Listening’s role in ecological design and master planning
Seeking expertise where it’s otherwise overlooked
Brent Bucknum, Hyphae Principal and Founder, took hundreds of photos in Belize.
The terrain from the window of the puddle jumper, a small passenger plane, bouncing across the Central American landscape.
The stirring rainforest canopy.
Floral and fiery hot sauce dabbed tenderly on tamales.
Near-successful attempts to capture leaping howler monkeys as their raucous — eerie even — roar dampened the chorus of birds and insects.
In a pair of photographs, he captured two similar scenes. Both featured people talking around a table. One framed a conversation with the Hyphae team and distillery engineers from Puerto Rico, their discussion scored by clacking calculators. The other presented a post-work cocktail with a group of farmers after a day in the fields. An air of expertise hovered over both, but only the former scene displayed the more conventional trappings of so-called savvy industry know-how.
Seeking expertise where it’s otherwise overlooked
Brent has a reputation for making friends wherever he goes. Look away too long during a project and you might find him buddying up with a facilities manager sneaking away to inspect drain pipes or climb up on roofs. He knocks on doors, lifts panels, turns over stones, asks questions, and sits down with whoever will share. For him, this is how he seeks to understand the full picture of a place — and a project. This is, to adapt a line from the popular series The Mandalorian, the Hyphae way.
In the Copal Tree Distillery’s case in Belize, inviting multiple parties to the table uncovered a major issue with the initial plans. Catching this oversight early allowed the Hyphae team to pivot, creatively adapting the plan to benefit the overall operation.
Seeking expertise where it’s otherwise overlooked — a win for the lost art of listening — charted a new and more effective course for the project. The rum punch and bottles of Beliken, sweating in the sun, while the Hyphae team discussed harvest days with local farmers was a tasty bonus.
The story of how Hyphae and the Copal Tree Distillery starts with a slaughterhouse, or at least the tail’s end.
A partnership begins
Copal Tree Distillery, maker of Copalli Rum, was developed by Belcampo Inc, a California-based sustainable food company. Their vertically integrated meat company with ranch, slaughterhouse, and Butcher Shops launched to wild success in the U.S., which set in motion additional international ventures. Hyphae first worked with Belcampo when they hired Hyphae during the later stages of design for a slaughterhouse.
The image of Brent painted earlier of someone willing to stray from well-trodden paths to grasp the totality of a project and see from every angle highlights a larger aspect of Hyphae’s work, the company’s leitmotif: if you want one part of a project to be successful you cannot ignore the greater connected whole.
Belcampo brought Hyphae in to think about stormwater management but the Hyphae team, true to their ethos, inquired about larger systems at play like waste and farming production. They weren’t avoiding the initial task; instead, they wanted to show true respect for the cause-and-effect relationship between integrated systems. No system is an island, each is a domino in a larger intricately connected chain. While Hyphae brought some insights to this initial project, the collaboration had just begun.
Belcampo Inc hired Hyphae to help in a major rebranding and significant architecture infrastructure upgrade of an old fishing lodge into the Copal Tree Lodge, an ecological agro-tourism focused resort in Punta Gorda, Belize. Besides new amenities and sustainable water infrastructure, they helped develop site infrastructure for a farm-to-table program and a workshop to showcase and teach visitors about the traditional ecological processes of historical Belizean crops, like chocolate, coffee, and rum. The rum was a hit, so they imagined scaling up.
From the ground up
A theme runs through Hyphae’s portfolio: clients witness Hyphae’s everything-is-connected approach and then bring Hyphae in to lead future projects from the ground up. Belcampo brought Hyphae in during the early stages to create an iconic ecological rum brand. Hyphae led the projects team through the industrial ecology and life cycle assessment of the facility then site masterplanning, design, and engineering. Hyphae served as the spoke in the wheel for a diversity of local and international consultants, including distillery engineers, environmental engineers, and biologists.
The distillery engineers knew rum making and were leaders in their field, especially in Puerto Rico, but they overlooked the differences between rainfall in Puerto Rico and Belize. To be fair, that wasn’t their focus — building distilleries was. Rum producers like Copal Tree Distillery, who use freshly pressed sugar cane, instead of the molasses used in conventional rum distilling, can only harvest sugar cane when the fields are dry. When the fields are dry and ready for harvest, the distillery runs around the clock processing fresh cane juice that starts to degrade immediately after harvest. Or as Brent said, “The microbes get to work right away.”
Spot the difference
The pair of photographs, one with the engineers and the other with local farmers, would have less significance if the images had not inadvertently captured a pivotal moment. In the second photo, sharing drinks after their day in the field, the Hyphae team discussed the harvest plan with the agricultural workers on site. They relayed the harvest figures as the men did the math in their heads. The Hyphae team realized quickly something was wrong, then the farmers validated their worry: there was no way they could expect that many dry days.
“These guys didn’t need calculators to estimate the number of harvest days,” said Brent. “They knew the place. Their lived experience made them experts.”
The entire business plan relied on the assumption there would be 200 days a year where it was dry enough to harvest. In Belize, the rum producers could expect about a third of the number of harvest days, from 200 to 120.
At first, this was a scary realization — it “broke” the business model. So, they had to rework the numbers. The problem presented a possibility for diversification. Hyphae and the team at Copal Tree Distillery looked around and realized the important role corn plays in the local culture and decided to not alter the size of the distillery or fly in sugar cane but to make an heirloom corn whiskey alongside the signature rum.
Jeremy Fisher, Project Manager and Hyphae alum, managed the distillery build-out. He was present during early planning stages. He noted local workers didn’t offer unsolicited feedback freely at first. “We would hang out with the workers, get to know them — their lives, their families, and their perspective on the land,” he observed. “We would take our meals in the kitchen with the staff instead of being served in the dining room so we built relationships naturally.” This wasn’t a prescribed method, but he reflected it was a fun way to get to know the people Hyphae was working with on the project. He added that this “on the ground” perspective helped paint the big picture Hyphae pursues. Thinking beyond the immediate confines of the distillery plan, the workers provided helpful insight to determine the effect of the build-out on the ecosystem — the water, the wildlife, the communities nearby. The local perspective helped shape the design through various iterations of scale.
The land, the seasons, the cycles of the natural world sculpted the business plan, not the other way around. This requires designers to rethink hierarchical understandings of skills and perspectives and find the overlap between a multiplicity of expertise and lived experience.
In short: listen. To the land, and to the people who know, impact, and are impacted by the landscape. This is participatory design. It’s the same whether you are in the jungle or if you are in the Bay Area.
Vision and execution
Surrounded by abundant tropical rainforest, Copal Tree Distillery intended to be both a functional processing facility, as well as an innovative example of net-zero-closed loop ecological alcohol production. The project is net zero water, power and waste. Rainwater supplies the crops and the entire facility from a 100,000 gallon rainwater catchment system with passive filtration. The cane, both creates the spirit and also provides power through biomass to steam conversion. Stormwater and wastewater are retained and treated through constructed wetland systems.
Disposing potent vinasse, a byproduct of rum production, is an environmental issue. Untreated, the dark syrupy goo seeps into water systems, robs plants of oxygen which ultimately leads to unmanageable algae growth creating severe effects on the local fishing industry. Through passive aeration, filtering, and microbial intervention, the vinasse is safely treated, conditioned, and then reused as natural fertilizer to, in many cases, grow more sugar cane on the property. Full circle.
A way of seeing
Brent flew back to Oakland, boarding another puddle jumper first. He flew up and down in a sequence of high-level views followed by ground-level perspectives offering more than one point of view of the landscape. He realized his initial flight to the Punto Gorda had modeled a way of seeing the project waiting for him in the rainforest.
If you want the full picture, you have to zoom in and zoom out, view it from the air and view it from the ground.
Read more about the Copal Tree Lodge and Net Zero Distilling.
Hyphae is a consulting firm and incubation laboratory. We collaborate with communities, government, designers, and researchers to merge the inseparable links between earth systems, human societies, and built environments to activate healthy, thriving, and connected communities through innovative and imaginative engineering and design. Where do you need the Hyphae approach? Let’s connect.
