Earth Healing with Bamboo -Ecoservices, Bioremediation, Agroforestry

摘要

In many tropical areas bamboos have a long tradition of more or less pan-tropical use, previously wild collected but now increasingly grown in both plantation and agroforestry type applications. Temperate bamboos, despite being well valued and utilized in their lands of origin, have been much less investigated or even seriously considered for applications in other similar or compatible climatic zones. The traditional uses of cut bamboo products have been enumerated often and are currently at well over 1,000. Many of the ecological services of bamboos are known, if obscure. The "high-tech" potentials are only now being explored. The senior author, an ethnobotanist with 24 years of bamboo investigation experience, will seek to make a case for the prominent inclusion of temperate bamboos in Earth healing scenarios for U.S.D.A. climatic zones 6-9. Essentially the salient fact is that bamboos can be used in any manner that tree wood can plus a number of applications utilizing its unique structure. And it can do this while performing needed ecological services and with an annual yield (after establishment) on a short-rotation cycle. From fuel to food to fiber, from re-bar to dimension lumber (composite) to houses, bamboo can save forests and farms. It can shrink our footprint, ameliorate the impact of our burgeoning organic waste stream, including that from C.A.F.O.'s, and raise the water table while conserving and rebuilding the soil. Bamboo can do all this as it calms our spirits and improves rural economics. Perhaps bamboo could even improve the national economy. Certainly, its many virtues are worth considering.