From the studio, a piece on the material.
There is a kind of tree that gives you something without dying.
It grows in a narrow band along the western Mediterranean, mostly in Portugal, Spain, and along parts of the North African coast. It is called the cork oak, or Quercus suber, and it has been doing something quietly remarkable for as long as humans have paid attention to it. It grows a thick layer of protective bark over its own trunk. This bark is what we call cork. And every nine to twelve years, human beings walk out to these trees and peel the bark off in strips, and the tree keeps living. Not just keeps living, but keeps thriving. The bark grows back. In nine years we come back. We take it again. The tree, apparently unbothered, produces more.
Most trees, when you strip their bark, die. This is because a tree's living tissue, the part that transports water and nutrients between the roots and the crown, is right underneath the bark. Damage the bark and you damage the tree's ability to function. Girdle a tree, which is to say strip a complete ring of bark from its trunk, and you have killed it. Loggers have known this for a thousand years.
The cork oak is different. Its outer bark is thick and porous and specialized. The tree grows the bark as a survival adaptation, likely evolved as protection against forest fires. Underneath the outer bark is a second, inner layer, which is where the tree's living tissue actually is. When cork harvesters peel the outer bark, they leave the inner bark intact. The tree is uninjured. It simply grows a new outer layer over the years, and when that layer is thick enough, the harvesters come back.
The first cork harvest of a tree's life happens when the tree is about twenty-five years old. This first harvest, called desboia, produces cork of relatively low quality, used for insulation and floor tiles. The second harvest, nine years later, produces slightly better cork. The third harvest, and every harvest after that, produces cork of the highest quality, used for wine stoppers, yoga mats, and everything else we make from this material.
A cork oak lives for two to three hundred years. Over its lifetime, one tree will be harvested somewhere between fifteen and twenty times. It will produce hundreds of thousands of wine corks, or tens of thousands of yoga mats, or millions of small objects we don't think much about. It will produce all of this without being cut down, and without being damaged.
The cork forests of Portugal and Spain, called montados, are among the most biodiverse ecosystems in Europe. Because the trees are not cut, and because they are managed for their bark, cork forests support wildlife that has largely disappeared from the rest of the Mediterranean. Iberian lynx live in them. Endangered black storks nest in them. The soil under a cork forest sequesters more carbon than most other Mediterranean landscapes.
You can see, I hope, why we chose cork.
I don't want to make this into a marketing pitch. There are a lot of materials in the world that have interesting stories, and having an interesting story does not make a material good. What makes a material good is whether it does its job well, whether it is honest about what it is, and whether making it costs the earth less than the alternatives.
Cork meets all three tests.
It does its job as a yoga surface, or a block, or a wine stopper, better than most of the synthetic alternatives, largely because it is naturally non-slip, naturally antimicrobial, and light without being flimsy. It is honest, in the sense that when you touch it you know what it is. It feels like what it is. This is different from a lot of modern materials, which are coated and treated and given surfaces that pretend to be something they aren't. Cork does not pretend. It looks like bark, because it is bark, and it feels like a natural material, because it is one.
And it costs the earth less. The cork forests are not being clear-cut to make yoga mats. The trees are still standing. They are still producing acorns and shade and biodiversity. The material we get from them is a byproduct of leaving them alone.
There is a version of the world where every material we use has this property. Where we take what grows, without stopping the growing. Where the objects in our homes are made from things that regenerate. Where the tree that gave us the mat is still alive somewhere, growing back the bark, waiting for us to come back in nine years.
That is not the world we have most of the time. But it is the world we can have when we make certain choices, and choose to keep making them.
The cork oak has been doing this for two hundred years. It doesn't need our attention. It just needs to be left alone to do what it does.
We're paying attention anyway.