Madeira Consorcio

73 Madeira Consorcio Meeting 16.9. 2015

73 Madeira Consorcio Meeting 16.9. 2015

The Bread Project: The new semester has started, and E. has to focus on the university job at this time; however, since last time, we had a few more suggestions for a good Name.

In any case, E.will need a good business partner; an artist usually isn’t very good at managing his own Project.

U.gave him a contact, Sr. José also bakes only with sourdough. The new “Goji” shop in Rua Queimada de Cima would be a good outlet for bread sales. They sell dried fruit, spices and other goodies.

Sa.said that IKEA has some cool packaging which might be nice for E.’s bread, she will let us have a photo of it.

Reforestation on Porto Santo:

Gr. and Sa. are in contact with each other about an urgently needed reforestation project for Porto Santo. A Portuguese scientist has written a good book about it. We as a group should try to promote such an event with actions.

The Porto Santo residents do not seem to be interested to reforest their island, which is basically a pile of sand, and they don’t even recycle. The water table is sinking and the water is poisoned by the lawn fertilizers used on the Golf course. With the planting of trees, the water table will improve.

U. mentioned that the Government is not very good at organizing tree-planting with the unemployed, they had such an event once in Madeira, They have to combine place, date, time, people, tree seedlings, bus transport, lunch, gloves etc and something will inevitably go wrong. Then the Madeirans have the tendency to give up, instead of trying to improve the system for the next time.

U. thinks tree planting could be handed to the Jeep Safari tours organized by travel agencies on Porto Santo: give them the seedlings and encourage the tourists to plant a few trees in designated areas, afterwards cared of by the Government gardeners. The Ferry could show the respective info during the trip and encourage the tourists to help planting. This should work well!

Here is the link again to a video with a nice story about a man who planted trees: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_7yEPNUXsU

U. thinks that we should place advertisements in the Diario with our ideas. If they don’t get out, nothing will happen but if they do, one or the other can trigger a good response, even from the Government. U. will work on such ads, to better illustrate the idea.

We also spoke about the potential the refugee wave means for Portugal in terms of population numbers. Portugal needs these people to avert a collapse of a viable state a few decades from now. These immigrants will be happy to plant trees; they would not feel themselves to be above it.

The Government issued a sensible information about the coming migrants, to quieten the fears of the Population

The word of the day: “Privilege is invisible to those who have it” from a TED talk.