That's. Yes. As. Interest. From. Food from. Food. From callously. Boom boom. Boom boom boom boom boom boom. Boom boom boom. Boom boom. Boom boom boom boom. Good to. See. Chief. Chief chief. Peter Baker. Oh. RINGBACK Me. * Me. Just musing. And no fleet. I think he could give. Me. A letter. So that. Got some of that truth there. For the 1st. Bit of the families the previously gave that a try that. You really are they. Going. To. Have it. Me. You can. Carry on as Jay is home to east county magazine where host Miriam Raftery will keep you informed about what is happening here be sure to tune in Monday on Friday afternoons at 5 servings. Sandiego from high atop monument peak in the logo mountains where k n s j broadcasting live at 89 point one f.m. Online at k n s j dot org And streaming live on your smartphone using the tune in radio love you sound of social justice j m s j 89 point one f.m. This god self this is sea change radio covering the shift to sustainability I'm Alex wise. But there isn't $100000000.00 bikes produced annually and if we got even a fraction of those made out of Amber to make a significant that in the amount of carbon that were put in the environment and possibly if bamboo is being ground it could be absorbing more carbon so it is a real wind that to change it to something like this. I guess the grass is itself a child produced babe of the vegetation. Perhaps Walt Whitman had this week's guests on Seachange radio in mind when he wrote those words as we talk to 2 entrepreneurs who in very different ways are using nature's bounty for innovative purposes 1st we speak to Hawaiian based bicycle maker Barrett work who uses bamboo strongest grass around to make his bike frames then we revisit my discussion with Bay Area based c. For a jury extraordinary Kirk Lombard. I'm joined now in Sea Change radio by Barrett work he is the founder of work arts and he makes bamboo bikes welcome to sea change Radio thank you good to be here so you make some beautiful custom build bikes in Hawaii want to you explain the difference between your bikes and the regular mass produced bike 1st of all the materials that you use really shout out want to explain why you work with bamboo. Yes the frames are made out of bamboo and they're joined with both carbon fiber and I also use natural fibers like linen or him and I'm experimenting with some local fibers from Hawaii but it's basically a composite joinery similar to any kind of carbon fiber fiber glass joinery and the bamboo is very light like aluminum or carbon fiber it's also super stiff and makes for a really comfortable ride it's naturally shock absorbing but also very stiff so it makes a great material and it looks beautiful and so the tubes are much fatter than you plan on a normal bike and that sets it apart and you can tell it's a little different almost like an older Cannondale aluminum bike in terms of its width right exactly that was an inspiration to me and I had a candle when I was a kid and I would love that style Actually when I was 1st prototype and I was have a problem with the frames were to plex the ball and I was using too small the diameter bamboo and I was remembering back in my Cannondale on how they're using that thin walled aluminum and with the larger diameter tubes they're able to stiffen up the right and that's exactly how it worked out with my designs as well and did you originally start building. That were traditional metal frames or have you always been a bamboo bike maker Yeah I never built frames out of steel or or any other metal material but I've been fanatical about bikes for a long time I mean I've been I was a bike mechanic a long time ago and was racing mountain bikes back on the sport was just getting started back in the Bay Area and biking has been a passion so I I wasn't fully focused on bikes at the time that the bike idea was born I was deep into my passion of woodworking and well the there's a passion before that blended into this which was I was working on organic farms on the big and I was well they're trying to use local resources they're grown bamboo they're grown coffee of a cotton. I'm trying to figure out ways to use what grows easily here with the bundle and bamboo grows super easy it's abundant but there was always this well I really wanted to plant a lot of it but nobody really had a great idea what to do with it because it takes a lot of skill to make something of value so this is been brewing in my mind for well since well since I came to Hawaii 15 years ago and finally through the practice of woodworking and all that ever other skills blended in figured out ways to to join the bamboo in a super strong way you know a way that as strong if not stronger than the metal frames Yeah I see your for yourself custom made furniture as well so were you doing the furniture before you entered the bike world Yeah exactly I've been doing furniture for many years and. That's how I got my start in the woodworking was building custom furniture on the big island It's beautiful stuff thank you and I see there's bamboo in some of the products but far from exclusive bamboo Yeah I think that's one of the mistakes that gets made with bamboo and you see bamboo furniture there's a kind of an idea that it's weak it's cheap it falls apart it seems that a lot of times the approach of building bamboo furniture is to use nothing but bamboo but that's not really the way to take use of bamboos super strength strength in certain ways and certain directions but it's not good in every possible way so if you can integrate it into like a table leg or a stool leg it's super strong like that but if you try to make a table top. It's you have to glue a 1000000 pieces together to make a flat surface it's not really a most appropriate youth so instead of like hanging onto this idea that has to be 100 percent bamboo just let go of that but not to be pure bamboo like we can still use local wood we have a lot of an abundance of many beautiful woods here so incorporating like monkey Potter. Silky oak is another beautiful and basic species and just integrating that in and creating something beautiful was that was the idea and making use of our invasive species an abundant species rather than focusing on the stuff that's in short supply like Co I mean everybody is crazy about Co and it's beautiful I love the stuff but we don't need to chop down entire forest. To have beautiful full furniture we can still make use of these alternative woods and to have something really amazing for that's the root of what how it came into being so walk us through your process of building a bamboo frame if you can like how do you keep it from getting damaged by weather how do you keep it from splintering and how do you select your wood it cetera Yeah I take it from the very start I mean I we have a several bamboo patches to harvest from here on a walk and like I'm going for the invasive species so we have thousands of acres I get a permit from the forestry department I go out and I select this is the most important part when you're selecting the bamboo because when I 1st started I just went out and look for the biggest and nice looking bamboo but what happens when you do that is going up harvesting immaturely bamboo and it splits and it and it cracks and you'd be like this is a junk material but after some experiment have figured out all right you're looking for a certain age bamboo you want ones that are. Totally mature and it's got the most dense fibers it's got the least amount of starch and at the bugs are going to eat some going and they're looking for these these grandpa poles but not too old because you will then they start to degrade and force a selection of number one and that's where most people go wrong and then so I've got my bamboo and then I air dry it for 6 to 9 months and I don't accelerate the drying has to be dried slowly otherwise it's going to crack it and also damage your material so there's that. And also I treat the material with. Non-toxic the humans it's a solution so that keeps out any insects so that's a big problem you know generally with a mature bamboo you don't have bugs problems but if you're building like a high end bike you don't want to have customers come back and be like you know what I got bugs running all over my frame and. The powder so they're going to have to know that could happen if you don't treat your bamboo and especially in Hawaii we've got plenty bugs so I'm not taking any chances they're a tree and I haven't had any bug problems and I mean ideally I would like to not treated but it's the best of what we can do environmentally So it's a compromise but it's definitely worth it so from there we've got a good bamboo product to start on the bike with and then get the poles cut rough to size to the frame to go into a jig so that roughly looks like the frame that you're going to be making and then I scrape off the natural outer layer of bamboo about to have this really hard coating on the outside it's like it's harder than any kind of paint it's got this high silica content in there it's it's so hard that you can't really sand it off it it kills sandpaper It's like harder than the material they make sandpaper with so you could you could sand one pole with one sheet of sand they really are to get another sheet sand paper so it has to be scraped off with this cabinet scraper metal scraper and you have found efficient ways to do this but that's really important to get that off because if you don't and you take your bite say from a human place like Hawaii and take it actually recently in Salt Lake City and in the winter and it's just so dry and if you don't have your poles coated and sealed with a different finish it just the humidity changes shocks in the in the poles so. The natural finish is too breathable so I cut it with an a pox the and a Polly Anna and I spar your things so it's protected and will preserve it for decades once the bikes finish. My. Letter. Man. I don't think you. Know what I'm saying and see. The. Man they got him. I know. A man. With. No. Skills. That. Follow the shift to sustainability with sea change radio on Twitter at twitter dot com slash Seachange radio and on our Facebook page this is Alex wise on sea change radio I'm speaking to Barrett work he is the founder of work hearts and makes custom made bamboo bicycles. So Barrett just looking at your website I see that most of your bikes are hard tail they're not suspension bikes is that because you're trying to save weight on the bike or is does bamboo not lend itself well to a suspension bicycle it would be possible to do suspension bike but my focus right now is not that market there's so many great ways to make a bamboo bike that don't require such a complicated design so. And it's starting from the simplest design and getting more complicated so the 1st designs have been single speed no gears no derailers just a really clean chain line doesn't need any cable routing fix basically a fix Yeah or a cruiser so that's the simple design and that's design that I teach students because I also teach workshops for people to build their own frames here in Honolulu over a weekend or for 3 days something like that. And then next complicated start adding derailers and disc brakes and with each complication like that it adds a bit more time and so suspension is not impossible but what's been the biggest interest in the bag as people come in to do these workshops so I teaching at the Honolulu Museum of Art and people are just so excited I mean they're building their own friend I mean riding a bike they built themselves. And I can't make it so complicated we're going to let this pension in because it's just wouldn't be doable but they come out of there and they're riding you know they're either writing like a fixie or they're writing like one guy built a internal. Speed. Bike So it's got all the gears are in the hub but it still looks like a single speed. And you know it still has caliper brakes and all the all the bells and whistles like that but we're still trying to keep it simple so it can be done in a reasonable amount of time and reasonable cost so that's the main market right now yes how much do your bikes cost give us an idea of the range well for those workshops they run about $600.00 for the basic frames if you'd like a custom frame built by me they started 800 and then complete bikes run from 20 503000 then that neighborhood and how many bikes to estimate you've produced we're at 38 now and what kind of weight are we looking at compared to some of the alloy frames and carbon and titanium frames that we see in the high end bike market in a similar price range to what we're talking about here. Yeah that's that's pretty amazing about bamboos it's very light and very strong so it's right up there with the weight of a lightweight aluminum or titanium frame it's definitely lighter than any steel frame it's lighter than most aluminum frame I don't really like to talk about the weight of a complete bike because you can spend a fortune on components to save a gram here and ground there what it really comes down to to have a real fair comparison you've got to talk about the frame weight so the frames weigh typically for a lightweight aluminum frame around 3 and a half pounds 4 pounds so the bamboo frames come in about 3 and a half pounds for a student like they're around 4 and a half 5 pounds because I don't want to take any chances going super lightweight on the joinery but for the bikes I build I really engineer them for light weight and strength so the only lighter option than bamboo would be a carbon frame fully carbon frame but. Completely out of a poxy in carbon fiber so environmentally it's not the best choice but them do is a clear environmental choice over steel or carbon Yes speaking of carbon What kind of carbon footprint does a carbon frame bike have or a steel framed by compared to the bamboo bike frame obviously you can't do all the numbers but if you have any idea of what goes into forging just steel of the bikes that we ride generally compared to what you have well a little bit of research I've done a steel bike produces something like 5 kilograms of carbon just for producing the metals so right off that we don't have that because we're the the bamboo grows it's actually absorbing carving to grow and it's just cut there's no heat needed to process it you have the material for a negative carbon impact so. And if you were to that something like $100000000.00 bikes produced annually if if we got even a fraction of those made out of them do they make a significant dent in the amount of carbon that were put in the environment and possibly if you are bamboo being grown it could be absorbed more carbon so it is a real wind to change it to something like this so do you know of any other bike makers who work with bamboo Yeah there's there's a handful of bamboo bike makers around the world. There's there's even one and a Ron who has seen him on Instagram it's pretty cool there's a there's one that's more established and gone out there they're making bikes more on a production scale and a lot of those bikes get sent to I believe Germany or throughout Europe and so they're they're able to sell the bike for a good value in Europe and that money goes a long way in Africa making a good community and then yeah there's In China there is a bamboo bike maker and Vietnam and there's a couple more United States as well so it's it's it's a very small industry but it is growing for sure and Mexico to the Seems like they're doing quite a bit down there too. The website is work arts dot com That's w e r k arts. At work thanks so much for being my guest on Seachange Radio thank you I like. To listen to sea change radio anytime any place just subscribe to our free podcast simply follow the link from sea change Radio dot com or search for us in the i Tunes podcast directory. I'm joined now in Sea Change radio by Kirk Lombard he is the founder of sea foragers Seafood Company Kirk welcome to sea change Radio thanks for having me out so for our listeners want to 1st explain how c. Forger works Ok well it operates along the lines of sort of like a produce box c.s.a. Delivery people sign up online for a minimum of I think for deliveries they pay a set rate and then I choose based on what I think is most sustainable option plus what's the freshest so and then I provide that seafood I deliver to various drop locations and also door to door service it's requested if it's in San Francisco we can do that so so what gave you the idea for this are there other c.s.s. C.s.f. Surround the country to do this oh yeah yeah it's a I think a growing trend happily. A few a few other competitors in the Bay Area but when you look at how many different seafood companies there are I mean there are dozens in California. There are fewer people who define themselves as c s F's or fish delivery packages and and so there's there's less competition which is one of the reasons that I was interested in doing it just on a business level the way the way I see forger started is that I do walking tours where I very fishy sort of fish centric seafood he salty walking towards I take people around various neighborhoods and on the coastline and I teach them about the sea weeds to grow their monkey face eels live under the rocks and we practice how to how to cast how to throw casting nets so people can catch their own small fish. Using the Hawaiian casting net technique and I I d. Mystify that because there's a lot of different people who teach how to do that online and I have the simplest way to do it and the most effective so I teach people how to to go out and get stuff and I was doing these tours for a couple of years and I just started to notice that. At the end of the tour I get a lot of people. Who would ask me they'd say so if I can't go out and throw casting net and catch my own herring or I don't have time to go out and catch a perch on the on the coastline here or go fishing for stripers or whatever how do I get something that I know is fresh and sustainable so I was pointing them in various directions and just throwing a lot of business at various other. More really the result one or 2 different companies that I was really throwing people towards And I just decided Well since there has been a question why don't I provide the seafood in with the the. The contacts that I've made in the seafood world over the last 20 years I've been able to do that so yeah that's how it how it happened take us back to about 20 year period a little bit give us a little bit of background you have a very interesting spastic. It's a it's a hard one because I've I've worn a lot of different hats so that would just I've done a lot of different jobs over the years and but the one thing that I always have done is a voice fish mostly recreationally and I've always just been in love with being out on the water and or just along the shoreline as it were. Most of the fishing that I actually do is shore based so like the things things that I write about in my book . The most are things like monkey face eels and night smelt and surf smelt and. Fishing from some of the peers in the Bay Area and that's all that's always been sort of my you know my focus. And yes so. As many different jobs and careers as I had over the years the one thing that I always have done is been connected to the ocean in some way or another. And so I just decided at a certain point to. To commit to a life in seafood I'm a true seafood a Tarion in the in the old Mr Flood that I'm making an obscure reference to a to a book by Joseph Mitchell who has a wonderful wonderful take on American Seafood in the 1930 s. You can you can read about in a book called up in the old hotel but he has a piece called Old Mr Flood which describes a person who's just passionate about seafood and old Mr Flood refers to himself as a seafood Tarion And so that's how I refer to myself and what is the problem with being a seafood Terry and in today's marketplace if you're not a conscious consumer in terms of what you're putting in your body and what you're doing in terms of supporting some of these less the stain of all businesses why you really want to you explain how your business is kind of a reaction to some of the market inequities in inefficiencies if you don't have a conscience and you don't have a problem you know you can go do anything but I but if you do have a conscience and you know you're concerned about the plight of the. Of the oceans and the sea food resources you know there's some very practical things that you can do so what is the flip side of your business you know people who actually are conscious about seafood are your consumers but 99 percent of people don't even think about where their seafood comes from why should they one thing I just always not ever felt like I like it's productive to tell people what they should do so I do what I do and if that appeals to people Hey I'm more than happy to provide seafood and what I do is I always have the name of the boat I know when the fish was landed I give details to my customers about how those fish were landed I'm into the story I'm into people knowing that what we provide on a weekly basis depends on a lot of factors it depends on the skill of the guy going out and getting those fish it depends on how big the swell is it depends on what is migrating and what is available and what quotas have been reached all of that stuff if you're not attuned to that then you just you come to think that it's just always there and the problematics seafood as I see it is the stuff that's just always there so a major component of what we do is trick is to try to is to educate and you know people don't sign up for c forger unless they're open for open to that you know I ever now and then I get somebody who writes me an email saying hey you know I could have gotten such and such a fish for half of what you're charging. And then I say Well 1st of all how do you know that such and such a fish is even the species that you're buying the New York Times did a study well with it was either 40 or 60 percent of all American Seafood is mislabeled the to the species level it's at that's just insane So you're buying and you're buying tuna How do you know what you're getting anyway so let alone how it was caught when it was caught where it was caught who caught it and how they were treated how much they were paid for that I mean all of that stuff. Once that becomes a mystery then it's just there's openings for you know the miserable treatment of the ocean and the fisheries I try to take that mystery out and the people who are part of that as well are down and down the whole supply chain there's a lot of misery there as well we've chronicled some of the work in Southeast Asia Oh man have you ever seen a man of my tours or one of my talks I met a guy who was working on a film it was called. It's a really darkly humorous title it was called grinding NEEMO. And my so if you're haven't a really bad day do not go and see this movie if you're having a really good day and you just think that you're you're flying too high and you want to bring yourself down a couple of notches go watch grinding memo which is all about the shrimp industry I guess and I don't want to say the wrong country as it was in Tunisia or something and how they've they've depopulated the coastal resource to the extent that the only fish left to feed the shrimp in the in the coastal destroying shrimp farms that are being built the only fish left are the like the clown fish like NEEMO so they put these drag boats that drag over the tops of these coral reefs and destroy the reefs and then they catch these little tiny fish and then they grind them into fish meal to feed the shrimp that are in the shrimp ponds that are destroying the coastal ecosystem so it's and they're employing slave labor to do this now you don't need to watch the movie but you should check it out anyway because it really will really impress you he's the founder of sea foragers Seafood Company Kirk Lombard Kirk thanks so much for being my guest on sea change Radio thanks for having me on. The. Final. You've been listening to sea change radio our interim music is by Sanford Lewis in our music is by Alex wise additional music by galactic the Jerry Garcia Band and John Sholay check out our Web site at sea change Radio dot com That's a change Radio dot com to stream or download the show or subscribe to our podcast visit our archives there to hear from Bill McKibben Van Jones Paul Hawken and many others and tune in to see change radio next week as we continue making connections for sustainability for sea change radio I'm Alex was. Serving San Diego from high atop monument peak in the Laguna mountains this is k n s j where you can hear talk of the town with Michael Geary Monday through Friday from 8 to 9 am and 4 to 5 pm it's an insightful program about what our country needs to be doing to get back on track it's informative educational and even funny at times that's Talk of the town here on k. And s j Descanso 89 point one f.m. And streaming live online at k. Illustrate auto org. From Pacifica This is Democracy Now it's white supremacy plain and simple and this that you have to go. To great supremacy that we see today activists topple of Confederate statue in Durham North Carolina just truly days after that deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville Virginia will speak to the college student who climbed up the ladder looped a rope around the top of the Confederate Soldiers monument then pulled the statue to the ground she was arrested Tuesday and is heading to court just after the show . Will look at the growing movement to remove Confederate statues and symbols with the green you sent 2 years ago she scaled a 30 foot fly on the South Carolina state capitol and remove the Confederate flag their day.