fábulas sustentáveis

Do I really like to be a PhD student? Would I do it again if I have the chance to go back in time? These questions become more frequent nowadays that I'm finishing the thesis. It is a personal journey with up and downs, frustration and happiness, lonely moments most of the time. The Power of Less  is a book that helps a lot to organize the work plan and to concretize goals, which I believe is one of the most difficult parts in doing a PhD...and in life! Especially because one are stuck in a issue and, as someone told me one day: a PhD student is someone who knows more and more about less and less. You go deep in an issue and sometimes you feel as digging a hole...your own hole, where you almost cannot see the light. One very important thing is to set the limits. Otherwise one can stay all the entire life doing a PhD because, you are really doing something that nobody had done before. But here it comes also an important part of a PhD project: the supervisor...

Sardines were  here .

When I started the PhD, the cod stocks were in very bad shape. On the opposite, sardine is a fish from low level of the marine food web; catch with purse-seining, a fishery with relatively low environmental impacts, and had greater potential of consumption in Portugal, since Portuguese love more sardines than any other people. Because Portuguese eat so much cod, it would be great if they would eat more sardine (or other small pelagic fish) instead. It turns out that after some years of trying to have something interesting to say in a PhD thesis... The cod is not so bad because some stocks (not all!) as for example the Norwegian, recovered and are now certified by MSC . Plus this year the North Sea cod stock seems that had finally recovered . And Portuguese sardine stock (Iberian stock) had problems, with consequent s uspension of the MSC certification in 2012. Now more and more evidences show that it is a threat to marine life the depletion of sardine stocks, with importan...