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thelastgallon 7 hours ago [-]
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
embedding-shape 3 hours ago [-]
> path through a ridge of hills using only a hammer and a chisel
It is absolutely bananas (and wonderful!) what a single human can achieve with love, passion and determination.
zemvpferreira 2 hours ago [-]
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.
embedding-shape 1 hours ago [-]
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.
KajMagnus 14 minutes ago [-]
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"
khalic 3 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
Folks might also be interested in San Fransisco's own "Tenderloin National Forest"
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.
embedding-shape 1 hours ago [-]
> 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.
rbreve 12 minutes ago [-]
Related a recommend this documentary by Sebastião Salgado, The Salt of the Earth
robocat 5 days ago [-]
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).
Gravityloss 53 minutes ago [-]
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.
mirmor23 1 hours ago [-]
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.
femto 8 hours ago [-]
A similar story to Wendy's Secret Garden in Sydney, Australia?
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.
nl 7 hours ago [-]
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)
femto 6 hours ago [-]
The battle for Wendy's garden will pale into insignificance compared to the battle for a "Sydney Harbour High Line".
In 2023 the NSW government committed to turn the adjacent harbourfront railway line into a public linear park. The next government shredded the agreement and has announced it wants housing everywhere. IMO it's prime land that is too valuable to be privately owned and should be publicly accessible. Anyone who disagrees should go for a harbourfront walk on a sunny afternoon. (Billionaires who's takeaway from the experience would be to buy the land for their own use don't count.)
The same battle played out in Cremorne in the 1890's. Today the park is one of Sydney's jewels.
This is the type of thing that the Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't guy and his friends refer to as "Pre-Legal activities".
arjie 7 hours ago [-]
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.
igleria 49 minutes ago [-]
> 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?
tim-projects 4 hours ago [-]
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.
inigyou 2 hours ago [-]
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.
0xDEAFBEAD 34 minutes ago [-]
Replaced by what exactly?
The US has one of the highest median incomes in the world adjusted for cost of living:
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.
vouaobrasil 3 hours ago [-]
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.
0xDEAFBEAD 27 minutes ago [-]
Conclusion: Stop planting trees. Be sure to get your daily doomscrolling in, though.
RGamma 3 hours ago [-]
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.
inigyou 2 hours ago [-]
Only hundreds. Two centuries ago, the total human population was about 5% of today's population.
RGamma 16 minutes ago [-]
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?
IMHO civilization in some form can always survive somewhere even with global warming and resource exhaustion, perhaps until a true extinction level event.
weinzierl 4 hours ago [-]
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.
inigyou 2 hours ago [-]
Why hasn't the government had them killed, like most cities do?
thataccount 6 days ago [-]
Typifies the old "you don't plant trees for you but you plant them for those who come after you."
fragmede 2 hours ago [-]
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.
inigyou 2 hours ago [-]
How did he stay motivated?
oatmeal1 6 hours ago [-]
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.
Sha1rholder 6 hours ago [-]
What do you think botanists and ecologists were doing before large-scale tree planting began?
matherial 6 hours ago [-]
What? No. Plants colonize new areas in complex succession sequences that require hundreds of years to play out. It might start with grasses, then shrubs, then dense stands of trees that die off and are replaced by stands of other trees... maybe there's a fire that needs to happen in between... and let me remind you that a "city park" is not exactly a natural formation anyway.
If you want a park in 30-50 years, you need to plant trees and design it with specific public-use objectives in mind.
culi 5 hours ago [-]
Agreed and I think ecological succession is often underappreciated. In secondary succession an ecosystem typically has a deep soil seed bank[0] to draw from. If a plot of land has been ravaged by human development and then abandoned, that may be absent and some human intervention can totally speed things along
Basically if you don't own land, you can plant stuff on.. land you don't own
prawn 2 hours ago [-]
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.
saidnooneever 6 hours ago [-]
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 (:
namenotrequired 2 hours ago [-]
According to the article, Hélio’s work was also purposefully destroyed several times
throwaway2037 7 hours ago [-]
Time of India is such a shit news source that it should be banned from HN.
The ToI article is dated: 2026-08-01
In the article it says:
> According to Forbes India, in 2003, Helio da Silva...
I guess ToI is having summer interns use LLMs to summarise old newspaper articles to produce more AI slop. Yay.
alister 5 hours ago [-]
I wanted to copy and paste the name of the park from the Times of India article so I could see the location in Google Maps, but the Times of India injects their URL into anything you try to copy. Such antisocial behavior. And I can't believe that browsers (Firefox in my case) even permit this. Is there ever a legitimate web-design reason to override copy or Ctrl^C?
smallerize 7 hours ago [-]
Your Forbes India link says "Without any formal authorization, Da Silva started in 2003"
1saadcodes 8 hours ago [-]
Love seeing stuff like this
HeartStrings 6 hours ago [-]
Obsessive fanaticism is the key to a life not wasted.
smallnix 3 hours ago [-]
Right, all these non-obsessed fanatics wasted their life. And don't get me even started on non-fanatics!
inigyou 2 hours ago [-]
But you can't just trick yourself into obsessively fanaticising something random just so you won't feel your life is wasted.
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.
I am happy I always read some HN comments before clicking on the OP link. I can save time. We should plant trees everywhere in the world, that's one of the great thing we can do for this planet and thus for us.
nemo_captain 5 hours ago [-]
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.
necovek 3 hours ago [-]
Since there were no public domain images to use, it was deemed more ecological to generate one with AI than fly a reporter to Sao Paolo and snap a few photos.
SXX 4 hours ago [-]
High tech, low life.
crossroadsguy 4 hours ago [-]
This is Times of India. Shortened as "ToI," and we here in India gracefully append "let" to it (well earned and established moniker). (And no, the printed edition's paper quality isn't suitable for "that" purpose.)
tvbusy 5 hours ago [-]
Now I remember why I have the site in my adblock list. AI Illustrations are an immediate block for me.
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 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.
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.
"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"
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Humboldt redwoods state park, and 'avenue of the giants' wouldn't exist if not for the tireless efforts of environmentalists.
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.
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)
https://www.sydneyharbourhighline.org.au/
In 2023 the NSW government committed to turn the adjacent harbourfront railway line into a public linear park. The next government shredded the agreement and has announced it wants housing everywhere. IMO it's prime land that is too valuable to be privately owned and should be publicly accessible. Anyone who disagrees should go for a harbourfront walk on a sunny afternoon. (Billionaires who's takeaway from the experience would be to buy the land for their own use don't count.)
The same battle played out in Cremorne in the 1890's. Today the park is one of Sydney's jewels.
https://www.bonditomanly.com/bondi-to-manly-walk-blog/2020/1...
why does reading this feel so good?
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.
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.
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.
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?
IMHO civilization in some form can always survive somewhere even with global warming and resource exhaustion, perhaps until a true extinction level event.
If you want a park in 30-50 years, you need to plant trees and design it with specific public-use objectives in mind.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soil_seed_bank
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY_zuNtf3_g
Basically if you don't own land, you can plant stuff on.. land you don't own
The ToI article is dated: 2026-08-01
In the article it says:
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? 2024-09-30
I guess ToI is having summer interns use LLMs to summarise old newspaper articles to produce more AI slop. Yay.
Originally submitted URL: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/rest-of-world/in-2...
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.