Gardening during the World Wars became patriotic duty and a crucial source of calories and nutrition as resources were diverted to the frontlines. Can we do the same today with the climate effort, and plant the ocean?
Credit: Herbert Bayer, 1943, NYC WPA War Services. Tip o’ the plow to Modern Farmer.
Though I’m in the everyday-is-Earth-Day camp, you’re welcome to receive this two-part newsletter as a special, “double-issue” just for the occasion. Really it’s the first iteration of the format I imagined for My Polar Disorder: one part my humble efforts at becoming a climate action hero (stuff I’m doing, want to), followed by book chat with authors of polar (and other) adventure stories. First up is Andrea Pitzer, author of Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World, who happened to be in Russia speaking to scientists when Russia invaded Ukraine. Maybe it’s too much? Instead of a two-parter like this, I ought to alternate between soap box and interviews? You can let me know. As ever, please share with those who might be interested.
Victory Gardens of the Sea
Bren Smith tends his crop off Long Island. Though Smith’s enjoyed the recognition for his blue-collar innovations to aquaculture, he knows he’s practicing a trade that dates back centuries in Native American communities and has had modern champions as well. “We must plant the sea,” Jacques Cousteau wrote in 1979. “That is what civilization is all about—farming replacing hunting.” Photo: courtesy of GreenWave.
MUCH AS I WELCOME a big news story that points up the need to prevent the poles from melting any faster, I still found myself grumpy in the days that followed the finding of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance at the bottom of Antarctica’s Weddell Sea. When we talk about the poles and climate, I grumbled, mostly to the dog, the story is always the same: we’re losing a shit-ton of ice, sea-levels are rising, and the risen oceans will soon take our coasts, flood low-lying nations, and drown our cities. Given the way we continue to spew heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere, much of this loss will surely come to pass. In fact, if we keep losing ice at the current pace, those of us in the middle latitudes will soon get to experience what it’s like to live on a planet that’s basically an unplugged refrigerator.
My funk wasn’t the alarming climate models, though, or even the prospect of cohabitating with smelly science experiments. It’s that the rising seas storyline presents the ocean as a menace when it is just as crucially our salvation. And that’s why I was excited to learn last week that the Long Island nonprofit GreenWave is making my latest retirement scheme — working title, Brad’s Ocean Farm — more attainable than ever. Broke me right out of my funk.
Maybe it’ll ring a bell when I mention that GreenWave was founded by Bren Smith, a former fisherman who went to sea at age fourteen to kill big fish and later became a kelp farmer. Smith made quite a splash pre-pandemic — Rolling Stone’s “25 People Shaping the Future,” TIME’s “The 25 Best Inventions of 2017,” a segment on 60 Minutes, etc. Far more recently, my colleagues at Patagonia Provisions made a short film about Smith and GreenWave that you can view here.
The furthest thing from a high-horse hippie, Smith struggled to make the switch from chasing big fish to sea veggies, but oyster beds, his first pivot after Atlantic cod stocks collapsed, got wiped out twice, once by Hurricane Irene and then again by Superstorm Sandy. The sea was trying to tell him something. Smith decided to listen. Kelp — and all the shellfish you can cultivate in a kelp forest — is his plan C (or maybe K?), but it’s working out.
Back in 2019, when I ripped through Smith’s feisty memoir/manifesto for a bluer environmentalism, Eat Like a Fish, I bought four more copies and dropped them into the mail to friends, appending a note: Let’s go in together on one of these ocean farms! A kelp farm, Smith explains, is “a vertical underwater garden: hurricane proof anchors on the edge connected by horizontal ropes floating six feet below the surface. For these lines, kelp and other kinds of seaweed grow vertically downward, next to scallops in hanging nets that look like Japanese lanterns and mussels held in suspension in mesh socks. On the sea floor below sit oysters in cages, and then clams buried in the mud bottom.” His crops, he notes, “are powerful agents of renewal. A seaweed like kelp is called the ‘sequoia of the sea’ because it absorbs five times more carbon than land-based plants and is heralded as the culinary equivalent of the electric car.” His farm design is open source: “all you need is $20,000, twenty acres [of ocean], and a boat.”
Well, a few years on, his model farm can run to more like $30K, and I’m still nudging my buddies to save up. When I checked with Charlie, the one pal I sent the book to who has shellfish bonafides (Nantucket scallops), he assured me he gobbled Eat Like a Fish right up, and said, “it’s a great explainer to the point of being almost a sales brochure.” Ha. Smith is a natural pitchman. Yet when we spoke earlier this week, Smith was quick to agree that more science is needed to verify the benefits of his aquaculture. He pointed me to this recent study that finds seaweed and bivalve farms reduce ocean nitrogen (the source of the massive “dead zones” in the Gulf of Mexico) and serve as fish nurseries.
With GreenWave, Smith’s goal is to establish 10,000 farms over ten years. Each will provide jobs; feed people; supply markets with fruits de mer; create reefs that protect coasts from storms; cull nitrogen; and, yea, sink carbon. During both World Wars, scores of Americans grew kitchen gardens to provide calories and nutrition while resources were diverted to the war effort. So why not grow victory gardens of the sea to win the climate effort? Again, they provide 5 times the carbon absorption of plants on land.
“For the last few years, we’ve been doing five or six mentorships per a year. They’re very high-touch, and while we had some success, we had a waiting list of 8,000, so we decided to create a way for others to get involved,” Smith explains—hence the hub on the GreenWave web site that business development types would surely call “an ocean farm in a box.” “We’ll continue to work directly with some, especially those who might not otherwise get the chance. But getting these farms going is hard. It’s like moving all the pieces on the chess board at once.” By linking startups to existing markets, Smith hopes to keep more of the farms going. The hub went live this week.
While I had him on the phone, I asked Smith what white collars like me typically do wrong when they try their hand at saltwater farming. “Design from the chair,” he said. “Guys get excited about all the ways to take it and make it more complicated than it needs to be, and when you do that, well, the ocean will just say, ‘Fuck youuuuu.’” He thought for a few seconds more. “You know, it’s actually hard to do. I can’t see what I’m growing. For soil—my “soil” is changing 10000 times a day… If you want to do this, you have to want to be on the water. You good chipping ice off a gunwale on a cold morning? Yea? Then good. You’ll do fine.”
Since I already have a pact with a couple of my rowing buddies to keep rowing until we can win races in our age groups through attrition, I’m okay with a few more chilly mornings. Better than living in a muggy fridge. Still, when I floated the idea by some colleagues, they told me I’ll sink unless I came up with a better name than Brad’s Ocean Farm. Seconds later, they had it: “Wieners at Sea.”
The Queen of Nova Zembla
Andrea Pitzer, lower right, at a bay on Svalbard, halfway between Norway and the North Pole, October 2018. Pitzer made three trips to Arctic while researching and writing her historical survival epic Icebound. Being there enabled her to “hear what ice sounds like when temperatures change...to see glaciers calve, and experience what it feels like when ice hits the hull of a vessel.” Photo: Kim Mirus
Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World, recently issued in paperback, is a remarkable feat of literary time-travel. A recreation of voyages undertaken in the 1590s, it includes more detail than some authors manage after interviewing living members of an expedition. This is partly due to author Andrea Pitzer taking pains to have 400-year-old diaries translated, but also her talents as a writer who, after visiting the places where the drama unfolded, was able to describe the circumstances vividly.
“Since I'm writing nonfiction, I wanted to stick with what [William] Barents and his men saw. And I never make anything up,” Pitzer explained when I asked her how much of her own experience figured in her book. “But by going on three expeditions that covered about half the months of the year in all and being in the areas of the Arctic that they were in, I got to see how ice forms when winter is coming on, I got to hear what ice sounds like when temperatures change. I got to see glaciers calve, and experience what it feels like when ice hits the hull of a vessel.” It works. So does all the context she provides: What it's like to freeze to death; what scurvy does to the body; what it’s like to fight a polar bear; famous mutinies. If none of that can possibly hold your interest, you can safely skip this interview. It’s built from emails and a phone conversation and has been edited for length, reordered a bit.
MPD: So I have to ask about the Endurance. What did you think seeing the footage of her last month?
Pitzer: I was struck with wonder at seeing how intact it is. The plastic trash polluting the planet today is a nightmare, but when it comes to shipwrecks, there’s something eerie and tender about the human detritus that exists as an underwater museum.
Like Shackleton, William Barents, the central figure in your book, set out to do something that had yet to be done, only to lose his ship to the ice. But in many ways Jacob van Heemskerck is the Shackleton of the last expedition you follow in Icebound. Why did Barents get a sea named after him and I’d never heard of van Heemskerck before?
When these Dutchmen got stranded in the high Arctic four centuries ago, Van Heemskerck was the captain of the ship, and Barents was the navigator. But it was Barents who went on all three Arctic expeditions the Dutch launched in the mid-1590s, and it was his obsession with Nova Zembla that stranded them for the winter on that third trip, leading to their epic quest for survival. I don’t want to give away too much of the plot of the book, but they also have different fates, and I think that’s a piece of it as well.
Don’t want to give any spoilers either, but one area I can’t resist is your discovery that these late 1590s seafarers imagined they’d find a “warm sea” at the North Pole. Or perhaps a “congealed sea” that “was neither earth, water, nor air…but a sort of concretion of all these, resembling a sea-lung.” How did you find these? And what were they smoking?
This open polar sea theory goes back thousands of years, and it persisted hundreds of years after Barents, if you can believe it. It's not that everyone believed it, but the theory isn't as ridiculous as it seems the first time you hear about it. They understood that the planet was a globe, and that the northern region tilted toward the sun in summer and would have daylight all the time. It's not entirely insane to believe that all that sunlight might have meant an open sea, if ships could just break through the ice above the mainland and sail north.
The Dutchman feared the ice, and with good reason. Why, for example, do icebergs “explode”?
Though there are many accounts of icebergs exploding (and even online video recordings), I haven’t read a good account of why they explode. If I had to guess (and it's just a guess), there's something about the bonds in the crystalline structure of ice that makes it prone, like a crystal goblet, to being very strong, even in the face of extreme and shifting conditions, right up until the moment it gives way. And if you've ever seen crystal shatter, it doesn't crack or break, it explodes.
Did you try spoon-wort – the Arctic grass that saved sailors from scurvy? Tasty?
We did come across some on one of my expeditions. But we took it as a biological sample. I didn't eat any! When you have scurvy, however, it apparently tastes downright amazing.
I had to look up “parhelion.” By chance, did you get to see these ‘sun dogs’?
No classic sun dog has appeared to me in the Arctic! But I did see an Arctic mirage, which was incredible. (Barents and his men also saw a mirage, though it was a different one.) We thought at one point that we saw human activity on a small nearby island--but that would have been impossible. The area where Barents and his men were stranded has never been inhabited, and it's still not inhabited today. The mirage appeared to be almost buildings going up on the top of one plateau. But everything kept moving. It was very unsettling, and even having read a lot of Arctic literature, in which these things aren't uncommon, it still took a few minutes for us to realize that even though we could photograph what we were seeing, it was a trick of temperature and light refraction in the Arctic air.
Pitzer at the ruins of William Barents' cabin on Novaya Zemlya (Nova Zembla) in the Russian Arctic, August 2019. Photo: Courtesy of Pitzer.
Much as climate change has made it far more feasible to, for example, locate Endurance, global warming has now rendered the frozen straits Barents encountered passable for more of the year. How is it different now?
We arrived at Ice Harbor on Novaya Zemlya just a little later in August than Barents was there over four centuries ago. His ship was seized by ice and stayed frozen in all through the next spring and into summer. But when we were there, there was no ice visible at all in Ice Harbor. The difference is due in part to the fact that Barents sailed during a Little Ice Age. But it's also due to the drastically declining Arctic ice, the quantity of which more or less fell off a cliff almost two decades ago and appears unlikely to recover.
In news stories, you often read that the Arctic and Antarctic are warming two to four times faster than the rest of the planet. Why is that?
Most people are now leaning toward the Arctic warming four times as fast as lower latitudes, although a few researchers still think it might be closer to twice the rate. And one reason for the faster warming is that melting ice accelerates the process. Ice is light and reflective, ocean water is darker and much less so. Light that is absorbed by land or water raises the temperature of that land or water. At the most basic level, we can say less ice on the planet means more heat.
You note in ICEBOUND how Barents set the mold of the “beleaguered polar hero” — and that does seem the right word. What accounts for our enduring (sorry) interest in these polar dudes who fail, freeze, suffer so much?
My sense is that we admire people who overcome adversity, and while earlier explorers certainly faced obstacles and challenges, Barents became the first template for one who failed utterly in the mission assigned to him (to find a route to China, to set up trade in the Far East) but whose story of suffering and survival became the whole point. Three hundred years later, the rugged polar explorer who could fight polar bears bare-handed or eat boots when he got too hungry would become a staple of news stories and autobiographical accounts. But in his day, everyone had heard the story of Barents and his companions—Shakespeare even made reference to them in Twelfth Night.
If you had to pick one literary polar epic, which would you choose?
Hm… Cherry, I guess. Some of those who’ve written these stories do a great job of starting you right in the middle of the action, the way [Alfred] Lansing begins his account of Shackleton’s story when they abandon ship. He was really the first to renew interest in that story [in 1959], and I just wrote a piece for the Nieman Foundation about the strange path to Shackleton becoming legendary. Cherry Aspley-Garrard has all the action, too, but he provides the set-up, a fuller picture, which I appreciate. And in The Worst Journey in the World: With Scott in Antarctica is just so well-written.
While the “heroic age” of exploration of the poles is behind us, it seems like the scientific era of polar discovery is on. Would you agree that we need to know what’s happening at the poles to address the climate crisis?
Yes, absolutely. Here’s just one example from the Arctic: melting permafrost, which researchers may not have fully included in climate projections, appears to be a significant threat. Microbes getting busy in thawed soil release carbon dioxide and methane, both of which contribute to the planet’s dire straits. The Arctic as a region has historically been a safeguard against climate change, but melting permafrost increases the threat that the Arctic will begin driving it instead. And right now, when it comes to melting permafrost, we don't even know what we're up against.
In a recent essay, you note that the war in Ukraine is disrupting international polar science. What’s at stake if the West and Russia can’t work together?
The war disrupted polar science immediately, and on many levels. First, there are Ukrainians involved in science at both poles, and everything is changing for them, often in horrific ways. Second, all the international cooperation necessary to run ambitious expeditions is on hold. Russia is currently the chairing country on the Arctic Council, and all the other members have suspended participation until the Russian tenure ends. Research into endangered animals, research on thawing permafrost, collaborations that have in some cases been in place for years--almost everything is on hold. And this seems very reasonable, given the severity of the human rights abuses and the egregiousness of the invasion. A new agonizing moment will come in months, if the situation isn't resolved, and maybe even if it is. How do you build back those shattered cooperation agreements? How is it possible to restore trust? Yet given that some 15,000 miles of Arctic Ocean shoreline sits in Russian territory, and that our window to address extreme climate change is closing, the stakes of not working with Russia again will be enormous.
Have you adopted any habits or quirks from the diaries you’ve read? Say, turning your clothes inside out to welcome the new year?
I'm not a mystical person on the whole. I’m someone who likes to dig to find practical answers to things. After I was able to find an explanation for something that had until then been a mystery for us, one of my sailor friends chided me, saying, “This is how legends die.” The only shipboard superstition that I've read about and imported into my own life on and off the sea is to touch wood when hoping for something or to ward off bad potential outcomes. It's a reminder to myself not to be too proud or assured that I have all the answers and know which way history will go at any moment.
In your acknowledgments, you note that your trip to Nova Zembla was “one of the happiest experiences of my life,” which was a bit funny to read after all the hardship in the previous chapter. What about it made you happy?
Well, the first thing to remember is that even though the engine died and I broke a finger and so forth, we always had a warm boat, plenty of food, and we didn't encounter polar bears very often. I had just turned 51 when I went to the ruins of Barents' cabin, and I'd already been on two Arctic expeditions. But the smaller boat and the amazing crew--not to mention their willingness to teach me as much as I wanted to learn about Arctic navigation opened up a new home for me in the Far North. Among this odd assortment of middle-aged sailors on an independent scientific research vessel, I felt I had found my people. I've gone back and sailed with them since. We’ve become very close friends. It is a joyous thing to set out with them.
Great Newsletter! The potential for climate positive aquaculture seems huge. I immediately bought the books discussed in both portions - so interesting. Also downloaded NOAA's Southern California Aquaculture Atlas that evaluates off shore regions for "aquaculture opportunity areas" (AOA's).
As a Ventura resident I was excited to see that the locations with the most potential appear to be off our coast between Ventura and Santa Barbara. Thanks Brad