This will be our last episode of Season 1. We’re taking a look back at all we’ve learned over the last 12 episodes. We’ve traced the story of hemp from its colonial roots in America, through the war on drugs, and legalization. The future of the plant is wide open. And we hope as we all build it together, the past can be reckoned with instead of being pushed aside in favor of profit.
This will be our last episode of Season 1. We’re taking a look back at all we’ve learned over the last 12 episodes. We’ve traced the story of hemp from its colonial roots in America, through the war on drugs, and legalization. The future of the plant is wide open. And we hope as we all build it together, the past can be reckoned with instead of being pushed aside in favor of profit.
Burgess Brown:
Welcome back to Trace Material. We want to start off today’s episode by
sharing some really exciting news with you. We’re proud to announce that we’ve been awarded
funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities to produce a second season of Trace
Material.
Ava Robinson:
In Season 2, we’ll be diving into a new material with you... plastic. Each episode
we’re going to focus on the story behind an iconic plastic item that has shaped America’s
culture, health, and environment, like Tupperware or the ubiquitous PVC pipe.
Burgess:
When we started Trace Material, we knew we wanted to think about one material per
season so we could really give each material the time it's due. We think that the everyday
objects and materials that surround us should be interrogated. Not just scientifically, but socially.
Ava: Imagine the yellowing Tupperware container in the very back of your kitchen cabinet. In
order to truly understand it, we want to know it’s chemical composition and how that affects your
health, but that’s not enough. We have many more questions. Was it bought at a Tupperware
part? Who was the salesperson and what was their experience? But beyond that, who made it?
Are workers paid fairly? Is there a history of pollution in the surrounding areas? Every object we
surround ourselves with has a rich story to tell, and we’re here to uncover them with you.
Burgess: I know, that’s a lot to think about when you’re just looking for something to put your
leftovers in. Which is why we’re devoting an entire season to each material we investigate. We
can’t wait to trace a new material with you, but this does mean we have to say goodbye to hemp
- for now. This will be our last episode of season 1.
Ava: You won’t hear new content from us for a bit we’re producing our next season, so make
sure you’re subscribed to be alerted as soon as we’re back. Don’t worry it won’t be too long!
Burgess: And our exploration of hemp will always be here for you to listen to again. But, before
we leave hemp behind, let’s take one last look.
Ava: Over the past twelve episodes, we’ve learned a lot about hemp, and specifically
HempLime as a building material. When we started thinking about this season of Trace Material,
we always knew it would end with us making a case for HempLime, but we didn’t want to simply
list reasons why it’s a useful material.
Burgess: We here at Parsons Healthy Materials Lab absolutely understand that HempLime
could be a solution to many of the sustainability issues that plague not only the construction
industry but also the planet today.
Ava: We chose hemp as our first material because we’re conducting our own research here at
the Lab into building with HempLime, and because it’s been in the news a lot as a brand new
wonder plant that can do almost everything.
Burgess: I don’t think we were the only ones wondering: if this plant is so amazing, where has it
been all these years? Why wasn’t there a hemp industry in America before 2018?
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Ava: Quick googling of the history of hemp will tell you it was “farmed” by founding fathers like
George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Hemp even recently made a comeback at Mount
Vernon to much fanfare.
Burgess: But when we dug into that history a little more deeply, we found that Mount Vernon
and Monticello weren’t just farms, and Washington and Jefferson were not plowing those fields
themselves. They were plantations where the majority of work was done by enslaved African-
Americans.
Ava: This aspect of hemp’s past has been largely ignored as the plant itself makes a comeback.
So that’s exactly where we started our story.
Burgess: We were lucky enough to be able to visit Farmington Historic Plantation outside of
Louisville, Kentucky. There, Executive Director Kathy Nichols and docent Cassandra Sea told us
about the state’s history of hemp farming.
Kathy: ...Hemp is the reason slavery is entrenched in Kentucky. It's the only crop that requires
that kind of labor force that's grown in the bluegrass.
Ava: Hemp is a very labor-intensive crop. And like many mass-produced crops that were grown
in America prior to the Civil War, it was mostly grown on plantations. At the time, hemp was
grown primarily for fiber to make textiles. It was used to make items such as clothing, sails, and
rope. So at Farmington, after planting, harvesting, and processing the hemp, the enslaved
people who worked there would have had hemp ropes turned against them in violence.
Cassandra: The very same thing that brought prosperity to the family that raised hemp was the
same thing that whipped the slaves that broke the hemp and that was just the, it was just crazy,
the cycle.
Burgess: While the enslaved families at Farmington were not able to profit off their own labor
and suffered tremendous physical and emotional abuse, they still innovated with the material
they were growing. Cassandra has traced her family’s lineage back to a family that was
enslaved at Farmington. She told us about a relative of hers who was using hemp to strengthen
mortar back in the 19th century:
Cassandra: Well, the story was that he made the mortar and he had an, all we knew is there
was a secret ingredient in his mortar to make it stronger. And everybody assumed that it was
buttermilk, because they didn't know anything about hemp or anything.
Ava: When we consider hemp’s future, we think that all of hemp’s past should be reckoned with.
Recognizing that something has a painful past doesn’t mean we can’t use it to build a better
future, it just means we should keep that past in mind and work for a future that remedies what
has come before.
Burgess: Hemp’s story doesn’t end here with it being a former cash crop that was farmed by
enslaved people. Actually, it gets more complicated. After the Civil War, hemp production
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decreased in the States as it became much more expensive to produce it without forced labor.
At this point, most of the hemp used in the United States was grown in the South Pacific.
Ava: However, hemp’s cannabis cousin, the drug marijuana, grew in popularity. Hemp was
caught up in the war on drugs that gripped the United States throughout the 20th century.
Cannabis was villainized through racist propaganda that targeted African-American and Latinx
people, and the laws created to perpetuate those racist systems disproportionately affected
those same communities.
Burgess: Until very recently, hemp was mainly thought of as “pot’s benevolent cousin.” But in
the 2010s, hemp was finally legally distinguished from marijuana. The new farm bills were
championed by Democrats and Republicans alike. However, they mainly focused on increasing
revenue for farmers, who are overwhelmingly white. Some states even passed legislation to
block those with former drug convictions, again those folks being disproportionately Black, from
being allowed to farm hemp.
Ava: Besides increasing revenue for farmers, the hope of the farm bills was that hemp could
also revitalize rustbelt areas by bringing back large-scale manufacturing. But as of 2020, that
hasn’t happened yet. Currently, most hemp is grown for CBD. CBD is very popular in the
wellness space and continues to fetch high prices.
Burgess: The hemp variety grown for CBD can be harvested by hand, and doesn’t require the
use of a decorticator. Without getting too far into the details, a decorticator is a very expensive
piece of machinery that separates two parts of the industrial hemp plant: the fiber and the hurd.
The fiber can be turned into textiles, and the hurd can be used in building products. On our trip
to Kentucky, we spoke with farmers at Harrod’s Creek, who despite having secured a
decorticator were still facing significant challenges in this burgeoning market.
Eleanor: They didn't license for infrastructure first. They just licensed it for anybody that wanted
to grow. So people jumped into it and grew whatever kind of hemp they were growing without
anybody to buy it on the other end at the time of harvest. And that has led to some farmer's
bankruptcies for sure.
John: There’s no textbook for it. And nobody’s going to tell you how to do it. I mean, this whole
industry, all sectors of it, it's like the wild West.
Ava: Because there’s not an established market for industrial hemp yet, independent farmers
take on a significant financial risk when they plant a new crop like hemp. New ventures in
agriculture and industry often need support while a market is created. We see the beginnings of
a success story when we visit New Castle, Pennsylvania. A local non-profit, DON Services, is
investing in every facet of the hemp industry, from growing, to processing, to manufacturing and
building. So far they’re only able to do that with the support of grant funding.
Burgess: And while grant funding is hard to secure, hemp does seem worth the extra
investment. The current oil based system that produces textiles and building materials today
isn’t sustainable. It’s overly complex and involves too many toxic chemicals which pollute our
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soil and water systems, and ultimately end up inside of us! Listen to how Alison Mears, Director
here at Parsons Healthy Materials Lab, tells it:
Alison Mears: Mostly if you think about the way building products are manufactured, you
imagine a factory where the smoke stacks and you imagine a bunch of ingredients going in
there. You imagine a lot of energy being expended and at the end you get your PVC tile, for
example. When we think about hemp and lime, you can imagine the field where the industrial
hemp is growing. And you can imagine the quarry, which is where the limestone comes from.
Alison: The limestone is processed with heat, with energy to create lime. The hemp is taken
from the field, laid out to dry in the field and then goes through a process of breaking down the
stalks and then it's ready for use in this product. And you add the hemp hurd to the lime powder
and you add water in a bucket. If you, you know, if you have a bucket and you can start to
create a hemp lime mix that you could build with. So it's a very simple process. Very
understandable.
Ava: Winona LaDuke, indigenous rights activist and former Vice Presidential nominee, sees a
similar potential in her community for hemp to help us move away from petrochemical products.
Winona: What I want to do is to talk about how we are going to build a post petroleum economy.
And that has to be built with something like hemp. And so I am particularly interested in fiber
hemp for textiles. That's my interest and that's largely because most of what we wear today is
either cotton or fossil fuels, and an average tee shirt and jeans takes 5,000 gallons of water. On
a worldwide scale, cotton represents 4% of the world's agricultural crops and 24% of the world's
agricultural chemicals. That's a lot of fossil fuels that should not be put on land or in our water.
Winona: You know, CBDs and, and marijuana, they're awesome. But I'll tell you what: fiber is
going to change the world. The materials economy is what you’ve got to tackle. And also what
I'm going say is something you know, which is you don't want to tackle the materials economy
that is, which is as wasteful as the materials economy we have now. There's no point of making
a bunch of single use hemp items when you need to remove single use products from your
materials economy. Those are the things that we need to look at. I don't want to be in the
business of making a bunch of straws.
Burgess: Moving away from a petroleum-based economy has to be intentional. When we look
around us and we look backward, we can see what mistakes were made. It’s easier to build
industries and economies that look similar to what we have now. But those systems are often
already broken. We need new systems to realize hemp’s full potential.
Ava: We’ve spent several years researching hemp. And its story has unveiled a lot we didn’t
know about both America’s history and its present. The future is wide open. And we hope, as we
all build it together, the past can be reckoned with instead of being pushed aside in favor of
profit.
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Burgess: We’d like to let Cassandra and Kathy from Farmington Historic Plantation close out
this season. They’re growing hemp again at Farmington, and Cassandra’s son Benjamin
planted the first seeds:
Cassandra: But when Benjamin was out here, he had them seeds in his hand and he was
planting them...I think something changed. I think it might not have changed, but it came out. I
had never heard him say “self reparations.” And when he said it, it seemed like he had had an
epiphany... “You do, you, you don't wait for somebody to give you something. You do it yourself.
You get the knowledge.” And I didn't know he felt like that. I didn't know he felt like that the day
he was planting them seeds.
Kathy: Yeah. He was talking about it in relationship to the hemp. That, that was giving him back
his power. He said, I call that self reparations. But it also, to me in the context he used it was
more than just him doing something for himself, it was a healing.
Cassandra: Yeah. He said it connected honor to his ancestors.
Ava: Please stay subscribed to hear us dive into plastics in season 2. In the grand scheme of
things, plastic is a relatively new material but in a short time it’s completely taken over American
life. For better? For worse? Stay tuned. Trust us, there are a lot of interesting stories you don’t
want to miss.
Burgess: And that’s a wrap for Season One! Trace Material is a project of Parsons Healthy
Materials Lab at the New School. It is produced by me: Burgess Brown, Ava Robinson and the
HML team. We want to say a special thanks to Alie Kilts whose contributions were instrumental
in getting this podcast up and running. Thank you to each of our guests this season for sharing
their rich experiences and expertise with us. And thank you to Friends of Healthier Materials
who make this podcast possible. Our theme music “Rainbow Road” by Cardioid. Additional
music from Blue Dot Sessions. We’ll talk to you soon.