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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

#61

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #34
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 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…

Conclusion: Stop planting trees. Be sure to get your daily doomscrolling in, though.

Re: São Paulo resident transforms degraded area into urban forest

#62

Post by RGamma »

inigyou wrote: post #45
RGamma wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Re: São Paulo resident transforms degraded area into urban forest

#63

Post by KajMagnus »

embedding-shape wrote: post #53
zemvpferreira wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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"

Re: São Paulo resident transforms degraded area into urban forest

#66

Post by whstl »

nemo_captain wrote: post #22
Hugsbox wrote: post #5

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.

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.

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.

Re: São Paulo resident transforms degraded area into urban forest

#67

Post by specialist »

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…

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.)

Re: São Paulo resident transforms degraded area into urban forest

#68

Post by embedding-shape »

KajMagnus wrote: post #63
embedding-shape wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Re: São Paulo resident transforms degraded area into urban forest

#69

Post by specialist »

embedding-shape wrote: post #54
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…

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.

Re: São Paulo resident transforms degraded area into urban forest

#70

Post by [deleted] »

khalic wrote: post #36

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 peo…

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