Ecovila Vale de Caparide
Ecological Management program/proposalThis Portuguese small scale but “real study case” breaks all routine and opens a breathing space and new sources of hope. Ecovila Vale de Caparide is about bringing back, in our overall thinking process spring water, biodiversity, soil fertility, forest and the sun, direct access to all fundamentals.
DaST`s proposition is to integrate, through a new systemic approach to social and environmental challenges, the principles of sustainable design into the Cascais community built in environment.
In Energy, Environment and Development, Professor Jose J Delgado Domingos, IST, Lisbon published a very thorough analysis that should to be studied in schools and given to politicians, given a leave of absence from office until they understand it’s full meaning and subsequently propose a right-minded plan for our countries.
“Sustainable development has to be looked at from a global and integrated perspective or it will be doomed to fall into the contradictions among the excessive specializations. The conceptual structure that thermodynamics grants when applied to Earth as a thermodynamic system, to the living being as a conserver of energy and to the social and economic activities are a domain that can also be examined in terms of energy and information fluxes, where the fundamental physical principles are valid and applicable, open up a whole new world of possibilities. Portuguese scientific and engineering community has underestimated this concept of an integrated vision which, in fact, is the source for leadership and progress, finding justifications that discard too easily the specific aspirations that others may have envisioned.”
“If a company that overspends its capital goes bankrupt, what will the consequences be for a society that over dilapidates its natural resources? Economic growth has been synonym of accumulation of capital gathered by man, suggesting the idea that this capital will substitute for the natural capital, which are the Natural Resources; This, however, cannot happen!”
“What we are talking about is the integration – of what science in its time was unaware – and of what, today’s science, is aware. Although, politicians and economists seem to want to discard in their continued ignorance of these facts.”