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.
São Paulo resident transforms degraded area into urban forest
41–50 of 129 posts
Re: São Paulo resident transforms degraded area into urban forest
#42ive 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
Re: São Paulo resident transforms degraded area into urban forest
#43This 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?
Re: São Paulo resident transforms degraded area into urban forest
#44I 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 loo…
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.
Re: São Paulo resident transforms degraded area into urban forest
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
Re: São Paulo resident transforms degraded area into urban forest
#46The 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?
Re: São Paulo resident transforms degraded area into urban forest
#47Obsessive fanaticism is the key to a life not wasted.
But you can't just trick yourself into obsessively fanaticising something random just so you won't feel your life is wasted.
Re: São Paulo resident transforms degraded area into urban forest
#48There 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.
Re: São Paulo resident transforms degraded area into urban forest
#49ive had hard time finding place to plant trees, can someone share if they of any 'forgotten lands'
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.
Re: São Paulo resident transforms degraded area into urban forest
#50love 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