The Twenty-Four Filial Exemplars is a collection of short stories written in the 13th century by Confucian
thinker Guo Jujing. One of these stories, entitled “He Wept Until the Bamboo Sprouted,” features a young boy
named Meng Zong. Zong’s mother grows very ill, and she desires bamboo soup. Finding no bamboo in the grove, Zong weeps. Moved by his piety, bamboo shoots miraculously sprout from the ground. Zong collects the shoots and makes his mother the soup. After consuming it, she is fully healed.

“He Wept Until the Bamboo Sprouted” represents just one of many references made to bamboo over the
span of human history. Often regarded as a symbol of luck, health, and creation, bamboo has always served as a significant nexus between agriculture, nature, and humanity. Today, climate change poses significant threats to all three of those aforementioned aspects, as anthropogenic activities drive greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. The adaptation of agricultural strategies that actively work to mitigate climate change, while also coexisting with local ecosystems, is therefore imperative. Moreover, it is ethically necessary for these strategies to address the socioeconomic inequalities that are often exacerbated by the consequences of climate change.

Thus, climate change solutions are best achieved when they combine opportunities for greater access to world markets with mitigation and adaptation techniques. One possible mitigation strategy lies in bamboo. As one of the fastest carbon-sequestering plants, bamboo stands have the potential to draw large amounts of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere while rapidly accumulating biomass (Gu et al., 2019). In short periods of time, large quantities of bamboo can be harvested and sold to provide a source of income for rural communities and smallholder farmers. Therefore, sustainably grown, well-managed bamboo forests can act as powerhouses of carbon sequestration and increase access to capital for rural and developing areas that have been exploited by conventional agricultural markets worldwide. Thus, it is worthwhile to explore the use of bamboo as a crop to fight the climate change crisis.

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