This week we’re hearing from Jack Bennett from Homer. Bennett is an industrial hemp advocate looking to establish more hemp homes throughout rural Alaska.
BENNETT: As an advocate of organic foods and using herbs for natural healing, I easily understood the benefits of building all-natural. A house requires at least ten different technologies: fiber glass, insulation, house wrap, OSB plywood, sheet rock… And hemp replaces that – one product. Industrial hemp as a construction material is a zero-waste product, zero footprint.
The problem is, in Alaska, especially in rural Alaska, it’s $8 to $10 an hour to heat a home with diesel. It impacts average family households by 50 percent. With the savings up to 70 percent, “hempcrete” is gonna save rural Alaska. It may not be the solution to affordable housing, but it’s a solution.
I have traveled all over Alaska to my hometown of Fairbanks, AK at the World Energy Forum, presenting it to 200 tribes as a solution to affordable housing and solving the rising cost of energy of living in the Bush.
I’m working with members of the House and Senate. SB 8, commercialization of industrial hemp is coming up in January. I will ensure that it passes. I will work with Alaskan farmers that have one acre, five acres, seven acres, 150 acres, 150,000 acres to collect the material.
I am super passionate about renewables in my life today. And I’m in a position to make change, within my limitations, within my disabilities – a day at a time. And I’m never gonna give up.
Shahla Farzan is a reporter with KBBI - Homer.
Shahla first caught the radio bug as a world music host for WMHC, the oldest college radio station operated exclusively by women. Before coming to KBBI, she worked at Capital Public Radio in Sacramento and as a science writer for the California Environmental Legacy Project. She is currently completing her Ph.D in ecology at the University of California-Davis, where she studies native bees.
When she's not producing audio stories, you can find Shahla beachcombing or buried in a good book.
