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Short Stories

Good News!

Saturday, 21st december 2024. This story brings the year 2024 to an end and welcomes in the New Year of 2025, a year that begins with the hope that things will get better, in every respect. Because improving the protection we give to Nature also helps to protect our fauna and flora and, ultimately, the conservation of our climate and our surrounding nature will benefit people themselves, both in terms of health and financially. It is against this background that I tell you this story… Not so long ago, a good-looking young lady was waiting for me in a huge …

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Once upon a time, I saw a tree crying…

Saturday 14th December 2024. According to the Copernicus Climate Change Service, the EU’s Earth Observation Programme, this current year is set to be the warmest since records began. I couldn’t look away, for I have always kept a close eye on things, so that I also treat trees if I have to and am allowed to. When the bark beetle invaded my pine trees (pinheiro bravo) and this type of insect threatened to destroy my beautiful mixed forest, I spent a few days looking for ways to outwit the bark beetle so that it wouldn’t eat my hundred-year-old pine trees …

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You do not “transplant” an old tree.

Saturday, 7th december 2024. There are people and there are people: some help; others put obstacles in the way. Such as high-voltage power lines. A few days ago, an employee from e-redes, the former EDP electricity supply company, came to visit us in Caldas de Monchique, and she had brought a photo of an umbrella pine in her briefcase. It was the 120-year-old umbrella pine from our botanical garden, which has survived all the forest fires so far, including the last one in 2018. I had stood next to it with a garden hose and extinguished the fire all around …

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What future does a mountain village have?

Saturday 23rd November 2024. Jeremy Walton is 47 years old and a qualified computer technician. He went to school in Monchique and Portimão and studied in Faro. Jeremy has lived in Monchique for 42 years and has a very special hobby. He gardens and has a thing for trees and plants. Is this because he has developed an understanding of nature? ECO123 interviewed him while he was working in the botanical garden and wanted to find out what motivates him… ECO123: Jeremy, you have lived in Monchique for a long time, since you were a child. You haven’t become a …

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How do we cure our relationship with Nature? Part two

Saturday 16th November 2024. Answer: Firstly, by no longer taking part in ineffective UN climate conferences, such as the one currently taking place in Baku, Azerbaijan (COP 29). On the one hand, we should stop flying*, and, on the other hand, we should systematically plant new, young trees in sensible places. Biologist Sonia Soares from Algoz practised this last Friday: with children from the Silves South school group in Algoz, at the EB 2/3 school. On the one hand, she is reducing the carbon footprint and burning less paraffin and, on the other hand, converting the CO2 already in the …

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How do we heal our relationship with Nature?
A trilogy by Theobald Tiger

A trilogy by Theobald Tiger

Saturday 9th November 2024. We recently had a very special kind of visitor. One Sunday morning, at ECO123’s botanical forest garden in Caldas de Monchique, we were visited (without being asked) by hunters with their dogs. Then the shooting started. I shouted loud and clear that they should please be considerate and stop their shooting immediately, and I was lucky. They left our magazine’s private property, although they were not happy about it, because they wanted to shoot partridges and hares and take them away with them. That set me thinking. Since then, I’ve been wondering whether these hunters learned …

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Organic food is healthy, but is it tasty?

Saturday 2nd November 2024. On Saturday 19 October, ECO123 was invited to take part in an event for journalists, organised by Agrobio (1), under the scope of a European programme, with its main aim being to provide a lunch made from organic foodstuffs for us to sample and appreciate. In addition, we visited a street market selling organic products and an organic supermarket. This is an increasingly important subject in Portugal, considering that, at this moment in time, 27.7% of farmland in Portugal is already given over to organic production. 70% of this land is used for grazing, and therefore …

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Two thirds of the Earth for nature conservation?

Saturday 26th October 2024. Right now, as you start reading this story, a few people are meeting in Cali, a city 500 kilometres west of Bogota in Colombia, for a conference that seeks to turn the unbelievable into reality: turning two thirds of the Earth into a nature reserve. Really? How do you do something like that? I would be very happy if we here in Portugal could protect the district of Monchique and its 400 square kilometres, in all its natural diversity. I take a pair of binoculars and look at the forest as an example of biodiversity…. Quite …

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The journey

Saturday 19th October 2024. Every botanical garden has something magical about it. Whenever I visit a botanical garden, I imagine that I am immersed in a magic world of trees, plants and little hidden animals. Furnas, on the island of São Miguel in the Azores, enchanted me from the very beginning. By chance, I had my swimming trunks and a towel with me and came across a huge round swimming pool with warm water from volcanic geysers in the middle of the forest. The water wasn’t clear and clean; no, it was brown, like the earth, and smelled a little …

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After us, the flood?
The journey.

After us, the flood?
The journey.

Saturday, 12th october 2024. Part one. The European Space Agency’s (ESA) first planetary defence spacecraft left Earth (Florida) earlier this week on a Falcon 9 rocket (from Elon Musk, Space X) and took off into space, just in time – before Hurricane Milton completely destroyed the area. The fact is that once a rocket has been launched and disappeared into orbit, the whole enterprise can be described as “successful”. What remains of us down here is then just a scrap of history. The main thing is that the spaceship flies first. The Hera mission is therefore on its way to …

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