Episode 38: Changing the Climate One Acre of Ocean At a Time

Transcript

00;00;10;02 – 00;00;32;08

Hello and welcome back to Change@Work. I’m your host Chris Thornton senior principal here at Daggerwing Group. This week we have a very special guest Doctor Brian von Herzen, founder and Executive Director of the Climate Foundation. And the episode you’ll hear about how the Climate Foundation came to be and what they’re setting out to achieve. Down to the nitty gritty science explanation behind it all.

00;00;32;11 – 00;00;54;03

Now, I went into this conversation knowing nothing about kelp farms and marine permaculture. But Doctor Brian broke it down in such a way that made it easy to understand, and honestly gave me a lot of hope for the future of our planet. So if you want to feel some hope too, and learn a lot about our warming oceans and what can be done about it, have a listen.

00;00;54;05 – 00;01;21;23

It’s a fascinating conversation. Joining us today is Brian von Herzen, founder and Executive Director of the Climate Foundation, which upholds the vision and the mission to regenerate life in the ocean using marine permaculture technology. Brian received his physics degree from Princeton University and his PhD in planetary science from the California Institute of Technology, where he was awarded the prestigious Hertz Fellowship.

00;01;21;27 – 00;01;46;02

Brian, we always like to learn a little bit about our guests before we dig into the deep conversation. So let’s let’s get to know you. What’s the first thing you do when you get home from work? When I get home from work, well, I generally take a little nap and go bicycling. we actually have some lovely sunsets here in the hinterlands of the Sunshine Coast of Queensland, Australia.

00;01;46;04 – 00;02;08;13

And there’s some incredible sunsets and, biking around on our little. We’ve got two, two bicycles and no cars. So we’re kind of living the low carbon lifestyle, and, and the sunsets are incredible because it’s a desert out to the west of us. So you end up getting the sunlight hitting the bottoms of the clouds, and you have this beautiful periwinkle and salmon, just glorious sunsets.

00;02;08;13 – 00;02;35;08

And we’re so grateful for this garden of Eden. We call it Earth 2.0 down here in Australia, where we’re working to regenerate life and the seas and the soils. It’s incredible. I’ve experienced those sunsets. I remember absolutely beautiful. Hey, do you collect anything that’s interesting that you’d like to share? I like to collect experiences. Yeah. I’ve got to talk some of my richest experiences that have been interacting with the incredible wildlife on our planet.

00;02;35;11 – 00;03;07;11

I was kind of shocked that 200 years ago, 95% of the mammalian biomass on the planet was wild, and humanity represented 5% of mammals on the planet. A century ago, humanity was around 15% and wildlife was 85%. And this decade, humanity and their domesticated livestock represents 96% of all mammalian biomass. And the wildlife. The wild mammals are down to 4% of the biomass on this planet.

00;03;07;13 – 00;03;27;27

That’s how much we’ve changed in the last 200 years. And so when I get a visit from, a lovely kangaroo or a wallaby or one of our lovely possums who are eating the yellow guavas in our tree, I just feel so grateful. I’m so grateful that these wild animals are still coming to visit. We even get visits from place monitor lizards.

00;03;28;00 – 00;03;53;06

I call them Lacy, and we, you know, it’s just it’s incredible experiencing that wildlife up front and that magic that I get here on land. We also get on the ocean because our seaweed platform is habitat for thousands of sardines. Hundreds of tuna families of dolphins have taken up residence around our platform and spent months there. And we even had a visit from two 20ft long shaped whale sharks over two years.

00;03;53;11 – 00;04;17;03

So it’s like nature’s voted with her fans and said, Brian, you’ve got the good stuff right here. We’re regenerating primary productivity. We’re regenerating marine habitat that’s been lost over the last 100 years. And at the same time, we’re helping to fix carbon using a nature based approach that can safely remove carbon from the atmosphere. I am not an expert in your area.

00;04;17;04 – 00;04;47;20

I certainly wouldn’t even try to compare my experience and knowledge to to all that you have, but I’m certainly interested in all that you’ve just shared. What do you think something an outsider like me wouldn’t know about what you do in your industry? Well, I think it’s useful to talk and think about the forests on our planet, because forests play a pivotal role in creating habitat and fixing carbon out of the atmosphere.

00;04;47;23 – 00;05;11;26

What’s less known is that our sea forests, including kelp forests, plankton, forests and tropical seaweed for us play an equally fundamental role. Literally, the ocean is the second lung of our planet, and in a warmer planet, nature is breaking down. We’re actually, you know, the warm water on the surface of the ocean is placing a barrier to the natural upwelling that feeds the kelp forest.

00;05;12;02 – 00;05;37;29

In the United States and Australia alone, we’ve lost 3000km² of kelp forest in the last century. and it’s a severe situation. So just regenerating those 3000km² is a first challenge across the Pacific. It sounds like you’re doing something about that, though, right? So we’ll get into that. And I want you to take us there. First, let’s talk about your journey.

00;05;38;01 – 00;05;56;20

What led you to create the Climate Foundation? That’s a great question. Well, my father was an oceanographer, and when I was very little, he would take me and learn how to like at the age of three, I was boogie boarding on a surf mat. And, you know, in high school I was learning how to surf. And then he taught me how to snorkel and free dive.

00;05;56;20 – 00;06;23;27

And we went scuba diving together in Mexico. We saw incredible tapestries of fish and an abundance and sadly, most of that is gone today. Now it’s not irreversible, but we’ve lost, you know, half of the fish biomass in the last 30 years has been fished. And furthermore, 90% of the big fish are gone. So our challenge and our opportunity is to give nature half a chance, restore the supply of deep nutrients and let her down exponentially.

00;06;23;29 – 00;06;48;02

And that’s a challenge. Now my own journey. I had a a career for three decades as a system engineer in Silicon Valley, and we went from designing systems on a chip in Silicon Valley to systems on a ship in the Pacific Ocean. And that is how can we create and fill the gaps caused by our climate disruptions to regenerate the bounty that is life in the ocean and life on the Earth.

00;06;48;05 – 00;07;10;08

And is that what led you to create the Climate Foundation? 20 years ago, we were doing an expedition across Greenland, and we noticed these little melt ponds where the water was melting. It looked like a blue swimming pool. And the first year there was blossoming falls. The next year there were blue ponds, the next year they were blue lakes.

00;07;10;08 – 00;07;31;28

And then by the fourth or fifth year, they were giant lakes that were 100ft deep and tens of kilometers long. And by 2012, 97% of the surface of Greenland had melted. And I realized we have an exponential problem here. And to address it, we are going to need to harness nature, because nature has been fixing carbon for eons.

00;07;32;00 – 00;07;51;16

Get our carbon budget back into balance and really work to repair the climate if we did nothing. Business as usual. You know, this is a fundamental threat to civilization and food security. Food security is is our challenge and our opportunity. And as I see it, you know, no civilization has survived a collapse of the seas and the soils.

00;07;51;22 – 00;08;11;09

We need to rely on the rest of nature to ensure food security for humanity and for 8 million species who can’t vote. Well, after seeing the situation on Greenland, I decided to take a sabbatical from my work in Silicon Valley, and I went back to my hometown and actually learned about plankton biology. Where’s that hometown? Woods Hole, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod.

00;08;11;09 – 00;08;36;07

Okay. My father was an oceanographer. He studied marine geology and geophysics. It turned out, you know, they discovered in 1977, he and Bob Ballard discovered the hydrothermal vents for the first time, which is thought to be the origin of life. Yeah. In the ocean. Yeah, yeah. And so it was amazing because he was a geologist, you know, this is this is what happens, you know, while you’re making other plans, you discover the origin of life on the planet.

00;08;36;08 – 00;09;01;02

You know, it’s kind of incredible. And so, you know, same thing for me. I mean, I have this engineering background I had, you know, learn planetary science at Caltech. And I came back to my roots of planetary science and technology development. And it was that combination of the two. And that is here’s the problem. The algae is on the ocean, but the nutrient supply is fading because of a warming ocean.

00;09;01;05 – 00;09;21;05

How do we stave off the Permian mass extinction that wiped out 96% of all marine species on the planet? And by the way, we’re 2% of the way there already. Well, we’ve got to restore that nutrient supply either the water has to come up or the seaweeds have to go down. Turns out it’s a hundred times less energy to bring the seaweeds down.

00;09;21;07 – 00;09;41;07

so we did that and it’s like, okay, we got the nutrient supply. Now the Seabees provide the habitat and we just need to provide that substrate, all the pieces to give nature half a chance. And we see it. We see it every day. Nature rebounds exponentially. We’ve got these little sardines off my shoulder. We’ve got cool game coming in and nature’s voting with their fins.

00;09;41;07 – 00;10;10;08

You know we’ve got the good stuff. So it’s an incredible validation really. That natural validation is so satisfying to me because it tells me that we’re on the right track to regenerate life in the ocean. Yeah, that that’s what we needed. There’s the link. There’s the link. Now we get it. When you think about what the Climate Foundation is, is aimed at addressing, tell me where the foundation fits into the opportunities and definitely the problems that you see.

00;10;10;11 – 00;10;29;05

In the last decade, we’ve worked on interventions in soils, particularly with biochar, compost and healthy soil microbial communities. Oh, that’s that work has been taken up and has grown beautifully. And there are several carbon standards now for biochar. We then embarked on the road less traveled, and that is once if by land, twice if by sea and in the sea.

00;10;29;05 – 00;10;50;04

That second line of the earth. Yeah, we need work to regenerate there and there we saw the problem is 90% of global warming goes into the ocean. And that warm layer of water at the surface of the ocean is like a lid that prevents the upwelling of these nutrients, that nutrient supply, that overturning circulation. You know, it’s good for your legs and it’s good for the planet.

00;10;50;10 – 00;11;12;08

We need that circulation to keep those ecosystems alive. And so that challenge is really about, first of all, food security. And that is how do we as a civilization survive during the difficult years of climate disruption that are to come? We’ve just seen the tip of the iceberg, literally. But, you know, there at this table, as an ice age live life loves an ice age.

00;11;12;15 – 00;11;36;18

It’s also stable as an ice free planet. But that’s a long way from here. And, you know, I think we need to do what we can to get back on the road of the environmental conditions and the climate conditions that civilization’s developed on. So I’d love to dig into how did you get here as a human? Because we talk about microchips and now we’re talking about second lungs.

00;11;36;18 – 00;11;56;11

Like, what’s that? I bet it was a clear path for you. But for me, as an outsider, that feels like a major switch. Tell me. Tell me what the clear path is. Well, the clear path is that in system engineering, let’s say we’re designing a system on a chip, like a computer or something. You’ve got to deal with the the layout, you know, the geography.

00;11;56;12 – 00;12;20;22

You have to deal with the electrical power supply, you have to deal with a heat transfer and, you know, and electromagnetics and all sorts of other considerations, packaging, all the rest. That’s a multi-dimensional problem to solve as a designer, as an architect, the same thing in the ocean, that hectare by hectare. How can I address the gaps that exist today in having a healthy kelp forest off shore?

00;12;20;25 – 00;12;46;04

Well, the kelp forest needs the substrate. The kelp forest needs a nutrient supply of water from the deep or, the nutrients that are just 100m below the surface everywhere in the ocean. Can we overcome these gaps that have been caused by climate disruption and effectively regenerate healthy ecosystems that can lead to healthy climate, because we know the climate affects ecosystems.

00;12;46;08 – 00;13;12;05

But did you know that ecosystems have an instrumental role in climate, a big feedback loop effect. And and, you know, they’ve already there’s a number of papers out there that have described how forests produce little Sasquatch. Her pains. That’s the pine forest smell. Oh, actually, they contribute to clouds. And so they’re finding as they cutting down the Amazon rainforest, there are less and less clouds and less and less rainfall.

00;13;12;11 – 00;13;43;29

It turns out the forest helps to create the clouds it creates. It provides that moisture for the clouds. It provides cloud condensation nuclei. And so this role of ecosystems on climate is profound. And we’re finding the same thing for kelp forests. It’s phenomenal. And what I still am really interested in how this systems mindset and being able to understand how you create my language, not yours.

00;13;43;29 – 00;14;06;27

An ecosystem on a microchip allows you to look at the world and say, there are some systems issues here that I can help solve. Am I viewing your journey correctly? Definitely. And that’s why we’ve embraced permaculture. In fact, we just did a paper with one of the fathers of permaculture, Dave Holmgren, and it appeared in one Earth Journal just last quarter.

00;14;06;29 – 00;14;37;08

And it talks about applying the dozen permaculture design principles to the marine environment. Now, they were designed for soils and gardening and all the rest, but they apply beautifully to the kind of ethos that we need to bring. Can you tell us what a marine permaculture is? Yes, a marine permaculture is a platform that hosts seaweed and other life and is able to provide a complete multilevel ecosystem, if you will, the nutrient supply.

00;14;37;11 – 00;14;58;23

well, at sunset, we lower the platform down 100m and the seaweed soaks up nutrients like a sponge, nitrate, phosphate, micronutrients. At sunrise, we bring the platform up to the surface, where it absorbs sunlight and carbon dioxide in the top meter in the sea. Okay. And that’s providing replete nutrients and replete sunlight 12 months a year. It’s incredible.

00;14;58;25 – 00;15;14;27

How big are we talking and we talking? I don’t I’ve got a garden in my backyard. I’m going to think that it’s bigger than this garden in my backyard. How big are we talking? Well, this platform behind me right now is a quarter acre, and that’s what we’ve tested so far. But we’re one step away from a full hectare.

00;15;14;27 – 00;15;39;25

That’s two and a half acres. Yes. That would be economically sustainable for coastal communities across the world. I worry this is concentric, but that’s kind of like wild thinking like that takes big thinking that if I can’t solve all of that, I can still affect part of it is that the thinking definitely. We aim to regenerate life in the ocean one hectare at a time.

00;15;39;27 – 00;16;04;26

So I grew up on a 65 acre farm. I’m not going to defend the farming practices. I’m going to defend the farming and the intent behind it. So if I’m comparing what we have in 65 acres, we could fit many of your platforms. Is the goal to concentrate them in areas, or is the goal to have one an area and then spread them out across geographies?

00;16;04;28 – 00;16;29;18

The goal is to have hectares distributed across thousands of coastal communities. In the Philippines where we’re working today, there are a quarter million seaweed farmers who are on the front lines of climate disruption today. The water’s too warm, the nutrient levels are too low, and they get 20 named hurricanes per year in Philippine waters. Each farmer is given a permit, a license to farm one hectare.

00;16;29;21 – 00;16;56;08

And so literally each farmer could take one of these hectare platforms and put it in the deeper waters of the ocean. Anything over 100m and grow, under their permit. And the intention is to build a thousand points of light across coastal communities and enable this hectare scale, regenerative offshore seaweed mariculture to take place. Now, historically, aquaculture has had a number of inputs and a number of side effects.

00;16;56;16 – 00;17;23;19

That’s why we’re moving from aquaculture towards mariculture and mariculture has few, if any inputs and is regenerative and is actually providing habitat for wild fish. At the same time, we’re getting a sustainable partial harvest of seaweed. I knew most of the words that you just said, but there were a few that I didn’t, so I’m going to guess that before you’re trying to solve the whole thing and the ecosystem in a large space, and now you’re going to a small space.

00;17;23;19 – 00;17;52;03

Did I understand you correctly? The small space is about two and a half acres each. Cultivation. Yeah. And, thousands of farmers and thousands of communities, can benefit from this. Anything we get right in the Philippines, we can multiply by a factor of 12. And in Indonesia, where there’s 2.8 million seaweed farmers and, 10 million hectares of rice, what gives you hope right now that this is a workable solution?

00;17;52;05 – 00;18;19;04

Well, the future is here today. It’s just not broadly distributed yet. There’s an increasing station that we need to have healthy food sources that, there’s a key challenge and a key opportunity. And ultimately, these regenerative permaculture interventions, can not only address and reduce our emissions, they can begin to do the work of drawing down some of the carbon dioxide in our atmosphere.

00;18;19;07 – 00;18;49;00

because these the seaweed a quarter of it falls off the platform during growth. And like, leaves falling from a tree that sinks 1000m a day to the deep seafloor where it remains for centuries. And finally, we see these kelp forests as being instrumental in what Cambridge University calls the need for climate repair. And that is, while we’re getting our carbon budget back into balance, we need to keep our communities at reasonable temperatures that are going to enable civilization to continue.

00;18;49;02 – 00;19;10;21

So when you started talking about this, is after you answer the questions about yourself, I felt a bit hopeless. Now, after hearing all that you’re doing and how it works and feeling a whole lot of hope, am I, am I? Should I temper that hope? Or is am I right to feel hope here? I think you’re right to feel hope.

00;19;10;21 – 00;19;34;08

But we do require we need to harness the engines of private enterprise to enable public benefit businesses to be sprung up at a small scale, with streamlined regulation and all the rest to enable this growth to occur. If we can triple the area under deep water irrigation each year for the next dozen years, we can reach a gigaton of carbon fixation.

00;19;34;11 – 00;19;59;24

In the mid 2030s. Now that is what Princeton University calls a climate stabilization wedge. Oh, that’s an opportunity. We’re going to need a dozen wedges just to address some of the carbon removals that we’re going to need. But if this can achieve one wedge in the next decade, I will be able to die a happy man. And ultimately, you know, be very happy with our accomplishment.

00;19;59;26 – 00;20;23;25

I’m hesitating, but I’m going to ask the question, are you going to die happy? That’s my intent. I’ve actually been inspired by many, colleagues who have. I’m going to call them a Zen Buddhist evenness. Okay? They really say the Earth is what it is and what we need to do is through our actions, express meaning in our lives.

00;20;24;02 – 00;20;40;01

And I’ve got to tell you, you know, we we were transplanted here to Australia, to the Western Pacific to work on this marine permaculture back in 2020. But in many ways, I feel like I’ve landed in a Garden of Eden and it feels like Earth 2.0. All the animals are different. All the birds and all the trees are different.

00;20;40;03 – 00;21;04;26

It’s like songbirds were invented or created here 32 million years ago. And there’s just so many songbirds. You’ve got kookaburras in the background. And I will tell you that connection, that daily visceral connection with wildlife is really inspiring. It gives me hope every day that we can build and regenerate this habitat for land and sea creatures, and really leave half the planet to nature.

00;21;04;26 – 00;21;31;07

Ultimately, it’s about regenerating the natural abundance that we had pre-industrial. Like you talked about. Engage young farmers. And in communities within the Philippines, do you think that engagement with local communities is the path to make this happen? Definitely. You know, there are all sorts of technologies. Some of them are very centralized and very hierarchical, but others are decentralized.

00;21;31;12 – 00;21;57;01

And we really view marine permaculture as a broad scale technology that a hectare scale can help thousands of communities across the world to actually regenerate their ecosystems, their marine ecosystems, have a sustainable harvest, regenerate coastal community industry. As fisheries are collapsing, seaweed becomes more and more of a prevalent aspect and it actually helps to regenerate fisheries as well.

00;21;57;03 – 00;22;28;03

So this is a healing approach, and it’s really through a deep understanding of the seas and the soils that we can help to give nature half a chance. And she will rebound exponentially with this doesn’t feel like a this doesn’t feel like a burdensome, cumbersome solve. This feels like something that is manageable within what a local farmer can do and with what communities can support.

00;22;28;03 – 00;22;48;22

Is that the intent? That is the intent. You know, the first platforms, we do a lot of R&D and, you know, two steps forward, one step back. So it’s really expensive to do the first ones. But our goal is to improve the performance and decrease the cost of these platforms to the point where it can be easily financed by development banks and by even local communities.

00;22;48;25 – 00;23;33;04

So you get to choose two of the three of the following, okay, policy change advocacy efforts, corporate involvement where they will benefit. And from these efforts in, in the supply chain that there are people on the end going to be ready to buy whatever’s coming there to pass along to consumers. What would you prior two of those you get to choose to I would say, first of all, policy because I lot with all of our colleagues in California, if they want to grow one lowly acre of kelp near shore, it takes 17 state and federal agencies approvals and a dozen years to actually get and do that.

00;23;33;04 – 00;23;53;17

And that’s why we are on the west side of the Pacific, where it’s six weeks to get a one hectare approval rather than six year. Wow. That’s that’s how severe that is. Now corporations have stepped up and they’re helping to provide some of the R&D, some of the carbon methodology validation, monitoring, reporting and verification. And that’s great as well.

00;23;53;22 – 00;24;22;15

And I would say it’s a combination of donations and contributions, large and small. We view the Climate Foundation as a nonprofit startup studio that’ll be spinning out projects and hectares and technologies that can help the Marine Permaculture Alliance globally grow as a healthy, regenerative industry. You’ve educated me phenomenally on the like. I know so much more. I didn’t know about this, right?

00;24;22;15 – 00;24;49;20

Other than you’re going to be our guest. I know a little bit about you, but I didn’t know a lot about your efforts. How important is education in fostering awareness? You can’t have one on one conversations with everybody. What else do we need to be doing to bring awareness to the public so that they understand why they should want policy changes, why they should want to be advocates for this work.

00;24;49;23 – 00;25;16;10

It’s so important to share the successful narratives that we’ve seen with Kelp Forestation. Some of our colleagues have actually developed, you know, acres of, kelp offshore in federal waters off shore California. And they actually got written into sports fishing magazines because a lot of fishermen are worried. Are you taking something away from fishing? Well, it turned out that was the best place to fish in Southern California, that it was right next to the kelp forest.

00;25;16;12 – 00;26;03;14

And so that kind of moving from fear to love, and that is embracing the forest habitat that helps the fish and helps the seaweed cultivators, that kind of. Yes. And education is absolutely critical. Doctor Briant on hers. And how can we learn more about your efforts? Please check out our work at Climate foundation.org. We are working with volunteers and contributors to help bring and accelerate these regenerative solutions on sea and land to our food supply system so that during our difficult decades to come, we can have a climate resilient food supply for humanity and for those 8 million species who can’t vote well, thank you for giving us some hope and some real solutions.

00;26;03;16 – 00;26;34;07

What an honor to meet you. Thank you so much for doing this podcast. What a treat. Well, likewise, it’s all about outreach and getting the message out and really being part of the what I feel. I’m going to quote al Gore where he says Hope itself is a renewable resource pool, and what we’re doing is generating hope based on science and facts and putting two plus two together just, you know, a sequential logical progression of how we need to go.

00;26;34;07 – 00;26;54;25

And that’s what we do. We generate hope and not only a think tank, but a thinking do tank with boots on the ground and fins in the water to prove that it works. That was perfect. What a pleasure. I hope you have a great day. Thank you so much for starting it with us. Thank you Chris, it’s a real pleasure.