permaculture

[Kathryn <elkatsan@gmail.com>]

what a beautiful example of successful change- thank you, Lawrence for
posting this!

Kathryn
San Luis Obispo, CA

On Mon, Mar 28, 2016 at 11:10 AM, Lawrence London <lfljvenaura@gmail.com>
wrote:

> The Seas Will Save Us: How an Army of Ocean Farmers are Starting an
> Economic Revolution — invironment — Medium
>
> https://medium.com/invironment/an-army-of-ocean-farmers-on-the-frontlines-of-the-blue-green-economic-revolution-d5ae171285a3#.mr2toeizn
> Bren Smith
> Bren Smith is the owner of Thimble Island Ocean Farm and executive director
> of GreenWave.
>
> The Seas Will Save Us: How an Army of Ocean Farmers are Starting an
> Economic Revolution
>
> I’m a fisherman who dropped out of high school in 1986 at the age of 14.
> Over my lifetime, I’ve spent many nights in jail. I’m an epileptic. I’m
> asthmatic. I don’t even know how to swim. This is my story. It’s a story of
> ecological redemption.
>
> I was born and raised in Petty Harbour, Newfoundland, a little fishing
> village with 14 salt-box houses painted in greens, blues, and reds so that
> fishermen could find their way home in the fog. At age 14 I left school and
> headed out to sea. I fished the Georges Banks and the Grand Banks for tuna
> and lobster, then headed to the Bering Sea, where I fished cod and crab.
> The trouble was I was working at the height of the industrialization of
> food. We were tearing up entire ecosystems with our trawls, chasing fish
> further and further out to sea into illegal waters. I personally have
> thrown tens of thousands of pounds of by-catch back into the sea.
>
> It wasn’t just that we were pillaging. Most of my fish was going to
> McDonald’s for their fish sandwiches. There I was, still a kid, working one
> of the most unsustainable forms of food production on the planet, producing
> some of the most unhealthy food on the planet. But God how I loved that
> job! The humility of being in 40-foot seas, the sense of solidarity that
> comes with being in the belly of a boat with 13 other people working
> 30-hour shifts, and a sense of meaning and pride in helping to feed my
> country. I miss those days so, so much.
>
> But then in the early 1990s the cod stocks crashed back home: thousands of
> fishermen thrown out of work, boats beached, canneries shuttered. This
> situation created a split in the industry: the captains of industry, who
> wanted to fish the last fish, were thinking 10 years down the road, but
> there was a younger generation of us thinking 50 years out. We wanted to
> make our living on the ocean. I want to die on my boat one day — that’s my
> measure of success.
>
>     I grew up shooting moose out of my kitchen window. I never thought
> climate change had anything to do with my life. But it does. From my
> vantage point, climate change is not an environmental issue at all — it’s
> an economic issue.
>
> So we all went on a search for sustainability. I ended up in Northern
> Canada on an aquaculture farm. At that point aquaculture was supposed to be
> the great solution to overfishing, but when I got there I found more of the
> same, only using new technologies to pollute local waterways with
> pesticides and pumping fish full of antibiotics. We used to say that what
> we were growing was neither fish nor food. We were running the equivalent
> of Iowa pig farms at sea.
>
> So I kept searching and ended up on Long Island Sound, where there was a
> program to attract young fishermen back into the industry by opening up
> shell-fishing grounds for the first time in 150 years. I signed up, leased
> some grounds from the state of New York, and re-made myself as an
> oysterman. I did this for seven years. Then the storms hit. Hurricane Irene
> and Hurricane Sandy thrashed the East Coast. Two years in a row the storms
> buried 90 percent of my crops in three feet of mud, and 40 percent of my
> gear was washed away in a sea of death. At the same time, lobster were
> being driven northward by warming waters, and acidification was increasing
> faster than at any other time in 300 million years, killing billions of
> oyster seed up and down the American coast.
>
> Suddenly I found myself on the front lines of a climate crisis that had
> arrived 100 years earlier than expected. For a long time I’d seen climate
> change only as an environmental issue because environmentalists were always
> framing it in terms of birds, bears, and bees, but I’m a fisherman. I kill
> things for a living. I grew up shooting moose out of my kitchen window. I
> never thought climate change had anything to do with my life. But it does.
> From my vantage point, climate change is not an environmental issue at all
> — it’s an economic issue.
>
> The same years my farm was wiped out by hurricanes, 83,000 people lost
> their jobs in New York City because of flooding, many of those in
> manufacturing. Unemployment claims doubled in Vermont along the storm’s
> path, and 80 percent of U.S. farmland was shriveled by drought, driving up
> food prices for middle and working class families. It turns out there will
> be no jobs on a dead planet.
> Vertical underwater farming
>
> After my farm was destroyed, it was clear to me that I had to adapt because
> I was facing a serious threat to my livelihood. I began to re-imagine my
> occupation and oyster farm. I began experimenting and exploring new designs
> and new species. I lifted my farm off the sea bottom to avoid the impact of
> storm surges created by hurricanes and started to grow new mixes of
> restorative species. Now, after 29 years of working on the oceans, I’ve
> remade myself as a 3D ocean farmer, growing a mix of seaweeds and shellfish
> for food, fuel, fertilizer, and feed.
>
>     My job has never been to save the seas; it’s to figure out how the seas
> can save us.
>
> That’s how I got to where I am today. Now let’s dive in and take a look at
> the farm and deconstruct why it’s designed the way it is. Imagine a
> vertical underwater garden with hurricane-proof anchors on the edges
> connected by floating horizontal ropes across the surface. From these lines
> kelp and Gracilaria and other kinds of seaweeds grow vertically downward
> next to scallops in hanging nets that look like Japanese lanterns and
> mussels held in suspension in mesh socks. Staked below the vertical garden
> are oysters in cages and then clams buried in the sea floor.
>
> If you look for my farm from ashore, there’s almost nothing to see, which
> is a good thing. Our underwater farms have a low aesthetic impact. That’s
> important because our oceans are beautiful pristine places, and we want to
> keep them that way. Because the farm is vertical, it has a small footprint.
> My farm used to be 100 acres; now it’s down to 20 acres, but it produces
> much more food than before. If you want “small is beautiful,” here it is.
> We want ocean agriculture to tread lightly.
>
> Our 3D farms are designed to address three major challenges: First, to
> bring to the table a delicious new seafood plate in this era of overfishing
> and food insecurity; second, to transform fishermen into restorative ocean
> farmers; and third, to build the foundation for a new blue-green economy
> that doesn’t recreate the injustices of the old industrial economy.
> Eating like fish and transforming an entire workforce
>
> First: food production. As ocean farmers, we reject aquaculture’s obsession
> with monoculture, an obsession similar to that of modern land farming. Our
> goal is diversity. It’s a sea-basket approach:We grow two types of
> seaweeds, four kinds of shellfish, and we harvest salt. But with over
> 10,000 edible plants in the ocean, we’ve barely scratched the surface. We
> eat only a few species, and we grow basically none in the United States. We
> intend to de-sushify seaweed and invent a new native cuisine, not around
> our industrial palate of salmon and tuna but around the thousands of
> undiscovered ocean vegetables that are right outside our backdoor.
>
> Native seaweeds contain more vitamin C than orange juice, more calcium than
> milk, and more protein than soybeans. It might surprise those of you on the
> hunt for Omega-3s to learn that many fish do not create these heart-healthy
> nutrients by themselves — they consume them. By eating the plants fish eat,
> we get the same benefits while reducing pressure on fish stocks. So it’s
> time that we eat like fish.
>
> We’re working with chefs to cook up kelp noodles with parsnips and bread
> crumbs in barbeque sauce; green sea butters and cheeses; kelp-based
> umami-filled bouillons. Our new ocean dinners are fun, they’re creative,
> and they’re delicious. This is our opportunity to rearrange the seafood
> plate by moving ocean plants and bivalves to the center and wild fish to
> the edges. Imagine being a chef in 2015 and discovering that there are
> thousands of vegetable species you’ve never cooked with. It’s like
> discovering corn, arugula, tomatoes, and lettuce for the first time. As one
> of my partner chefs — and the former punk-rock drummer — Brooks Headley
> says, “As a chef it feels frightening, daunting, and exciting all at once.”
> Ocean greens such as kelp are not small boutique crops. We can grow
> incredible amounts of food in small areas: 25 tons of greens and 250,000
> shellfish per acre in five months. If you were to create a network of our
> ocean farms totaling the size of Washington state, you could feed the
> planet.
>
> This is zero-input food that requires no fresh water, no fertilizer, no
> feed, no arid land. It is hands down the most sustainable food on the
> planet.
>
> And as the price of fertilizer, water, and feed goes up, zero-input food is
> going to be the most affordable food on the planet. The economics of it
> will drive us to eat ocean greens. The question is, will it be delicious
> food or will it be like being force-fed cod liver oil? As farmers, it’s our
> job to grow this new cuisine, and for chefs it’s their job to make it
> tasty.
>
> Ocean farming isn’t just about food. It’s about transforming an entire
> workforce, transforming fishers into restorative ocean farmers. My job has
> never been to save the seas; it’s to figure out how the seas can save us. I
> say that because millions of years ago Mother Nature created two
> technologies designed to mitigate our harm: shellfish and seaweeds. Oysters
> filter up to 50 gallons of water a day, pulling nitrogen — the cause of our
> oceans’ spreading dead zones — from the water column. Our farmed kelp,
> called the Sequoia of the sea, soaks up five times more carbon than land
> based plants. Seaweeds could be a powerful source of zero-input biofuel;
> feasibility studies suggest we might produce 2,000 gallons of ethanol per
> acre — that’s a 30 times higher yield than soybeans and five times more
> than corn. According to the Department of Energy, if you were to take a
> network of our farms equaling half the size of the state of Maine, you
> could replace all the oil in the United States.
>
> Our farms function as storm-surge protectors, breaking up wave action to
> reduce the impact of hurricanes and rising tides. And they serve as
> artificial reefs, attracting more than 150 species of aquatic life. Sea
> horses, striped bass and grey seals come to eat, hide, and thrive on our
> farms. My farm used to be a barren patch of ocean, now it’s a flourishing
> ecosystem. As fishermen, we’re no longer pillagers, hunting the last fish.
> We are a new generation of climate farmers who have joined the fight to
> restore our planet. We’re trying to break down the seawalls that separate
> our land-based and ocean-based food systems. Even the best land-based farms
> pollute, sending nitrogen into our waterways, so we use our kelp to capture
> that nitrogen, turn it into liquid fertilizers, and send it back to organic
> farmers to grow their wonderful vegetables. When the nitrogen then runs
> back into Long Island Sound, we capture it again.
>
> We are also working on new forms of livestock feeds. For example, there’s
> exciting — though still preliminary — research that suggests adding algae
> to diets could reduce methane output in cattle by up to 90 percent. The
> idea is to build a bridge between land and sea in order to close the loop
> between our food systems. Too often our thinking stops at the water’s edge.
> A bridge is needed.
> The blue-green economy
>
> Our goal is to build a just foundation for the blue-green economy. Saving
> the seas is not enough. There is 40 percent unemployment in my hometown. I
> wouldn’t be doing this work unless it created jobs for my people, unless it
> opened up new opportunities for the 3 billion folks who depend on our
> oceans to make a living.
>
>     For the first time in generations, we have an opportunity to grow food
> the right way, provide good middle-class jobs, restore ecosystem, and feed
> the planet.
>
> Our old economy is crumbling. I can’t get cell service in half of the
> country, let alone decent health care or a healthy meal. The old economy is
> built on the arrogance of growth at all costs, profiting from pollution,
> and the refusal to share economic gains with 99 percent of Americans. But
> out of the ashes of the old economy, together we are building something new
> based on new-economy principles of collaboration, community-driven
> innovation, shared profits, and meeting social needs. Because ocean
> agriculture is still in its infancy, we have the unprecedented opportunity
> to build a model from scratch, to build from the bottom up an economy that
> works for everyone, not just a few. We have the opportunity to learn from
> the mistakes of industrial agriculture and aquaculture. This is our chance
> to do food right.
>
> We addressed the first question of farm replication and scale, not by
> patenting or franchising — those are tools of the old economy — but by
> open-sourcing our farming model so that anybody with 20 acres and a boat
> and $30,000 can start his or her own farm. One of our new farmers is a
> third-generation lobsterman who was unemployed because climate change had
> pushed lobsters northward. We got him up and running, growing and selling
> the first year. Among our other farmers are former Alaskan salmon
> fishermen, an Iraq war veteran, and a Latino family whose ancestors were
> driven off their farmlands in Mexico. We replicate and scale by
> specifically designing our farms to require low capital costs and minimal
> skills. We seek simplicity not complexity. We believe that replication is
> driven by setting low barriers to entry so that people from all walks of
> life can grow and prosper with us. At the same time our farmers receive
> startup grants, access to free seed, gear donated by Patagonia, and two
> years of free consulting from GreenWave. What is most important, we
> guarantee to purchase 80 percent of their crops for the first five years at
> triple the market rate.
>
> We intend to create stable and secure markets that give our beginning
> farmers time to learn the trade and to scale up their farms. They keep
> farming because they know they’ll get paid well for what they grow. Our
> vision is hundreds of small-scale ocean farms dotting our coastlines,
> surrounded by conservation zones. Imagine a Napa valley of ocean merroirs
> dotting out coastlines.
>
> We envision 3D farms embedded in wind farms, harvesting not only wind but
> also food, fuel and fertilizers. We envision using shuttered coal plants —
> like the one closing in Bridgeport, Conn. — for processing animal feed and
> salt. We want to repurpose the fossil-fuel and fishing industries so that
> they will protect rather than destroy our oceans.
> Getting out of the boutique food economy and recreating an industry
>
> The second question is how to build the infrastructure needed to ensure
> that ocean farmers and communities will reap the rewards of the blue-green
> economy. For too long, farmers and fishermen have been caught in the
> beggar’s game of selling raw commodities while others soak up the profits;
> too many of us are locked in the boutique food economy, selling as CSAs and
> at farmers markets, with the majority of us not making an adequate living
> and having to hold down multiple jobs to make ends meet. But now, in our
> unexplored oceans we have a chance to plan ahead and to build an
> infrastructure in the right way. One of our new farmers, a 65-year-old
> fisherman, whose family has fished in Rhode Island for 300 years, put it
> this way: “The last thing we want to do with 3D farming is re-create the
> fishing industry.”
>
>     We can invent new occupations, shift entire workforces out of the old
> economy into the new restorative economy.
>
> Instead of repeating history we’re building infrastructure from
> seed-to-harvest-to-market. We’re starting nonprofit hatcheries so that our
> farmers can access low-cost seed. We’re creating ocean seed banks so that
> the Monsantos of the world can’t privatize the source of our food and
> livelihoods. We cap the price of a sublease at $50 an acre per year so that
> low-income ocean farmers can access property. But by “property” we do not
> mean privatization. Our farmers don’t own their patch of ocean; they own
> only the right to grow shellfish and seaweeds there, which means that
> anyone can boat, fish, or swim on their farms. I own the process of farming
> but not the property, and this keeps my farm as shared community space.
> We’re also building in levers of community control. Leases are up for
> review every five years so that if I’m farming unsustainably, my rights can
> be revoked.
>
> At the same time, we’re building the country’s first farmer-owned seafood
> hub, which is not only a place to process, package and ship the raw
> commodities we raise but also a space to leverage the unique qualities of
> our seaweeds. The power of kelp is that it’s not just food; there is a
> whole range of products we can produce that meet environmental and social
> needs: organic fertilizers, new livestock feeds, kelp biofuels, and even
> medicine. With thousands of yet undiscovered ocean plants, farmers and
> scientists can join together to discover and grow new forms of medicine.
> Pushing injustice off the table
>
> If we provide our communities with the right mix of low-cost, open-source
> infrastructure, our hub will become an engine for job creation and the
> basis for inventing new industries. It will also be an engine for food
> justice, a place where we embed good jobs, food access, and nutrition into
> the structure of ocean agriculture. This means, for example, working with
> local grassroots groups like CitySeed in New Haven, Conn., to ensure that
> low-income folks can use food stamps to carry double the value at our
> Community Supported Fisheries (CSFs) and our Beyond Fish retail store. It
> also means using our hub as a hiring hall where local workers can find jobs
> on our farms, in our startups, and in our kitchens. If you come to the hub
> for a job, don’t bring your resumé. We don’t care if you are a former felon
> or an undocumented immigrant; we’re going to put you to work.
>
> The final challenge is how to re-arrange the relationships between those of
> us who produce food and those of us who buy it. Failure would be to
> recreate the power dynamics of the old economy. Just as we need to
> re-arrange what’s on our dinner plates by moving ocean greens to the
> center, we need to move farmers, food workers, communities, and protection
> of the planet to the center of our plate, and push the destructive, unjust
> old economy off the table. We’re putting farmers and buyers on equal
> footing by negotiating with institutions to guarantee forward contracts so
> that we get paid before we grow, and if our crops fail, then both the
> farmer and the buyer share the loss. It’s time for everyone to share the
> risk in the risky business of growing food in the era of climate change and
> globalization.
>
> The relationship between farmer and buyer has to go even deeper.
> Reformatting the food system is going to be costly. It’s going to be
> complex. Simply using purchasing power will not be enough. Anchor
> institutions such as hospitals, universities, wholesalers, and retailers
> have a new role, a new set of responsibilities in the new economy. They
> have a duty to invest aggressively in our farmers, our infrastructure and
> our communities. This involves donating a portion of their profits and
> their endowment to building hatcheries, seafood hubs, logistical and
> transport systems, incubation, and R&D. This will mean less profit for the
> private sector and a lower rate of return for universities. But it will
> also mean more value in terms of social and environmental good. All around
> us we can see that “business as usual” will not save this planet. It’s time
> to divest from the old economy and invest in the new.
> The new economy: Rethinking “the politics of no”
>
> Finally, we are insisting that markets reward the positive externalities of
> our farms. We’re working in places like Connecticut to include ocean
> farmers in existing nitrogen trading programs. New farms are being built in
> polluted areas like Bridgeport and the Bronx River in order to soak up the
> nitrogen and carbon, pull out heavy metals, and re-build reefs. Instead of
> harvesting food, these farms harvest ecosystem services. While others
> pollute, we restore — and as farmers we should be paid for the positive
> externalities of our work. In the new economy, markets have to reflect the
> environmental benefits we provide.
>
>     We could set aside the entire world’s oceans, and our ocean ecosystems
> would still die. Conservation alone is no longer environmentalism.
>
> In 1979, Jacques Cousteau, the father of ocean conservation, wrote: “We
> must plant the sea and herd its animals using the ocean as farmers instead
> of hunters. That is what civilization is all about — farming replacing
> hunting.” This dream of Cousteau’s and of Green Wave’s is frightening to
> some environmentalists. The idea of hundreds of ocean farms dotting our
> coastlines and the idea of 3D farms embedded in wind farms are unsettling
> to many because of the scale. As a result, the instinct of
> environmentalists is to do everything they can to protect the oceans from
> any and all forms of economic development. They shield themselves with a
> “politics of no.” I’m sympathetic to these fears, especially given the
> history of industrial aquaculture in the 1980s; yet in the era of climate
> change, it’s an illusion for environmentalists to think they can save our
> seas by relying on a conservation strategy alone while continuing to ask
> the oceans to feed our hunger for wild seafood.
>
> Conservation represents its own form of climate-change denial. We all know
> it’s real, but the true significance, the implications, the urgency,
> haven’t sunk in. Just look at what’s happening on land and sea: rising
> water temperatures and acidification threatening one out of four marine
> species with extinction; drought and extreme weather expected to make U.S.
> corn prices go up by 140 percent in the next 15 years alone, while
> agriculture is responsible for one-third to one-half of all carbon
> emissions and uses 80 percent of the fresh water in some areas, making it
> the primary cause of droughts, rising food prices, and food insecurity.
>
> If there is one lesson we should learn from the 2015 water wars in
> California, it’s that our food system is going to be driven out to sea.
> Yes, we need marine parks, but we could set aside the entire world’s
> oceans, and our ocean ecosystems would still die. Conservation alone is no
> longer environmentalism.
>
> The climate crisis demands that we use our fears as a catalyst for change.
> For the first time in generations, we have an opportunity to grow food the
> right way, provide good middle-class jobs, restore ecosystem, and feed the
> planet.
>
> This is the new face of environmentalism. As our food system gets pushed
> out to sea, we can come together to block privatization, to protect our
> commons and to spread the seeds of justice. We can invent new occupations,
> shift entire workforces out of the old economy into the new restorative
> economy. This is our chance to recruit an army of ocean farmers to grow a
> new climate cuisine that is both beautiful and hopeful so that all of us
> can make a living on a living planet.
> permaculture mailing list
> permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
> subscribe/unsubscribe|user config|list info:
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/permaculture
>