The Voyages of the Bamboo Ark
What elicited the most response from our blog post here last October? The mention of our plan to build the Bamboo Ark. Through all the apocalyptic gloom, the image of kids and adults working together to build an ocean-going craft fashioned from Mother Nature’s green steel clearly struck a chord. So, we return to that venture with this post, reviewing the ways our boat-building venture has over the last five months morphed over the last several months from a floating lab for Geoversity’s future Coastal Wetlands Field Station on Panama’s Pacific coast, into a far more complex and challenging undertaking.
The shift emerged from our conversations with Geoversity Design co-founder and master builder Jörg Stamm. Our focus continues to be on developing designs suitable for low-income coastal and river communities imperiled by rising seas. What might we accomplish with local materials and only the most rudimentary of tools and machinery? We found ways to prolong the utility of Bambusa vulgaris, a giant open-clumping species of bamboo now ubiquitous in the tropics, with ideas like opening nodes and stuffing culms with recycled plastic bottles or even contracting bicycle inner tubes manufacturers to produce ones that would fill the usable length of a culm. However, our general interest in the use of bamboo globally for its outstanding utility for building and carbon sequestration soon led us to consider how we might use this as an opportunity to demonstrate developing bamboo technologies, for instance plywood, environmentally benign fiber coatings, or complex 3D printed designs to generate unique connectors.