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- Hacker News
- Reminds me of The Man Who Planted Trees: https://vimeo.com/829168309by rubinlinux
- 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.
by Gravityloss - 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).
by bluGill - Typifies the old "you don't plant trees for you but you plant them for those who come after you."by thataccount
- 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.
by tim-projects - Mars has lots of open land
Of course with libertarians, it's never about the purity of thought, just the convenience to their pocketbook
by AtlasBarfed - > 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.
- 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.by inigyou
- 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.
by vouaobrasil - > 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.
by RetroTechie - 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.
by mirmor23 - True, amazing places to visit and pass onto the future generations. Particularly like them right after the rainfall, great spots to checkout.by nmandapa
- > 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?
by igleria - Because it's sublime.by danhdsss
- 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.
by Schlagbohrer - 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.)
by specialist - > 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.
- 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.by fragmede
- How did he stay motivated?by inigyou
- 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.
by femto - This is the type of thing that the Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't guy and his friends refer to as "Pre-Legal activities".by Schlagbohrer
- 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.by arjie
- 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)
by nl - 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).
by robocat - 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.
by khalic - 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.
- 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
- I … feel like this isn’t a feel good story? This man put 22 years of his life into something that could be done is less than a week with explosives/modern machinery?by pm90
- > 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.