Welcome to TerraSeixe
The goals described in these pages are not new. For a long time, though, they were no more than a Quixotic dream until one torrid day in August 2015 when a group from GEOTA, a major Portuguese NGO, at the invitation of Acção Ambiental, a tiny one, visited the Seixe valley. The natural features seen that day were enough to convince a small team to work jointly to ensure their conservation.
Recognition of these qualities is not new either. For years almost all the basin has officially been part of the Natura 2000 Network and it is similarly recognised as an Important Bird Area. Moreover, the region is considered of critical environmental importance in southern Portugal.
Areas of highest biodiversity conservation priority – Seixe basin outlined in blue
But the protection bestowed by this recognition displays more wish than will. The basin may still shelter a high biodiversity including not only the country’s best fragments of the Mirbeck Oak, Portugal’s second largest native tree, and even some vestiges of rare Laurisilva woods together with the threatened wildlife these habitats shelter. Yet this image
may represent not only the past – Mediterranean woodland fragment on the left, and present – a new eucalyptus plantation, centre, but the future, an older plantation, top right, ready for felling and conversion to pulp, of Portugal’s once rich natural heritage.
That small team has begun a long journey. The endeavour is ambitious – to implement environmental stewardship which exists in harmony, not conflict, with Nature and establish an environmental education programme that inspires wonder and concern for our environment and convincingly explains why that stewardship is imperative. It is large – a full river basin of 254 km². And it is very longterm – rewilding areas so that, if climate change allows, they inspire us, one day in a century or two, to sense how the world was before our arrival. All this is well beyond our capacities alone. Much of our early efforts, therefore, have been devoted to recruiting partners. We now have several partners from a range of institutions.
The TerraSeixe website will describe the rest of that journey and the fundamental concepts and approaches we aim to follow to realise the original dream: to establish this area as intended under Natura 2000, not only to protect and conserve biodiversity and ecosystems but also to bring economic opportunity to society in a way that does not compromise the Seixe basin’s natural heritage. We must learn to live sustainably with the planet on whose health ours depends.
Margaret Mead: Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.
