Hemp Essay

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Recommended: Effects of deforestation on earth

Hemp and its multitude of amazing uses
Hannah Ison

In the last few years, people have started to rediscover hemp and all of its amazing uses. Up until the end of the nineteenth century, hemp was admired for its medicinal and practical properties. This admiration was abandoned by modern pharmacology due to the symbolic role of marijuana in counter-culture; this created a widespread aversion to hemp and the entire cannabis plant. Abuse of cannabis as a drug led to the prohibition of hemp cultivation and since then there has been an attempt to make people believe that hemp is nothing more than the crazy cousin of marijuana. When someone is shown a piece of clothing that’s made from hemp but looks just like linen, a change in understanding begins. This is the point at which people will start to realise that hemp is not a “deadly” drug, but simply a plant with a long and prominent history of service to mankind. What some people fail to understand is that hemp has been produced for thousands of years as a natural and extremely durable source of fibre for paper, rope, cloth, sails, canvas, building materials and even food and medicine.

Hemp has a very long and interesting history. It is believed that the weaving of hemp fibre began over 10,000 years ago and it is the first plant known to have been domestically cultivated. A piece of hemp fabric found in Mesopotamia (an area in what is now known as Turkey) is the oldest remnant of human history and was dated back to 8,000 B.C. Hemp fabric from this era has also been found in Taiwan. The Egyptians used hemp rope in 3500 B.C. during the construction of the pyramids; they used it because of its great strength, which was ideal for working with large blocks of stone as it wouldn’t fray ...

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...a number of cults that surrounded worshipping it. If we can get past its connections with marijuana and focus on it as its own useful material, we could use it to make a huge ecological impact. Deforestation is a serious environmental crisis with terrible effects on our ecosystem; despite this, we continue to make 93% of all paper from trees when we could use more environmentally friendly alternatives like hemp. Hemp is an extremely durable source of fibre that can be used for so many things including paper, rope, cloth, sails, canvas, building materials and even to create and fuel a car. Our current reliance on fossil fuels, forestry and petroleum-based products has created a substantial impact on our environment. Hemp is an economical material that is safe, recyclable and extremely resilient which is why it should be considered as an alternative wherever possible.

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