Portugal

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 5th October 2024. Jane Goodall, a British scientist and environmental activist, asked the German doctor and scientific journalist Eckart von Hirschhausen: “If we as humans claim to be the smartest species on the planet, why are we destroying our own home?” This question can be found in the new bestseller ‘Unlearn CO2 – Time for a climate without crisis’, edited by Klaudia Kemfert, Julian Gupta and Manuel Kronenberg. The book, in which 14 authors from very different walks of public life guide readers towards a climate-friendly future in 14 different essays, is very special. And because the question posed …

Saturday the 21st september 2024. Thinking about our individual carbon footprint can be an important part of the solution to the environmental threats that we face. Of course, we also need to talk about the big climate criminals and find a transnational exit strategy for them: for BP, Shell and Exxon, for Gazprom, Aramco, China-Coal and Rio Tinto, and for the other 93 multinationals that do their business and make their money with fossil fuels and the extraction of minerals at the expense of humankind, at the expense of the habitability of our blue planet. These 100 multinationals emit 80% …

Saturday 10th August 2024. In the southernmost mountains of Portugal, the groundwater is beginning to run out. Monchique’s springs and streams have already dried up. The situation has never before been as drastic as it is this summer. At the end of July, ECO123 contacted the Institute for Nature Conservation and Forests (ICNF) in Lisbon and asked to be informed about the emergency measures that the authority has in place for dealing with this situation. Since the forest fires of 2018, there has been an explosive growth in the spread of invasive trees, with acacias and mimosas now engulfing an …

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 27th July 2024. A pocketknife can be a friendly companion in the forest of Monchique. Monchique is a village in the mountain range of the same name in south-west Portugal, at the beginning or end of Europe – it all depends on which way you look at it. Portugal, and the Monchique Mountains in particular, are known for their cork-oak and chestnut forests. Generally speaking, that was still the case only a generation or so ago, in 1990. Then along came the paper industry and the private owners of these forests began to cut down their forests and plant …

Saturday 20th July 2024. Do you have to love nature to be able to protect it? Or is it enough simply to calculate the value of a forest in economic terms? The attitude that people have towards the forest, towards invasive tree species and the risk of forest fires arising from the large-scale cultivation of eucalyptus, explains the ethical rationale behind the creation of the institution responsible for nature conservation in Portugal: the Institute for Nature Conservation and Forests (Instituto da Conservação da Natureza e das Florestas – ICNF). Only two percent of the forested land in Portugal belongs to …