"Os Conflitos ambientais em Portugal (1974-2015): uma breve retrospectiva"

In this chapter, the authors made a survey of the research undertaken by social scientists and their reflections on environmental conflicts in Portugal. In these, a critical discourse has emerged concerning, on the one hand, the weak public environmental awareness, and, on the other, the progressive obliteration of environmental movements and their institutionalization throughout the creation of different environmental groups and the incorporation of the “environment” in legislation and in political discourse. In a brief retrospective, we review several conflicts taking into account different relevant factors: level of mobilization, media attention received, organization, impact, and ideological reference they have had in Portugal since the seventies. We have particularly highlighted the movement against nuclear energy and the construction of dams, the pollution caused by intensive breeding, the expansion of eucalyptus plantations, the conflicts against “wild” forms of mining, the business of toxic waste, the expansion of the economy of the concrete, the installation of landfills, and the defense of the natural heritage. This survey has considered three periods: the 1970s, marked by the emergence and performance of ecological movements of different ideological extraction; the second half of the 1980s, marked by the institutionalization of the environment and the imposition of a new legal framework with impact on environmental policies resulting from the integration into the European Economic Community; and finally, a third period, from the 1990s to present, marked by increasing environmental media coverage, with a particular emphasis on environmental conflicts in a context of an increasing liberalization of economic activities and the expansion of extraction and of the concrete economy. This is also the period where the environment emerges in disputes over the uses of the territory as economic and asset value. Most of these conflicts arise from the activities of local agents or national environmental groups that quickly gain strong local roots and sometimes even have some success. However, their impact on the national and Community legislation seems to be less relevant.

Trans-national cooperation: an asset in the Portuguese overseas trade. Foreigners operating in the Portuguese overseas trade, 1580-1590

This paper aims to discuss the role of foreign merchants, operating from Portugal, in the Portuguese overseas trade, during the first ten years of Iberian Union. The focus is not in products or routes, but in the mechanisms of association of such merchants. Iberian Union created a legal framework which prohibited the interference and trade of Portuguese agents in the Spanish Empire and vice-versa. Due to the imperialist wars of the Habsburgs, the Portuguese Empire also suffered from Dutch and English rivalry both in the Indic and in the Atlantic and also from the embargos of Dutch and English products and ships in Iberian ports. In such conjuncture, how did merchants related with each other? What was the impact of the political union of the Portuguese and Spanish crowns in trading associations? The used data sources are the notarial contracts of Lisbon for the same period. The paper highlights the role of Castilian merchants in the Portuguese trade, but it also stresses that Iberian partnerships have prevailed before 1580. The role of other merchants, such as Flemish/Dutch, Germans, Italians and French, is also considered. The paper discusses how and why did these merchants join in trans-national partnerships and what was their role in the Portuguese trade network at the time.

Finite-strain laminates: Bending-enhanced hexahedron and delamination

With a new finite strain anisotropic framework, we introduce a unified approach for constitutive model- ing and delamination of composites. We describe a finite-strain semi-implicit integration algorithm and the application to assumed-strain hexahedra. In a laminate composite, the laminae are modeled by an anisotropic Kirchhoff/Saint-Venant material and the interfaces are modeled by the exponential cohesive law with intrinsic characteristic length and the criterion by Benzeggagh and Kenane for the equivalent fracture toughness. For the element formulation, a weighted least-squares algorithm is used to calculate the mixed strain. Löwdin frames are used to model orthotropic materials without the added task of per- forming a polar decomposition or empirical frames. To assess the validity of our proposals and inspect step and mesh size dependence, a least-squares based hexahedral element is implemented and tested in depth in both deformation and delamination examples.