Episode: 133 — "How to Use Your Time Wisely — Ziad Al-Hamdi" · Full Episode #133
Language: Libyan Arabic
Ziad Al-Hamdi (زياد الحمدي) is a Libyan designer and environmental activist. He is the founder of Friends of the Mountain (أصدقاء الجبل), a reforestation initiative working in the Nafusa Mountains in north-western Libya. He is a co-founder of Al-Sadda Tajoura (الصدى تاجوراء), one of the first independent Libyan newspapers founded after the 2011 revolution, which ran for six months. He also teaches workshops on the care and propagation of houseplants.
Ziad founded Friends of the Mountain as a response to deforestation and ecological neglect in the Nafusa range. The project began with a small group planting native saplings on bare hillside and has built itself into a recurring effort to restore both forest cover and the local relationship to it. He framed the initiative not as charity but as civic infrastructure: the work of teaching a region that its land is something it lives with rather than something it draws from until it is gone.
See: Four Saplings
In 2011, in the months immediately following the revolution, Ziad co-founded a newspaper called Al-Sadda Tajoura. It was one of the first independent local newspapers of the post-Gaddafi period. It ran for six months. He described the experience with the clarity of someone who watched a project succeed at its founding mission and then run out of structural oxygen — a pattern repeated across the post-revolution Libyan civil society sector.
In 2012 and 2013, Ziad participated in H2O, a civic project that toured more than 60 Libyan cities and towns conducting surveys and consultations on what the country's new constitution should contain. The tour was one of the largest grassroots constitutional consultations of the post-revolution period. One of its concrete legislative effects was a successful lobbying campaign that lowered the minimum age for a Libyan presidential candidate to 35 — pushing back against an earlier draft that would have kept the office closed to most of the generation that had made the revolution.
Ziad teaches workshops on the care and propagation of houseplants. The workshops are not a side hustle. They sit inside the same body of work as the mountain reforestation: an attempt to put the urban Libyan adult back into a working relationship with a living thing they are responsible for. He treats a houseplant as a small unit of the practice the Nafusa needs at scale.
The episode's framing — using time wisely — runs through every line of his work. He spoke about the cost of waiting for institutions to act, the cost of being a designer in a country that did not yet have a market for design, and the discipline of choosing small concrete projects (a sapling, a survey, a plant pot) over abstract advocacy.