Dashrath Manjhi is best known for carving a 110-metre-long (360 ft), 9.1-metre-wide (30 ft), and 7.7-metre-deep (25 ft) path through a ridge of hills using only a hammer and a chisel, because his wife fell and died from injuries due to the ridge blocking easy access to a nearby hospital on time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashrath_Manjhi
I echo that sentiment but oppose the positive adjectives tied to his motivation. Rather I believe can be at our best when motivated by our dark emotions towards positive actions: Grief, rage, madness.
Mr. Manjhi was compelled to this momentous thing after his world was torn apart by it. He persevered while the very people whose lives and whose children's lives he was improving mocked him. He worked for 20 years compelled by his demons and the universe is better off for it. I hope destroying the mountain gave him peace.
I dunno. Grief, rage and madness can only take you so far. The care and compassion for other human beings is what makes you continue. I don't think he'd be able to hammer down such a path for the duration of 20+ years unless he was deeply passionate about preventing the same issue for others in the future, even if they mocked and taunted him at the time.
It feels great to see this kind of story. We're all suffering from this (false) idea that we can't do anything, things are too bad, somebody else has done it before, or somebody else will do it. The fact is, humanity is pulled forward by people like this, who find their goal and don't let it go.
We need this right now, we're stepping into a pretty dark century, we're probably going to lose millions or billions of people to the effects of climate change, and we need every little bit of hope we can muster and build up.
Go plant an oak tree. Not in theory, not a big plan for a monumental effort, just plant an oak tree. They survive for many lives of men and are a cornerstone for feeding the entire ecosystem. If you can't plant one where you're supposed to, plant one where you're not. It takes an afternoon not a lifetime.
Where I am white oak grows by the hundreds of thousands. I see new seedlings ever summer but I would estimate only about 3-5% get past that seedling stage. All that to say that an afternoon of work isn’t enough, if you want to grow a tree you need to follow up on it for atleast a year or more.
Is there some abandoned parking lot in your town? Get some friends together with pick axes for a depaving party. Or, for something a bit less dedicated, craft some seed bombs (mix dirt and clay together into small cookie balls with native seeds in them) and throw them into the abandoned area. Boom, wildflowers, then pollinators, insects, birds, voila.
> Or, for something a bit less dedicated, craft some seed bombs (mix dirt and clay together into small cookie balls with native seeds in them) and throw them into the abandoned area
This is a lot of fun (albeit illegal in many places) to spruce up somewhat dead-looking villages and towns. Traveling with a passenger that holds a sack of seeds out the window is another way :) Do make sure you're actually using seeds of plants from naturally occurring species though, so you don't go around introducing new and invasive species that could potentially be harmful to the native species.
I'm very interested in "seed bombs". We have to plant something like one trillion trees just to keep up with losses from forest fires. Imagine the economics, supply chain, science, innovation, etc required to plant one trillion trees and all their supporting shrubs and ground cover.
My impression is they work well enough for flowers. I have no idea about shrubs or ground cover.
I'm aware there's some efforts to seed bomb trees. There was one such experiment in Discovery Park Seattle WA. I chatted with some people from WSU, Tacoma Tree Project, or something like that. That particular experiment tried using drones over a small plot. None of the seeds sprouted. (Sorry, I don't have more details.)
This was adjacent to some other experiments. eg Tacoma Tree Project & WSU are investigating why native redcedars are now perishing faster, and maybe find ways to mitigate the loss. I think there's about a dozen research plots scattered around the Puget Sound.
I don't spend much time following forest restoration "news". But I do know that it's a nascent industry that'll become huge.
Probably the toughest part of "reforestation" like that isn't the "planting of trees" process, but you have to actively monitor them and make sure they actually work out and survive. A bit amount of these enormous "plant trees over large areas" efforts fail simply because they didn't even come back once to actually maintain the plants until they're strong enough to actually form a ecosystem.
So sure, just planting one trillion trees is a huge task, but making sure they actually survive and grow to big strong trees to make a forest, will be short of impossible. Better to aim for smaller patches that can naturally spread over time as it matures by itself.
Here's a pretty short and sweet video talking more about the maintenance and actual survival of the trees for more than just photo-ops: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5ufbMgxN04
Absolutely. And those failures sour support for further efforts. Vicious cycle.
Reforesting (rewilding) is farming and gardening. Proactive ecological management. Per "You broke it, you bought it." We are recreating forests. In my area, we have to restart the forest life cycle. The correct plants in the correct order in the correct habitat. If we leave it to "nature", the blackberries and alder would choke off everything else.
Plus, there's ever more evidence that humans have long reshaped (managed) ecosystems. Like the controlled burns the indigeous people of America did. On a contintal scale!
I volunteer at greencitypartnership.org, leading a crew restoring a large park.
I've been wondering how we might build a community of urban forest hackers. To share tips and info, how to deal with vandals, help each other make yard signs, how to transport water over trail, etc.
I would love to know better ways for breaking up a parking lot.
I opened up 4 separate spaces for tree planters. I started with pickaxe and pry rod (nicknamed The Persuader by its owner). That's real work. Next, I borrowed a Makita rotary hammer from our local tool library. Very helpful!
My "boss" has a protocol to improve plant survival and reduce labor: pile up 10" - 12" of mulch. If my trees survive this summer I'll be very happy.
So, my boss's teams use the "too much mulch" hack, to great success.
But her innovation is slow to spread. Because our teams only meet yearly (some of us do float around to other job sites, which is great). But we have no contact with other teams, other cities, other regions. And seeing is believing. (I too was very skeptical and reluctant to schlep that much more mulch.)
And I'm sure someone somewhere has some labor saving hacks for tackling Himalayan blackberry. Once removed, my boss's hack is to use pinebark to prevent their return. Works great! (Another innovation slow to spread.) But oh boy removing invasives like blackberries, english ivy, scotch broom, etc currently requires a lot of labor.
(I know about super steam lances. Notion is to cook root balls from the inside out. I'm still trying to find a unit to experiment with. I heard there's one in Oregon, that I might go visit.)
> And I'm sure someone somewhere has some labor saving hacks for tackling Himalayan blackberry.
Goats. It's not labor eliminating, you've got to set up and maintain temporary fencing, and you've got to remove plants that dangerous for goats to eat, and you need to take care of the goats generally. But, they can really help get things under control.
Looks like his real name (da Silva is the most common surname in Brazil) and nominative determinism: "Sun of the Forest". Silvicultura.
I'm trying to get some trees to grow - it's a lot of work: Hélio has spent huge amounts of time and money on it (average wage might be USD1000/month and article says he was spending 7000 a year and if that was in the past then amount is a lot more in today's dollars).
After her husband's death in 1992, Wendy Whiteley took to cleaning up an unused railway easement behind her house. It turned into a substantial garden. The railways refused to guarantee its future (it was on their land), but in 2015 it became an official park. Well worth a visit on a sunny afternoon if you are in Sydney.
In 2023 the NSW government committed to turn the adjacent harbourfront railway line into a public linear park. The next government shredded the agreement and has announced it wants housing everywhere. IMO it's prime land that is too valuable to be privately owned and should be publicly accessible. Anyone who disagrees should go for a harbourfront walk on a sunny afternoon. (Billionaires who's takeaway from the experience would be to buy the land for their own use don't count.)
The same battle played out in Cremorne in the 1890's. Today the park is one of Sydney's jewels.
There's a children's book that I've been reading to my daughter called The Curious Garden about a boy gardening on abandoned tracks. It's a reference to the High Line, of course, but it's interesting there's more than one like this. I suppose the end of the age of passenger rail in these countries offered opportunities like this.
Amazing guy. I like the part where he was not deterred by the (stereotypical human garbage) business guy that kept destroying the plants so his hoarding of the land didn't get in the way.
Humboldt redwoods state park, and 'avenue of the giants' wouldn't exist if not for the tireless efforts of environmentalists.
I often speak to people online who look at society and want to tear it down and start again. I've never understood that attitude.
Growth out of decay takes work, but it takes considerably less work than accelerated decay and then trying to start again when there is nothing fertile left to build on.
I like this article because it demonstrates that there is always fertile land and opportunities where people are not looking.
The general direction of society is still immense destruction of the biosphere. That doesn't change because you can make conditions better locally and in the short term, especially when such actions don't go against the general momentum of society. The fact is, there's often conflation with improving individual lives and conditions (the warm fuzzy feeling) with actually doing real good when it comes to our impact on this planet. The former is not necessarily related to the latter, especially since the system has just the right amount of leeway to allow people to feel better and let off steam without really changing the ultimate long-term direction.
Even if there are many opportunities as you say, if the general momentum of society has three destructive acts for every one good one and that doesn't change, then society is still as destructive as ever.
For instance, for people who care deeply about nature and the non-human aspects of the planet, human society is incredibly destructive and hasn't done much to change that direction, regardless of how many feel-good projects have occurred.
Precivilisational lifestyles can only carry a small fraction of our current population. To a significant degree we're locked into this, and have been for thousands of years.
You'd still get regional overpopulation issues. E.g. the Justinian plague in 541 AD. That's still far away from mobile hunter gatherer tribes with densities of a few dozen people per 1-100 km^2.
Homo sapiens is 300,000 years old, Homo erectus 2 million years. Modern civilization might not last on the order of 10,000 years, industrial civilization maybe not even 500 - or perhaps "forever", if we make it to controllable runaway technological improvement?
The perception is that society itself is the roadblock to improving society. For example American "democracy". It's easy to imagine things could improve faster if Congress and the executive were simply deleted overnight.
News focuses on the negatives, but we're doing reasonably well in absolute terms. Big random changes are likely to cause regression to the international mean, which is generally below the US on most metrics.
It's because the powers that be do not want to make the society we want. They want to make the society they want, often at our expense. Therefore they must be torn down.
> Growth out of decay takes work, but it takes considerably less work than accelerated decay and then trying to start again when there is nothing fertile left to build on.
Indeed. This is why conservation of habitats (however small, or degraded) makes more sense than trying to restore already-destroyed areas.
That said: if I could pick an area to work on for myself, I'd go for a stretch of wasteland. Why? Because the before-after difference would be more stark (read: more satisfying). And heavily degraded lands are in muuuch bigger supply than little-degraded areas.
More important would be a general willingness of the locals to not interfere with restauration efforts.
> I like this article because it demonstrates that there is always fertile land and opportunities where people are not looking.
Stronger: "fertile" isn't strictly needed. Fertile soil can be built - if necessary, starting from 'scratch' (yes it does take time). Basically: grow stuff (anything is better than nothing), mulch (bio-waste is free), keep doing so, and whatever soil you started with, will improve over time.
As the soil improves, plants grow better & other life returns.
If you have an account, you can follow his profile and support his work. If you don't have, you can see the images anyway.
If the author simply put the image into the article it would only be sending kudos to Hélio instead of supporting him. Of course a single follow or profile view is not that much, but it helps to spread his work
It's the asymmetry at play. It takes a few minutes to fell a tree. While it takes decades to grow. To grow an actually fully grown 100 year old tree is a multigenerational project.
How could you foster such things? There's always short-sighted people and generations, it's close to impossible to make this happen. I've seen it personally when relatives have felled century old yard trees planted by our ancestors, for no practical purpose. There is at least one foundation that attempts to preserve forest, with strict rules, which has received already some donated forests. But who knows how that can be corrupted over the time forest actually takes to grow.
Trees don't live forever. A fully grown cottonwood tree (I'm picking on example I know of, others are similar, but different in details) at 100 years old is impressive, but that is near the typical lifespan and so at 120 years old that tree is dead of old age (in ideal conditions they live to 400 years, but 100 years is above average in nature). Forests are a constant cycle of new trees growing.
Forest fires are a very important part of the forest cycle in many places. So be careful about funding efforts to fight forest fires - often the correct answer is to light more of them (see a forester for details of your local forest).
Sure. Many pines can survive forest fires. But some other trees don't or are short lived anyway. I never suggested trees live forever. But 100 years is not a long time for many.
The nerd version of this is Larry Finger. After retiring from physics and software development, he dedicated his life to open source wifi drivers for Linux, contributing over 1500 patches to various drivers to get a wide variety of hardware to work under Linux. It was a really thankless task to figure out undocumented hardware. He passed mid-2024, contributing late into his life.
This is so important, especially in São Paulo. This city has 100000 homeless people living there. Imagine the population of a medium-sized city living with no roof over their head in a city with a population 100x that big.
I've never been, but I remember they had a big push some years ago to ban outdoor advertising to reduce "visual pollution." Sao Paulo looks so clean and beautiful from Google Street View--it makes the ugliness of the graffiti really stand out. I can't comprehend the nasty mind that decides to pollute other people's environment like that.
Defacing public property is worse. It's toxic individualism and self-expression. If people wanted to put up a mural, they'd collectively vote to do so. In a proper society, graffiti artists would face public punishment from the collective.
Is it really toxic individualism if there’s a (mostly healthy) subculture dedicated to it, though?
In a “proper society” we could pass around the talking stick to reach consensus on a whole grab bag of things.
I’m not a tagger myself, but I do think there is something poetically democratic about people participating in the public forum in this way. At least, beyond the four-letter words and flying dicks, anyways.
Yes, because the subculture doesn't represent the majority. It's the opposite of "democratic"--it's a small group of people imposing their aesthetic on what you acknowledge is a "public form"--without the consent of the public.
"Democracy" isn't about individuals or small groups making their voices heard. That might be a necessary factor, but it's not the purpose. Democracy is about the majority having the right to create the kind of society they want to live in. Maybe people in Sao Paulo like the graffiti (or maybe not, since the ban on other types of visual pollution seems popular). But it's the majority's decision to make.
Eh, if anything, "human built drab concrete environments" is exactly what graffiti should cover and be used to fight, add a bit of color to life. Don't like it? Don't make it so boring and dull in the first place.
People who graffiti trees, stones and other natural elements are fucking cunts though, ruining nature's art with their shitty tags, that's really horrible behavior.
Lots of people like the clean, subdued aesthetic. If they wanted "color" that's what they'd build. It's not for taggers to decide how much or little "color" a city should have.
> Lots of people like the clean, subdued aesthetic
And lots of people feels like it's a oppressive aesthetic. Not sure I've ever heard the concrete jungles of a city called "clean and subdued aesthetic", so cheers for this new perspective! The very same counter-culture that likes to color things, is also partly about breaking the rules, so here we are :)
> The implementation of the law was controversial. The advertising industry took it worst. Many of the graffiti images which had brought the city an international reputation for artistic innovation were destroyed and others badly damaged, including the officially approved 680-meter-long mural painted by the grafiteiros Os Gêmeos, Nunca and Nina along the 23 de Maio expressway. At the same time the artists' work was being celebrated in the Street Art exhibition at Tate Modern Gallery in London, with large-scale works by Os Gêmeos and Nunca decorating the Tate Modern's external walls. This international recognition of the significance of the artists' work led to a re-evaluation in São Paulo of the importance of street art and the impact of the law. Following a public debate on the subject of what constituted art a registry of street art in São Paulo meriting protection was established by the city.
I'm glad to hear they managed to find a good balance between forbidding advertisement (which the intent of the law seems to be about, not more general "anti-visual pollution") and keeping celebrated artist's artwork around instead of destroying it.
As a paulista, I actually like street graffiti in big cities, a lot of times I don't think they look ugly at all. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I guess.
I think that skate park is even better with street graffiti. If I see a skate park like that one with no graffiti or any art whatsoever It'll just look bland, boring and ugly. The graffiti gives it beauty and personality, especially since it is very tied to skate culture.
I have the same feeling when seeing a dense metropolitan São Paulo center with tall buildings. It might not be pretty in every building, especially residential areas, for sure, but none at all is really ugly and bland. For my paulista heart, a lot of graffiti is what gives the city (or rather, state) its charm.
“Pixo, present in most buildings found in deprived areas of São Paulo, was considered to be a major form of visual pollution by the participants: ‘visual pollution is a visual intervention that shouldn’t be there…like pixo, graffiti not so much, but pixo I think it is horrible.’”
People deserve to be free from such ugliness in their environment.
The story of the High Line in NYC is pretty similar, Burnside in Portland and FDR in Philly.. you can just do things! (Except in the UK, where you can't.)
This reminded the movie Ikiru (いきる), basically a elder discovered he will die and after some time he finds a purpose to its meaningless life, transform a wasteland into a playground.
All these stories have one thing in common: be obsessed with something that will improve other people's life.
I find the idea of planting trees ironic. It would seem to me the better aim would be identifying the issue as to why native plants are not already reproducing successfully, and then fix it. Plants are quite good at reproducing themselves, even if not in the immediate area.
What? No. Plants colonize new areas in complex succession sequences that require hundreds of years to play out. It might start with grasses, then shrubs, then dense stands of trees that die off and are replaced by stands of other trees... maybe there's a fire that needs to happen in between... and let me remind you that a "city park" is not exactly a natural formation anyway.
If you want a park in 30-50 years, you need to plant trees and design it with specific public-use objectives in mind.
Agreed and I think ecological succession is often underappreciated. In secondary succession an ecosystem typically has a deep soil seed bank[0] to draw from. If a plot of land has been ravaged by human development and then abandoned, that may be absent and some human intervention can totally speed things along
> It would seem to me the better aim would be identifying the issue as to why native plants are not already reproducing successfully
I live nearby. The issue is: it's located between two lanes of an avenue in a densely populated neighborhood of the largest city in americas. Imagine opening a 100m wide strip of grass in manhattan, you won't expect it to naturally turn into a forest. Same here.
My family has volunteered a few times to spend a day planting trees on farmland given over to conservation in Australia. It’s good fun and very sociable. There’d be organisations that do this in many countries.
I wanted to copy and paste the name of the park from the Times of India article so I could see the location in Google Maps, but the Times of India injects their URL into anything you try to copy. Such antisocial behavior. And I can't believe that browsers (Firefox in my case) even permit this. Is there ever a legitimate web-design reason to override copy or Ctrl^C?
It's slightly annoying that it literally says in the article that he has a photo album showing the growth of the area over time, yet the article chooses to use an AI-generated image at the top instead to depict that. An AI-generated image that looks like shit. What a way to represent this man's incredible accomplishment.
I am happy I always read some HN comments before clicking on the OP link. I can save time. We should plant trees everywhere in the world, that's one of the great thing we can do for this planet and thus for us.
I notice it ALL the time. Do people really find it nice to use an AI generated image instead of using a real picture in reporting? Our taste is going down every single day it feels like.
Since there were no public domain images to use, it was deemed more ecological to generate one with AI than fly a reporter to Sao Paolo and snap a few photos.
I don't think anyone finds this specially nice or compelling, even the people implementing or asking for it.
The usage of AI here is just a way of doing things for cheap to satisfy some sort of minimal requirement in the content, probably something SEO related, or just content padding.
This is what the whole AI transformation is about: ticking boxes for cheap.
This is Times of India. Shortened as "ToI," and we here in India gracefully append "let" to it (well earned and established moniker). (And no, the printed edition's paper quality isn't suitable for "that" purpose.)
There are a few one man army like this.
Dashrath Manjhi is best known for carving a 110-metre-long (360 ft), 9.1-metre-wide (30 ft), and 7.7-metre-deep (25 ft) path through a ridge of hills using only a hammer and a chisel, because his wife fell and died from injuries due to the ridge blocking easy access to a nearby hospital on time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashrath_Manjhi
> path through a ridge of hills using only a hammer and a chisel
I know you put the numbers and everything, but I didn't quite grasp just what a monumentous task this was until I saw the image of the "path through a ridge": https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Link_between_Ghivra_...
It is absolutely bananas (and wonderful!) what a single human can achieve with love, passion and determination.
I echo that sentiment but oppose the positive adjectives tied to his motivation. Rather I believe can be at our best when motivated by our dark emotions towards positive actions: Grief, rage, madness.
Mr. Manjhi was compelled to this momentous thing after his world was torn apart by it. He persevered while the very people whose lives and whose children's lives he was improving mocked him. He worked for 20 years compelled by his demons and the universe is better off for it. I hope destroying the mountain gave him peace.
I dunno. Grief, rage and madness can only take you so far. The care and compassion for other human beings is what makes you continue. I don't think he'd be able to hammer down such a path for the duration of 20+ years unless he was deeply passionate about preventing the same issue for others in the future, even if they mocked and taunted him at the time.
He got some support too, later: (from the Wikipedia article)
"though most villagers taunted me at first, there were quite a few who lent me support later by giving me food and helping me buy my tools"
No one wants to be the one that dances first, no one wants to be the person that dances last
Grief, at least, is not necessarily a dark emotion. It is an inevitable part of love, which is itself almost always full of good and bad emotions.
"Misery is wasted on the miserable." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQTbkEeCTeM
It has Google Streetview! https://maps.app.goo.gl/5bNdpnHTEjehj1kV8
It feels great to see this kind of story. We're all suffering from this (false) idea that we can't do anything, things are too bad, somebody else has done it before, or somebody else will do it. The fact is, humanity is pulled forward by people like this, who find their goal and don't let it go.
We need this right now, we're stepping into a pretty dark century, we're probably going to lose millions or billions of people to the effects of climate change, and we need every little bit of hope we can muster and build up.
Go plant an oak tree. Not in theory, not a big plan for a monumental effort, just plant an oak tree. They survive for many lives of men and are a cornerstone for feeding the entire ecosystem. If you can't plant one where you're supposed to, plant one where you're not. It takes an afternoon not a lifetime.
Where I am white oak grows by the hundreds of thousands. I see new seedlings ever summer but I would estimate only about 3-5% get past that seedling stage. All that to say that an afternoon of work isn’t enough, if you want to grow a tree you need to follow up on it for atleast a year or more.
Folks might also be interested in San Fransisco's own "Tenderloin National Forest"
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/tenderloin-national-fore...
Is there some abandoned parking lot in your town? Get some friends together with pick axes for a depaving party. Or, for something a bit less dedicated, craft some seed bombs (mix dirt and clay together into small cookie balls with native seeds in them) and throw them into the abandoned area. Boom, wildflowers, then pollinators, insects, birds, voila.
> Or, for something a bit less dedicated, craft some seed bombs (mix dirt and clay together into small cookie balls with native seeds in them) and throw them into the abandoned area
This is a lot of fun (albeit illegal in many places) to spruce up somewhat dead-looking villages and towns. Traveling with a passenger that holds a sack of seeds out the window is another way :) Do make sure you're actually using seeds of plants from naturally occurring species though, so you don't go around introducing new and invasive species that could potentially be harmful to the native species.
I'm very interested in "seed bombs". We have to plant something like one trillion trees just to keep up with losses from forest fires. Imagine the economics, supply chain, science, innovation, etc required to plant one trillion trees and all their supporting shrubs and ground cover.
My impression is they work well enough for flowers. I have no idea about shrubs or ground cover.
I'm aware there's some efforts to seed bomb trees. There was one such experiment in Discovery Park Seattle WA. I chatted with some people from WSU, Tacoma Tree Project, or something like that. That particular experiment tried using drones over a small plot. None of the seeds sprouted. (Sorry, I don't have more details.)
This was adjacent to some other experiments. eg Tacoma Tree Project & WSU are investigating why native redcedars are now perishing faster, and maybe find ways to mitigate the loss. I think there's about a dozen research plots scattered around the Puget Sound.
I don't spend much time following forest restoration "news". But I do know that it's a nascent industry that'll become huge.
Probably the toughest part of "reforestation" like that isn't the "planting of trees" process, but you have to actively monitor them and make sure they actually work out and survive. A bit amount of these enormous "plant trees over large areas" efforts fail simply because they didn't even come back once to actually maintain the plants until they're strong enough to actually form a ecosystem.
So sure, just planting one trillion trees is a huge task, but making sure they actually survive and grow to big strong trees to make a forest, will be short of impossible. Better to aim for smaller patches that can naturally spread over time as it matures by itself.
Here's a pretty short and sweet video talking more about the maintenance and actual survival of the trees for more than just photo-ops: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5ufbMgxN04
Absolutely. And those failures sour support for further efforts. Vicious cycle.
Reforesting (rewilding) is farming and gardening. Proactive ecological management. Per "You broke it, you bought it." We are recreating forests. In my area, we have to restart the forest life cycle. The correct plants in the correct order in the correct habitat. If we leave it to "nature", the blackberries and alder would choke off everything else.
Plus, there's ever more evidence that humans have long reshaped (managed) ecosystems. Like the controlled burns the indigeous people of America did. On a contintal scale!
Terrific share, thanks. Will binge soonest.
I volunteer at greencitypartnership.org, leading a crew restoring a large park.
I've been wondering how we might build a community of urban forest hackers. To share tips and info, how to deal with vandals, help each other make yard signs, how to transport water over trail, etc.
I would love to know better ways for breaking up a parking lot.
I opened up 4 separate spaces for tree planters. I started with pickaxe and pry rod (nicknamed The Persuader by its owner). That's real work. Next, I borrowed a Makita rotary hammer from our local tool library. Very helpful!
My "boss" has a protocol to improve plant survival and reduce labor: pile up 10" - 12" of mulch. If my trees survive this summer I'll be very happy.
So, my boss's teams use the "too much mulch" hack, to great success.
But her innovation is slow to spread. Because our teams only meet yearly (some of us do float around to other job sites, which is great). But we have no contact with other teams, other cities, other regions. And seeing is believing. (I too was very skeptical and reluctant to schlep that much more mulch.)
And I'm sure someone somewhere has some labor saving hacks for tackling Himalayan blackberry. Once removed, my boss's hack is to use pinebark to prevent their return. Works great! (Another innovation slow to spread.) But oh boy removing invasives like blackberries, english ivy, scotch broom, etc currently requires a lot of labor.
(I know about super steam lances. Notion is to cook root balls from the inside out. I'm still trying to find a unit to experiment with. I heard there's one in Oregon, that I might go visit.)
> And I'm sure someone somewhere has some labor saving hacks for tackling Himalayan blackberry.
Goats. It's not labor eliminating, you've got to set up and maintain temporary fencing, and you've got to remove plants that dangerous for goats to eat, and you need to take care of the goats generally. But, they can really help get things under control.
Hélio da Silva, o plantador de árvores
Looks like his real name (da Silva is the most common surname in Brazil) and nominative determinism: "Sun of the Forest". Silvicultura.
I'm trying to get some trees to grow - it's a lot of work: Hélio has spent huge amounts of time and money on it (average wage might be USD1000/month and article says he was spending 7000 a year and if that was in the past then amount is a lot more in today's dollars).
A similar story to Wendy's Secret Garden in Sydney, Australia?
https://www.wendyssecretgarden.org.au/
After her husband's death in 1992, Wendy Whiteley took to cleaning up an unused railway easement behind her house. It turned into a substantial garden. The railways refused to guarantee its future (it was on their land), but in 2015 it became an official park. Well worth a visit on a sunny afternoon if you are in Sydney.
I think this is a great story.
For those who aren't aware, that strip of land is probably some of the most valuable residential land on earth.
HK: $200,000+/ sq m (for premium properties on The Peak)
Monoco: $56,000/sq m
Milson's Point (next to Wendy's Secret Garden): $33,000/sq m
Pacific Heights, SF: $22,000/sq m
(According to my/ChattyG's calcs)
The battle for Wendy's garden will pale into insignificance compared to the battle for a "Sydney Harbour High Line".
https://www.sydneyharbourhighline.org.au/
In 2023 the NSW government committed to turn the adjacent harbourfront railway line into a public linear park. The next government shredded the agreement and has announced it wants housing everywhere. IMO it's prime land that is too valuable to be privately owned and should be publicly accessible. Anyone who disagrees should go for a harbourfront walk on a sunny afternoon. (Billionaires who's takeaway from the experience would be to buy the land for their own use don't count.)
The same battle played out in Cremorne in the 1890's. Today the park is one of Sydney's jewels.
https://www.bonditomanly.com/bondi-to-manly-walk-blog/2020/1...
There's a children's book that I've been reading to my daughter called The Curious Garden about a boy gardening on abandoned tracks. It's a reference to the High Line, of course, but it's interesting there's more than one like this. I suppose the end of the age of passenger rail in these countries offered opportunities like this.
This is the type of thing that the Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't guy and his friends refer to as "Pre-Legal activities".
> He believed that if he planted native species, the soil would recognize them and vice versa, quite like something etched in memory.
why does reading this feel so good?
Amazing guy. I like the part where he was not deterred by the (stereotypical human garbage) business guy that kept destroying the plants so his hoarding of the land didn't get in the way.
Humboldt redwoods state park, and 'avenue of the giants' wouldn't exist if not for the tireless efforts of environmentalists.
I often speak to people online who look at society and want to tear it down and start again. I've never understood that attitude.
Growth out of decay takes work, but it takes considerably less work than accelerated decay and then trying to start again when there is nothing fertile left to build on.
I like this article because it demonstrates that there is always fertile land and opportunities where people are not looking.
The general direction of society is still immense destruction of the biosphere. That doesn't change because you can make conditions better locally and in the short term, especially when such actions don't go against the general momentum of society. The fact is, there's often conflation with improving individual lives and conditions (the warm fuzzy feeling) with actually doing real good when it comes to our impact on this planet. The former is not necessarily related to the latter, especially since the system has just the right amount of leeway to allow people to feel better and let off steam without really changing the ultimate long-term direction.
Even if there are many opportunities as you say, if the general momentum of society has three destructive acts for every one good one and that doesn't change, then society is still as destructive as ever.
For instance, for people who care deeply about nature and the non-human aspects of the planet, human society is incredibly destructive and hasn't done much to change that direction, regardless of how many feel-good projects have occurred.
Precivilisational lifestyles can only carry a small fraction of our current population. To a significant degree we're locked into this, and have been for thousands of years.
Only hundreds. Two centuries ago, the total human population was about 5% of today's population.
You'd still get regional overpopulation issues. E.g. the Justinian plague in 541 AD. That's still far away from mobile hunter gatherer tribes with densities of a few dozen people per 1-100 km^2.
Homo sapiens is 300,000 years old, Homo erectus 2 million years. Modern civilization might not last on the order of 10,000 years, industrial civilization maybe not even 500 - or perhaps "forever", if we make it to controllable runaway technological improvement?
We have more forests today in Europe than we did 400 years ago.
Hence the desire to tear it down.
Conclusion: Stop planting trees. Be sure to get your daily doomscrolling in, though.
The perception is that society itself is the roadblock to improving society. For example American "democracy". It's easy to imagine things could improve faster if Congress and the executive were simply deleted overnight.
Replaced by what exactly?
The US has one of the highest median incomes in the world adjusted for cost of living:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/incomes-across-distributi...
The fraction of the US population living on $30 or less per day is comparable to Sweden:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/poverty-share-on-less-tha...
Our education system also looks pretty good in international comparisons:
https://xcancel.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/17320875113279081...
News focuses on the negatives, but we're doing reasonably well in absolute terms. Big random changes are likely to cause regression to the international mean, which is generally below the US on most metrics.
> I've never understood that attitude.
It's because the powers that be do not want to make the society we want. They want to make the society they want, often at our expense. Therefore they must be torn down.
> Growth out of decay takes work, but it takes considerably less work than accelerated decay and then trying to start again when there is nothing fertile left to build on.
Indeed. This is why conservation of habitats (however small, or degraded) makes more sense than trying to restore already-destroyed areas.
That said: if I could pick an area to work on for myself, I'd go for a stretch of wasteland. Why? Because the before-after difference would be more stark (read: more satisfying). And heavily degraded lands are in muuuch bigger supply than little-degraded areas.
More important would be a general willingness of the locals to not interfere with restauration efforts.
> I like this article because it demonstrates that there is always fertile land and opportunities where people are not looking.
Stronger: "fertile" isn't strictly needed. Fertile soil can be built - if necessary, starting from 'scratch' (yes it does take time). Basically: grow stuff (anything is better than nothing), mulch (bio-waste is free), keep doing so, and whatever soil you started with, will improve over time.
As the soil improves, plants grow better & other life returns.
"View this post on Instagram" No thanks, put into the article.
If you have an account, you can follow his profile and support his work. If you don't have, you can see the images anyway.
If the author simply put the image into the article it would only be sending kudos to Hélio instead of supporting him. Of course a single follow or profile view is not that much, but it helps to spread his work
It's the asymmetry at play. It takes a few minutes to fell a tree. While it takes decades to grow. To grow an actually fully grown 100 year old tree is a multigenerational project.
How could you foster such things? There's always short-sighted people and generations, it's close to impossible to make this happen. I've seen it personally when relatives have felled century old yard trees planted by our ancestors, for no practical purpose. There is at least one foundation that attempts to preserve forest, with strict rules, which has received already some donated forests. But who knows how that can be corrupted over the time forest actually takes to grow.
Trees don't live forever. A fully grown cottonwood tree (I'm picking on example I know of, others are similar, but different in details) at 100 years old is impressive, but that is near the typical lifespan and so at 120 years old that tree is dead of old age (in ideal conditions they live to 400 years, but 100 years is above average in nature). Forests are a constant cycle of new trees growing.
Forest fires are a very important part of the forest cycle in many places. So be careful about funding efforts to fight forest fires - often the correct answer is to light more of them (see a forester for details of your local forest).
Sure. Many pines can survive forest fires. But some other trees don't or are short lived anyway. I never suggested trees live forever. But 100 years is not a long time for many.
Typifies the old "you don't plant trees for you but you plant them for those who come after you."
The nerd version of this is Larry Finger. After retiring from physics and software development, he dedicated his life to open source wifi drivers for Linux, contributing over 1500 patches to various drivers to get a wide variety of hardware to work under Linux. It was a really thankless task to figure out undocumented hardware. He passed mid-2024, contributing late into his life.
How did he stay motivated?
The Man Who Planted Trees
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY_zuNtf3_g
This is so important, especially in São Paulo. This city has 100000 homeless people living there. Imagine the population of a medium-sized city living with no roof over their head in a city with a population 100x that big.
Why hasn't the government had them killed, like most cities do?
Sorry, what?
Most governments kill their homeless people. Why hasn't this one?
Ugh, graffiti is really a crime against the built environment: https://offloadmedia.feverup.com/saopaulosecreto.com/wp-cont....
I've never been, but I remember they had a big push some years ago to ban outdoor advertising to reduce "visual pollution." Sao Paulo looks so clean and beautiful from Google Street View--it makes the ugliness of the graffiti really stand out. I can't comprehend the nasty mind that decides to pollute other people's environment like that.
My hot take: as long as the artists (or vandals I suppose, depending on your point of view) are talented, I don’t actually mind.
It adds a “lived-in” character to the space which I quite like.
Defacing small business owners’ property is obviously a dick move but if you’re at an abandoned warehouse, skatepark, or waterfront, I say go nuts.
Defacing public property is worse. It's toxic individualism and self-expression. If people wanted to put up a mural, they'd collectively vote to do so. In a proper society, graffiti artists would face public punishment from the collective.
Is it really toxic individualism if there’s a (mostly healthy) subculture dedicated to it, though?
In a “proper society” we could pass around the talking stick to reach consensus on a whole grab bag of things.
I’m not a tagger myself, but I do think there is something poetically democratic about people participating in the public forum in this way. At least, beyond the four-letter words and flying dicks, anyways.
Yes, because the subculture doesn't represent the majority. It's the opposite of "democratic"--it's a small group of people imposing their aesthetic on what you acknowledge is a "public form"--without the consent of the public.
"Democracy" isn't about individuals or small groups making their voices heard. That might be a necessary factor, but it's not the purpose. Democracy is about the majority having the right to create the kind of society they want to live in. Maybe people in Sao Paulo like the graffiti (or maybe not, since the ban on other types of visual pollution seems popular). But it's the majority's decision to make.
It's a skatepark, skateparks have graffiti, it's art live with it
No, entropy is a choice: https://www.timeout.com/tokyo/sport-and-fitness/hlna-skygard...
That sea of undecorated concrete sure is ugly. I'll take the painted skate park in Sao Paulo. Different strokes...
Right? This feels like complaining about people kneeling at the church.
Eh, if anything, "human built drab concrete environments" is exactly what graffiti should cover and be used to fight, add a bit of color to life. Don't like it? Don't make it so boring and dull in the first place.
People who graffiti trees, stones and other natural elements are fucking cunts though, ruining nature's art with their shitty tags, that's really horrible behavior.
Lots of people like the clean, subdued aesthetic. If they wanted "color" that's what they'd build. It's not for taggers to decide how much or little "color" a city should have.
> Lots of people like the clean, subdued aesthetic
And lots of people feels like it's a oppressive aesthetic. Not sure I've ever heard the concrete jungles of a city called "clean and subdued aesthetic", so cheers for this new perspective! The very same counter-culture that likes to color things, is also partly about breaking the rules, so here we are :)
> And lots of people feels like it's an oppressive aesthetic.
And when they’re in charge they can decorate however they want. They don’t get to impose their aesthetic preferences on public spaces without consent.
> Not sure I've ever heard the concrete jungles of a city called "clean and subdued aesthetic"
“Clean City” is literally the name of São Paulo’s anti-visual pollution law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa
> The very same counter-culture that likes to color things, is also partly about breaking the rules
Of course they hate the rules. The rules are there to protect normal people from them.
Fitting page :)
> The implementation of the law was controversial. The advertising industry took it worst. Many of the graffiti images which had brought the city an international reputation for artistic innovation were destroyed and others badly damaged, including the officially approved 680-meter-long mural painted by the grafiteiros Os Gêmeos, Nunca and Nina along the 23 de Maio expressway. At the same time the artists' work was being celebrated in the Street Art exhibition at Tate Modern Gallery in London, with large-scale works by Os Gêmeos and Nunca decorating the Tate Modern's external walls. This international recognition of the significance of the artists' work led to a re-evaluation in São Paulo of the importance of street art and the impact of the law. Following a public debate on the subject of what constituted art a registry of street art in São Paulo meriting protection was established by the city.
I'm glad to hear they managed to find a good balance between forbidding advertisement (which the intent of the law seems to be about, not more general "anti-visual pollution") and keeping celebrated artist's artwork around instead of destroying it.
As a paulista, I actually like street graffiti in big cities, a lot of times I don't think they look ugly at all. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I guess.
I think that skate park is even better with street graffiti. If I see a skate park like that one with no graffiti or any art whatsoever It'll just look bland, boring and ugly. The graffiti gives it beauty and personality, especially since it is very tied to skate culture.
I have the same feeling when seeing a dense metropolitan São Paulo center with tall buildings. It might not be pretty in every building, especially residential areas, for sure, but none at all is really ugly and bland. For my paulista heart, a lot of graffiti is what gives the city (or rather, state) its charm.
There's a movie that might provide you some understanding. Pixo [0].
0: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3135326/
Residents don’t seem to like it: https://toxicnews.org/2017/05/16/translations-of-sao-paulos-...
“Pixo, present in most buildings found in deprived areas of São Paulo, was considered to be a major form of visual pollution by the participants: ‘visual pollution is a visual intervention that shouldn’t be there…like pixo, graffiti not so much, but pixo I think it is horrible.’”
People deserve to be free from such ugliness in their environment.
Related a recommend this documentary by Sebastião Salgado, The Salt of the Earth
Another related Brazilian interesting fact is that almost all greenery in Rio de Janeiro is replanted, since must was coffee plantations.
The last emperor of Brazil decided to replant it all, since it was affecting wellbeing and water supply to the city at the time
The story of the High Line in NYC is pretty similar, Burnside in Portland and FDR in Philly.. you can just do things! (Except in the UK, where you can't.)
I've always admired Madrid's Rio and also Valencia. Adding trees to urban life == massive social win.
Obsessive fanaticism is the key to a life not wasted.
Right, all these non-obsessed fanatics wasted their life. And don't get me even started on non-fanatics!
But you can't just trick yourself into obsessively fanaticising something random just so you won't feel your life is wasted.
This reminded the movie Ikiru (いきる), basically a elder discovered he will die and after some time he finds a purpose to its meaningless life, transform a wasteland into a playground.
All these stories have one thing in common: be obsessed with something that will improve other people's life.
I find the idea of planting trees ironic. It would seem to me the better aim would be identifying the issue as to why native plants are not already reproducing successfully, and then fix it. Plants are quite good at reproducing themselves, even if not in the immediate area.
What? No. Plants colonize new areas in complex succession sequences that require hundreds of years to play out. It might start with grasses, then shrubs, then dense stands of trees that die off and are replaced by stands of other trees... maybe there's a fire that needs to happen in between... and let me remind you that a "city park" is not exactly a natural formation anyway.
If you want a park in 30-50 years, you need to plant trees and design it with specific public-use objectives in mind.
Agreed and I think ecological succession is often underappreciated. In secondary succession an ecosystem typically has a deep soil seed bank[0] to draw from. If a plot of land has been ravaged by human development and then abandoned, that may be absent and some human intervention can totally speed things along
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soil_seed_bank
What do you think botanists and ecologists were doing before large-scale tree planting began?
> It would seem to me the better aim would be identifying the issue as to why native plants are not already reproducing successfully
I live nearby. The issue is: it's located between two lanes of an avenue in a densely populated neighborhood of the largest city in americas. Imagine opening a 100m wide strip of grass in manhattan, you won't expect it to naturally turn into a forest. Same here.
Another deforesting story/method: the Miyawaki Method, was developed in the 1970s by botanist Akira Miyawaki.
https://www.sugiproject.com/blog/miyawaki-method-for-creatin...
love this. feel like in my country it would be labeled some kind of 'hazard' because it wasnt contract work and then it will be pulled out again (:
According to the article, Hélio’s work was also purposefully destroyed several times
ive had hard time finding place to plant trees, can someone share if they of any 'forgotten lands'
There's a subreddit about that, https://old.reddit.com/r/GuerrillaGardening/
Basically if you don't own land, you can plant stuff on.. land you don't own
My family has volunteered a few times to spend a day planting trees on farmland given over to conservation in Australia. It’s good fun and very sociable. There’d be organisations that do this in many countries.
Time of India is such a shit news source that it should be banned from HN.
The ToI article is dated: 2026-08-01
In the article it says:
I Google searched for "Forbes India, in 2003, Helio da Silva" and found the original here: https://www.forbesindia.com/article/lifes/crazy-tree-planter...
Date? 2024-09-30
I guess ToI is having summer interns use LLMs to summarise old newspaper articles to produce more AI slop. Yay.
Your Forbes India link says "Without any formal authorization, Da Silva started in 2003"
I wanted to copy and paste the name of the park from the Times of India article so I could see the location in Google Maps, but the Times of India injects their URL into anything you try to copy. Such antisocial behavior. And I can't believe that browsers (Firefox in my case) even permit this. Is there ever a legitimate web-design reason to override copy or Ctrl^C?
Most of the time the legitimat web-design reason for user hostile behaviour is marketing/monetizing/spyware.
Morally legitimate, you ask? :)
Love seeing stuff like this
Better article with good pictures : https://thursd.com/articles/helio-da-silva-sao-paulo-tiquati...
We tried that but then someone pointed out this one which is even better (and probably the most original source): https://saopaulosecreto.com/en/tiquatira-linear-park-en/
It's slightly annoying that it literally says in the article that he has a photo album showing the growth of the area over time, yet the article chooses to use an AI-generated image at the top instead to depict that. An AI-generated image that looks like shit. What a way to represent this man's incredible accomplishment.
You might like https://saopaulosecreto.com/en/tiquatira-linear-park-en/ better.
Mods should replace the OP link from India times with this saopaulosecreto link instead
Updated, thanks!
Originally submitted URL: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/rest-of-world/in-2...
I am happy I always read some HN comments before clicking on the OP link. I can save time. We should plant trees everywhere in the world, that's one of the great thing we can do for this planet and thus for us.
This!!!
I notice it ALL the time. Do people really find it nice to use an AI generated image instead of using a real picture in reporting? Our taste is going down every single day it feels like.
High tech, low life.
Since there were no public domain images to use, it was deemed more ecological to generate one with AI than fly a reporter to Sao Paolo and snap a few photos.
I don't think anyone finds this specially nice or compelling, even the people implementing or asking for it.
The usage of AI here is just a way of doing things for cheap to satisfy some sort of minimal requirement in the content, probably something SEO related, or just content padding.
This is what the whole AI transformation is about: ticking boxes for cheap.
Now I remember why I have the site in my adblock list. AI Illustrations are an immediate block for me.
This is Times of India. Shortened as "ToI," and we here in India gracefully append "let" to it (well earned and established moniker). (And no, the printed edition's paper quality isn't suitable for "that" purpose.)
AI-generated image → instant churn
Which of the images do you think that are AI-generated? If I didn't miss something, all of them are from the real place.