![]() ![]() Suddenly last spring, his backyard green wall felt like a prototype, and he doubled down researching the properties of bamboo. Trained at Columbia University, Velasco had been thinking about Calexico’s struggles with excessive heat, air pollution, double-the-state-average asthma rates (now exacerbating COVID infections) and the big specter: climate change amping everything up. She promised him the root system would catch on in what she called "that s-ty dirt," and sure enough, in just over a year, he saw his skinny bamboo plants shoot up 10 feet and fill in, a verdant picket fence between Velasco and the dust. "She made me feel old."įour punishing hours later, they finally got the plants in, and Lydick taught Velasco how to keep the young bamboo fertilized and irrigated. "I’m a big guy, but Lauren out-passed me," Velasco said. They started digging out back together in the high-bake sun and realized pretty fast that Velasco’s backyard was essentially rocks and pieces of busted-up old concrete with some silt holding it all together. For me, this is pretty much life and death. He wanted to try using bamboo as a shield.Ģ050 is closer than 1980, and 2050 is when the earth is supposed to be on fire. They drove a few miles from the nursery to Calexico, where Velasco had a dirt alley behind his house that, along with the county’s typical dust storms, was coating his backyard in particulate matter he figured was probably making it into his lungs as well. On a late-spring afternoon in 2019, Lydick and a 33-year-old urban planner named Christopher Velasco loaded up his truck bed with four, 15-gallon pots of Punting Pole bamboo, a pickaxe and a shovel. ![]() "Think of bamboo like a leather daddy," she told me the first time we spoke. Solidly Gen Z and fully expecting a warming world to deliver more eco-mayhem, she’s become fascinated with bamboo’s ability to grow up fast and tough in apocalyptic conditions. Lauren Lydick commissioned herself early to continue those experiments at a much larger scale. The son of farmers himself, Christian Lydick has spent more than two decades experimenting at his small, ornamental plant nursery with different species of bamboo that can stand up to Imperial County’s punishing heat and degraded soil. In the middle of this desert terrain, her father has cultivated enough bamboo to act as a barrier, a green wall that won’t let the poison through. They became amateur meteorologists, monitoring the wind, knowing that a dust storm would mean a bad breathing day.įrom the porch of her family’s trailer on their acre of land in El Centro, about 15 miles from the Mexican border, Lydick still watches dust storms coming at her from the North. The kids were surrounded by a half million acres of flat, open, pesticide-laced farmland. Most of Lydick’s friends had asthma, too - they’d share inhalers and watch out for each other in dangerous situations, such as when the gym teacher made them run. She laughs about that now, at 23, and remembers it not as a mean, bullying thing so much as camaraderie. ![]() Lydick’s nickname in high school was Pneumonia. And even though there was no escaping her easily triggered, asthmatic chest. Its roots will hold the earth together for you." Lydick felt that sense of protection somehow, even though she lived in Imperial County, California, one of the hottest, most polluted places in North America. It’s said that in rural parts of Japan, parents tell their children, "If you feel an earthquake, run into the bamboo. Sometimes reading, sometimes just lying on her back looking up through the green, Lydick felt like she could be anywhere. As a teenager, she took a blanket, "War and Peace" and weed. This report also was made possible in part by the Fund for Environmental Journalism of the Society of Environmental Journalists.Īs a kid, Lauren Lydick would pack up a towel, a "Harry Potter" book, and head out alone into the bamboo groves. This story originally appeared in Inside Climate News and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalistic collaboration to strengthen coverage of the climate story.
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