bypassing the communistic housing paradigm

how costa rica dealt with globalist rape and run tactics

The US has 4% of earths population but consumes 40% of its resources. Much of that is used to house people in our outsized homes. Yet, the homeless population is soaring. Meanwhile, the 1% are building ever bigger mansions.

Much of current homeless problem can be laid at the feet of the Biden administrations purposeful invasion policy at our borders. In April of 2023 more migrants entered the US than babies born to Americans. As Tucker Carlson recently pointed out, the Biden administration is housing many of them in airports and police stations.

But the problem is more complex than Biden’s clueless policies.

Because carbon is the measuring stick preferred by those pushing the climate change agenda, there is a lot of research about carbon. As regular readers know, I question climate change and the role we are told carbon plays. However, because personal carbon production is an indication of the level of ones resource consumption, breaking down who is producing the most carbon can tell us who is consuming the most of planetary resources. That’s why I find this recent Oxfam report interesting - the richest 1% account for more carbon emissions than the poorest 66%.

The report finds that it would take about 1,500 years for someone in the bottom 99% to produce as much carbon as the richest billionaires do in a year.

In other words, the mansions built by the Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey’s, Elon Musk’s and Jeff Bezos of the world, their private jets, limos and so on, consume enough carbon resources to house 4,620,000,000 regular folks.

Ultimately, what we have here are crises created by billionaires.

The size of billionaire houses range from 20,000 ft2 to well over 100,000 ft2. But, they might be waking up to their role as the primary trashers of the planet. The appetite for houses at that higher end may be waning. In 2022 a new 105,000 ft2 house in LA listed at $295 million sold for a mere $126 million.

your questions

You readers have been asking some questions about some of the natural building materials I’ve written about recently, so I’m going to take a few paragraphs here to answer some of them.

A question that often comes up when people first begin to learn about homes made of bamboo and other natural building materials is - aren’t they labor intensive? The short answer is, no. The longer answer requires consideration of what goes into building a typical modern house.

Another question was, “What toxins exist in modern housing?”

Let’s take-on both those questions in this answer.

Let’s say a couple sells their house in the city for a modest profit and buys some land in the country.

They design an efficient, modest, 1,000 sq2 home that will incorporate local, naturally occurring resources. They begin to gather those resources from their land and nearby public lands. They hire some experienced local craftsmen to help them with aspects of construction for which they have no experience. They have taken natural building workshops to learn how to do the rest. It takes them a year to get the project done.

If they spend fifty weeks working forty hour weeks to build the home, that would be two thousand hours of labor for them. Let’s say their local help worked an additional thousand hours. They were able to pay the local help out of pocket. When the home is done they have no debt to globalist bankers - no mortgage.

They now have a home that has no toxins so they’ll never have any medical bills from toxic house syndrome. It’s an efficient passive solar design with a wood burning stove for backup heat, so they have no heating and cooling bills. Because they have no investment in expensive mechanical systems, they saved thousands on the cost of the home.

The money they saved by foregoing mechanical systems, not hooking up to the grid and scaling down the size of the home was invested in a minimal stand-alone solar system that cost less than $5,000. It allows them to have lights, run a computer and some appliances in the kitchen. They’ll never have a power bill so they’re not beholden to the globalists that run the power grid. If the globalists pull-off a cyber attack and shut down the grid to cull the population (coming soon?), they’ll be unaffected. They’re not beholden to centralized, collectivist power companies.

Their gray and black water is plumbed into infiltrators that lie underground in the yard. Those are over-planted with fruit and nut trees which spread their roots throughout the infiltrator system to utilize the water and nutrients to produce food for the family. What most people pay to have sent to centralized, collectivist sewage treatment plants that end up polluting ground water and leaving behind a toxic legacy, this couple has turned into a backyard food resource. And they’ll never have a sewage bill.

Their water is rainwater that comes from the roof of the house. It gets filtered and diverted into cisterns. A small, on-demand solar pump pressurizes the system. They’re not beholden to communist style, centralized, collectivist water utilities. They’ll never have a water bill.

Because they have taken responsibility for their actions, they do not contribute to the problems that come with the socialistic collectivization of housing and utilities.

The labor comparison comes to the forefront when we consider their neighbors down the road who decide to go the ‘easy route’ and buy a prefab house of the same size. It’s heated and cooled with forced central air running on electricity from the globalist power grid. Because the system and house design are both terribly inefficient, it takes an enormous amount of energy to keep the house comfortable.

The house uses metals of all types throughout its construction, including metal studs. Consequently, it’s susceptible to attack by DEW’s (coming up).

The materials for the mechanical systems and the building materials for the house are shipped from all over the planet to arrive at this location. The labor needed to mine, manufacture and ship all those resources is incalculable. Much of the work is done by child labor or by adults working for slave wages in third world countries. The wood products all come from globalist wood product corporations that are clearcutting forests all over the world, to the detriment of local cultures. The result of this will be graphically highlighted below.

Some of the wood products come from Malaysia, some from Central and South America, some from the Pacific Northwest. Some have been treated with copper sulfate, a highly toxic preservative.

Some of the products used in the finish materials are painted with toxic paints.

Floors and counter tops are all covered with toxic materials and glued with high VOC, toxic glues.

A reader mentioned drywall. Here is how drywall is made. There are dozens of other examples.

“A wallboard panel consists of a layer of gypsum plaster sandwiched between two layers of paper. The raw gypsum, CaSO4·2H2O, is heated to drive off the water and then slightly rehydrated to produce the hemihydrate of calcium sulfate (CaSO4·1/2H

2O). The plaster is mixed with fiber (typically paper and/or glass fiber), plasticizer, foaming agent, finely ground gypsum crystal as an accelerator, EDTA, starch or other chelate as a retarder, and various additives that may increase mildew and fire resistance, lower water absorption (wax emulsion or silanes), reduce creep (tartaric or boric acid).[9] The board is then formed by sandwiching a core of the wet mixture between two sheets of heavy paper or fiberglass mats. When the core sets, it is dried in a large drying chamber, and the sandwich becomes rigid and strong enough for use as a building material.

Drying chambers typically use natural gas today. To dry 1,000 square feet (93 m2) of wallboard, between 1,750,000 and 2,490,000 BTU (1.85–2.63 GJ) is required. Organic dispersants and plasticizers are used so that the slurry will flow during manufacture and to reduce the water and hence the drying time.[10] Coal-fired power stations include devices called scrubbers to remove sulfur from their exhaust emissions. The sulfur is absorbed by powdered limestone in a process called flue-gas desulfurization (FGD), which produces several new substances. One is called "FGD gypsum". This is commonly used in drywall construction in the United States and elsewhere.[11][12] “

It’s important to note that this Wikipedia article says nothing about what’s involved in making the paper for dry wall. The paper is likely more labor intensive and toxic than the drywall manufacturing process. Someone has to go out into a forest somewhere and cut trees down with a chain saw. Then the trees have to be hauled to a mill, processed with energy greedy manufacturing processes and treated with toxins to turn that wood into paper. Pollution from paper is mills is among the most notorious in the world. NIMBY.

The labor in that modern house is beginning to add up.

Plasticizers are mentioned twice in the above Wikipedia article. What are they?

Plasticizers are toxic, endocrine disrupting chemicals added to numerous manufactured products to make them perform in ways that make the final product conform to the preferred desires of the manufacturer.

Our health is not part of the globalist housing equation. That seems to be purposeful.

Plasticizers are added to a wide variety of products; garden hoses, cosmetics, plastic bags, perfumes, shampoos, sun screens, shoes, toys, food packaging, medical devices, carpets, curtains and hundreds of other items.

In modern construction materials they’re added to; flooring, stucco, cement, paint, counter tops, wire insulation, adhesives, finishes and hundreds of other materials - including tape’s and putty’s used to finish drywall.

Plasticizers are not stable. They outgas. If they’re in your tight home, the fumes get trapped inside and contribute to toxic house syndrome. If they’re on your skin, they can be absorbed into your body. They can also be absorbed into your food from packaging.

Wear and tear of construction components containing plasticizers will cause abrasion which will release microplastics into your house that can get into your lungs, water, food, bedding etc.

A timely post by Dr. Anna Mihalcea deals with a recent study done by Consumer Reports about plastics and plasticizers in food.

Recent Consumer Report Reveals High Levels Of Plastics In All Food Categories - Is Poisoning Our Biosphere Via Geoengineering The REAL Cause?

The plastic issue is why I stopped shopping at Trader Joe’s a dozen years ago. All of their produce is packaged in plastic.

back to the labor comparison

Then we have to consider; all the labor involved in mining the materials needed to do all of that, all of the labor needed to make all the paints, preservatives, glues, caulks, glass, copper, plastics, the factories that’d to be built to do all of that, the machinery required to build the factories, the machinery required to run the factories, that machinery required to ship all of that, the machinery required to build the factories to make the ships, the labor for all of that, the labor required to drill for the oil needed to produce all of the energy required to do all of that, the labor required to make all the machinery required at ports to ship all of those resources from all over the world, the labor to handle those goods at ports and on and on and on, ad nauseam.

That’s a whole lot of labor.

All of this is known by natural builders as embodied energy. Yes, a modern prefab house can be built in less time than it takes to build a natural home. The problem is, when industry funded universities and NGO’s calculate the energy performance of a modern house, they don’t consider the energy required to mine, manufacture and ship all the planetary resources a modern house consumes. Nor do they consider the energy used to build a modern house. In other words, they don’t calculate the embodied energy in modern housing. They only calculate how well a house performs once it’s constructed. That’s the lie that gets sold to the public. Like vaccines, modern houses are not “safe and effective”.

It quickly becomes apparent that the couple building the natural home are much smarter than the couple paying five times as much for a prefab house, a house that will likely cause them health issues for the entire time they live in it.

And now the new owners of the prefab are indebted to the globalist banksters and the socialist utility companies for the next 25 years. With the stroke of a pen they have become indentured servants to predatory globalists because they made a bad choice about housing. They are now socialists living in a communist collective run by billionaire globalists.

metal buildings

Another question that came up several times was - what about metal buildings? More specifically, what about homes built from recycled shipping containers? Another reader asked about (metal) travel trailers.

There are two concerns with metal buildings. The first one has to do with their susceptibility to DEW’s. I covered that in this earlier post.

The second issue has to do with EMF’s inside the house. If you have AC wiring, electrical appliances, computers, wifi, telephone base stations, cell phones, wireless tv or other wireless devices or remote controls, all of those are emitting RF and EMF frequencies into the house. In a metal building those frequencies tend to get trapped inside the house, bouncing around like a pen ball in a pen ball machine, exacerbating exposure to anyone inside. This is why Faraday cages have become popular. Faraday cages are metal structures that can block EMF’s from reaching those who are protected inside it. Living in a metal house is like living inside a Faraday cage where all the sources of EMF’s are coming from inside the cage.

Houses made with metal studs, metal beams or metal siding, like those on Maui, at Paradise California and other such fires, were destroyed by the HPM DEW attacks responsible for those fires. As I explained in the link above, HPM’s are powerful microwaves. We all know what happens when we put aluminum and other metals in a microwave oven.

The World Trade Center was also hit by DEW’s. That’s why there was no massive pile of rubble after they fell down. Those materials were all pulverized into dust, as were the metal homes in the post linked above.

If a house is built of natural materials it’s not only less susceptible to the type of DEW’s attack that devastates metal cars and buildings, it will also not trap EMF’s inside.

A reader mentioned reflective, plastic bubble insulation. For all the reasons just mentioned, insulation made of reflective metals are also problematic. From an EMF point of view, an older, relatively safe, wooden stud house can be ruined by the addition of reflective aluminum or Mylar backed insulation. There is also the issue of toxic outgassing from the plastic.

Someone said straw bale homes are fire traps. Not true. Straw bales are very tightly compacted. I’ve watched people try to set them on fire. The looser exterior straw smolders a bit, then the fire goes out. Once the bales are put into the wall, they’re further compacted to the point that very little air remains. Then those bales are covered with plaster, which restricts air to the point that they’re even more fire resistant. A typical wood frame wall is essentially a series of chimneys which allows fires to shoot up inside walls. Not so with straw bale walls. Testing has confirmed that straw bale walls are three times more fire resistant than typical wood frame construction.

onward

In 1992 I moved to Gila, NM, a small farming community located along the Gila River in the South West part of the state near Silver City. Less than a year later I bought 13 acres of irrigated farm land along the San Francisco River in the unincorporated community of Pleasanton, about thirty miles up the road from Gila.

I soon met some neighbors who ran the local food buying club. They had been living there for about ten years. Thanks to the club, they knew a lot of locals. Through them and the club I quickly began to meet a lot of local folks.

But let’s back up a bit. Before I moved to NM I was working for a company in Tucson called Rammed Earth Construction, founded by Quinton Branch in the ’80's. I had heard about the company and sought them out. Quinton didn’t need any help at the time but he hired me anyhow.

After working with him for a while I determined he was one of the smartest guys I’d ever met.

We were building rammed earth homes using the same ancient, 1,200 year old techniques I wrote about in the last post. Quinton was a natural born teacher and I was natural born student. He took me under his wing and taught me a lot.

The in-house architect was Tom Weulpern. He had an architectural degree in earthen design. He and I hit it off. We both loved to windsurf. Over the ensuing years we took numerous trips to Mexico to camp on beaches and windsurf on the Gulf of California.

One Saturday morning in 1989 Tom and I were shooting the breeze in his Tucson office when a guy walked in and introduced himself as Matts Mhyrman. I knew who he was. He had become locally famous for building the first legal straw bale home in the US - a guest house built in his back yard for his elderly mom. That project had been featured once a week for months on Good Morning America.

The exposure on Good Morning America left Matts inundated with inquires. He was trying to retire so he had come into Toms office looking for an alternative minded architect and contractor who might be interested in designing and building straw bale homes. Tom explained that Rammed Earth was geared-up for rammed earth and adobe construction and that none of the crew knew anything about straw bale construction. He declined the offer from Matts.

I followed Matts out the door and told him I was interested. He invited me to come help with an upcoming project. Two weeks later I helped raise the walls on the second legal straw bale house in the US. Since then, tens of thousands have been built around the US.

By then my love affair with bamboo was flourishing. I had researched the best species of bamboo for the higher elevations of southern AZ, ordered some from various growers around the country and had begun to propagate them. By the time I met Matts I had hundreds of bamboo plants.

While working with Matts on that second straw bale home, I told him about the amazing qualities of bamboo. A few weeks later I got a call from a guy by the name of Bill Steen. He told me Matts had told him that I was the guy to talk to about bamboo. Bill also told me he was working on a book about straw bale construction and wanted to know if bamboo might be useful. I told him that bamboo could be used to pin straw bale walls, that it could also be used for wattle and daub and many other things. The next day he came to my house and bought several bamboo plants.

Initially, straw bale walls were pinned internally with rebar or long bolts. Both were problematic because they acted as condensation vectors inside the straw bale walls, which meant they tended to rust. Much of this rust would develop in the first months after plastering due to the moisture from the plaster being trapped inside the wall for a period of time. Today, largely thanks to the Steen’s running with my suggestion, bamboo has become the preferred material for pinning straw bale walls. The bamboo is lashed to the outside of the bales, creating an external skeleton effect (see video). It has an indefinite life span in straw bale walls and unlike metallic building materials, poses no threat when hit with DEW’s.

When Bill got those bamboo plants from me, he and Athena Swentzel were seeing each other. She had recently built a straw bale house on her native Pueblo reservation in Northern NM. They would combine forces to write The Straw Bale House. Because of all the different aspects and techniques covered, this book is now considered by many to be the Bible of natural building. (A straw bale house I designed and built is featured in that book). Eventually they had three boys (see video in previous post).

In a very short time period I had met all of the primary progenitors of the adobe, rammed earth and straw bale building renaissance.

Initially, shortly after the invention of the baling machine, straw bale construction had a short run, mostly in Nebraska during the 1930’s and 40’s. It wasn’t until this more recent iteration that it really took hold. And yes, it was ironic - or maybe not - that it mostly began in and around Tucson, the adobe and rammed earth capitol of the US.

Tucson was quickly becoming known as the heart of the alternative building movement.

Tucson is known as the Old Pueblo for a reason. It was originally settled at least 5,000 years ago. Whether that was by what we now call the Hohokum people or the Pima - known today as the Tohono O’odham nation - can be debated. Long ago they had a very large community growing Pima cotton, nopal, agave, chapalote corn, squash and tepary beans in fields irrigated with water diverted from the Santa Cruz river.

By the 1400’s the Hohokum mysteriously disappeared from what is now the Tucson area. Padre Kino arrived in the late 1600’s and began building missions.

Spanish troops began construction on the Tucson Presidio in 1775. The Spaniards made use of the same irrigation ditches that the Hohokum had abandoned several hundred years earlier. The presidio became what is now the heart of Tucson.

From an alternative builders viewpoint, this history has proven to be advantageous. Tucson has thousands of 200+ year old adobe buildings still in use today. Padre Kino’s San Xavier Mission, made of adobe block, was begun in 1692, which makes it about 325 years old. Sunday services are still held there.

In spite of the fact that two hundred years ago there was no such thing as building permits and codes, many of those adobe buildings are as solid today as they were two or three hundred years ago. Consequently, local building officials had to acknowledge that, although earthen construction doesn’t conform to globalist building codes, it was nevertheless a proven building system. Because Tucson and Pima county were forced to back off strict building codes for adobe construction, those jurisdictions became known as some of the most open minded building departments in the US.

Fate had put me in the middle of all of the above. Then I moved to South West NM where I soon learned that fate had even more in store for me.

back to NM

My friends with the food buying club introduced me to a woman who lived an hour away (due to the mountainous terrain) in Kingston, a former mining town that had been abandoned because the mine had played out long ago. In this neck of the woods we call such towns ghost towns. As far as the extractive industries are concerned, the globalists long ago mastered the rape-and-run mining game.

Her name was Catherine Wanak. She had worked as a producer in Hollywood and had taken early retirement. She bought an old lodge in Kingston, fixed it up and began to run it as a bed and breakfast.

Kingston sits at 6,240’ in elevation. It’s a mountain town. Even though it’s not far from the Mexican border, it can get cold there. Catherine had begun to learn about passive solar energy and alternative building systems, including straw bale construction. She decided to build a straw bale addition onto the south side of the lodge to create a passive solar greenhouse that would help heat the lodge in the winter.

Around that time another friend was putting the finishing touches on his straw bale home in Gila. His name was Steve McDonald. Steve and Matts Myhrmann hooked up to write the very first basic book on straw bale construction - Build It With Bales. I eagerly watched over their shoulders while they edited the book on the computer at Steve’s house. The first version of the book was hand made. It was later revised to the one you see in the link. I may still have one of the original hand-made copies.

In 1994 some folks in Oregon got together for a week to learn about cob and timber frame construction. Somehow Catherine heard about this and offered to hold a similar gathering the following year at her lodge in Kingston.

The date for that event (summer of ’95) partially conflicted with the national meeting of the American Bamboo Society which was in Savannah, Georgia that year. I drove there because I knew I would be able to harvest some bamboo poles from groves there. I was able to make it back to Kingston in time for the last three days of what turned out to be the first ever Natural Building Colloquium at the lodge. As the video below shows, most everyone who was on the cutting edge of natural building was present.

Bill and Athena Steen were the glaring exception.

I had dozens of bamboo poles on the top of my truck so I held several impromptu workshops on how to work with bamboo.

By then Catherine was seeing Pete Fust. Turns out, Pete was a professional disk (frisbee) golfer. As I’ve mentioned before, at one point I considered going pro with freestyle frisbee. He also had a green thumb. Needless to say, we hit it off.

Pete introduced me to all the teachers present for the colloquium. Older versions of them can be seen in the video below.

That was 1995.

Several years later The Lama Foundation held their first natural building colloquium at their place north of Taos, NM. Some of you may know that as the place where Richard Alpert spent a lot of time from 1970 on. He was also known as Ram Dass. His book Be Here Now was a best seller in those years. I was asked to come and do a bamboo workshop at their first Natural Building Colloquium (’96 or ’97?).

Matts Mhyrman (r) and Pete Fust working on a bamboo sweat lodge that was my bamboo workshop at the Lama Foundation in 1996 (or 7?).

Since then I’ve held workshops in California, Hawaii, New Mexico, Arizona and Mexico.

In 2015 Catherine held a twenty year anniversary Colloquium at her lodge. Matt Anderson came with his camera to film some of the projects and interview all the old timers who showed up. I didn’t make it to that event, nor did several others who contributed much more to the movement than some of those who were interviewed.

https://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/whats-a-colloquium-2020/

In 1998 I persuaded Catherine and Pete to go with me to the International Bamboo Conference in San Jose, Costa Rica.

Pete Fust (l) and Catherine Wanak in the exhibition hall of the bamboo conference in San Jose CR 1998. I don’t recall the other fellows name. In the center is a clump of Guauda that’s been removed from the ground to show it’s growth pattern. The structure shows how bamboo is used in CR to build a framework for bamboo homes.

Costa Rica had undertaken a large project to replant a lot of clear cut tropical forest areas with bamboo. Those forests had been raped by globalist wood product companies over the previous decades. Much of this land was now suffering from severe erosion and mud slides from torrential, tropical storms.

Little did we know… this problem would became elevated to an unprecedented, dangerous level during our time in Costa Rica.

While in-flight to San Jose, C.R. we were notified that we might not be able to land due to an incoming hurricane. As it turned out, we landed just as the brunt of the hurricane came ashore in North Eastern Costa Rica, Eastern Nicaragua and Honduras.

This was hurricane Mitch, which to this day is the second deadliest Atlantic hurricane on record. It was by far the most deadly and destructive hurricane to ever hit Central America. At least 11,374 people lost their lives during that storm, mostly in Nicaragua and Honduras. Some reports put that number at over 20,000. Many of them were buried alive by mudslides that occurred due to mindless rape-and-run tactics by globalist wood product companies.

Clear-cutting tropical rain forests is very profitable. But the Creator put those forests there for many good reasons. For native people, those forests produced all the fruit, vegetables, meat and medicine they needed. Those forests also kept the soil in place and prevented excessive runoff and mudslides.

Intact forests are a protective sponge and a bountiful resource. Remove them and all hell breaks loose.

Of course, no corporate executives were prosecuted for those crimes.

By the time we landed mid-day in San Jose, Mitch had already begun to unleash his rain. There were torrential rains all night. It was raining when the conference began the next morning. It rained all that day. Mud slides were beginning to happen around San Jose. The city was on full alert.

As the news of the unfolding disaster began to come in that first morning, a sober and considerate mood settled over the event. It was quickly becoming abundantly clear that the reforestation work that Costa Rica was doing with fast growing bamboo was critically important.

In spite of Mitch, the conference agenda largely stayed on track. But many presenters began to stray from their prepared presentations to talk about how to build emergency shelter with local bamboo and how to get more fast growing bamboo plants to the campesinos to quickly reforest clearcut mountainsides. It just so happened that all of the people in the world who knew how to implement bamboo aid projects were present at that conference. A lot of grassroots aid projects were born over the next few days.

Today, thanks to those efforts in 1998, throughout Central America, a lot of clear cut land has been, or is being replanted with fast growing bamboo.

Much of the bamboo planted by the Costa Rican government at that time was the species I wrote about in my last post, Guadua angustifolia, a species from Columbia that many consider to be the premier construction grade species in the world.

Part of the Costa Rica bamboo project involved harvesting mature Guadua poles to build housing for low income folks displaced by disasters like hurricanes. The conference organizers had arranged several tours for those who could stay after the initial three day conference, Those of us who stayed not only got to see some of the magnificent groves of Guadua (photo at top of page), we also got to tour some of the very well designed and built, low income bamboo housing projects.

The house in the back is just about ready to be plastered.

At the INBAR bamboo conference in Hawaii a few years earlier I had met Manuel and Emiliano Ratana, bothers from Costa Rica. In Hawaii they told me that if I came to Costa Rica for the conference that I should come and visit their bamboo farm. We reconnected at the conference and they reminded me the invitation was still open. I wasn’t about to turn down an offer to stay on a tropical bamboo farm.

After the conference Pete, Catherine, myself and a friend of theirs (whose name I don’t recall), rented a Suzuki Samuri to spend a few days touring South Western Costa Rica.

I had met Linda Firestone in Hawaii. We connected again in Costa Rica and she invited us to visit her permaculture farm where she had recently planted a number of bamboo species. From there we drove out onto the Osa Peninsula.

A large ficus tree blown over by hurricane Mitch on Linda Firestones farm. She is standing on the tree. Pete Fust is hehind her and his wife Catheirne Wanack is behind him. The guy in front is Pete and Catherins friend whose name I don’t recall.

We then all headed to the Retana brothers farm. A day later, Pete and Catherine flew back home. I stayed for another month, as did Pete and Catherines friend.

The Retana brothers on the right with Manuels wife. We’re standing in front of a young clump of Dendrocalamus asper.

The Retana brothers have over a thousand acres of land in the coffee growing region of Western Costa Rica where they grow a number of species of bamboo. At the time of my visit they were primarily engaged in making bamboo furniture which they sold throughout Costa Rica and neighboring countries.

They were also busy propagating thousands of Guadua bamboo plants to plant on their land. Those plants have long ago been planted. They’re now using poles from those groves to build homes.

If you’re in Central America and you want a bamboo house built, I recommend these two Ticos. You can find out more about them at BambuTico.

On the return flight the pilot flew us low over Nicaragua and Honduras so we could see the massive mud slides that had occurred where the forests had been stripped from the sides of the mountains. It was hard to fathom that, thanks to a few greedy corporate CEO’s and some crooked politicians, thousands of people had recently been buried alive in the mudslides I was looking at below the plane.