The Nafusa hillside and the start of Friends of the Mountain. Told by Ziad Al-Hamdi (EP 133).
Friends of the Mountain (أصدقاء الجبل) — the reforestation project Ziad founded in the Nafusa range — did not begin with an institution. It began with a small group of friends planting native saplings on a bare hillside in north-western Libya. The first season's planting was, in the scale of the country's deforestation, almost nothing. Ziad treated the scale as the point. The work had to start somewhere, and the somewhere had to be small enough to actually happen.
The project's method is structurally modest. Native species. Slow growth. Repeated returns to the same plots in subsequent seasons to check on what survived. Workshops, in parallel, that teach the local relationship to the land rather than only the act of planting. The reforestation effort is, in Ziad's framing, only half forestry. The other half is civic education: a region learning to recognise its land as a thing it lives with rather than a thing it draws from until the land is gone.
The episode places Friends of the Mountain inside a broader pattern in Ziad's life — the Al-Sadda Tajoura newspaper, the H2O constitutional survey tour, the houseplant workshops. The pattern is the same in each case: small, concrete, repeated work, conducted in the absence of working institutions, that adds up over years into something the institutions would have needed decades to deliver.
The first saplings on the Nafusa hillside are the worked example of the principle. There was no funding round, no ministry, no NGO partnership. There was a hillside, a group of friends, and a season's worth of saplings.
See: Ziad Al-Hamdi