Portugal

Saturday the 20th may of 2023. Part One. On 5 November Lenz was walking through the hills, all by himself. The summits and high mountain flanks were gleaming in the sun, and the valleys below were covered in green after the rain. Brooks were rushing across the rocks, and the eucalyptus trees were swaying in the wind. Temperatures had gone up a bit again. The clouds in the sky were scurrying from north to south, as if in a hurry. The umbrella pines above him were absorbing the strong winds. The air was humid and the long valleys stretching from …

Getting to know Portugal also means getting to know its culture and its climate, its people and its regional history. Situated in the mountain range of the same name, Monchique lies in the far southwestern corner of Portugal. Caldas de Monchique marks the starting point and the finishing point of our guided Monchique Mountain Hike. On the first day guests make their own way by train to Portimão and on by bus to Caldas de Monchique (VAMUS, Line 94) to get to know the village and the accommodation (Orientation Day). The hiking guide, having lived and worked here for donkey’s …

Saturday, 18th february 2023. Nestle, Unilever, Procter & Gamble. This is the gamut of the top companies polluting our world with plastic. Do you know what actually happens to the plastics that you and I dutifully drop off at the Ecoponto to be recycled? Well, do you? At the moment, the play „Alice in the Wonderland of Waste“ (Alice no País do Lixo), staged by the AORCA troupe in Lagos looks at the issue of waste recycling using drama and dance. Last Tuesday I atched the dress rehearsal, for there can be no review without seeing the actual play performed. Which is why I …

Saturday 14th January 2023. Today’s big news was this: humanity has crossed the threshold of eight billion. So what do the good teachers of Portugal do? What will we remember them for? That’s right, they’re on strike. Once again. This time the issue is their career paths within the state school system. They are striking because they are altruistically thinking of their missed prospects of promotion. Very funny. Just visualise this. Those poor poor teachers. Fair enough, they are not exactly in a good place. Entry-level salaries are meagre, not even reaching 1,000 euros. And this after spending four to …

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 …

From time immemorial, Nature has been providing us with our essentials, including fruit, cereals, fish, meat and wood. Clean air and clean water are other free gifts of Nature. Economists group all these aspects together under the concept of natural capital. Put simply, natural capital is defined as the stock of natural goods and services, such as soil, forest or the sea, which provide fresh air, for example, or drinking water. Yet it is, in fact, problematical to attempt to place a value on the services of nature. If humans want to use the natural resources in a gentle and …

Born in Porto on 10 May 1951, José Francisco de Almeida Pacheco is a teacher, anthropologist and pedagogue. ECO123 had a chat with this resourceful educationalist, who has brought greater democracy to educational management, and asked him what value nature has in education in Portugal. Do you think that nowadays, when UN ambassador Jane Goodall is saying that human beings, the most intelligent creatures on Earth, are destroying their planet, it still makes sense to educate children? This was a question I asked 55 years ago, in 1968, when I was living in a country that was under a dictatorial …

What is wrong and what is right? If only this were always so clear. A decision had to be taken. It’s always easy to be wise after the event. On the morning of 3 August 2018, a group of men assembled at the Lisbon HQ to discuss the day’s business, weighing up the pros and cons. Should they switch off the overland power lines in southern Alentejo and the Algarve, or should they allow them to carry on as normal? This was the kind of day when anything could happen: an ideal day for a misadventure, an ideal day for …

“This is a book about our future.” These are the first words of “Earth4All”, published by the Club of Rome. Its subheading declares it to be a Survival Guide for our planet. Here are some quotes: “We all know that we have to put a stop to the extreme poverty affecting billions of people. We know that we have to resolve the galloping inequality. We know that we need an energy revolution. We know that our industrial diet is damaging our health and that the way we produce our food is destroying nature, triggering a sixth mass extinction of animal …