Present and past means of transport

The owner of this donkey was waiting for her son who was shoping in the Intermarché supermaket. She cannot read or write, therefore she cannot get the driving license - that's why she still keeps this quite old donkey - for her shopping trips to the town! What a convenient solution is that?

Never drink water

This picture was taken in a tasco / tabern in Gouveia.

I've been told before that the sewage treatment plant in Gouveia doesn't opperate properly and so faecal matter was found at the bottom of the drinking water reservoir. The man who told me this said he went to complain to the local public health delegate (delegado de saúde pública) that the tapwater was smelly. The public heath delegate said "There you are again complaining! You're just this sort of person and I'm not going to follow up your complaint". Then the man asked an acquaintant who is public health delegate in another county to come for coffe in his village and ask for a cup of tapwater as well. He did and found it to be smelly as well, and only then the case was followed up. Now it is known what is happening - the sewage treatment plant is not working properly and untreated sewage flows into the river. Full stop.
If you are in Gouveia - rather drink wine - as the picture suggests!

A tradição...

A primeira vez que fui confrontada seriamente com a questão ”O que é afinal a tradição?” estava num autocarro com um pneu furado na margem de uma estrada alentejana. Até esse momento de maior incerteza e de espera foi aproveitado pelos especialistas em ecologia vegetal que estavam aí reunidos para discutir um projecto de investigação sobre o efeito da alteração dos usos tradicionais do solo... Não se chegou a grande conclusão, para além de que “tradição significa coisas diferentes para diferentes pessoas” e que coisas bem recentes podem ser consideradas tradição.

Depois li uma explicação do Prof. Jules Pretty que dizia que a tradição se define pela forma de transmissão do saber e não pela sua antiguidade; trata-se de saber pela experiência feito que é passado oralmente e de forma informal.

Mais tarde conheci duas comunidades ecológicas (Zajezka na Eslováquia e Széplak na Hungria) que seguem as tradições locais com o objectivo de alcançar maior sustentabilidade. O argumento é que as práticas tradicionais permitiram as pessoas manterem as suas comunidades viáveis durante séculos, portanto, embora por vezes desconheçamos o sentido de certas práticas, elas são funcionais e por isso devem ser mantidas.

Surge-me um contra-argumento em relação à manutenção cega da tradição, inspirado em Steiner: o desenvolvimento da consciência humana individual exige uma maior abertura para diferenças e diversidade de práticas, de modo a assegurar a liberdade individual.

Lendo um boletim da “Criar Raízes” apercebi-me do problema de que frequentemente não é dado crédito a ideias inovadoras nas aldeias. Os velhos já podem não saber como gerir os seus terrenos face às políticas económicas e tecnologias modernas, mas olham com desconfiança para práticas novas.

O que me parece acontecer nas aldeias tradicionais é que só o que é tradição é que está certo; fazer as coisas de modo diferente do que os nossos bisavós faziam “está errado”. Quem o faça é “doido”. Assim existe uma coerção social, que faz com que cada indivíduo siga as práticas socialmente aceites. Só assim consigo perceber que em todo Portugal as batatas são cultivadas em regos que levam estrume e feitos exactamente da mesma maneira, abrindo um rego com a enchada e cobrindo o rego anterior. Ok, a prática talvez esteja optimizada neste caso. Mas há também casos em que práticas com menos sentido são seguidas “à letra”, como na mobilização do solo no olival: será que é mesmo preciso? Ou só se faz para manter as aparências de ter o olival bem tratadinho?

O conhecimento tradicional tem certamente aspectos chave e sabedoria que permite a gestão sustentável dos sistemas agrícolas, mas a infelxibilidade associada à tradição poderá compromteter a adaptação e resiliência dos sistemas agrícolas aos tempos que correm.

Abandonment

Abandoned house in an abandoned village in the county of Gouveia.

Something is wrong.

Structured procrastination

"I have been intending to write this essay for months. Why am I finally doing it? Because I finally found some uncommitted time? Wrong. I have papers to grade, textbook orders to fill out, an NSF proposal to referee, dissertation drafts to read. I am working on this essay as a way of not doing all of those things. This is the essence of what I call structured procrastination, an amazing strategy I have discovered that converts procrastinators into effective human beings, respected and admired for all that they can accomplish and the good use they make of time. All procrastinators put off things they have to do. Structured procrastination is the art of making this bad trait work for you. The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely nothing. Procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing; they do marginally useful things, like gardening or sharpening pencils or making a diagram of how they will reorganize their files when they get around to it. Why does the procrastinator do these things? Because they are a way of not doing something more important. If all the procrastinator had left to do was to sharpen some pencils, no force on earth could get him do it. However, the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important.
Structured procrastination means shaping the structure of the tasks one has to do in a way that exploits this fact. The list of tasks one has in mind will be ordered by importance. Tasks that seem most urgent and important are on top. But there are also worthwhile tasks to perform lower down on the list. Doing these tasks becomes a way of not doing the things higher up on the list. With this sort of appropriate task structure, the procrastinator becomes a useful citizen. Indeed, the procrastinator can even acquire, as I have, a reputation for getting a lot done.
The most perfect situation for structured procrastination that I ever had was when my wife and I served as Resident Fellows in Soto House, a Stanford dormitory. In the evening, faced with papers to grade, lectures to prepare, committee work to be done, I would leave our cottage next to the dorm and go over to the lounge and play ping-pong with the residents, or talk over things with them in their rooms, or just sit there and read the paper. I got a reputation for being a terrific Resident Fellow, and one of the rare profs on campus who spent time with undergraduates and got to know them. What a set up: play ping pong as a way of not doing more important things, and get a reputation as Mr. Chips.
Procrastinators often follow exactly the wrong tack. They try to minimize their commitments, assuming that if they have only a few things to do, they will quit procrastinating and get them done. But this goes contrary to the basic nature of the procrastinator and destroys his most important source of motivation. The few tasks on his list will be by definition the most important, and the only way to avoid doing them will be to do nothing. This is a way to become a couch potato, not an effective human being.
At this point you may be asking, "How about the important tasks at the top of the list, that one never does?" Admittedly, there is a potential problem here.
The trick is to pick the right sorts of projects for the top of the list. The ideal sorts of things have two characteristics, First, they seem to have clear deadlines (but really don't). Second, they seem awfully important (but really aren't). Luckily, life abounds with such tasks. In universities the vast majority of tasks fall into this category, and I'm sure the same is true for most other large institutions. Take for example the item right at the top of my list right now. This is finishing an essay for a volume in the philosophy of language. It was supposed to be done eleven months ago. I have accomplished an enormous number of important things as a way of not working on it. A couple of months ago, bothered by guilt, I wrote a letter to the editor saying how sorry I was to be so late and expressing my good intentions to get to work. Writing the letter was, of course, a way of not working on the article. It turned out that I really wasn't much further behind schedule than anyone else. And how important is this article anyway? Not so important that at some point something that seems more important won't come along. Then I'll get to work on it.
Another example is book order forms. I write this in June. In October, I will teach a class on Epistemology. The book order forms are already overdue at the book store. It is easy to take this as an important task with a pressing deadline (for you non-procrastinators, I will observe that deadlines really start to press a week or two after they pass.) I get almost daily reminders from the department secretary, students sometimes ask me what we will be reading, and the unfilled order form sits right in the middle of my desk, right under the wrapping from the sandwich I ate last Wednesday. This task is near the top of my list; it bothers me, and motivates me to do other useful but superficially less important things. But in fact, the book store is plenty busy with forms already filed by non-procrastinators. I can get mine in mid-Summer and things will be fine. I just need to order popular well-known books from efficient publishers. I will accept some other, apparently more important, task sometime between now and, say, August 1st. Then my psyche will feel comfortable about filling out the order forms as a way of not doing this new task.
The observant reader may feel at this point that structured procrastination requires a certain amount of self-deception, since one is in effect constantly perpetrating a pyramid scheme on oneself. Exactly. One needs to be able to recognize and commit oneself to tasks with inflated importance and unreal deadlines, while making oneself feel that they are important and urgent. This is not a problem, because virtually all procrastinators have excellent self-deceptive skills also. And what could be more noble than using one character flaw to offset the bad effects of another?"

By John Perry
http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/

My study area

This image is from Alves et al, 2003. It ilustrates where land abandonment is ocurring fastest in Portugal and where it is likely to be most severe in the coming years. That's why I selected those counties for my research: where the problems are most severe it makes most sense to seek solutions, or so I thought...

SERRA DA ARADA COVAS DO MONTE VI

Stretches around Idanha and Pinhal Interior

I'm sure John Constable wouldn't mind painting this landscape close to Idanha-a-Nova... :)
In this area cheese made of sheep milk and olive oil are the main agricultural products.
I did a little trip around the Pinhal Interior to gain an impression of whether agriculture is as marginalized as the statistics indicate. It's worse than I imagined from the secondary data. In the Pinhal region only forestry exists: Pine tree plantations, Eucalypt plantations, scrublands and burned hills. The scrublands look quite pretty as the pink heather and several types of yellow flowering legumes (tojo, giesta and carqueija are the local names) are in full bloom. In the granitic lowlands the white flowering Cytisus is incredibly abundant.

And this is how the Pinhal Interior region looks like. From Coimbra over Castelo Branco to Guarda: tree monocultures in different stages of development or damaged by woodfires, scrublands and rocks. Yes, and northwards, it doesn't count as Pinhal Interior, but the region around Viseu isn't much different either.

Covas do Monte

This village couldn't have a better name: Caves of the mountain, could it?
It's located at the Serra de S. Macário in central Portugal, in the county of S. Pedro do Sul. It's quite hard to reach the village, there's a road but it's quite steep and it takes almost 40 minutes from the town of S. Pedro do Sul. It is estimated that 60 people live in the village and 2000 goat. The village has a communitarian herd, i.e. the goat from all households form the village herd, and every day another person has to climb the mountains with the herd to find pasture...

A very interesting rural development project called "Criar Raízes" is ongoing in this village. They are trying to introduce some new things in the village and to help to create a new vision of what the village could become to create a brighter future.

Here is a blog with more pictures from the village and ongoing activities related to farming: http://agricultura-covas-do-monte.blogspot.com/

Landscapes and disconnect

It might be rather foolish from my part, but I cannot stop wondering how different the few places in the world I'm acquainted with are. The weather, the landscapes, the way of life, the way of thinking. It all seems to be interconnected. I just watch and watch and eyes and mouth open wide. I don't understand anything.

Polytunnel plastic

The plastic for polytunnels is sold in the "agricultural cooperative" - a rustical warehouse trading mainly in agrochemicals.

I looked very surpised at my mother when she asked for "1 Kg of polytunnel plastic". The salesman also said: "No, no, we need to know how many meters you need." Of course. But after cutting the 1,5x8m piece he put it on the scales. The thing is, to cut the piece in the size you want it you have to say how many meters you need, but it is priced according to weight!

"Qual é coisa qual é ela

que se compra ao metro e se paga ao quilo?"

ou

"Mas o que é que é aquilo

que se compra ao metro e se paga ao quilo?!"

;*)

Interview bore

I'm getting prepared to become an interview bore...Picture from "Participatory Learning and Action" Pretty et al. IIED