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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Saturday 5th October 2024. Jane Goodall, a British scientist and environmental activist, asked the German doctor and scientific journalist Eckart von Hirschhausen: “If we as humans claim to be the smartest species on the planet, why are we destroying our own home?” This question can be found in the new bestseller ‘Unlearn CO2 – Time for a climate without crisis’, edited by Klaudia Kemfert, Julian Gupta and Manuel Kronenberg. The book, in which 14 authors from very different walks of public life guide readers towards a climate-friendly future in 14 different essays, is very special. And because the question posed …

Saturday  28th September 2024. Ten steps to climate neutrality Part 2 100 multinational corporations emit around 80% of the world’s CO2. Thinking seriously about your own individual carbon footprint is an important part of solving the climate crisis on our planet. Of course, we must also finally find a transnational exit strategy for the big climate cheats: the end for BP, Shell and Exxon-Mobil, the end for Gazprom, Aramco, China-Coal and Rio Tinto and the other 93 multinational corporations that do business with fossil fuels and the extraction of minerals and ores, to the detriment of humanity, at the expense …

Saturday 14th September 2024. He should not be completely forgotten. 20 years ago, the great economist of the Prague Spring in former Czechoslovakia, Professor Ota Šik, died in exile in Switzerland. His ideas and conceptions of employee-owned companies could now be applied to the case of Volkswagen. Labour is a very important factor in the manufacturing process, together with capital, land and machinery (production facilities), and it should therefore enjoy at least a 25% share of the profits. For example, you use labour to make a car, or something else – a wardrobe, a pair of shoes, a colourful dress. …

Saturday, 31th august  2024. “We don’t want another Miami here,” says local resident Vítor Lopes (43), from Caramujeira near Lagoa. “Don’t we already have enough tourism?” ECO123 talked to Vítor Lopes (43) and Luís Lopes (64), his father, at a meeting in Lagoa. ECO123 had asked its readers three questions about the proposed building of a hotel on a nature reserve: Firstly, which nature reserve? Secondly, which district of the Algarve are we talking about? Thirdly, which banks are involved in the financing? Vítor Lopes (43) was the first to send the right answers to the questions. And then he …

Saturday 24th August 2024. The housing crisis in Portugal is getting worse, and there is a lot that needs to be changed politically in order to resolve it. Until then, we have to contribute in whatever ways we can. Specifically, by helping CASA – Support Centre for the Homeless, which provides aid and support to hundreds of people every day… With these words, the cabaret artist Diogo Faro’s crowdfunding campaign begins on the platform https://ppl.pt/causas/faro, which is open until Monday 2 September at 6pm and aims to raise 3,500 euros for the Portuguese support centre for homeless people, ‘CASA’, in …

Saturday 17th August 2024. If a strip of land on the south coast of Portugal has been designated as a nature reserve, surely there should be no power on Earth to describe this region as a development area that can be used for the construction of yet another hotel. Correct me if I am wrong. A nature reserve is a nature reserve – or are there some exceptions? When a bank grants a loan for a house, it normally checks all the facts. It wants to know whether it is throwing money down the drain (to put it bluntly), and …

Saturday 6th July 2024. There are no limits to the imagination, are there? I can just envisage the first major European tour operator cancelling all trips to Portugal this year, showing the government that the tourist industry acts responsibly and takes care of its customers – especially in the event of illness. I no longer recommend travelling to Portugal, especially to the Algarve. This is because the government – no matter whether it is socialist or conservative – has run Portugal’s healthcare system into the ground, to such an extent that people no longer dare to become ill. If you …

Saturday 8th june 2024. The Portuguese Society for the Study of Birds (SPEA) is pleased to announce that Rui Borralho was appointed as Executive Director in May. Replacing the outgoing Executive Director, Domingos Leitão, Rui Borralho has enjoyed a solid career and nurtures a fervent passion for nature conservation, bringing with him more than 30 years of experience and a deep dedication to wildlife. With a PhD in Forestry Engineering, specialising in Wildlife Management, from the University of Lisbon’s Instituto Superior de Agronomia, Rui Borralho has always been passionate about nature. ‘It’s a huge responsibility and challenge, and I’m very …

Saturday, 25th may 2024. Living, as we are now, in the heat of the climate crisis, when the forest in Portugal is on fire, we know exactly what we have to do to put it out. We call the fire department, and we quickly roll out our own hoses. It’s all quite clear, isn’t it? We don’t wait until 2035 or even longer. We don’t wait to put out the fire. Why is it taking so long to implement the transformation in the energy sector? Solar and wind energy have been around for a long time now, hydroelectricity for centuries. …

Saturday 18th May 2024. The CO2 observatory in space has been in operation since 2023, because what can be measured can be reduced. Until recently, it was always claimed that CO2 could not be seen, smelled, tasted, heard or even touched. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in the USA has the largest collection of geoscientists on the planet. Their mission is to visualise CO2 and function as a key trusted source of comprehensive environmental information about both the current state and the future of the Earth. NASA scientists design, build, launch and operate missions, including satellites, to understand how our …