Life

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 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, 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 23rd March 2024. Market gardening – the worldwide trend of small-scale farming based on the use of organic and regenerative farming techniques has arrived in the Algarve. More and more farms are offering their produce at farmers’ markets from Lagos to Tavira; some even deliver a weekly vegetable box to your doorstep. If you haven’t come across the term “market gardening” yet, in a nutshell, it’s all about small-scale intensive farms and smallholdings that grow a diversity of vegetable and fruit crops and sell their produce directly to consumers through local farmers’ markets and on-farm stalls, or local grocery …

Saturday 3rd February 2024. The small publishing house “Haupt”, based in Bern, Switzerland, has published an interesting and important book. Telling the story of the spice trade over 5,000 years, it was written by Norwegian journalist Thomas Reinertsen Berg and translated from Norwegian into German. Why isn’t this book also available in Portuguese and English translations? And why does a Norwegian have to write a book about the history of spices when Portugal played such an important role in their trade, alongside the Netherlands, England, China, India, Vietnam, Indonesia and Sri Lanka? Wouldn’t this also have been a suitable topic …

Saturday 27th January 2024. Now, here for once we have not just talk – things are actually delivered. Last Monday, the new museum of Vila do Bispo was inaugurated by Mayor Rute Silva in the presence of the president of the Algarvian CCDR (Coordination and Development Commission) José Apolinário. The new Museum Vila do Bispo is called O Celeiro da História – The Barn of History – and is the result of the restoration of the former Celeiros de Vila do Bispo – EPAC. The formerly dilapidated building has been transformed into a public cultural centre. A public centre of …

Saturday, the 18th of November 2023. Fancy an ocean with a mountain view in the south of Portugal in early December, in the Monchique mountains, with the Atlantic stretching out at your feet? Starting Friday 1 December (public holiday) and Saturday 2 December through Sunday 3 December, the Monchique mountains are hosting their annual hiking festival. The town hall of this small mountain village is putting on over a dozen different hikes, well worth your while taking the train and bus to make an extended weekend out of it. Getting off the train at Portimão station, you take Line 94 …

Saturday 11th November 2023. Nearly everything has been said about the possible mining of lithium in northern Portugal. As far back as in autumn 2019, four years ago now, ECO123 was already taking an in-depth look at this issue. This is something you might want to read up on again? Clicking on https://eco123.info/portugal/entrevistas/o-legado-que-vou-deixar-aos-meus-filhos-e-o-que-a-mina-la-deixar/ will take you to our extensive ECO 123 archive. That’s when you’ll understand why Portugal’s Prime Minister has now stepped down, and why active and passive corruption rears its ugly head again and again with issues shaping our future, clean energy, the ability to live in a …

Saturday 14th October 2023. Peace – and maintaining peace – requires active seeds. Those who oppress a people for decades, taking away the soil to live on, stealing the resources necessary for survival, even cutting off its water supply, mustn’t be surprised if and when the moment arrives where things come to a head. Investing in hate and violence turns into a twisted spiral. At some point a threshold is crossed where patience or hope for better times cease to exist. Active seeds growing hate are when one human being takes away the chance of development from another person, and …