If a Kelp Falls in the Forest and No One Hears…
"The Climate Foundation is on a campaign to spread marine permaculture to all the waters of the world."
A wonder of nature, perhaps a metaphor for its magic, is that the planet’s most majestic forest grandeur is hidden from our view. Though this forest’s “trees” are taller than sequoias, they are invisible to us. They grow down, not up. Unburdened by having to fight gravity or thirst for fickle rain, they grow thirty times faster than their leafy cousins on land. You just need a snorkle, scuba, or a submersible to visit them.
From the warm shallows of Borneo to the icy waters off Greenland are unseen, underwater, vast forests of green. They are doing what forests do best — sheltering lifeforms large and small, providing food and fodder, sequestering carbon. Their nesting “birds” are manatees, whale sharks, dolphins and sea turtles.
Sadly, these forests are as much under attack by the hand of man as are their landed brethren. These giants tumble not by ax or chain but from heat, acid tides, microplastics, toxic runoff, abuse and neglect. But all the while, growing conditions are getting consistently better. According to a report this year in Nature, our blue planet is greening, and that is not a metaphor.
 |
Green shading represents areas where ocean surface color has significantly changed. |
Analyzing 20 years from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard the Aqua satellite, NASA researchers watched 56 percent of the global ocean, mainly equatorward of 40°, undergo a color shift from blue to green. Fertilized by exceptional surpluses of carbon and nitrogen, photosynthesizing microscopic organisms make chlorophyll. Greening is changing the surface-ocean ecosystem at a scale and speed never before witnessed.
The bad: green is even more absorptive of solar heat than is blue. Ocean stratification — keeping warmer surface layers from mixing with cooler, deeper parts of the ocean — may harmfully impact deeper benthic ecosystems. With solar uptake in Watts-per-square-meter already far too high (due to declining sulfate aerosols, albedo, El Niño, greenhouse capture, etc.), this is not a good thing. But a hot ocean grows plants. Now, what can we do with that?
There are scientists and creative thinkers who want to reseed coastal sea glades. Using a process that Climate Foundation founder Brian von Herzen calls “Marine Permaculture” (he explains the name in this podcast), his team is regrowing kelp forests, beginning with small patches, or “farms.” Kelp starter plants grow on floating ropes, attracting mussels. The kelp and mussels draw in so much carbon dioxide they de-acidify the water, providing an ideal environment for shell growth. By artificially pumping nutrients from the deeper water below, with wind and solar, these startup farms are replenished by nutrient flows, speeding establishment.
Already in the Yellow Sea of China over 500 square kilometers of such farms provide livelihoods. Sea farmers patrol in sailing junks and haul up the kelp ropes from which hang baskets filled with scallops and oysters. Globally, around 12 million tons of seaweed is harvested annually, three-quarters coming from China. The world eats five billion dollars worth of that high-quality protein every year.
A 2012 study by the University of the South Pacific’s Antoine De Ramon N’Yeurt projected that if 9 percent of the ocean (an area four times the size of Australia) were to be repopulated with seaweed farms, the added photosynthesis would capture 19 gigatons of CO₂, every year, nearly half of fossil pollution today. Add biochar to end-of-life for waste from kelp processing plants and that drawdown multiplies. According to N’Yeurt, “This amount of biomass could increase sustainable fish production to potentially provide 200 kilograms per year, per person, for 10 billion people.”
In the Philippines where, after landing several prizes for the conceptual design, the Climate Foundation spent more than one million dollars to set up its first arrays, von Herzen describes how he noticed local sardine fishermen trawling nearby at night.
“… because the sardines love to hang out, you know? … [W]e have seen thousands of sardines, hundreds of tuna. We had a family of dolphins spend more than a month around our deep sea platform and we’ve had a whale shark swim an estimated 200 kilometers and spend three days eating our algae. So nature voted with her fins. She said you’ve got the good stuff.”
Von Herzen jokes he has the Whale Shark Seal of Approval now.
The “platform” — each eventually will be about one hectare in size, one hundred assembled to cover a square kilometer — is a carbon polymer frame structure suspended about just below the surface. Cables dangling below the frame are planted with kelp, a brown leafy seaweed you may recognize as the kombu in your miso soup.
The frame can be interspersed with containers for shellfish and other kinds of fish as well, von Herzen says.
There would be no netting, but a kind of free-range aquaculture based on providing habitat to keep fish on location. Robotic removal of encrusting organisms would probably also be part of the facility. The marine permaculture would be designed to clip the bottom of the waves during heavy seas. Below it, a pipe reaching down to 200–500 meters would bring cool, nutrient-rich water to the frame, where it would be reticulated over the growing kelp.
That is all it takes, circulating nutrient flows, sunlight, and seawater. Voilá! Dinner for ten billion.
Von Herzen’s objective is to create what he calls “permaculture arrays” — marine permaculture at a scale that will have an impact on the climate by growing kelp and bringing cooler ocean water to the surface. His vision also entails providing habitat for fish, generating food, feedstocks for animals, fertilizer and biofuels. He also hopes to help exploited fish populations rebound and to create jobs.
Brown seaweed like kelp is the fastest growing tree in the world. Faster than bamboo on land. In the right conditions, a single plant adds more than a meter per day of mass. That translates into thousands of tons of carbon pulled from the atmosphere per square kilometer of ocean surface, per year.
Our aim is to build hectare-scale marine permaculture — every seaweed farmer has a license to cultivate one hectare of seaweed locally. And that is a great size, because that’s also the size that we believe is going to be commercially sustainable.
And there are a quarter million seaweed farmers on the front lines of climate disruption in the Philippines alone. That’s been a great first country for us because literally we need to help those seaweed communities from collapsing today, because the water’s too warm, the nutrient levels are too low, and they get hit with 20 named hurricanes per year.
We were on a direct hit ourselves — super typhoon Rai (Odette) December 2021 — and most seaweed cultivation is just wiped out in a hurricane as you can imagine. But our platform lowered five meters below the surface and not only did it survive 15 foot waves and 120 knot winds but it remained intact and most of the seaweed was still on it and the day after the hurricane we were growing seaweed again on the surface and six months later we delivered a quarter ton of seedlings of seaweed to our neighboring communities so they could restart their farms. With our partners at Coast4C https://coast4c.com/ we applied to the Safe Seaweed Coalition to build a seaweed seed bank that we’re building today and it’s going to lower down during the storm and then come back up after a storm and reseed all the neighboring communities so that’s now a funded project thanks to our serendipitous hurricane proven seaweed platform.
This is a beacon of light for the future because I’ve had professional seaweed colleagues leave the Philippines because it’s just so it was so difficult to deal with the hurricanes and getting wiped out every few years. It’s like a bowling alley and when your pin gets knocked over you know you’re out of business. Imagine starting over and losing your house and losing your boat. I mean all these things are devastating but you know there’s something the indigenous folks do in the Philippines that I learned later I wish I’d known it earlier. When a hurricane’s coming they take the motor off their boat. They scuttle their boat and sink it with a little milk bottle up on the surface. The hurricane comes through and when it’s all over and then they just lift the boat up and bail it out and put the motor on it again. And that works great. That’s exactly the answer for seaweed. So there’s a great example of indigenous knowledge contributing significantly to best practices.
As Sea F. Briganti’s Loliware company has demonstrated, kelp can also make biodegradable plastic. On a mission to replace the tens of billions of plastic straws washing up on sandy beaches every day, Loliware straws are made from all-natural, food-grade kelp. If a straw unfortunately makes its way to the ocean, it poses no harm to marine life. As their website says: “Loliware is an award-winning materials tech company focused on replacing single-use plastics with seaweed-derived alternatives that are Designed to Disappear®.” The plastic’s polymer chain will eventually be unzipped by sunlight, saltwater and wave action or harmlessly eaten and digested to fertilize more seaweed. Briganti’s customers now include Delta Air Lines, Georgia-Pacific, Home Depot, Inspire Brands, UPS, Chick-fil-A, and Coca-Cola.
The Climate Foundation is on a campaign to spread marine permaculture to all the coastal waters of the world. They envision an industry that employs millions of people regenerating ocean deserts into thousands of kelp forests and restoring life to the ocean. A simple technique enables it all — upwelling waters from cool temperature to warmer temperatures, something that can be done with floating solar arrays or offshore wind farms. With the recent award of the million-dollar X-Prize for Carbon Removal, they are off and running. Von Herzen says,
I was told by my friend Tom Chee that there’s as much ant biomass on the planet as there is humans and I think if you include termites and some other arthropods he’s right. They actually eat 10 times the amount per day that humans do but they managed to do it in a way that’s regenerative.
Can we learn something from the ants and the insects of the world and actually find a way to turn our aircraft carrier of food production five degrees to the right and actually learn how to generate food security regeneratively rather than extractively? I think that’s an opportunity in the oceans. If we can regenerate the habitat, regenerate the food sources, we can bring back the sardines, the anchovies, the herring, and that’ll be a great foundation for food security across the planet.
I think having the seal of approval from a whale shark — an example of something that can be enormous by filter-feeding on microscopic organisms — is a great sign for all of us to think about. How we can grow big while making small changes? And scaling up from local to global impact? Like a whale shark.
Removing half of global CO2 pollution every year by seaweed farming is nothing to sneeze at. Especially if you have seasonal allergies to tree pollens. Each hectare might take a million dollars to establish but could produce that much annually in food and other products. Growing new kelp forests in just 1 to 2 percent of the ocean would sequester enough carbon to restore the climate, assuming we can get civilization to something approaching net zero.
Sir David King, the Commonwealth’s UN climate envoy, calculated:
When the pandemic broke out, governments rushed to enact multitrillion-dollar aid packages that sometimes cost more than 20 percent of their gross domestic product (over 25 percent in the United States). Washington has debated spending another $1 trillion on pandemic relief and emergency stimulus, on top of the $2.2 trillion Cares Act and $4 trillion in federal loan guarantees for businesses. That is, for the most part, money well spent. The pandemic is a massive, deadly threat. But of course, so is the climate crisis…. Contrasting climate and the coronavirus is something of a false dichotomy, because the two can compound each other. These difficulties will worsen as climate change alters the way humans interact with other species and one another, increasing the risk of future pandemics just as rising seas displace 150 million people who live along coastlines by mid-century…. Promising interventions exist, and they will cost an order of magnitude less to deploy and scale up than what we’re spending now to fight the pandemic.
In 2023 Climate Foundation successfully launched its prototype solar-powered surface platform and completed a 1000 sq. meter (quarter-acre) submersible seaweed array.
Visitors to the Climate Foundation site can learn more about marine permaculture, including the various ways in which it benefits the planet; look up detailed technical and organizational questions about the project; or explore the organization’s other projects. They also can subscribe to the newsletter or support the foundation’s work by making a donation
Thank you for reading The Great Change. This post is public so feel free to share it.
References
Cael, B.B., Bisson, K., Boss, E. et al. Global climate-change trends detected in indicators of ocean ecology. Nature 619, 551–554 (2023).
Climate Foundation, Brian von Herzen of the Climate Foundation talks to Paul Watson, co-founder of Greenpeace
Climate Foundation, Philanthropy News Digest, Oct 26, 2021.
Climate Positive: Brian von Herzen, PhD. | Scaling marine permaculture
Eco-Business, Eight finalists for The Liveability Challenge 2023 unveiled, with solutions combating the most urgent urban sustainability challenges of our time (April 27, 2023)
https://www.facebook.com/ClimateFoundation/
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture, Brian Von Herzen, Why oceans are the next billion $ opportunity of regenerative agriculture.
Nori Reversing Climate Change Podcast November 20, 2020
Ocean Visions and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, Answering Critical Questions About Sinking Macroalgae for Carbon Dioxide Removal (2022)
Ritschard, R. L. “Marine algae as a CO 2 sink.” Water, Air, and Soil Pollution 64 (1992): 289–303.
Witze, Alexandra. “Oceans are turning greener due to climate change.” Nature (2023).
Yale Environment, The Oceans Are Getting Greener, Remote Sensing Reveals, E360 Digest (Oct 2, 2023).
For most of the children refugees, this will be their first experience in ecovillage living. They will directly experience its wonders, skills, and safety. They may never want to go back. Those who do will carry the seeds within them of the better world they glimpsed through the eyes of a child.
Those wishing to make a tax-deductible gift can do so through Global Village Institute by going to http://PayPal.me/greenroad2022 or by directing donations to greenroad@thefarm.org.
There is more info on the Global Village Institute website at https://www.gvix.org/greenroad or you can listen to this NPR Podcast and read these recent articles in Mother Jones and The World. Thank you for your help.
The COVID-19 pandemic destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed climate change, a juggernaut threat to all life, humans included. We had a trial run at emergency problem-solving on a global scale with COVID — and we failed. 6.95 million people, and counting, have died. (The Economist estimates the real figure is probably twenty to thirty million, if excess deaths are included. That ignores the numbers of injured with long Covid and other complications who likely will have shortened lifespans from their infections.) We ignored well-laid plans to isolate and contact trace early cases; overloaded our ICUs; parked morgue trucks on the streets; and incinerated bodies until the smoke obscured our cities as much as the raging wildfires. The modern world took a masterclass in how abysmally, unbelievably, shockingly bad we could fail, despite our amazing science, vast wealth, and singular talents as a species.
Having failed so dramatically, so convincingly, with such breathtaking ineptitude, do we imagine we will now do better with climate? Having demonstrated such extreme disorientation in the face of a few simple strands of RNA, do we imagine we can call upon some magic power that will arrest all our planetary-ecosystem-destroying activities?
As the world enters a new phase of the pandemic, there is growing recognition that we must learn to do better. We must chart a pathway to a new carbon economy that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backward — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience. We must lead by good examples; carrots, not sticks; ecovillages, not carbon indulgences. We must attract a broad swath of people to this work by honoring it, rewarding it, and making it fun. That is our challenge now.
Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger or Substack subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions are being made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.
Thank you for reading The Great Change.
Comments