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Humility for Peace.

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 …

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Micro plastics banned by the EU.

Saturday 30th September 2023. In the year 2020, every Portuguese citizen produced on average some 40 kg of plastic packaging waste. Across the EU, this places Portugal at the top of this particular ranking. If you look at an infographics published by Statista, only Ireland produces more waste per inhabitant (62 kg), followed by Hungary (47 kg), Germany (40 kg) and Estonia (40 kg), at a par with Portugal. According to the Eurostat data, Greece, Cyprus and Croatia produce the least plastic waste. On a global scale, dealing with waste is one of the most important environmental issues – and …

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Is there life before death?

The setting is Nepal. Looking out the window of his childhood home, M gazes across a green valley, with some mixed and conifer forest a little further down. M is from Merangdi, a village with a handful of houses in the Solukhumbu district. In fine weather, stepping out of his parents’ house and looking up towards the north, he can see the highest mountain in the world, Mount Everest, 8,848 metres high, in the sky. The tall summit towering above the valley and Province no. 1 is an imposing sight. M and his three siblings, two older brothers and a …

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I have a dream

I have a dream

The Salt March of 1930… was a campaign by Mahatma Gandhi that was intended to break the British monopoly on salt and, in the end, led to India’s independence from Britain. The Salt March was the most spectacular campaign launched by Gandhi during his fight for independence. The campaign aimed to inspire civil disobedience and to stand up against the dependence on too high taxes imposed by Great Britain. On 12th March 1930, Gandhi set off from his home town with 78 of his supporters, on a march that continued for 385 kilometres to Dandi on the Arabian Sea. He …

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Unsung Heroes

If the entire population of Lisbon was wiped out within nine years, how would we react? We are all aware of the war in Syria, which has been tearing the country apart since 2010, causing the death of an estimated 500,000 people and forcing millions of others to flee their homes and become refugees. In this age of mass social media, we can sometimes become desensitised to the suffering of nameless citizens who live in faraway countries, but at Aljezur International School the students, teachers and parents have a special interest in the news from Syria.  Since 2015, they have …

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Eco-villages worldwide

Local solutions for global problems Around 10,000 village and community projects worldwide have come together in the Global Ecovillage Network. They are village communities, urban areas or deliberately created living communities that jointly opt for a path of sustainability. They focus on five areas: ecology, the social aspect, culture, the economy and education. We present four projects in the second part. Findhorn \ Scotland The Findhorn Foundation in Scotland is one of the oldest existing eco-villages. On 17th November 1962, Eileen Caddy, Peter Caddy and Dorothy Maclean moved to a modest caravan park in Findhorn Bay with their caravan and …

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Greenpeace on the Digital Conference re:publica

Volker Gassner (l-r), spokesman Greenpeace Germany, Jürgen Knirsch, trade expert, and Stefan Krug, Director of the Political Representation Greenpeace Germany, speaking on 02.05.2016 on the re: publica in Berlin. The environmental organization announced at the press conference that makes it public secret TTIP papers. See the file here:

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Eco-villages worldwide

Local solutions for global problems By definition, an eco-village can be a traditional village community, part of a city, or a living community founded for this purpose. An eco-village in Europe or North America mostly comes into being because its inhabitants want to live healthier or more community-based lives. In the global south, in contrast, it is often a matter of survival: food autonomy, protection and survival in conflict regions, or about escaping poverty. In the process, worldwide cooperation through sustainability strategies has developed. We invite you on a journey to several different parts of the world. Auroville, India – …

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seat61

Travel worldwide by train

Mr. Mark Smith has made an adventurous hobby into his profession. From Marylebone Station to Buckinghamshire to the north-west of London, where he lives with his wife Nicolette, their two children Nathaniel (8) and Katelijn (6), and their cat Phoenix, his Chiltern Railways train takes up to 90 minutes to cover 60 km. Mark himself once worked for British Rail, today he gives all travellers information about all railway routes worldwide. You want to travel by train from Portugal to England, or from Lisbon to Moscow, Vladivostok, Beijing or Calcutta? No problem. Mark Smith tells all adventurers via which routes …

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A escola na aldeia (Foto Jenner Zimmermann)

India every day

5th Instalment The Tale of Two Villages I’ve been living in India for over forty years, the last thirty of which have been in the small university town of Santiniketan, some 150 kilometres north of Calcutta. I studied there to start with, then I stayed, to translate the work of the major Indian writer Rabindranath Tagore from Bengali into German. I translated the conversations of the Hindu saint Sri Ramakrishna, as well as writing and publishing books about Hinduism and the dialogue of religions. Thirty years ago, in two tribal villages, I started setting up a different kind of development …

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