Portugal

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 …

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, 15th june 2024. Portugal has 308 municipalities. One of them is the medium-sized city of Torres Vedras, located 54 kilometres to the north-west of Lisbon and covering an area of 407 km². This inland municipality has 83,072 inhabitants (Census 2021) and spreads over 13 parishes. The municipal council is led by the Socialist Party and its mayor is Laura Maria Jesus Rodrigues (63). At the beginning of the year, the municipality’s Climate Action Plan was presented to the public at a well-attended meeting in the auditorium of the Environmental Education Centre. The local inhabitants were then given the opportunity …

Saturday 4th May 2024. The way he writes is not as dry as I initially thought. Rather, it is characterised by a highly active scientific competence, coupled with a writer’s finely tuned sense of humour in its practical application. The author does not remain locked away in an ivory tower of theory. As well as providing us with reliable findings, he also takes a look forward at science fiction and a studied glance back into the Earth’s history. The book is interesting and weighs 575 grams. I weighed it on my kitchen scales. It is 21 cm long and 16 …

Saturday 13th April 2024.   Prologue: We had been vaccinated, twice in fact. When we all came down with Covid-19 at the same time, I had the growing sensation that something had gone very wrong. Either it was the vaccine from the small hospital in Monchique that gave me the shot, or we’d caught it at the EB23 Manuel de Nascimento school in Monchique, where the BRIDGE club met. The auditorium had probably not been disinfected and there we were, trapped: two dozen decision-makers from various associations, companies and institutions, as well as politicians. That was in mid-May 2022 and …