Arief Rabik is an Indonesian scientist, entrepreneur and conservationist whose expertise is bamboo. Arief wears a number of hats. He’s the director of the Environmental Bamboo Foundation, and the founder of Indobamboo, a company that makes innovative bamboo products for construction. He also runs a program called 1000 Bamboo villages, which works with Indonesian people living in deforested areas, helping them to regenerate their land, while also providing a sustainable income from bamboo that they harvest.

Arief is a systems thinker. Meaning, for a given situation, he tries to understand how different parts interact, in order to design relationships that work better. This means not only thinking about the initial consequence of an action, but the consequences of the consequence. And so on down the line. Clearly, that could get complicated quickly. Which is why I wanted to talk to him about his thought processes, what his influences are, and how he thinks about sustainability.

I spoke to Arief in Queensland at the site of the Woodford Folk Festival, where he is designing an experimental facility to treat bamboo so that it can be used for more permanent construction for the yearly festival.  

Unfortunately, time was tight, and we were not able to follow all the interesting paths that came up in the conversation. Even still, I found this to be a fascinating discussion. I hope you do too.

Show Notes

02:16 Arief’s parents were bamboo innovator and renowned designer Linda Garland, and entrepreneur Amir Rabik, who has worked with sustainable materials, particularly bamboo, in Bali for decades

04:02 Natural Capitalism by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and Hunter Lovins

04:24 The Rocky Mountain Institute

05:35 The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People by Stephen R Covey

11:04 The biochar bamboo system Arief is designing for Woodford involves the following elements:

• A grove of bamboo is irrigated by treated waste water from the festival, which acts as fertiliser.
• Once mature, bamboo is harvested and placed in a large, sealed barrel.
• The barrel is flooded, and then smoke from a fire is piped into the barrel, impregnating the wood. This deters any would-be insects or microorganisms which mayh have eaten the wood.
• The fire uses dead wood from the festival site for fuel
• The fire is quenched at a particular time, allowing for the charred wood to be used as biochar. The biochar is spread out over the bamboo grove, further enhancing fertility and closing the nutrient loop
• [NB: any mistakes or inaccuracies in this explanation are Julian’s]

11:48 Susudake, Japanese technique of preserving bamboo using smoke

13:31 Arief’s guide to using bamboo to enhance social, economic and ecological and resilience, Towards Resilient Bamboo Forestry

13:54  Ecosystem services provided by bamboo:

• Holds water
• Grows quickly, creating a canopy to shade other plants
• Helps build soil
• Stabilises ground and prevents erosion
• Absorbs carbon
• “Rain suck” potential – evapotranspiration. Bamboo consumes a lot of water, but this water then evaporates from the bamboo’s leaves and helps to form clouds
• Easy to process/use for construction

16:28 Globally, there are 2 billion hectares of deforested land plus/minus 12 degrees of the equator

26:25  Building resilience needs to start with the social and economic. Once there is trust, and economic sustainability, only then can you work towards ecological improvement.