climate (11)

Could Homes Built of Bamboo Help Solve the Climate Crisis?

Photos by Jonathan Davis / Spaces808.com/. Reprinted with permission

From The Mercury News, Sept. 28, 2022

Julia M. Chan | CNN

While bamboo has been used in construction in Asia for thousands of years, it’s starting to catch on in sustainable housing development in parts of the United States and other places in the world.

Bamboo Living co-founder and chief architect David Sands is at the forefront of modern sustainable bamboo construction. His Hawaiian-based company specializes in creating bamboo homes and other buildings, with clients including rock star Sammy Hagar, actress Barbara Hershey, music mogul Shep Gordon, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar — and Sands himself.

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Why bamboo? What makes it an ideal material for construction and the environment?

The giant bamboos are the fastest-growing woody plant on the planet. If you go to the Guinness Book of World Records, I think it was between two and three feet a day that they recorded it growing. So you end up with these plants that are 100 feet tall in just a couple of months. By year three, you’ve got incredible building material, and that’s when we harvest for our houses.

Because it’s the fastest-growing plant, it’s probably the fastest natural way to get CO2 (carbon dioxide) out of our atmosphere. Through photosynthesis, it’s taking that CO2 and turning it into sugars and then into actual fiber, the storage mechanism for the atmospheric carbon. And that’s a big deal in terms of getting the CO2 out of the atmosphere rapidly.

Normally when you harvest a tree, you kill the tree, and it’s got to start all over. And with the bamboo, every year it’s sending up new trunks, so you just harvest a percentage of those trunks and it just keeps growing. The plants can live up to 120 years. You know how you just keep mowing the lawn and the grass keep popping back? It’s really like that — it is a grass. It’s the biggest of the grasses.

From an architect’s perspective, can you talk about bamboo’s strength and flexibility?

It’s an incredibly strong material. On a weight basis, it’s actually stronger than steel, which is much, much heavier than the same cross section of bamboo. Bamboo has more than twice the strength of the wood usually used for construction, and it’s got a compressive strength similar to concrete.

We’ve had our buildings go through multiple Category 5 hurricanes, up to 200 mile-an-hour winds. We’ve had our buildings go through up to 6.9 on the Richter Scale in terms of seismic events, or earthquakes. Because the bamboo is so much lighter weight and stronger on a weight basis, it can flex and then recover.

Where have you built homes? And is there potential to go elsewhere?

We’ve got homes in the Caribbean, in the South Pacific, Southeast Asia, (and) Southern California now. I was just in Florida working on a project. I’m going to India to meet with a group that wants to build our homes there.

There’s definitely the opportunity to go pretty much into any climate. I think stylistically the homes that we’ve done thus far have all had that kind of tropical feel to them. But there was a client yesterday that wants to do a project (on) Long Island, which would be really fun.

Have you seen an increase in interest in bamboo homes?

Yeah, there is. We have never been busier and we’re expanding production now. I think the concern with the climate crisis has really gotten to the forefront of people’s attention, and really being able to make personal choices that directly impact that is a big deal.

It’s certainly what got me started. I built a home for myself on Maui 30 years ago and I was trying to be as sustainable as I could be. But then they delivered the lumber to build the house, and it was really a gut punch of, like, that’s a whole forest! And that’s happening every time, for every house in the United States. And I just felt like, “I’ve got to do something different.”

You live in a bamboo home now. What’s it like?

I love it. There’s a connection to nature in terms of just knowing that the house itself is helping solve the climate crisis. But then the beauty of it, the shapes and forms we’re able to do with it that you wouldn’t necessarily be able to do with dimensional material; it really is like living in a piece of furniture. All of the handcrafted joinery, beautiful radiating rafters and beams, they add a level of beauty to the building.

Article sent us by Maui Surfer

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How Humans Grew Acorn Brains

If we are going to tackle humanity’s biggest challenges, we will need to use our unrivaled ability to think long-term. Understanding how we developed this ability can help us use it to its full potential.

by Roman Krznaric


Human beings are quite capable of dealing with immediate crises. A devastating flood takes place and we send in the emergency relief. A pandemic occurs and we shut the borders and develop the vaccines. A war erupts and the refugees are found homes. More or less.

But when it comes to long-term crises, humanity’s record is less exemplary. Our response to the climate emergency — which is already here but whose greatest impacts are yet to come — has been painstakingly slow. We freely create technologies, from AI to bioweapons, that could pose devastating risks for our descendants. We fail to tackle deep problems like wealth inequality and racial injustice, which get passed on from generation to generation.

This temporal imbalance raises a question: is it even in the nature of our species to take the long view? Looking at the record so far, you would be right to be skeptical.

But there’s some unexpectedly good news: we are wired for long-term thinking like almost no other animals on the planet. As I argue in my recent book The Good Ancestor, grasping this scientific truth requires understanding the crucial difference between what I call the Marshmallow Brain and the Acorn Brain.

The Marshmallow Brain is an ancient part of our neuroanatomy, around 80 million years old, that focuses our minds on instant rewards and immediate gratification. This is the part exploited by social media platforms that give us dopamine hits by getting us to constantly click, scroll and swipe, as so brilliantly depicted in the film The Social Dilemma. It is named after the famous Marshmallow Test psychology experiment of the 01960s, where children who resisted eating a marshmallow for 15 minutes were rewarded with a second one: the majority failed.

There are well-known critiques of the test, for instance the fact that the ability to delay gratification is highly dependent on socioeconomic position: those from wealthier backgrounds find it easier to resist the treat, while a lack of trust and fear of scarcity can push kids towards gobbling it up.

A more fundamental critique, however, is that we are not simply driven by immediate rewards. Alongside the Marshmallow Brain we also possess a long-term Acorn Brain located in the frontal lobe just above our eyes, especially in an area known as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. This is a relatively new part of our neuroanatomy — a mere two million years old — giving us a rare ability to think, plan and strategize over long timeframes.

But don’t other creatures think and plan ahead? Sure, animals such as chimpanzees make plans, like when they strip leaves off a branch to make a tool to poke in a termite hole. But they will never make a dozen of these tools and set them aside for next week.
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How We Drained California Dry

A story of remaking the land and taking the water until there was nothing left

Technology Review

This is how we’ve come to the point today, during the driest decade in state history, that valley farmers haven’t diminished their footprint to meet water’s scarcity but have added a half-­million more acres of permanent crops—more almonds, pistachios, mandarins. They’ve lowered their pumps by hundreds of feet to chase the dwindling aquifer even as it dwindles further, sucking so many millions of acre-feet of water out of the earth that the land is sinking. This subsidence is collapsing the canals and ditches, reducing the flow of the very aqueduct that we built to create the flow itself.

How might a native account for such madness?

No civilization had ever built a grander system to transport water. It sprawled farmland. It sprawled suburbia. It made rise three world-class cities, and an economy that would rank as the fifth largest in the world. But it did not change the essential nature of California. Drought is California. Flood is California. One year our rivers and streams produce 30 million acre-feet of water. The next year, they produce 200 million acre-feet. The average year, 72.5 million acre-feet, is a lie we tell ourselves.

www.technologyreview.com/2021/12/16/1041296/california-climate-change-water-drought

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Some say the world will end in fire…

In the last few months I’ve experienced extreme cold (Minnesota) and warm weather (80’s here in Baja). It made me think of summers down here, which are just about unbearable, and the 2 extremes (as applied to being outside—I’m not talking about heaters in the cold or air conditioners in the heat). In the cold, you can bundle up to mitigate the extreme, but in the heat you’re out of luck. One time in August down here, my landlord Yuca and I would go across the dusty road and lie down in the shallow river in T-shirts and shorts, then come back to my room and stand in front of the fan while soaking wet for a few precious moments of coolness.

Fire and Ice 

Some say the world will end in fire, 

Some say in ice. 

From what I’ve tasted of desire 

I hold with those who favor fire. 

But if it had to perish twice, 

I think I know enough of hate 

To say that for destruction ice 

Is also great 

And would suffice.

-Robert Frost

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1st Presentation on New Book Small Homes

40-50 people showed up for my talk/slide show Wednesday night at the North House Folk School in Grand Marais. I’m amazed anyone came, it was so cold out. Kindred spirits fer shure.

Us born-and-bred coastal Caifornians are wimps when it comes to weather like this. It was minus 4 degrees F this morning. Sometimes it gets down to -20F, and if the wind is blowing, -40 wind chill factor. When you step outside, the cold attacks you, it’s all you can think of.

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Rain in Norcal on its way

SYNOPSIS:

Fairly dry and warm condition are forecast through midweek, except for a slight chance of rain in the north bay on Tuesday.  Chances of rain increase by Thursday and then greatly increase into this weekend.


DISCUSSION:

The week will start out dry with patchy morning fog in various locations throughout the county.  A light system far north of the county is expected to develop on Tuesday, but is not expected to produce very much rain.  Rain, if any, from this system will be only along the northern county border.  Fairly dry conditions are expected throughout most of county on Wednesday with a very weak system moving into the area late Wednesday night to early Thursday morning where very light rain is expected.  Then,  a much stronger storm is expected to move into the area by late Friday and will produce rain throughout the remainder of the weekend.  Precipitation amounts may range from 1.35-inches along the eastern side and southern portions of the county, and up to 2.54-inches of rain along the coast, higher elevations and along the northern county boarder.  This system is expected to produce heavy rain at times with strong winds throughout the weekend and into next week.

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Poppa’s Gonna Have A Brand New Bag

Full moon Friday night

Jim Morrison said that it wasn’t until The Doors released a record that he was free to get on with creating something new. Now that Tiny Homes On The Move is finished, I’m looking out on the horizon for what’s next. Right now, it looks like this:

Blogs Rick has almost got The Shelter Blog up and running (with a Word Press template). My son Evan is going to manage it. Lew, Evan and I will post stuff on it. All shelter-related, unlike my eclectic blog. The idea is to do online what our book Shelter did in 1973: showcase owner-builders and the lifestyle that a bunch of us share. Providing as much of our own food and shelter as possible (you can’t be totally self-sufficient; self-sufficiency is a direction). As opposed to Dwell magazine, homes rich in color, utility, and good vibes. We intend this to be station central for people of the owner-builder persuasion.

   We’ll post all the stuff we are now getting from people who have been inspired by our books to build something. In this sense it’ll be different from other blogs in that much of the material will be original and unique, not a pastiche of what’s floating out in the web-o-sphere.

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Friday Fish Fry

Dry dry dry. Day after day of no rain. I think the driest in history.

Saw Inside LLewyn Davis last night. Disappointing. I wanted to like it, because the concert put on in NYC in September by the musicians recruited by musical director TBone Burnett was terrific, and I have a lot of respect for the Coen brothers and their witty and fresh approach to film making. But this was just a bore. John Goodman’s character was overblown and weird, say like Jack Nicholson in one of his rare misfires as the Joker in the 1st Batman film, or Johnny Depp’s characters in the Tim Burton movies—sorry, I’m not buyin it…I don’t understand all the adulation for Llewyn. Music not even that good. Very little humor. Best picture of year, puhleeeze.


I cut down a 35-year old Weeping Santa Rosa Plum, the other day, was rotting from the inside. Interesting to see what was a pretty big (and productive) garden presence reduced to a couple of piles of kindling and to-be-split firewood

Yesterday we went to Flora Grubb, a large nursery specializing in palm trees and succulents in San Francisco. Great place, down near the produce market, with a Ritual Coffee stand inside. I shot a lot of pictures, we’ll post more when I get time. https://floragrubb.com

All Hail by The Devil Makes Three on Grooveshark

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Friday Fish Fry


The Sky Ain’t Cryin Big news around here is no rain, and none in sight. Dry dry dry.

The ground is cryin.

Mushrooms are hidin.

Creeks are dribblin.

Hills, usually verdant this time of year, are brownish green, oh my.

People I pass on my walks say, beautiful day, I grit my teeth and agree.

A beautiful day right now would be torrents of rain.

Foraged Firewood I rented a log splitter and Marco I split enough wood for two years in about 5 hours. Usually I pick up oak from the side of the road, but this year there was a ton of cypress and eucalyptus lying around, cut to firewood-sized logs, needing only splitting. Very few people around here get their own firewood these days; probably half the houses in these two small seaside towns are second units for city people who come infrequently. The do-it-yourself era around here ended years ago.

Killer Kayak The Hammer, made by P&H in the UK, is a new and uniquely designed ocean kayak. Check it out in the surf:  

Note: you’ve got to put in a fair amount of time in order to maneuver around like this. If you live in the San Francisco area, check out the California Canoe and Kayak Co. in Jack London Square in Oakland. They must have over 100 boats in stock. If you’re serious about buying a kayak and put down a $300 deposit, they will let you try out any number of kayaks over a three month period, keeping them for several days until you find the one that suits your needs.

Kindhearted Woman Blues – Robert Johnson

Kindhearted Woman Blues by Robert Johnson on Grooveshark

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