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São Paulo resident transforms degraded area into urban forest

saopaulosecreto.com

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Re: São Paulo resident transforms degraded area into urban forest

#51

Post by Schlagbohrer »

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.

Re: São Paulo resident transforms degraded area into urban forest

#52

Post by Schlagbohrer »

femto wrote: post #8

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 Syd…

This is the type of thing that the Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't guy and his friends refer to as "Pre-Legal activities".

Re: São Paulo resident transforms degraded area into urban forest

#53

Post by embedding-shape »

zemvpferreira wrote: post #48
embedding-shape wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 compe…

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.

Re: São Paulo resident transforms degraded area into urban forest

#54

Post by embedding-shape »

Schlagbohrer wrote: post #51

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…

> 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.

Re: São Paulo resident transforms degraded area into urban forest

#55

Post by mirmor23 »

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.

Re: São Paulo resident transforms degraded area into urban forest

#57

Post by TitaRusell »

oatmeal1 wrote: post #17

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.

[dead]

Re: São Paulo resident transforms degraded area into urban forest

#58

Post by Gravityloss »

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.

Re: São Paulo resident transforms degraded area into urban forest

#60

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD »

inigyou wrote: post #44
tim-projects wrote: post #30

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 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.

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.

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