bamboo

Fieldtrip to bamboo community in Ubud, Bali

Following on from the Jogyakarta Consultative Forum, Dave Hodgkin from the Humanitarian Bamboo Project, Sarbjit Singh from RedR India, Loren Lockwood from Caritas Swiss and I continued our fieldwork investigation into bamboo with a week of visiting bamboo organisations, NGOs and modern bamboo construction in Ubud, Bali (30 June - 6 July).

Our first stop was Linda Garland’s Environmental Bamboo Foundation, located in the valley adjoining Monkey Forest. Arief gave us a tour of EBF’s exquisite grounds, bamboo treatment plant and bamboo products. It provided a fascinating though regrettably brief insight into the 30 years of research, design and construction by the EBF team, and into the history of EBF’s advocacy of bamboo as a versatile, high-quality and environmentally friendly building material.

Much of EBF’s work over the years has focused on the collection of traditional knowledge and skills regarding the use of bamboo in Indonesia; throughout the EBF complex, examples abound of these traditional construction methodologies in practice.

Our second visit was a tour around the John Hardy Foundation’s environmentally-oriented Green School project and the design, bamboo treatment and construction facilities of the John Hardy Foundation’s bamboo business, P.T. Bambu. Aldo Landwehr, their chief designer, gave us a tour of the beautifully designed bamboo classrooms and buildings currently under construction, which were designed and built by P.T. Bambu for the Green School program, as well as some of the other bamboo structures that they had built, including the well-documented bamboo bridge.

With the John Hardy Foundation’s background in jewelery design and production, there were myriad innovative design elements evident in their use of bamboo, and some spectacular buildings, including the largest bamboo structure in the world. But considering that the same basic bamboo construction technology shared by these buildings has been developed and used over hundreds of years by local communities, the most striking aspect of the projects is the choice of bamboo to build large-scale, high-quality, design-oriented building art. From Dave’s fieldtrip report linked below:

“Visual documentation of bamboo construction systems and the resultant spectacular constructions that are being created by Bali’s bamboo elite provide valuable visual tools for use by humanitarian practitioners in convincing both communities and organisations of the value of bamboo.”

Much of what we saw on the various tours was asked to be kept a commercial secret:

“Although bamboo treatment and jointing issues appear well resolved by the bamboo construction community, there remains a high level of commercial security concerns and hence reluctance to share new technological improvements. Given the relatively basic technological needs of the humanitarian sector, this poses no real issue other than the obfuscation caused by the ensuing industry factionalism. These concerns appear to apply equally to both bamboo technologists, researchers and practitioners.”

It is clear that there is a large community of organisations and businesses researching and using bamboo, and an established body of knowledge. It is also too evident that this hasn’t been successfully translated into the humanitarian world. It is going to be interesting to see the progress of the Humanitarian Bamboo project as it draws on these sources and interprets them into the universe of disaster response.

We also caught up with Petra Schneider, the director of IDEP. IDEP is an Indonesian NGO based in Ubud, Bali, which does a lot of community-based work on environmental sustainability issues. Thanks to Petra’s media background, IDEP have generated a huge amount of highly accessible reference material for communities in Bahasa Indonesia and English, available for download on their website, on subjects such as permaculture, sustainable development, gardening and composting, waste management, environmental education, seed saving and community-based disaster management.

As an Indonesian NGO with extensive local networks, IDEP has been involved with disaster management since the 2002 Bali bombings. They run awesome programs on community disaster preparedness, emergency response and sustainable disaster recovery, and have responded to tsunamis, landslides, flooding and earthquakes. I’ve been most impressed with their work on community-based environmental programs about disaster management and recovery, through their permaculture training programs at the GreenHands Field School in Aceh.

Something that IDEP did that I thought was just stunning were the short puppet films made in collaboration with “No Strings”, a charity in the UK and Ireland that developed out of the Muppets crew. No Strings specialise in making engaging adventure films for children that are culturally sensitive, locally appropriate and have educational messages about disaster preparedness, deforestation and environmental issues, etc. Unfortunately copyright remains with No Strings so the movies are not downloadable from the IDEP website. Here is an article about the puppet shoot, and another about the Tales of Disasters series. I have a copy of the 5 films on preparing for and responding to tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanoes, landslides and flooding, if anyone wants to have a look. We got a range of their CDs and DVDs on their disaster response and risk reduction programs, their permaculture manual and other key works.

Petra indicated that IDEP is moving towards a more holistic view of resilient communities, e.g. implementing permaculture training programs at the same time as wastewater management, environmental awareness, disaster preparedness etc. Someone remind me to send her a copy of Salt & Walker’s Resilience Thinking.

IDEP’s environmental background and holistic philosophy means that they consider disaster preparedness and resilience an integral part of their community-based work, instead of the other way round. I asked Petra about this: whether it was likely for the larger agencies like Oxfam, Red Cross, UN agencies etc to ever move down this path of genuinely integrating environmental considerations as a key aspect of their approach and philosophy. She said that the work they do is successful because they spend time in the communities - months, really, stretches of at least 6 months - and realistically it is difficult for large bureaucratic organisations to have that capacity and flexibility. But there will always be a role for large bureaucratic organisations, just as there will always be a place for smaller, more responsive organisations like IDEP.

I suppose I’m more interested in the more mainstream agencies that engage in disaster response, who will always form the bulk of mediating the international disaster response. While being open to inspiration from NGOs like IDEP, I’m more interested in looking at opportunities for sustainable practice within mainstream practice. How can we set up systems that integrate sustainable practices as norms in mainstream disaster response, not just as extraordinary ventures by millionaire philanthropists or unique programs by small, innovative organisations?

Dave’s report from the Ubud fieldtrip with many more pretty pictures can be found here.

© Kim Williamson 2008