fábulas sustentáveis

The next question might be: And how many do you really need? Very few, I would say. The problem is that we do not think about their purpose or the joy about having less stuff. We are educated to work more, to get more money, to buy more stuff without ever thinking what make us happy. The Minimalists leave their message: love people and use things because the opposite never works !

Destroying the deep sea to get metals for our throw-away mobile phones and other e-devices? Seas At Risk thinks it is better to step up efforts on the circular economy – make devices repairable, re-usable, recyclable. Use mineral resources more efficiently and keep them in the economy loop instead of wasting them. Buy less, plan more and live simple.

As in other business areas, a few companies in the world control almost the overall seafood market. These key companies, responsible for most of the seafood production, are committing to move further to sustainability with science support. If they do, others might follow. This is an interesting initiative since apart from the scientific background it is based in "dialogues", "communication" and "connecting" different parts of the issue. The seafood production is a business above all the resources or environmental constrains and if we want to improve sustainable measures, it is not enough to use only science based policies or consumers' advice. We need to connect the parts. The word “keystone actor” is an analogy with the “keystone species” concept in ecology, developed by Professor Robert T. Paine. A scientific paper published in 2015 by Österblom, Jouffray, Folke et al. illustrates that the largest companies in a given industry can opera...

tomorrow will be a better day...this is more or less what Tomorrow  movie tells us. I enjoyed the positive approach of the movie that is about sustainable way of living but also the overall perspective about how to change habits and political models which our society is based in. I thought it was very interesting to learn with the movie  Where Does Money Come From?  because it is amazingly simple and terrifying at the same time. Money is created by banks, private companies: Physical cash accounts for less than 3 per cent of the total stock of money in the economy. Commercial bank money – credit and coexistent deposits – makes up the remaining 97 per cent of the money supply.  There are several conflicting ways of describing what banks do.  The simplest version is that banks take in money from savers, and lend this money out to borrowers. This is not at all how the process works.  Banks do not need to wait for a customer to deposit money before t...

Deep Souls - Made of Water from PROfundo on Vimeo .

the movie Cowspiracy show how big are the environmental costs of producing animals for food: - greenhouse gas emissions (more than all transportation), - habitat destruction (the forest that is being destroyed to provide land to produce soya), - biodiversity loss (with non-selective fishing gears as for example bottom trawl) and, - water use (an hamburger requires much more water than all the water used for showering). if it is that meat production relies in so much resources, why there is not more aware among society about lowering down meat consumption? most of the people try to turn off lights at home or have a shower instead of a bath, thinking in doing the best for the environment. but if those things are not the most efficient way to reach a more sustainable way of living, why to keep them? it is not worth to put all the "eggs in the same basket". we should have a governmental strategy with policies teaching people how to reduce consumption habits that ha...

IMERSÃO from Morgan Jouquand on Vimeo .

História a História an human legend that starts in the 15th century. but only in the 20th century it grows as a political issue. 6 months in the other side of the ocean with low paid labour. each man alone in a small boat, fishing with a line and returning to the main boat after 8 hours, to work even hours more until the fish was prepared and salted. the government at that time, a dictatorship, helped the owners of the boats, supply chain industries and fishermen organizations in order to have cheap salted and dried cod to feed the people. at the same time promoted a symbol of a country bringing back again richness from sea (after the Portuguese discoveries in 15th and 16th centuries). then trawlers came and the overfishing situation gave less fish and smaller with consequently economic losses. Economic Exclusive Zones were created, Portugal joins the European Community and national fisheries became ruled by the Common Fisheries Policy. after this all story Portuguese stil...

Each time there is an end, this end is on my mind. I wonder how many deaths will happen in my life. It will always be more and more until my own death. Time does not stop and in some way, death is important to make life more precious and rich. Every life that I shared is now part of my life.

And one day a Fabula becomes reality: Giving the users a lead role in making decisions and developing plans for managing marine resources builds self-esteem and buy-in, making it far more likely that they will comply with the rules and abide by the sanctions imposed for non-compliance.

Sandgrains Trailer NoSub from Matchbox Media Collective on Vimeo . The trailer with subtitles is  here . It is the same old story...there is less fish in the sea because some big boats, from other countries, are fishing and making business with resources that are the basic food and income for the local population. Who eats that fish? And if it happens the opposite...How many agreements exist that EU countries let other countries to explore their resources? The problem is not only the agreement on itself, but the unfairness between different levels of logistics and resources to track the activity and to manage the fish stocks. If you want to see it, you go here next Monday!

Just two generations ago, preparing meals was as much a part of life as eating. Now we’ve given up what is perhaps our best excuse to get together and spend time with the people we love—mealtime—and someone else stands at the stove. We’re either watching cooks on TV like we would a spectator sport or grabbing grub, bagged, and eating it alone and on the go. ... Because not cooking is a big mistake—and it’s one that’s costing us money, good times, control, serenity and, yes, vastly better health. I really agree that it is good to cook. When I cook, I learn how to buy food, where it comes from, and how to prepare it. Each time I eat, I understand all the work that is behind my meal and the cost of the food produced to feed me. In the same way, the last book of Michael Pollan, Cooked , talks about the importance of cooking for healthy and more sustainable food habits: The effects of not cooking are similarly far reaching.  Relying upon corporations to process our food me...

I think it is very interesting to understand the biology of food. I'm always curious to know more about: where it comes from, how it was grown, and how it came to the supermarket shelf. It is not easy to have such a broad knowledge. Nowadays we have everything, during all the time, available to consume. We do not even care or understand the seasonality of food production. It is not easy to chose when we cannot understand how much it requires to bring that small living thing until the shelf in our food store. This project shows the biodiversity in the supermarket.  It is fun to show the many fish one can find in a Portuguese supermarket... Biodiversidade no Hipermercado - Um Mar de Peixes from Terra Líquida Filmes on Vimeo . ...but bacalhau is not a Portuguese fish! Maybe it would be better to say that it is a Portuguese way to prepare fish that comes from Norway, Iceland or Newfoundland (North-West Atlantic) .

To finish the thesis gives me a feeling of cleaning home. The living room that is a shelter. It is a place that protects but also limits the movements and I do not want to leave it.

The Guardian tracked how some of the world's big supermakets are using suppliers relying on slave labour to put cheap prawns on their shelves. Thai 'ghost ships' enslave, brutalise and even kill workers are linked to global shrimp supply chain. Thailand exports around 500,000 tonnes of shrimps every year. It is one of the biggest exporters in the world. From the total production, 10% are commercialized by the company CPFoods, a main source of shrimps in UK and USA supermarkets. Globalization brings seafood from everywhere to our plates. Nevertheless each of us is responsible for what we put in the plate. People die because of shrimps! Insane business. Here the story in Portuguese.

Fish tales is a company from The Netherlands that sells sustainable seafood. The interesting thing is that they do not only have a MSC certification, they also promote the fishery in videos and the producers in the packages.   It seems that it is good business to tell the story behind the fish. The responsible, Bart van Olphen, a chef and the author, says: What makes seafood stories so special?  You won’t be able to easily find a nice story behind every product.  Highly educated marketing managers and communications directors are needed to bring out stories people hopefully pick up.  This is the reason why I am so happy to be active in the seafood business: because fish is the only product we still consume from the wild, it leads directly to many great stories, beautiful scenery and people.  Communicating seafood is the easiest job to do; you just build a bridge between producers and consumers and tell the real story in as transparent a way as possi...

To see this TED talk at this stage of my PhD thesis, mostly writing and re-writing, is very exciting. Someone has the same thoughts as me? Great! Or did I reach the same thoughts as someone working with fish? Exactly! We just have found the same evidences. Anyway, I have a second point that I would like to add: Eat sustainable seafood, save the oceans. It is not just about the way we fish, it is also the way we eat. So now... I just need to write a few pages, based on bibliography, using the best research references I can find, with the most important facts about the issue, in the simplest words, not too long, understandable, and in good english, which is named a PhD thesis...to state: We need to preserve the oceans to feed the world. But we need to eat sustainable seafood to save the oceans.