Fab Future Forest

What? A new kind of maker space dedicated exclusively to making with regenerative materials.

Why? Our consumer economy relies on harmful extractive materials that have a horrible impact on precious natural ecosystems and drive loss of habitats and species.

Why in a Forest? In the forest, we see the impact of our material choices. Can your scraps fall to the forest floor and be decomposed? Did the materials that you're using hurt the health of this forest? Did they hurt a forest somewhere else?

Examples of Regenerative Materials

Here's a bamboo-hemp-and-mycelium biocomposite that we innovated: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/stir-fried-architecture-bamboo-mushrooms-breakthrough-loren/

Bamboo: If left unharvested, a bamboo clump will choke itself in 28 years. If, however, you harvest the 4-year-old bamboo culms, the bamboo cluster can remain healthy for hundreds of years, stabilizing the soil, fixing nitrogen, sequestering carbon, and producing oxygen.

Mycelium: The parts of fungi that are usually underground can be grown into myco-foam and myco-leather. Myco-foam is thermally insulating, sound isolating, fire retarding, and mold & mildew resistant. Myco-leather has the hand of traditional leather, but is fully waterproof.

Are you interested in biodegradable plant-based plastic alternatives? We'd love to find ways to grow plastic replacements in the forest.

In the forest, we have 1.5 acres of invasive silver-wattle acacia. Harvesting this wood keeps it from taking over more of forest and pushing out native plants. The acacia saplings can be bent and worked like willow. The branches can be used for weaving. The underside of the bark makes strong cordage.

Timeline

March 2020: Fab Future Regenerative Design Jam. Regenerative Design, Collaboration, and Foraging experts Dr. Carley Corrado, Jessica Carew Kraft, Dr. Melody Ivory, Danny Beesley, and Jon Connors helped teams compete to design the most impactful regenerative products.

May 2021: First successful bamboo-hemp-and-mycelium biocomposites showed promising materials for building/growing mycology lab treehouses and maker space treehouses in a forest.

June 2021: Began looking for the location for Fab Future Forest.

June 2022: Found and bought Fab Future Forest on the west slopes above Dry Creek Valley. This 40-acre (16-hectare) forest is the natural boundary between old-growth-Douglas-Fir-and-Redwood-dominated coastal rainforest and Oak-Bay-and-Madrone-dominated inland forest. There are between 40,000 and 50,000 mature trees and diverse and healthy fauna, flora, and fungi.

September 2023: Figured out how to suspend treehouses from trees without harming the trees.

April 2023: Completed basic water and power infrastructure setup.

June 2023: Continued progress on scaling mycelium growing to building scale.

October 2023: Finished collecting initial tooling for working with mycelium and invasive wood.

July 2024: Need your help to make the final improvements to Fab Future Forest.