Robertson and her partner, José Melo, are offering locals and visitors the opportunity to slow down, look, touch and breathe in native plants and herbs as part of a process of conscious walking. Maureen Robertson is a Goethe-inspired Medical Herbalist, co-founder of The Scottish School of Herbal Medicine, and José Melo is a Shamanic Practitioner. They have created a course and …

You covered some 3,500 kilometres between Lisbon and Athens. How did you travel? We left Lisbon with a rucksack on our backs. We walked and hitch-hiked. What route did you follow? We caught a ferry from Lisbon to Almada. From there, we started walking in the direction of Évora, and we also hitched lifts. After this came Madrid, and then we changed route and headed for San Sebastian. How many days did it take you altogether to reach Greece? We set off on 9th July and our goal was to reach Athens by 15th August. This was the date we’d …