 Jeeves & Wooster. Bertie is in the usual mix. This time he has been forced to meet an intimidating nouveau riche American. The American has mastered a good business based on jute but somehow overlooked mastering himself. The result is a very imposing and over-the-top home with gaudy stained glass windows: cars with unnecessary bonnet ornaments; gauche jewellery on an even more gauche suit; disastrous dining rooms. All the tack is there. ‘All this,’ booms the American at Bertie. ‘Comes from jute. Jute! Do you know it?’ Bertie looks nonplussed. ‘Gosh. You don’t say...?’
Silence.
Bertie glances again at the distasteful ornaments including stuffed birds and wooden carvings of elephants with plastic tusks. ‘Dashed useful stuff, jute...’
As classic British putdowns it is hard to beat. Of course jute cannot make that much. It certainly does not extend to wooden furniture. But had Wodehouse written that scene with bamboo rather than jute in mind Bertie’s comments would have been altogether less ironic.
"His umbilical cord is cut with a bamboo knife, he is rocked in a bamboo cradle, he farms with a bamboo tool, he feeds his cattle with bamboo grass, and he is carried to his grave on a bamboo tier." (National Geographic)
By most counts bamboo has several hundred uses. The list starts with eating – hundreds of millions include bamboo shoots and roots in their diet – and finishes with industrial manufacturing. So varied are the uses that it’s hard to imagine what you could not make. Fishing rods? Easy. But you can also cook fish inside bamboo or serve fish on split culms (stems) or make bamboo cane fish traps. It burns like wood which is remarkable because in biological terms it’s a grass. Shredded bamboo conducts electricity. In the late nineteenth century Edison even used carbonized bamboo as filament for his first electric light bulb and Alexander Graham Bell used bamboo in the first phonograph needle. Everyone knows that in gardens harvested bamboo cane can support other plants. But bamboo can also be grown as a hedge, or as ground cover, or used in erosion control.
Lashed scaffolding in Hong Kong is a classic building application. Bamboo has also been used within buildings as a visible decoration or to reinforce concrete in place of steel. By some reckoning bamboo has tensile strength approaching 85,000 kilograms per square cm versus under 75,000 kilograms per square cm for some steel. In India it is used to brighten houses. You can make bamboo pens for writing or piercing tools for tattooing. Just where does it stop? You might not be able to smoke bamboo but at least you can make a bong from it.
Bamboo is sometimes considered as Asian in origin but this is untrue. Before the modern era bamboo was native in every continent except two: Antartica (not too well known for its greenery) and Europe. It was found in pretty much every location inside these continents too, from Latin American riversides to Australian shorelines to the lower reaches of Himalayan mountains to deserts and sub-Saharan Africa. It was as much a rural as urban species. Most of the world, in short, had bamboo.
A century plus into industrialism and bamboo is now found throughout Europe, especially areas exposed to the warming Gulf stream like Devon and in Scotland. Surprise location: Aberdeen in northern Scotland. Antarctica these days is the only place where you can’t find bamboo growing, though almost certainly it will be found inside those huts where scientists hibernate.
Given the essentially global footprint it is hardly surprising that bamboo has influenced man’s thinking. It is commonly recognised as a symbol of both flexibility and also resilience and strength; yin and yang in a single stem. Bruce Lee famously remarked that ‘the stiffest tree is most easily cracked, while the bamboo or willow survives by bending with the wind.’ We sense intuitively what is meant by a Bamboo Curtain (a sometimes rigid and sometimes open gap between Communist China and the capitalist west) as much as a Bamboo network (a sometimes rigid and sometimes loose connection amongst Asian business communities).
So common and widely used is Bamboo that it has reached the stage of having its assets grafted on to other plant species. Fallopia japonica has hollow but very strong stems that earn it’s other name of ‘Japanese bamboo’, even though it is not a bamboo. The ‘Bamboo Palm’ (Chrysalidocarpus lutescens) is in fact a palm tree but because it’s bark has concentric rings that resemble bamboo it is often counted as a sturdy bamboo. ‘Wealth bamboo’ is common in Hong Kong and China and often placed at the entrance to apartments or other doorways even though it is strictly part of the Dracaena family (Dracaena sanderiana).
The commercial value of bamboo globally is said to be around the US$5 billion annually. This may not be especially large. It is significantly less than timber and only one-tenth of the net worth of Bill Gates, for example, but becomes more meaningful when you consider how many people are involved. Altogether 2.5 billion people either trade in or use bamboo. This means that every third person in the world makes physical use of some form of bamboo. No wonder that bamboo in India is called ‘poor man’s wood’. In China it is ‘the people’s friend’.
Bamboo grows incredibly quickly. It can be harvested in under five years versus close to 30 years for most softwoods or about one-sixth of the time needed to harvest trees. It is said that over ten kilometres of poles can be harvested during the lifetime of a single clump. Once harvested it also regenerates rapidly. While groves stand seemingly forever new bamboo shoots emerge annually from the rhizomes. This ensures propagation without disrupting the surrounding soil. The dustbowls created by deforestation in Australia and Latin America are notably lower in bamboo harvesting.
There is one especially intriguing aspect to the economic worth of bamboo. Unlike trees once it has matured it remains exactly the same size for the rest of its life; it never grows higher or wider and the culm does not add a ring of growth a year as trees do either. The result is that bamboo provides instant evidence of both its size and how many stems may be harvested at any one time.
Sadly bamboo has just as frayed a relationship with man as timber. Earlier this year the UN placed extinction warnings on nearly half the world’s 1,200 woody bamboo species. By any scale this is a dramatic warning. It’s like saying that half of the world’s species of rice will disappear within a generation.
Related to the reduction in bamboo biodiversity the global paper industry has awakened to the fact that bamboo (the tall stem type and not the running type which stays low to the ground) can sometimes be pulped more or less as easily as wood. The result is an increasingly widespread use of a few preferred bamboos. Globally close to 1.5 million metric tons of bamboo are harvested annually. This harvesting happens particularly in China and India though all countries in temperate and tropical regions are starting to harvest bamboo commercially. The Philippines now has bamboo exports worth several hundred million US dollars. Bamboo cannot yet be cut by traditional wood mills in the same way that wider trunks of softwoods and hardwoods can but it can nonetheless be pulped.
Massive bamboo grove destruction is not a problem all by itself. Besides ruining forests themselves, with all the problems of land erosion and salination this causes, prominent animals like China’s giant panda (the one on the WWF logo) and Africa’s mountain gorillas depend on bamboo for much of their diet. These are close to extinction in a natural habitat. Although both species may continue in captivity the message in both situations is clear: save the bamboo and save the animal.
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