At fifty-one, Hal Hinkle was winding down a successful career on Wall Street and he was trying to figure out how to spend his retirement. He owned some property in Oregon, and launching an initiative to reforest the area seemed like a great way to reduce America’s carbon footprint.
He recruited volunteers and sponsors for his “million-tree” campaign. He visited elementary schools, forged connections with nonprofits, and sought out donors. “People thought this was cool,” he remembers. But then when he consulted with a scientist at the Sierra Club, “The scientist basically told me it was the dumbest idea he’d ever heard.” The problem with trees, he soon learned, is that they grow too slowly to stop the planet’s accelerating march toward “tipping points.”
Since his aborted attempt at planting millions of trees, Hinkle has launched a nonprofit dedicated to climate-change education and founded an eco-friendly organic vineyard, and he now runs a company creating carbon-negative construction materials.
In 2009, he decided to buy about thirty acres of decades-old grapevines in California. The vineyard had fallen into disrepair, but he believed he could create a vineyard that would be both profitable and sustainable, and the end result, good organic wine, would appeal to both a consumer’s conscience and the pleasure principle.
After getting the vineyard up and running, Hinkle was planning to build a new house, and he asked his builder to recommend green construction materials. Among them was a bamboo-based engineered timber from a small California company called BamCore. Although he ended up selecting a more fire-resistant product — a prescient choice, since the home would be hit by wildfires twice in the next three years — Hinkle was fascinated by the concept of using bamboo. “The idea just got stuck in my head,” he says. “Why aren’t we using nature’s strongest, fastest-growing fiber in buildings?”
Hinkle set up a meeting with the BamCore founders, whom he says “at that point, were just the proverbial two guys in a garage,” then spent the next year researching the company’s product. “All the focus on decarbonizing buildings has been on the impacts of the operations side,” Hinkle says. “But what really matters today, because of the urgency of climate change, is the immediate upfront carbon emissions of construction.”
Recognizing that using bamboo to frame houses and multistory buildings could dramatically reduce the climate effects of construction, Hinkle offered to make an investment in the business. Within a few years, he joined the company as CEO. Since then, BamCore has blossomed into a bona fide construction company, and its appeal is great. Bamboo’s strength means that less material is required to build a home, and since each structure is cut to order, it only takes a handful of workers to assemble the frame. These features save on the costs of construction, but for Hinkle the real value of bamboo is that the plants absorb carbon from the soil and atmosphere.
“The essential principle is trees are good, but bamboo is better,” Hinkle says. “It’s nature’s fastest-growing and strongest structural fiber; it regrows where you cut it in just one year; the way we use it, it’s more thermally efficient than wood; it’s strong enough to handle earthquakes; and it’s carbon-negative, because when you put it into a building, you’re storing all the carbon it has sucked up.”
In spring 2023, BamCore was awarded a $2.2 million grant from the Department of Energy as part of a program to accelerate the development of buildings that store carbon. Since then, Hinkle and his team have started exploring ways to apply their technology to multistory commercial buildings.
Hinkle’s life’s work has been a balancing act between profit and nonprofit, rationality and instinct, individual and community, the local and the global. Some people might find these tensions paralyzing, but for him this is the essence of a life well lived. “There’s a saying in the climate community: ‘Don’t worry about the earth, it will be just fine,’” says Hinkle. “The earth will continue to evolve geologically and biologically, with or without us. But if we care about our human evolution and long-term survival, then we have to figure this out.”
You can read the original article at magazine.columbia.edu
Me gustaría leer sobre como construir con adobes gracias. Cómo * saludos desde Nicaragua