Tag Archives: society in transition

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 …

… 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 …