Report

It’s not every day that you meet the Minister, if you don’t live in the capital yourself, and even if you do, the Minister himself doesn’t spend every day in the capital. He often travels around the country, sometimes even abroad. Around midday he was expected at a lunch with the businesspeople of the Portuguese and Foreign Chambers of Industry and Commerce. You paid fifty euros for admission, plus VAT, and then were happy to wait for the Minister. Sometimes you wait your whole life for something, often you don’t know why, almost always without an obvious reason. Waiting is …

Everything began in 2011 with a guerrilla gardening campaign, Luís Bello Moraes (41), founder of Portalegre in Transition, told ECO123 on the patio of the FICAR cultural centre. They sowed thousands of sunflower seeds in all of the public gardens and parks of the city. And just as soon as they began to get growing, the mentors behind the initiatives met up with residents and invited them to plant vegetables in between the plants. In a shopping centre, the Transition group has its “Den” that serves as the surroundings for both tranquillity and relaxation and where they discuss and decide …

Annelieke van der Swijs (48), Sara Carvalho (40) and Sandra Rocha (26) work alongside over 30 other members of the Coimbra Transition group. They deal both with social needs and the ecological and economic problems existing in this city of 145,000 inhabitants and temporary home to over 30,000 students. Everything started in 2009 with the organic garden in the Coimbra Botanical Garden and the “Little Botanical Market” providing spices and aromatic herbs. In 2013, the association was founded to a large extent because the Municipal Council and other local entities were only willing to take the Transition group seriously when …

Fishing from the land. Six o’clock in the morning. We parked at the isolated spot where the team were starting to arrive, in the area of Meia-Praia in Lagos. We crossed the railway line and the dunes, heading resolutely towards the boat – known locally as a ‘calão’ – whose location we could guess, but which we couldn’t see. Once again, we were going to watch people fishing using the ancient ‘xávega’ net, similar to a beach seine. Just an outboard motor and lighter nets gave the process a modern touch. At six thirty and with the first light of …

Solar Impulse, the solar-powered round-the-world flight. Flying was always one of humankind’s dreams, in order to be able to observe the world where we live like a bird. But the beginnings were difficult, when the Wright brothers took to the air in their first gliders and later motor-powered aeroplanes at the start of the 20th century. Building on that, in the last 100 years, air travel has become one of the biggest commercial sectors with the highest CO2 emissions. Today, we are possibly witnessing a new revolution in air travel – without CO2. SolarImpulse 1 SolarImpulse is a Swiss company …

… but all over the world, more and more people are asking themselves how humans could live their lives more sustainably. Ana Nunes and Carlos Abafa from Monchique are two of them. “Economy and ecology follow separate paths – it cannot continue like that in the future,” they say. Their question is based on a critique of the concept of the industrialised, throw-away society we currently live in, of life in a one-way street with endlessly growing mountains of rubbish, unrestricted exploitation of our planet’s natural resources, industrial intensive livestock farming, the monocultures of eucalyptus forests and dependence on fossil …

The group ‘Braga in Transition’ first appeared in 2011, drawing on the artistic movement known by the name of ‘Projéctil’. According to Hélder Faria, one of its members, this occurred naturally because “it is always in an artistic context that awareness is raised.” “Our day-to-day work is a process of gradual change, we change habits slowly. We don’t detach ourselves radically from the system, and we’re attentive to what’s around us.” They believe that they must approach daily tasks in a positive frame of mind. “We can’t let ourselves become dispirited owing to the difficulties that all of us face …

“This all began with a party”, recall Gonçalo Pais (38) and Fernando de Oliveira (45). Both live in the Lisbon dormitory town of Linda-A-Velha that packs almost 20,000 inhabitants into 2.32 km2. In the morning, the majority of adults head off to work, dropping their children off at schools along the way. And at night, they return to their respective slots in their tall blocks of flats. Since the opening of the largest supermarket in Pingo Doce’s chain in Portugal, the local weekly market with its direct trade in fresh vegetables and fish has died a death. The Transition initiative …

For a long time, people have been warning about the exhaustion of large-scale industrial production – threatened by factors of a natural, social and environmental nature. The worst-case scenarios will force the vast majority of people to radically alter their lifestyles. Oil-based products, and their highly polluting derivatives, are to be found everywhere in the daily lives of people in the big cities. If there is a break in supplies, it will occur suddenly. It was with this in mind that the group “Famalicão in Transition” was formed in 2011, says Manuela Araújo, the main driving force behind a group …

It is nine years since the university lecturer Rob Hopkins(1) started a movement of change, in the small Irish town of Kinsale. The movement has been expanding ever since and today it is established or being established in several hundred cities. Monchique was the first place in the Algarve to join and create a small group to spearhead the project in December 2011. The project functions on the basis of trust, which means small localised groups, and 250 members at most. ECO123 spoke to one of the activists, Lesley Martin, who told us that she prefers to progress step by …