Message from Ms.Steffi

Letter from Us to Ms.Steffi :

Just wanted to tell you that few students of the Be-2 Aware club wanted to

know why you are working on bamboo since that means you will have to cut

bamboo plants to make something - they wanted to know if you can avoid that

and use alternative material like stone or rocks....it will be nice if you

write what you feel about this[?].

Response from Ms.Steffi

Dear all!

I am happy to see that you come up with this thought. Why to cut natural material from an alive plant?? That doesn’t seem to be very environmentally friendly … Why not using material that is “dead” and just lying around?

Your thought is so right, it’s great that you think about stones. I have been to Hampi in India and found it the best example to see humans using rocks and stones which are just there. The whole landscape there is just FULL of stones and rocks, everywhere you can see the stones in their natural ways in the landscape and then in between the stones put together to houses and temples. It’s great!!

I have also been in Darjeeling in the mountains in the north. There the landscape is full of trees and gras, also bamboo. There are no stones except under the gras and I guess there are even places where humans opened the soil and took out stones and earth to make buildings with it. But there are way not so many than in Hampi. What to do now for the people in Darjeeling? They could phone someone in Hampi and ask for a big lorry full of stones to transport to Darjeeling to build houses there. The people in Hampi would be happy probably because they can earn some money selling the stones… But imagine the use of energy the lorry needs to bring all the superheavy stones all the 2500 km up to Darjeeling, even up the mountains! Wouldn’t that be very very much? Imagine also if all the people who don’t live in an environment where there are a lot of stones and rocks would call Hampi to buy stones. Hampi would become rich but after a while all the rocks and stones would be gone. Many lorries would drive all over India and use a huge amount of energy to save the trees and bamboos everywhere else from being cut. But at the same time the air becomes even more polluted and India needs more powerplants or fuel to provide the lorries with enough energy. By the way, also the processing of stones is energy-intense, or can you shape them with your knives? AND: can we do everything that we want and need out of stones? What about swings? What about cars? Computers?You see: we have a life full of complex wishes and demands, no matter if it’s in India or in Germany. The question is what do we really need?

I think you can see: stones are simply not available everywhere, the transport of them often doesn’t make sense either and we also simply need other materials to create the things that we need and want. Does that make sense to you?

Then we seem to have the choice to use natural materials or artificial materials like plastic, or hybrids like aluminum and steel, and concrete. You know what happens when we produce a lot of plastic and just throw it out of the window, it will stay there forever, looks awful, makes animals sick and slowly also humans themselves. Is it the fault of the plastic or of the human habits? There is a guy named Michael Braungart. He created the idea of separate material circles. It is called “cradle-to-cradle”.We know from nature that material can rot and go back into the earth from where new life can grow, we can also see artificial material circles. Take aluminum or plastic: these materials can be recycled. The people in the aluminum factory can melt a used aluminum chair into a big pot of aluminum and then shape it into new produced table. Cool, isn’t it? You know that from paper also. The same thing can be done with several artificial materials. BUT that only works if they are not mixed with other materials. A plastic-aluminum-chair cannot be recycled if you cannot disassemble the different materials.

It is like there is no “perfect” solution for the use of materials. Neither the artificial ones nor the natural ones are perfect. They all have strong AND weak points. And people always have to measure both and decide then which is the best compromise for one special situation. For another situation at another place or even the same place can another solution be the better one.

I used bamboo in India because it is a plant which grows in large numbers easily and naturally in the Indian countryside. It is just there. It grows fast without human influence so it can provide humans with a lot of material. Trees need much more time to grow. Bamboo is light, it is stronger and more flexible than steel and harder than wood. It’s aesthetic is a bit similar than wood, it makes the atmosphere warm and cosy where it is used. It is quite easy to process, way easier than steel for example.

The clue about using plants, cut them off and make them grow more is, that plants use carbon dioxide. This gas is so dangerous because it destroys the part in the sky that protects the whole earth from all kinds of things from the outer space. Because humans are producing so much carbon dioxide by using cars, light, engines and factories we try to reduce that on the one side and try to protect the plants on the other side. Plants store the gas within themselves.

Why using natural materials at all if we need to protect them? That is because we simply don’t have enough not-natural materials that don’t harm nature. So the best way seems to be today, to reduce our needs on the one side and to get into a good use-and-preserve-relationship with the nature on the other side. Do you know where the term “Sustainability” comes from originally?

All the best from Berlin!

Steffi Silbermann