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São Paulo resident transforms degraded area into urban forest

São Paulo resident transforms degraded area into urban forest

rmason

Comments (63)

  • Mizza
    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.)
  • thelastgallon
    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
  • khalic
    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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • robocat
    Hélio da Silva, o plantador de árvoresLooks 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).
  • femto
    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.
  • igleria
    > 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?
  • rbreve
    Related a recommend this documentary by Sebastião Salgado, The Salt of the Earth
  • 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.
  • tim-projects
    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.
  • weinzierl
    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.
  • thataccount
    Typifies the old "you don't plant trees for you but you plant them for those who come after you."
  • fragmede
    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.
  • oatmeal1
    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.
  • celias
  • kang
    ive had hard time finding place to plant trees, can someone share if they of any 'forgotten lands'
  • saidnooneever
    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 (:
  • throwaway2037
    Time of India is such a shit news source that it should be banned from HN.The ToI article is dated: 2026-08-01In the article it says: > According to Forbes India, in 2003, Helio da Silva... 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? 2024-09-30I guess ToI is having summer interns use LLMs to summarise old newspaper articles to produce more AI slop. Yay.
  • 1saadcodes
    Love seeing stuff like this
  • HeartStrings
    Obsessive fanaticism is the key to a life not wasted.
  • dzdt
  • Hugsbox
    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.
  • meindnoch
    AI-generated image → instant churn