ZW1

Saturday 1st february 2025. With everything that has been happening in these last few weeks, a little comfort is certainly good. And what could be more comforting than to see what wonderful things can be created when people join forces, cooperate and communicate? Evolution is not just about rivalry, as we like to believe, but, above all, about cooperation. We can learn so much from nature’s symbioses. A rhinoceros is a colossal creature, measuring up to three and a half metres long and weighing 1.5 tons. Lions and hyenas prefer to look for lighter prey. Nevertheless, this animal likes to …

Saturday, 25th january 2025. More beautiful. Bigger. Harder. Tighter. Smoother. Stronger. Do we still want more? There’s a new political party in Portugal that has put up signs on the motorway in the Algarve… Bitch-bitch, bitch-bitch. A wannabe clean man is depicted standing there like a hitchhiker and he probably wants a lift. At least that’s how I understand André Ventura. A clever chap, he rents an advertising billboard and happily makes a fool of himself. He’ll never get another chance like this. Is he in the government? No. His politics are nothing more than a marketing coup. What do …

Saturday 18th january 2025. The pictures and films we are currently seeing from California are disturbing. At this very same moment in time, we are installing the tenth high-power sprinkler in our own forest, while we receive the news that the forest and mountains near Los Angeles are ablaze and the winds are mutating into storms and fuelling the fires that are now destroying entire communities. This distinctly reminds us of what happened in the Monchique mountains during the week of 3-10 August 2018, when, according to police reports, a high-voltage E-Redes power line was repeatedly touching against a eucalyptus …

Saturday 11th January 2025. A Happy New Year to all our readers in 2025! As guardians (or rather graveyard keepers) of the language, neither the German nor the Portuguese publishing houses could bring themselves to give the Italian writer, doctor, painter and politician Carlo Levi, born in Turin in 1902, a permanent place in their literary programmes. The fear of the political disease of fascism was, and still is, very real, and not only in Munich. “Do we want to seize the opportunity now?” an editor at C.H. Beck in the Bavarian metropolis must have asked himself, “before the fascists …

Saturday 4th january 2025. It’s a New Year. Have you made it? And your good resolutions? Live a climate-neutral life? And reduce your carbon footprint? Reduce the amount of waste? Eat a healthy diet? Wait a minute. We can make you a very special offer. Our cooperative has booked a speaker, a permaculture teacher called Lesley Martin. She will be offering our readers a weekend course in March, April and May, in which you can find out what you need to do to produce good food from good soil: potatoes, onions, carrots and courgettes, as well as tomatoes, garlic, cucumbers …

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 …

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 …