Books

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 26th August 2023. For a good while now, since the major forest fire of 2003 in Monchique, our ECO123 team has been looking at minimizing the risk of forest fires. You see, we live and work in a burnt-down forest near Monchique. In a way, we are also doing the job of a reinsurance company. As we speak, forests are burning in all southern countries of Europe on a daily basis. However, a country that has been particularly hard hit this year is a large country that normally doesn’t feature on the map as a high-risk area, namely the …

Planting trees is the most effective measure against the overheating of the Earth. Maybe in a few years‘ time humanity will come to the realisation that part of our salvation lies in rebelling, i.e planting trees as if our lives depended on it and reanimating landscapes wherever possible… This is the way 48-year old Jochen Schilk puts it in his book Re-Greening the World “50 infectious stories about planting trees”. Rarely have I been sent a book in such an unconventional way. One Friday morning as I opened my letterbox down by the road there it was, wrapped in brown …

Saturday the 15th of October 2022. Today I would like to tell you about a book that is well worth reading, published in both Portuguese and English. This is in fact a publication that remains very topical today. The two authors offer up the 200 most important plants forming part of the natural world of Portugal‘s southwestern coast, so readers can get to know them, and have left this work for all eternity. Comprising 256 pages, this book forms an indispensable part of a sustainable life. It‘s like the salt in the soup and self-published, in the way everything that’s …

55 spontaneous species that cure This is one of those books that are a must-have on the shelves of any plant lover, of anyone with an interest in alternative nutrition. With prefaces by the phytotherapist Anne McIntyre and the biologist and researcher Célia Cabral, Uma mão cheia de plantas – 55 espécies espontâneas que curam (a handful of plants – 55 spontaneous species that cure) is a guide to exploring 55 wild plants with surprising therapeutic properties. With technical information and images by Fernanda Botelho, this work provides the common name, the scientific name, the botanical family, the history, description …

How our family tries to lead a CO2-neutral life A family of four sits at the table having dinner. As they do, the two adults talk to the children about a somewhat boring topic: climate change. Their 13-year-old daughter had come home from school, had sat down at the computer and played with the WWF’s footprint calculator. She wanted to work out her family’s ecological footprint. The result for this four-person household: 42 tonnes of CO2 per year. The evening’s discussion gradually develops into a family project. Each of them wants to actively save on CO2 emissions in order to …