Marsupials in Tasmania can get everything they need from the rainforest without destroying it. So, why can’t humans do the same? Brian Von Herzen wants to apply this idea to the ocean and restore the sea life wiped out by climate change via marine permaculture. The way he sees it, if we take care of nature, nature will take care of us.
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change Podcast by Nori, the world’s first carbon removal marketplace. Here are your hosts, Ross Kenyon and Christophe Jospe.
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change Podcast with Nori. I’m Ross Kenyon here with Christophe Jospe and Paul Gamble. We just picked up our guests from the UW campus and received a thorough engagement. You wouldn’t say interrogation, would you?
Unknown speaker: Borderline. Borderline.
Ross Kenyon: But it was some of the most sincere engagement of Nori. Sometimes people maybe gloss over the details of what we’re doing. It can be a little complicated, which is why we do the podcast and release other content, making it really easy for people to understand blockchain and climate change. There’s a lot of hard concepts in there, a lot of big ideas. We met our match here today.
Christophe Jospe: Indeed, indeed. Well, first of all, it’s a great pleasure to be sitting across the table from Dr. Brian Von Herzen. He’s the Executive Director of the Climate Foundation. I have known about Climate Foundation for quite some time. I’ve known about Woods Hole, which I’ve actually known about you, Brian, and I was so happy to hear you ask a question at Bonn in Germany during the Conference of the Parties that effectively was the sort of question that spelled out Nori’s And then we had the great chance to get to know each other in Minneapolis in May during the Carbon Farming Innovation Network, where you gave We have a great talk around feeding algae to cows and other large-scale impacts.
But all that’s to say, we’re happy for you to be here. And we like to start our podcast off with the sort of Genesis story, the why, what motivates you. You’re clearly on the Reversing Climate Change podcast, so you must care about this thing. But what drove you to that place?
Brian Von Herzen: Well, that’s a good question, Christophe. And thank you so much for having me be part of this. I’m going to interpret the Genesis question as how did we get started doing the Climate Foundation and really getting into this? And it happened when we were crossing the Atlantic in a small plane looking down over the surface of Greenland and we saw melt ponds. And there were little blue patches of water and they were melting ice.
Ross Kenyon: Greenland was melting.
Brian Von Herzen: Well, over several years, we got to go back. And every time I went back, it seemed like melt ponds had doubled. And after a couple years, they weren’t calling them melt ponds anymore. They were calling them melt lakes. And by the time we went back the third or fourth time, the lakes were more than 10 kilometers long, and they were more than 100 feet deep. And they were deep, dark blue. And by the way, they told us that these could empty out in 40 minutes, sink to the bottom of the ice, we’re talking about two or three kilometers of ice, and lift the ice hydraulically off of the rock.
And then the only thing holding that ice from the ocean was the tensile strength of the ice. And my colleagues at Caltech said they measured magnitude five ice quakes as these Ice quakes were happening and these rivers of ice were going into the sea. That’s on the Richter scale. Magnitude five on the Richter scale, ice quakes.
Unknown speaker: Okay. I didn’t know that was a thing, but wow, that’s wild.
Brian Von Herzen: It blew me away. In 2005, we measured 113 feet per day at the Jakub Schabenfjord Glacier. That’s 113 times more than normal. It’s normally a one foot per day. But we saw two orders of magnitude increase in flow of these ice streams. And to this day, Jakob Shamanfjord has been pouring ice into the sea, and it’s happening at an alarming and exponentially increasing rate.
Ross Kenyon: That’s how you first got interested in climate issues?
Brian Von Herzen: I mean, that’s when the concept of the Climate Foundation came together. And shortly after that, I took a sabbatical in plankton biology in Woods Hole. And that came from the idea that for us to balance our carbon budget, we need to Look to biology in many ways. And that’s once if by land, twice if by sea. The Paul Revere quote on land, it’s been biochar and we spent five years working on those biochar carbon methods. And in the sea, which is even more scalable, it’s about restoring life to the ocean.
And that restoration of life to the ocean starts with the macroalgae because we’ve lost 95% of our kelp forests off the West Coast, particularly in Northern California. And we’ve lost 95% of the kelp forests down in Tasmania. And we’ve been told by the leaders at the University of Tasmania, The Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, that kelp forest is not coming back because we’ve seen an ecosystem shift. That change from one stable state to another stable state, and now it’s sea urchin barrens, means that you’ve got... Got to completely erase that other stable state to get back to what we had originally, and that was a kelp forest.
So unless we develop some approach to actually bringing back the kelp forest, we’re not going to get it back. And unfortunately, this extends to algae of all sorts in the tropical and subtropical waters because of the global warming effects on the ocean there.
Ross Kenyon: Marine health is one of those things that scares us the most. People always focus on the effect on humans. I think it’s probably because it’s an easier story for us to understand, but the acidification of the ocean and marine health in general, if that collapses or has a hard time, I think that’s going to make for quite a lot of chaos.
Brian Von Herzen: That’s a really good point. And, you know, acidification hits home right here in Seattle. That’s because there’s a lot more ocean acidification here in colder waters early on, and it Really affects the shellfish industry, especially being able to have a hatchery where you have new shellfish. Those baby shells dissolve really quickly. And the result is you’ve got a lot more ocean acidification right here in Puget Sound than you do in waters to the south and closer to the equator. And the net result is the hatcheries here are on the front line of climate disruption when it comes to ocean acidification.
Ross Kenyon: They’re not going to take the oysters away from me, are they?
Brian Von Herzen: We’re gonna do our best to keep those oysters growing. And I’m happy to say that when we grow a kelp forest, we do reduce ocean acidification and we do pull that carbon out. So that’s really good for oysters and shellfish.
Ross Kenyon: We’re trying to be pretty hopeful. So convince me that we’re not just spinning our wheels here. We’re not wasting our time. There’s hope for this, right? The future is here today.
Brian Von Herzen: It’s simply not broadly distributed yet.
Ross Kenyon: Oh yeah.
Brian Von Herzen: That’s one of our favorite quotes there too. We paraphrase that once in a while around here. You can tell it’s one of mine. And what I mean by that is we’re doing marine permaculture, growing kelp forests, growing seaweed, helping seaweed farmers around the world today. And We’re looking forward to distributing it across the entire world.
Unknown speaker: What is marine permaculture and what is permaculture generally? I’m sure a lot of people don’t know.
Brian Von Herzen: So back in the 70s or earlier, Bill Mollison from Tasmania observed the marsupials living in the rainforest off Tasmania. And he noted that they got everything they needed from the rainforest. They got their habitat, they got their food, they got their forage, they got everything. And it didn’t even wipe out the forest, they were doing great. And it was very sustainable and very much in equilibrium. And he developed from that, he wondered, why can’t humans do as well as the marsupials do? Why can’t we get everything we need from the forest without destroying the forest?
And that’s the magic That is permaculture. You know, we all stand on the shoulders of giants. So I’m going to stand on Bill Mollison’s shoulders and say, why can’t we take that principle to the ocean? Because we know that the kelp forest is the ecosystem with the greatest carbon flux of any ecosystem on our planet. If you look at a square meter of kelp forest, it’s fixing 3000 grams of carbon per square meter per year. And that’s higher than even a tropical rainforest in Brazil. So we have to take care of our kelp forest right here because this is our Amazonian rainforest.
It’s on our watch. It’s in our country. And it’s up to us to take care of that and really regenerate those kelp forests so that we can be paying it forward and being able to sustainably Regenerate those kelp forests and also help the ecosystem while we’re doing it. That’s our inspiration for marine permaculture.
Christophe Jospe: So it kind of seems like you have two things going on. On the one hand, we’ve got forests that we don’t want to cut down. On the other, we have forests that we want to grow as quickly as possible and do that in a responsible way. From reading online and talking to you, there are some tricks that we can do to basically scale and grow kelp rapidly because that’s the point, right? We’re talking about balancing the carbon budget, managing the carbon cycle. There’s too much carbon in the atmosphere. It’s in the wrong places.
There’s too much carbon in the ocean. We want it deeper in the ocean and out of the atmosphere. What is the responsible way to deploy this? Do we kind of run against some of the same risks where, you know, if we think about land, okay, trees are good. Let’s just plant as many trees as possible as quickly as possible, which obviously leads to challenges. So are there certain nuances that we can learn from land? And what do we need to think about?
Brian Von Herzen: I think it’s really helpful to think in a global context. And we’ve already seen what I would call climate wars on this planet. We’ve got potentially 50 million climate refugees we’re dealing with now. And it’s either water wars or food riots or other problems. And like it or not, in this century, we need to be able to feed 10 billion people Without food riots and without water wars. And to do that, we need the resources to make it happen. And so we think of marine permaculture as a way of addressing food security, first of all.
Three billion people today rely upon the oceans for their primary source of protein. Secondly, ecosystem survival. Because if the ecosystem doesn’t survive, our civilization doesn’t survive. And thirdly, measuring the carbon export. From the atmosphere and surface ocean in this case, into the middle and deep ocean. So if we do all three of those, we’ll be taking care of our species, taking care of the 8 million species on this planet that cannot boat, and taking care ultimately of rebalancing our carbon budget. If we do all three of those, I think we come out of this alive.
Ross Kenyon: I’m glad to hear that the science is there. I’m sure there’s a role for nonprofits or NGOs and government, but is there a role for business in this place? Are there going to be people who, like there’s farmers on land? Are there going to be farmers at sea? And then what do we do with Am I rubbing off on you, Ross?
Unknown speaker: That’s Kristoff’s job, typically.
Brian Von Herzen: That’s great. I will share with you a story, and that is this year I got to go to Philippines for the first time. And my colleague there took us out to a reef where we have 2,000 seaweed farmers. And they told us decades ago they could grow the high-value red seaweed, the cotonei seaweed. That really made their villages thrive. I mean, this was food. It was their source of revenue. It was their livelihood. And they did it all the time. So 50 years they’ve been growing the seaweed there. But what happened in the 80s and 90s is the water got too warm and the nutrient levels got too low.
And that high quality seaweed would no longer grow. And so then they were reduced to growing the spinosum, which today is worth less than 40% of what the Katanii seaweed is. And so they still grow it, which is okay, but now they can no longer grow that spinosum seaweed three or four months of the year. And that’s because it’s just getting too hot and the nutrient levels are too low. And the result is the capacity factor of their farm is dropping to 65% or lower of what it could be. And that represents a serious hardship to these communities.
And we’re talking about people who are on the front lines of climate disruption. They have no crop insurance. They have no safety net. These folks, their livelihoods, their food, Their culture depends on the survival of these seaweeds. Now, the great news is we looked at some topo maps. We found there’s some deep water nearby. We can effectively bring irrigation to farms that previously have had no irrigation.
Ross Kenyon: You’re piping colder water into their farm?
Brian Von Herzen: We are planning to restore overturning circulation. And that means restoring that overturning of the mixed layer and that deep cool water cools off the reef. It also provides the macronutrients that are needed for those seaweeds to thrive. And so it’s as if it’s 6,000 years ago and we just figured out irrigation of farms.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Is anyone else doing that? That’s a wild idea.
Brian Von Herzen: Well, it’s a start and we’re working actually with several teams in the United States as well through the Department of Energy and the Mariner Program to enable this to occur. We’re engineers, technologists fundamentally. And what we do is find the root cause of the problem. We call them the nutrient value gaps in our climate disruption experience here. And one of them is the oceans are getting too warm and that increases the energy barrier that must be overcome to have wind. Cause upwelling and bring those nutrients in that deep water to the surface.
And if you don’t have upwelling, you don’t have nitrate, you don’t have phosphate, you don’t have algae and the tropical and subtropical oceans begins to collapse. And we’ve seen that up to 40% collapse over the past century.
Ross Kenyon: I can’t believe I let you say the phrase something gap and I didn’t make a Dr. Strangelove reference. Normally I would have jumped in there for sure. I said I made a meta comment after the fact. Very well. If I wanted to become a kelp farmer and I found something that the market wants, people want to buy this, it’s a high value type of seaweed, how would I do it here? Are you able to lease ocean floor? Are you able to buy it? How does this all work? I have a friend who really wants to get into this and be an entrepreneur in this space, but how does it work?
Brian Von Herzen: Do you want the 10 year plan or the one year plan?
Unknown speaker: Give me a taste of each.
Brian Von Herzen: Okay, well today it takes three to 10 years to permit a seaweed forest in the United States.
Ross Kenyon: Wow.
Brian Von Herzen: Which is nuts.
Unknown speaker: Can you go farther away?
Brian Von Herzen: Well, you can, but you know, the US economic zone is 300 kilometers offshore, so that’s pretty far out there.
Unknown speaker: It’s too deep.
Brian Von Herzen: Right, and plus, there’s a lot of good reasons to be in US waters, so it’s a real challenge, and we’ve been struggling with that challenge. By the way, parenthetically, In other countries, we’ve been able to get permits orders of magnitude faster. So we are working with the US government, we’re working with DOE, we’re working with NOAA, but we need to accelerate the process and it needs to be responsive to the small farm holder, the small holder.
Ross Kenyon: Those people in the Philippines, right? You want them to be able to very quickly go.
Brian Von Herzen: And in the US, we need millions of seaweed farmers in the US and we need to make it easy to do this, not hard. And so we’ve pioneered a concept Where we build our marine permaculture, we go to the Coast Guard, we ask for our registration number for our ocean vessel, and it is an ocean vessel that enjoys all of the 500 years of Admiralty Law precedent that’s been laid down, and we operate that ocean vessel as a ship. And that ship is sailing the seven seas and growing seaweed and fish habitat.
And the fish love it. They come and they collect there and they grow there and they thrive there. And so we’re looking at thousands of tonnes of seaweed and hundreds of tonnes of fish associated with each marine permaculture. And it’s a ship that literally is months to register instead of decades.
Ross Kenyon: So the unit of governance is not the seafloor, not a piece of property per se, but it happens through a vessel?
Brian Von Herzen: It’s an ocean-going vessel. My favorite metaphor is the life of Pi later on in the movie where the guy finds this floating island of life out in the sea. And our vision is to make a utopian floating island of life in the ocean that helps to regenerate life in the ocean. And it gives back to the ecosystem as much as we sustainably harvest, just like the permaculture forests of Tasmania.
Ross Kenyon: The parallel to regenerative agriculture or something. It’s just at sea.
Brian Von Herzen: Definitely.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah.
Brian Von Herzen: We have enough productivity to go around for everybody, including the ecosystems.
Ross Kenyon: And we love it too. There’s a kelp that tastes like bacon. Oh, it’s awesome. How many times has this come up on this show? No one has got us any yet.
Brian Von Herzen: I got it in Europe. I was there this year earlier and it’s lovely. I mean, it’s a dulse that’s cooked up with some rich creamery butter and it is really tasty.
Ross Kenyon: It’s because there’s high lipid content in various types.
Brian Von Herzen: It is high protein. It is wonderful. In fact, I love seaweed. We like to say kelp is the new kale, but it goes beyond- It’s great marketing.
Unknown speaker: Is it the kelp marketing board or whatever?
Brian Von Herzen: Well, you know, I get so excited about this because I’ve had the best seaweed of my life in the Philippines. And it’s like, I want to bring this wonderful, delicious food back to America because I was very fortunate to go there. You know, our colleagues gave us a wonderful experience there, really grassroots experience. And they serve locally this wonderful seaweed. You know, they do a vinaigrette and they’ve got onions and garlic and all these wonderful spices. And it’s really crunchy, juicy seaweed that’s just so much fun to eat. It’s like, this is the best seaweed I’ve ever had in my life.
And that’s exactly the experience I had this year. And I want to scale that because that is just incredible. It’s fantastic. And what I’ll tell you is from our research, we know... So we’ve been looking for ways To transform that and have a shelf-stable form that will work well. And our latest concept that we’re working on is called seaweed sauerkraut. And the way this works is it’s probiotic, you’ve got active cultures in there, and because it goes through this fermentation process, you have preserved The antioxidants, the phytonutrients, and the omega-3s.
And we’re talking a shelf life of six months or longer.
Ross Kenyon: I’m a huge consumer of kimchi and all the probiotic sauerkrauts. I’ve already bought this in my mind.
Christophe Jospe: That’s awesome. Ross is sold.
Brian Von Herzen: But we’re actually doing some alpha testing right now in Australia. And we are looking forward to rolling out seaweed sauerkraut across the country just as soon as we can make it.
Unknown speaker: We’re called Nori. One of those has to come here.
Christophe Jospe: All right.
Brian Von Herzen: You got it. You got it.
Christophe Jospe: What I like about this is... We are obviously talking about removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and oceans, and that’s really important. But sometimes to get these large scale processes going, you need to go find a market. And so you take seaweed out, you then sell things. And you find the market where it probably does other good things for the climate as well. And I remember a presentation you gave that was about feeding cows algae and sort of tracing that back as how that is better for the climate for a whole number of reasons.
Could you go into that?
Brian Von Herzen: Oh, certainly. Well, I’ll tell you, a quarter of all the greenhouse gases on this planet comes from domestic livestock. So it is a huge factor. And I’ll tell you, when it comes to cattle, sheep, goats, ruminant livestock, half of that carbon, greenhouse gas I should say, is going up in the form of methane. And what we found, there’s a really interesting story, some of our colleagues went up to Nova Scotia and hung out with some farmers. This one farmer Had two patches, his land was broken, split in half by a road, but it was by the sea, right?
But the road was going along the sea. So half of his cattle were three fences and the ocean, and the other half were on the other side of the road where they couldn’t access the ocean. This farmer noticed that the cattle that were on the half with the access to the ocean would go down to the beach from time to time and munch on some seaweed. And that was the only difference he could notice between these. But what he noticed was that these cattle by the ocean were happier, healthier, and heavier than the ones that were treated identically, so he thought, up on the other half of his property.
And so then people started to think, well, gee, maybe there’s something to this. Maybe there’s some aspect of the seaweed that they were voluntarily eating that actually improved their health. So they started doing some measurements and what they found was that these cattle had far less methane burps, it’s 90% burps, than the cattle that didn’t have access to the seaweed. And what I like is I’ve heard from New Zealanders that the wild deer in New Zealand go down to the beach at night and eat seaweed. You know, and the reason we know this is that the hunters of the deer go down to the beach at night and shoot the deer because they’re down eating the seaweed.
So... Those things aside, I’m thrilled the ruminants eat seaweed all their own. And then down in Australia, CSIRO did a study of 20 different kinds of seaweed to see, all right, which ones of these are going to really work the best on this methane reduction because they measured the methane. And they found that a lot of the methane had been reduced because of this seaweed that they were eating. And I was amazed to learn under normal conditions, 11% of the feed energy goes up in smoke, literally as methane burping out of the cow.
Well, effectively, they found one seaweed or two, the family of seaweeds that would actually cut 90% of those methane emissions. So that 11% going up in smoke turns into 1%. And that’s just transformative. It’s transformative for... The cattlemen, because they can improve their feed conversion ratio. It’s transformative for people because they can have more sustainable product. And it’s transformative for the earth because we’re halfway to achieving the goal that Australia has set to reach carbon neutral beef by 2030. And I will add to that, that if we grow that seaweed on a marine permaculture and we sequester half of the carbon from that marine permaculture, we will be able to take them carbon negative.
So we’re talking about carbon negative beef in the next decade. All thanks to Seaweed Feed.
Ross Kenyon: Alright, so you brought us back from the pessimistic brink that we had started with. One of the questions I had is that given that there are so many types of seaweed that we can choose from, and some are really great at some things, some are really great at others, is there a risk given your focus on permaculture that will end up with monocultures of various types of seaweed in the ocean that maybe won’t foster the diversity that you hope to generate?
Brian Von Herzen: I don’t think so. And the reason is that our intent for marine permaculture is that it be multitrophic. And by multitrophic, we include seaweed, fish, shellfish, even mammals. I mean, because earlier this year we saw two sea otters entering Berkeley Marina and hanging out. And that was a pretty marginal habitat. It wasn’t a very good habitat. We’re gonna be making class A habitat for sea otters and more because sea lions, pinnipeds, whales love to hang out near seaweed and kelp. And so we’re looking forward to documenting those ecosystem services that can keep the whole ecosystem alive.
I mean, when we look at the last major climate disruption on the coast of California, It was the 2014 warm blob that came down from Alaska, past Washington, Oregon, all the way down to California, and that made the water way too warm.
Ross Kenyon: What was this? Warm blob?
Brian Von Herzen: Offshore that descended from Alaska in 2014 all the way down to the coast of California. And then followed shortly thereafter by massive El Nino, right? The El Nino of the century, of the last century. And it might get worse. But that El Nino shut down that California current overturning circulation, that upwelling, that feeds the kelp. And that’s how we lost 90% of the kelp in California. And it wasn’t only that. We looked at the sardine population off California. From 2007 to 2015, we went from more than a million metric tonnes of sardines to 86,000 tonnes of sardines.
So we lost more than a factor of 10 in the sardines. And that went right up the population, tens of thousands of seabirds gone. And we had starving baby sea lions washing up on the shore. Off Northern California, Sausalito alone, they tried to rescue 3,000 starving baby sea lions. There were no fish to eat. And so this is the kind of climate disruption we need to address. We need to address it at the root cause. And that root cause is restoring the overturning circulation, getting those seaweed forests back on track, and building that multitrophic permaculture that is our ecosystems.
One of my teachers from Caltech was Richard Feynman. He loved to say there’s plenty of room at the bottom.
Unknown speaker: Paul’s face is jaw dropped there.
Brian Von Herzen: So I was very fortunate. My advisor put me up to it. Dick Feynman liked to say there’s plenty of room at the bottom. And he was talking about small machines, but I apply it to there’s plenty of room to actually restore that kelp forest ecosystem and to provide those nutrients from the deep and get the carbon export back to the deep. After we’ve taken care of the kelp and the ecosystem, that’s where the regeneration part comes. Taking care of nature means that nature will take care of us. And that’s a super linear principle.
It’s one thing to extract a certain amount of food that you sell, right? It’s another thing to be building the soil Building the ecosystem, because those dividends are going to come back and result in greater yields the next year. And those following years are the super linear interest, if you will, on the investment. And that’s what we believe in. That for us defines regeneration. Regeneration is a super linear growth of ecosystems and economic well-being together.
Ross Kenyon: Are you planning on monetizing these ecosystem services or do you hope that the selling of kelp is perhaps enough to sustain this model? I’m sure with permaculture there’s multiple income streams and that’s how you think about this.
Brian Von Herzen: We have found more than a dozen income streams. We’ll start with the five F’s and that is food, feed, fertilizer, fiber, and biofuels.
Unknown speaker: Where can I give you my money?
Ross Kenyon: We should talk fuels, right? That’s why you were up here right now.
Brian Von Herzen: Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: What an image there. The fuels that come out of this, I know there’s a lot of criticism of ethanol for way more energy it takes than it’s actually worth in many cases, but macroalgaes do this very well.
Brian Von Herzen: They do it incredibly well. In fact, we’re designing a bioharvester that’s going to be harvesting kelp without any fossil fuel. And it’s just a way to actually account for and minimize or eliminate most of the carbon intensity associated with the activities needed to produce these And transformative and regenerative approaches.
Ross Kenyon: You did those five F’s again?
Brian Von Herzen: Oh, yes.
Ross Kenyon: Food.
Brian Von Herzen: We love eating seaweed and everything that goes along with it. And the fish, the forage fish, the sardines, the anchovies. I mean, I love those fish and I love to eat those fish because those are the healthiest fish you can eat.
Ross Kenyon: Do you eat those Wild Planet? Wild Planet sardines, my favorite. My wife hates it when I open those though. She can smell it from a mile away and it’s like, stop, that plus the kimchi. It’s just awful. Like worst husband ever probably. You gotta eat a whole can at once.
Brian Von Herzen: I got my partner into eating the sardines too. So it becomes a community effort. I’ll tell you what I have for breakfast is celery and sardines.
Ross Kenyon: Oh wow. It’s a great combo. I don’t know if I’d be able to pull that one off in my home.
Brian Von Herzen: Before the oatmeal. Cause you know, if you eat those first, the celery is going to slow down those carbs from the oatmeal.
Ross Kenyon: Okay.
Unknown speaker: So all that qualifies as food then?
Brian Von Herzen: Food. And then the second one is feed. And we’ve already talked about the cattle feed, but it goes beyond that. We can have fish feed and we’re talking about feed that’s high omega-3. And what I want to do is transform an aquaculture salmon that might’ve been fed on grain.
Unknown speaker: Okay.
Brian Von Herzen: Into an omega-3 salmon. I don’t want a grain brain salmon. Do you?
Ross Kenyon: No, we’re all pretty paleo or paleo friendly. Right.
Brian Von Herzen: And so, you know, we’ve got to feed our fish what they’re supposed to eat. And that is DHA and EPA. It’s algae. I mean, the algae is the source of these omega-3s. The news is going to be coming out. I mean, it’s in the peer-reviewed literature already that our cognitive health span depends for so much of the population on having those long-chain omega-3s that can literally feed your brain. And I think that cognitive health span is so key. And the news is going to be coming out that, gee, depending on your apple lipoprotein status, you know, you can do your 23andMe genetic profile.
It’s like a third of Americans. And I’d say a quarter to a third of the whole world depends on a non-Western diet in order to maximize their cognitive health span. And their health and longevity. It’s all about eating those forage fish, sardines, anchovies, and some salmon.
Ross Kenyon: Food, feed. Fertilizer. Fertilizer.
Brian Von Herzen: So it is amazing that there have been several studies on actually using the seaweed not as an NPK fertilizer as a baseline, it has some of those, but as a foliar biostimulant.
Ross Kenyon: You said NPK is amazing.
Brian Von Herzen: NPK is nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. It’s the normal fertilizer, right? But they put that in the ground, that’s fine. The big place this makes a difference is you actually take the liquid seaweed extract, and we’re producing this now in the Philippines, and you spray it onto the leaves of the plants. And when you spray it on the leaves of the plants, it goes through the stomata, And there are biomolecules and micronutrients in the seaweed extract that upregulate the gene expression of the plant. And you get, as a result, denser root system and richer flowering.
And what that translates into, our results in the Philippines have been 11% more rice, 20% more vegetables, and a whopping 42% more eggplant compared to replete NPK fertilizer. So it’s like Where did this come from? Bonus fries. In fact, I saw a study in India where they did this on soybeans and they used 10 tonnes of cow manure on one side and On the right side, they did the same 10 tonnes of cow manure, but they did this foliar biostimulant with seaweed extract. They got 56% more soybeans off of that crop.
So it’s amazing to see this increase. It’s amazing. And I look to everything, all the crops that we can be producing here in the States and the transformative effect it can have. I think this is one of the leading markets is to look at how we can effectively regenerate the soils, which have been mined, the micronutrients have been mined out The seaweeds have all the micronutrients that are necessary for life. And this is provided in organic form. So you’re getting an organic product that can rebuild the soil. And we’re all about carbon farming and about getting those micronutrients back in the soil.
I call it real nutrition.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, you have a nice mix, too, of business-to-business products and also business-to-consumer. You have all sorts of things. There’s so many to go through, though.
Brian Von Herzen: There’s a lot.
Unknown speaker: Fiber, I think, was one of them, too.
Brian Von Herzen: Oh, Fiber is one of my favorites. So you can go and actually buy it in Asia. You can get clothing that’s 5% seaweed. You know, one of the ingredients in seaweed is alginate. And that’s one of the hydrocolloids. It’s a polysaccharide. And so there’s this company in New York that I just heard about called Alginate. And what they’re doing is they’re taking the soluble fiber alginate and processing it and turning it into clothing like way more than 5%. I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised if you can make it more than 50%.
Effectively, we can grow our fibers at sea and seaweed clothing.
Ross Kenyon: And within like a decade, are there going to be hippies or be like, but for hemp, you know, all the amazing things you can do with hemp, but now seaweed. Is that the future you envision?
Brian Von Herzen: You know, there’s 10,000 kinds of seaweed and none of them are toxic. I go out in the surf, I go surfing and I start munching on the seaweed that just by...
Unknown speaker: Just any kind of seaweed.
Brian Von Herzen: Well, you know, it should be like a kelp or something. Actually, when it’s different and interesting, like you find a red one, go for it. You know, generally, it’s best if that seaweed was rooted to a rock and alive and healthy and hadn’t been running on a beach somewhere. But, you know, if you’re in a live surf zone and some kelp goes by, I don’t mind munching down on that at all. I think it’s really fun. You got to try these new culinary delights. I mean, literally, we have like two dozen species investigated and actually being harvested.
We have 10,000 plus seaweed species to explore. We’ve barely scratched the surface.
Christophe Jospe: I would say that Brian’s probably a sea evangelist or seaweed evangelist, maybe more than.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I’m pretty convinced this is a great idea. Even if one of these income streams panned out, it would still probably be viable.
Brian Von Herzen: I agree with you. And, you know, the future is bright and we look forward to working with everyone to create the marine permaculture industry and effectively restore life on the planet, make sure we’ve got enough food for people, and at the same time measure that carbon export, which we need to do in order to get our carbon budget back into balance.
Christophe Jospe: We’re super interested in that part. But before we go there, I’d like to wave a magic wand because you are very clearly an entrepreneur, sort of disguised as a scientist.
Brian Von Herzen: We like doing both. I mean, I was raised as a scientist and I lived for 20 years in Silicon Valley.
Christophe Jospe: There you go. So you’ve got both sides. And so clearly you have an idea around the market and how to take things to market and how to have things scale. And the world we’re talking about doesn’t exist today, but we obviously want So can you paint a picture a little bit of what you see happening on the kind of demonstration scale farms or the sorts of farms that we need to get right, that the Department of Energy cares about funding to get right, and then we can really see this just exponentially take off, but… Right.
Brian Von Herzen: Well, with the Mariner Program, we have nine Category 1 projects that are actually focused on doing the planning and design for how do we build an offshore kelp forest? How do we build an island of life, if you will, offshore? And I think that’s one of the key questions. And thankfully, we’ve been supported by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. They developed something Two years ago called the Blue Economy Challenge and we were fortunate that out of 220 organizations we were selected as one of the 10 winners of the Blue Economy Challenge and with those funds we have developed a small marine permaculture system that we are deploying This quarter in Indonesia.
And we’re looking forward to getting the results this year that will show that these commercially relevant seaweeds that the farmers are growing in the Philippines and Indonesia and around the world grow better with this water from the deep. And so we’re going to upwell that water. We’re going to irrigate the seaweeds, the red seaweeds in this case, and demonstrate that differential growth rate. Once that’s in place, We look forward to going to the Philippines and helping those 2,000 seaweed farmers and actually get their business back on track and demonstrate that it’s working well and then scale it offshore because as much shoreline as we have, and that’s where seaweed is being grown mostly right now, between here and Australia, there’s 100 million square kilometers of accessible ocean and with less than 1% of it, We can feed the world and also restore life to the ocean.
So we see this as enormously scalable and we start by working with the subsistence seaweed farmers. We start by making sure that we can provide climate resilience To their livelihoods, because without climate resilience, there is no economic resilience. And so we partner with organizations around the world to ensure that this can happen. And then once it is successful, scaling offshore, where we can go further and further offshore and utilize these ocean-going vessels that are self-guided, they’re autonomous. It’s like Project Loon of the Sea that Google’s done. And the concept there is that we can actually use the currents and the mesoscale eddies to guide these systems to be harvested every quarter and yet also give back to the ecosystem.
And so it’s that model of scalability that we’re leaning into and just going for. Because, I mean, quite frankly, the earth can’t wait. We’ve got to actually get this going. And so we see that scaling and we see these major markets growing. And we look forward to really growing this entire marine permaculture industry so that people around the world can work on regenerating their forests and their fish. Yeah, I went to the Mediterranean last year. And sadly, it’s a mostly empty ocean. And, you know, the island of Sardinia is, you know, how they named the sardines.
It was the sardines of Sardinia. Well, I’ve seen no sardines anywhere near Sardinia or the Mediterranean. They’re very few. And sadly, the Mediterranean has been overfished for centuries, if not millennia. And we see the potential marine permaculture to bring back the seaweed, bring back the fish habitat. And ultimately, that can bring back the forage fish and the entire trophic pyramid to an ocean teeming with life once again. As a diver, I’m just amazed when I go diving in so many places, the Caribbean and elsewhere, And it’s just an empty swimming pool.
I mean, it’s beautiful blue, but where’s the fish? So as much as I care about plastic in the ocean, I care about no fish even more because our survival depends on turning that around. And so there are a lot of other groups and people that are working on getting the plastic out of the ocean. We’re working on the no fish. And getting fish back is really key, as I see it, to really getting us back on track.
Ross Kenyon: I think it’s a little bit of a different direction, but I know you have interest in blockchain and how this impacts marine permaculture. We also talked about Nori for a long time, as we alluded to at the beginning of the show. What applications do you see for blockchain or what excites you about it?
Brian Von Herzen: What excites me is the idea that we can get grassroots involvement because ultimately we’ve talked to members of Congress and senators, and we have been told that they will take no action until there is a grassroots mandate to put a predictable and rising price on carbon and balance our carbon budget. And so until that time, we have to build the grassroots support and the capital to say, we care. We care about balancing carbon. We care about the ecosystems of the earth. We care about sustainably feeding the people of the earth and having a soft landing when it comes to man’s influence on the globe.
So to do that, I see the opportunity for systems like Nori Tokens to empower individuals to take action, to be able to balance their carbon budget, to be able to say, yeah, I’m leaning into this. And we get that kind of support going and we’ll be able to grow permacultures all over this planet.
Ross Kenyon: So you see the monetization element of blockchain and new token systems where you’re encouraging new types of behavior like carbon removal. That’s the key way that this fits in to marine permaculture, helping you monetize your carbon removal as one of the many income streams of your permaculture.
Brian Von Herzen: I think it is a key part. These three parts, as we said, are food security, ecosystem survival, and carbon export, and the tokenization of And documentation of how that carbon is exported into the middle and deep ocean and how it’s tracked. That’s something we need to lean into, we need to invest in. We need to have those remote operated vehicles. There’s this open ROV down in Berkeley where you can like for $1,700, you can get your own ROV and sail it around and drive it around. You know, it’s like the lowest price ROV I’ve ever heard of.
Unknown speaker: Oh, what is an ROV?
Brian Von Herzen: That’s a remotely operated vehicle. It’s an underwater submarine. It’s like a little drone.
Unknown speaker: Okay.
Brian Von Herzen: It’s a drone that you get to pilot a submarine from the surface of your ship.
Unknown speaker: How far does it go?
Brian Von Herzen: Well, so far it’ll go hundreds of meters deep, but I think in the future they’ll go thousands of meters deep. And, you know, my father was one of the co-discoverers of the hydrothermal vent back in 1977.
Unknown speaker: Wow.
Brian Von Herzen: And you know how he did it? Well, he was a heat flow scientist, so he knew there was like this heat flow going on. It was anomalous. We didn’t know what was going on, but he teamed up with Dr. Ballard who had the Jason Right. And they went down and like they took their thermal probes down and they found where it was getting hot anomalously. And then Jason came along and that’s where we found the first Clambake, the first hydrothermal vents back in 1977. There were no biologists on the cruise at all.
So they had a radio back to Woods Hole and say, all right, what’s going on here? And they say, well, get some samples and fix them. I was like, fix them with what? We don’t have any chloroform, we don’t have any formalin, what are we gonna do? So they went back and found a stash of vodka and they sacrificed the vodka to fix the samples.
Unknown speaker: That’s quite absurd.
Brian Von Herzen: So, I mean, it’s just an example. I mean, these ROVs are the new technology and we’ve got these drones in the air and we’ve got these ROVs in the sea and we can actually measure that carbon export, but it costs money to do it, right? And so by tokenizing, we can make the investments to go through those methodologies and verify that carbon’s been sunk past a thousand meters and it’s going to last hundreds to thousands of years in the deep sea before it outcrops.
Ross Kenyon: So you think that the capitalization element, the ICO craze of last year is a way of not having to deal with venture capitalists or having to go to the government. You think this is a third way that’s more democratic, more open. That’s what excites you about that?
Brian Von Herzen: Definitely, because most major movements for good are grassroots movements. And that’s what this enables, enables all of us to lean into this. Whether we want to be seaweed farmers or balance our carbon budget or ensure food security, Or simply give back to the ecosystems of the planet. These are all motivations to develop marine permaculture. And we’ve had volunteers from around the world, from Australia, from France, from Tasmania, and from the US, come and offer their help to make this happen. And it’s really been, for me, a very buoyant force. I mean, even today, I was on the phone with one of our volunteers.
Have you heard of the WUF program?
Unknown speaker: I actually did it.
Brian Von Herzen: You did WUF.
Unknown speaker: World volunteers. Worldwide opportunities and organic farms.
Brian Von Herzen: Exactly. Yeah. We had a Wolf volunteer come up and say, you know, as much as I love permaculture, I realized that What I really care about is the ocean and marine environments. And so marine permaculture is just what I wanna do. So it’s great. It’s personally uplifting to have this overnight success, 10 years in the making, be such a grassroots support. We’re buoyed by the support of thousands of people. And we’d like to grow that into millions of people. And we see this approach as being one key way of doing that.
Unknown speaker: Well, our listenership is in the millions, so you’re in luck.
Ross Kenyon: It is not, but we love and appreciate you. Thank you. If you like the show, please, please upvote us wherever you see it. Share it on social media. Rate us highly in the app. Anything else we want to cover here? I think you have so many good closing quotes there in that last little bit.
Christophe Jospe: I think we just pass it back to you, Brian, if you want to give us any final words to take us home. I’m super keen on a whole number of things you’ve said. I think the remote operated vehicles really hits the nose on the head. I would like one. Indeed, it requires a machine, not a human, so we can trust what it’s feeding and then it can de-risk some of the estimations we have around how much carbon has been put away, which fits very nicely into the Nori structure. It’s also one of our biggest problems and something that keeps us up at night, we have to work on.
Right. Uncertainty ranges. And more data lowers those, wouldn’t you know. So take us home, Brian. What do you like to end with?
Brian Von Herzen: Well, what I’d encourage is for all of us to get involved, whether it’s Nori Tokens or getting involved with understanding seaweed and the marine environment or developing a marine permaculture and figuring out how we do that. By getting involved and letting our congressmen know that we care about this and Getting out and being really active. You know, I think that is really key. You know, we as a country have to deal with our political system. And what I’ve learned is it’s a winner take all system. And sadly, that means that we have to vote against our worst candidates.
We don’t get to always vote for our favorite candidates, but getting out and voting for them is key. And this sense, this is another saying that I remember now that Dick Feynman told me, and that is vote with your feet. And what he means by that is choose projects to work on that you believe in and that transform the world in ways that you know will make a difference. And voting with your feet is so important. Working on a project you totally believe in. And for us, that’s marine permaculture. And we would welcome everyone to join us on this incredible journey to, for me, balance the planet, rebalance the planet, and regenerate Our economic livelihoods, our ecosystems, and get our carbon budget back into balance.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, if I quit Nori, would you hire me?
Christophe Jospe: I’d jump ship and go over there. Definitely. Are we going to have our first firing on the air? Well, thank you very much. That’s been great. We’ll see you next time.
Brian Von Herzen: Oh, thank you, Kristoff. Thank you. Thank you, Ross.
