Bamboo bikes bode well for a peaceful future

I have seen and talked to the guys at Calfee at the bike shows for many years. The bikes are expensive but...

I remember when the carbon fiber and tungsten bikes came out, expensive, and they were part of the research that went into jet aircraft, and when the cold war ended, tons of these materials ended up on the market and bikes became feasible and cheap and competitive with high end steel. I remember an ad in some magazine from the early 90s from some bike maker who had purchased a bunch of tungsten and was advertising for other shops to part out the material.

Bamboo bikes are on the opposite end of the war and jet paradigm, only competing against chop sticks, and it make me think that the future could be in botany- I went to talk between Paul Hawkins and Michael Pollan at Berkeley last week and Hawkins is really big on Botany and reeled of a slew of products and technologies in different fields that are really cutting edge. The science of growing straight bamboo of a given tensile strength... after looking at and riding these bikes the solutions to the problem with people just seems limitless.

Isn't it fantastic that Calfee Designs in Santa Cruz has figured out how to make the bamboo bike in Ghana from local resources for $50/- even thought its "beast of a different type" i.e. with part from the Ghanian flee market? Bikes from bamboo just makes for a promising future.