The Seaweed Revolution with Vincent Doumeizel

Happy Planet Wednesday! 

This week we are joined by Vincent Doumeizel, a French native from Burgundy who is Director of the Food Program for Lloyd's Register Foundation as well as an expert on everything seaweed. Vincent has spearheaded the Global Seaweed Coalition, which "is a global partnership established to support the safety and sustainability of the seaweed industry as it scales up and to unite a fragmented market through a unified vision and goals."

Most recently Vincent published the book, The Seaweed Revolution.

Vincent called in from Climate Week in New York City to chat with Happy Planet,  and provide a foundation for understanding the potential impact of this sustainable sea-plant on our planet’s future.

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Vincent Doumeizel
The Seaweed Revolution

Safe Seaweed Coalition

Transcript

Abigail: Welcome to the podcast today where we celebrate innovation for a happy planet. I am your host, Abigail Carroll. This week we are speaking with Vincent Doumeizel, who called in from Climate Week in New York City. A French native from Burgundy, Vincent is a Senior Advisor to the United Nations Global Compact Program and Director of the Food Program for Lloyd's Register Foundation. 

Vincent is also author of the new book titled The Seaweed Revolution, which I have now finished and can recommend as it's not only a great read, but it's full of information about the science and opportunities behind seaweed.

But let's hear it from Vincent. 

So welcome to the podcast, Vincent.

Vincent: Well, thank you very much for this invitation.

Abigail: Well, thank you for taking time out this week. I know you're down at Climate Week in New York City. How's that going?

Vincent: Very well. A lot of exciting news, a lot of enthusiasm around the book and this solution more importantly.

Abigail: So you've written a book called The Seaweed Revolution. Tell me a little bit about it.

Vincent: Well, the idea is to tell the world that there are still a lot of solution and a lot of hopes. and I wanted to share that that seaweed is still vastly unknown and may well be the greatest untapped resource we have on the planet. It has the potential to address some of the biggest challenge we have in this generation and being the father of three kids and being tired of feeding them with fears and drama I wanted to give them and to the rest of the next generation some source of hopes and being a bit positive and optimism.

Abigail: Why is this reason to give us hope? 

Vincent: Because seaweed is a source of life on this planet that the first complex organism existing back a billion years ago were seaweed. And where then everything evolve, from from there. if we want to repair the planet, you have to start with the foundation.

If you want to rebuild your house, you're not gonna start with the roof. You should start with the foundation. Same, with our climate, with our life on the planet. We have to start with the foundation. So we have to pay attention to the foundation and enter into a new civilization which is farming the ocean, which is to understand the ocean and do not consider the ocean as a landfill.

which is what we are doing right now. So if we want to repair the ocean, which is, once again, where we all come from, we need to start with seaweed. Seaweed is once again, the greatest untapped resource we have.

Abigail: So, why do we need to repair the ocean? 

Vincent: Well you know, everything we dump on land, it ends up in the ocean. And there, it destroys life. It destroys all the ecosystem, and the ocean is by far the biggest ecosystem on the planet.

 is 50 percent of the oxygen we breathe. So, every second breath, we owe it to the ocean. Uh, the ocean is 80 percent of the biodiversity on this planet. The ocean is 95% of the inhabitable place on this planet.and if you step back, this planet is blue, it's a blue planet. It's not the planet earth, it's the planet ocean. And that's what it should be. And the ocean covers 71% of the planet and still it contributes to less than 2% of our food we supply today. It's crazy because there are still 1 billion people starving, and we don't use the ocean. So the whole idea is that we need to repair the ocean and we need at the same time to repair our planet and to feed our fast growing population. And the only way to do it is to use the ocean and stop being in an extractive mode only. be in a more regenerative mode with the ocean.

I come from the food industry where we keep talking about regenerative agriculture. And there cannot be any regenerative agriculture anywhere if you do not integrate the ocean in the equation.

The ocean is the source of regenerating everything: oxygen, fresh water, carbon, phosphate, nitrogen, any nutrients. it all goes through the ocean to get recycled, And if we want to build a sustainable future on land, we have to understand better what happened in the past, in the ocean.

Abigail: It's always hard to talk about seaweed, and we should have said that before, but I mean, Seaweed gathers 12,000 types of very different, different organisms. I keep saying that there were, I mean, red and green seaweed are 1.5 billion years old. Uh, and, and and then they evolved over the last billion years into different organisms. Typically, the green seaweed, they moved on land half a billion years ago only. They gave birth to the entire vegetation we see around us. So every tree and plant and, and, and fruit you see around you, they are descendants of green seaweed.

Vincent: And the funny thing is that today, the green seaweed that is on the beach will be way closer to an oak tree, a baobab, or a strawberry. Then it is to a red seaweed, from a genetic perspective. The genetic difference between a red seaweed and a green seaweed is bigger than the difference between a fungi and an elephant. So we are talking about very different organisms. So when I'm asked, what can you do with seaweed? It's like, what can you do with the life on…

Abigail: On the earth. Right.

Vincent: Yeah, it's, it's, it's huge. So you can do many things, they are very, very different. Their nutritional composition, of course, is very, very different.

Some can be very rich in protein. Uh, we were talking about soy meal. Soy meal is 25 percent protein, soy. Uh, some seaweed, like the nori that is wrapping our sushi, or the palmaria palmata, the dulse. Uh, they are 40 percent protein. So they are very rich in protein. Some will be richer in zinc, in iodine. But all of them, they are a nutritional bomb.

And they are the healthiest. Food you can get. I mean, it's uh, it's packed with critical nutrients. Omega three, long chain zinc iodine that's the only vegetable that gets vitamin B 12. Um, you, yeah, everything you need. And also seaweed is because it's not only a list of nutrients, also a, a, a cocktail effect, seaweed is naturally antiviral, antifungal, antibacterial, anti-inflammatory analgesic.

So once again, it's good for your body, and it's good for your planet.

Abigail: Yep. so we have all these different species. How have we decided the ones that we see the most? In the States, we see a lot of kelps. will we start seeing more diversity in the types of seaweed available for us to eat or, how, how's that going to work? 

Vincent: Hopefully, hopefully, yes. I mean, it's very strange, it's quite unique to the US, where seaweed equals kelp. So 

Abigail: Right. Yes. That's what grows here so easily, right? 

Vincent: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's quite unique. Because kelp is one type of brown seaweed. we are talking about 12,000 types of seaweed, so the brown seaweeds, they are 2000. Not all of them are kelp, so it's a very minor part. In terms of volume it's quite big compared to the other. But it's a minor part of the seaweed red seaweeds, they are 8,000 and you have more than 6,000 a red seaweed and 4,000 green seaweed.

So kelp is very, a small part of it. Kelp loves the cold waters, and you've got quite a lot of cold waters in the U. S. That may be important. The tropical waters are a bit less important for your country and also we know how to cultivate them.

Abigail: Yeah. 

Vincent: That's the critical thing. The problem to develop this seaweed industry so far is that we don't know how to cultivate it. We don't know how they reproduce. We don't know how they protect themself, and that can be very complex, you know? In some seaweed, in order to protect themself, they will, if they are attacked by a sea snail for instance, they will be able to release some toxin, which will warn the community and act as a repellent for the sea snail.

Abigail: Amazing. 

Vincent: And all this complexity, because they are doing that with the help of the bacteria around them. All this complexity, we need to learn that. Not only how to seed them or to reproduce them, we need to understand how they protect themselves or, or they live in some species with other organism because we do not want to reproduce the same mistake we did land with monoculture, 

Abigail: Yeah. 

Vincent: GMO and industrial farming. We should develop a permaculture in the ocean.

Abigail: Yeah, so 97 percent of seaweed right now that we're consuming in every which way in the world is coming from Asia. But there seems to be a lot of interest in Europe and Africa and the Americas to start growing seaweed locally. What,what's gonna be the tipping point to get those farms really productive?

Vincent: I think we are reaching the limit of our system right now on land. We see that this food system that we have developed are now the biggest contributor to climate change, to water scarcity, to biodiversity loss and somehow to social injustice because a large part of modern slaves, on this world are working in the food industry.

So I think it's time for a different model. and we'll have to produce way more than what we have right now. There was some calculation from European universities that because of the growing demand for calories, and because of the fast growing population we will have to produce in the next 50 years or so as much food as we ever produced as human beings over the last 10,000 years. So We cannot make it on land. The yields are stable for the last 20 years. There's no arable land left. 

Abigail: Right right there's nothing left. 

Vincent: So So there's no way. I mean, we need to find new ways to cultivate the world and that'll be the ocean if we want to do that. So once again, that's always this vision that drove me. And I think that's the tipping point that have reached in West, where if want to feed the population. there's no other way than to use the, the ocean food. And once again, if we want to do it in a more than sustainable and regenerative way, then start with the lowest trophic level. The basis of the foundation of the chain, which is seaweed. 

Abigail: Yeah. And do you think there are any unintended, harmful consequences that could happen if we started massive farms off the coasts of our continents? Is there something that, you know, we just can't, that might be hard to predict?

Vincent: Yes. I mean, just like everything, the question is: how do we grow it? So it all ends up to this question. So I, I simply hope that we have learned from experience, from our mistakes online, and that we will do a bit different and bit better in the ocean.

Abigail: Yeah.

Vincent: I would say yes, but we know what should not be done. We should not cultivate a non-endemic species. Which is why it's so hard, because... You can imagine that if you are in Alaska and you want to start a seaweed farm, I mean agriculture on land, but you only know how to cultivate guava, banana, and rice, you're not going to make it. And that's where we are with seaweed. We only know how to cultivate the Asian species, but we should not move their cultivation here. So, we have to learn how to grow our own sea vegetables, our own sea crops, and that's the key here, and that's why it's going to be slow, but but I think we have no other choice, really.

Abigail: Yeah. So we've talked a lot about seaweed as a food source, but seaweed has so many other applications. Can you speak to some of those?

Vincent: So yeah, food is the obvious, and the other, there's a lot of interesting effect besides the nutritional aspect, when you dry seaweed, you can keep them for many months without any need for any cold chain, and it keeps all the nutrients. This is, which is rather good news for the emerging population and for our climate, but seaweed is good for your body, but it's not only good for your body, we mentioned that, it's also good for the body of the animal. So feeding animals with seaweed, and we have many examples of this in Europe will boost their immune system, and then you can cut the use of antibiotics.

For some seaweed, it will reduce the methane emission. There's a small magic red seaweed which looks like decreasing the methane emission by 90 percent by livestock.

So long story short, if you give 40 grams of this small red Australian seaweed to each and every cow on the planet, the impact on climate will be equivalent to stopping each and every car on the planet overnight. So we are not talking about something marginal, it's huge. So let's try to feed animals with seaweed. That's the other thing. seaweed, and that may be the most overlooked but most interesting application, can be a source of bio-stimulant to replace fertilizers and chemicals inputs. And, and seaweed upcycle, naturally upcycle anything that comes into the ocean. So they will absorb the nutrients, phosphate, nitrogen, and then you can use them on land in order to use these nutrients to protect our crops. and then you can substitute them to fertilizers and more importantly, you can create a really circular agriculture where agriculture produce some waste that ends up in the ocean, seaweed collects these nutrients, this pollution, upcycle it, and move it back to the land.

That's exactly where we want to go. But seaweed can also be a very interesting source of substitute to harmful components. The most important one we could think of is plastic. I mean, the Earthshot Prize, there was a great meeting this week here in New York with Bill Gates and the Prince William and so forth, and one of the winners of the Earthshot Prize is NOTPLA, and they are substituting by seaweed. Edible bubble of water, edible plastic packaging material, sorry. Made out of seaweed. And by the way, they contribute to the to the release of my book in English, Seaweed Revolution. And we had the first ever book cover made from seaweed. 

Abigail: Oh, excellent. 

Vincent: So substitute this unsustainable packaging, notably plastic by seaweed.

That's very important. There are more than 35 startups over the world today that are doing this. Loliware, Sway Kelpi in the U. S. They are very active on on that, and there's more and more, interesting. You can substitute to cotton as well, textile which is quite unsustainable, because cotton is 2 percent of the arable land in the world, but 25 percent of the pesticide, 10 percent of the herbicides, and it needs a lot of water.

So, let's use seaweed instead. Once again, cotton is nothing but a descendant of green seaweed, so you can have the same properties in some of them. But more importantly, you can use seaweed to repair the ocean. Once again, and it's important to mention that because seaweed are disappearing. They are a victim of climate change.

They are a victim of ecosystem disruption. They are the fire under the ocean. And no one cares. And seaweed is the source of all life on this planet. So, if they disappear... The rest will disappear as well. And California, you lost 80 percent of the biggest seaweed forest in 5 years. Once again, we are all talking about the Amazon fire, but they're the fire in the ocean and no one cares.

We need to protect, replant and cultivate seaweed, otherwise they will disappear and we will as well. Seaweed can be also a very good source of carbon absorption and potentially carbon sequestration. Seaweed can decarbonize the economy on one hand, replacing plastic fertilizers, cutting metal emissions, and it can also absorb carbon. Some seaweed, like the one you have in California, the giant kelp, they can grow to 40 centimeters a day, up to 60 meters high. So it's growing very big and it absorbs a lot of carbon doing so. 

Abigail: Yep. Yep. And super sustainable.

Vincent: And, last but not least, because you don't do any revolution without tackling uh, social injustice.

And seaweed has a great potential to bring revenues and jobs to coastal communities where the fishing resources will decline and disappear, that's for sure. And the interesting part of it is that in emerging countries, we can see that these revenues, these new revenues and jobs, they are going mostly to women.

so it contributes to further women empowerment and gender parity. In Zanzibar, where I was a few weeks ago, 80 percent of the seaweed revenue, which is the second biggest export revenue in this island going to the women. And that has contributed to free the women from their condition.

 it has many, many potential. Uh, there's many, many thing you can do with seaweed and the best is it, we have not mentioned the medicine as well, but medicine, there's an Alzheimer treatment that has been released in China, which looks very interesting. There's more and more cancer treatment based on seaweed. There's a lot of treatment that, of medicine that are using seaweed already for digestion and guts. so yeah, there's, there's already many thing in that. In in France a French and American team of doctor even managed to restore the sight of a blind man using the protein that seaweed will use, algae will use to direct towards the light.

So once again, there's many, many thing you can do with seaweed and we have only understand a very small part of them so far.

Abigail: We have to take a short break, but when we return, we'll hear how Vincent became interested in seaweed and what he believes it will take to jumpstart the seaweed market worldwide.

Welcome back to Happy Planet; my guest today is Vincent Doumeizel. As you heard in the first half, Vincent has a lot of great reasons to be excited about seaweed. I asked him about his background and how he got started down this path. 

Vincent: I started my career in Africa. I realized there, what is world hunger and that doesn't look good when you are, not a teenager anymore, but Yeah. Like 20 something. that's quite traumatic, I think. and you want to find a solution.

So I spent 20 years of my career working in the food system, trying to make them better. and at the end of the day, I failed. And I feel like, I mean, we failed. We collectively failed. I mean, there's nothing we can do. as long as we keep using only the land, once again, the land is 30 percent of our planet.

And we are overproducing on land. In the meantime, we have 66 million square kilometers that are suitable for seaweed farming in the ocean. We are cultivating 2,000. So it's just crazy. to me, it was obvious that if we want to feed the next, generation, we will have to use seaweed, 

And maybe because with my job, I had to travel a lot. So I realized what starvation means on one hand. And I also realized that some countries have found some solution in Asia, notably. So I was like, why not to implement that? And then. It became obvious for many, notably at the UN where I'm working today I mean it was like an awakening call for them, like it dawned on everyone of us that, yeah, that's where the solution lies.

I mean, one of the solutions, of course, is not a silver bullet that will, um, solve everything. I mean, it's always a convergence of solutions and there will be many other solutions. But that's a very, very interesting one because we need them.

Abigail: Yeah, so, you know, a revolution is started by big ideas, but then you have to have a certain number of steps in place to implement a revolution. So, where are we now in this revolution? And what you think the next steps are that need to take place for us to really feel the wave? 

Vincent: Yeah. So, once again, first of all, there's a gap, a lack in terms of education and training and science. So, we need to improve science when it comes to the ocean, understand better what's happening there. I come from France, which is the second biggest maritime territory to the U.S. we have 550 scientists in France working on two type of wheat that are very similar, and we are cultivating this crop for 12,000 years. In the meantime, second biggest maritime territory, we have 70 scientists only, compared to the 551 for crops, 70 scientists only working on 12,000 type of seaweed that we have start to study over the last 10 to 20 years. And I think we are way better than the US 

Yeah. Yeah. 

Abigail: Well, that'll change when you can make a baguette out of algae. 

Vincent: We can. They have a very nice bread made from seaweed in the US. They are a US company, you know, and they do some bread out of seaweed with a lot of protein in there. So yeah, you know, the change is coming. so that's the first thing; so raise science. 

Then we have also to put in place the right regulations. It's very hard to get a license to operate. It's easier to pump oil from the ocean than to grow the restorative seaweed. So we have to ease that regulation. We have to ease the food regulation as well. Uh, there are some crazy situation on the food safety regulation. 

So we have to ease that and. we have to get together as well, which is why we have formed the first ever global coalition of seaweed stakeholders, the Global Seaweed Coalition, that I am co-leading with some research institute on the UN Global Compact.

So we have formed this coalition, which is gathering over 1,000 seaweed brands today. and we are organizing in EU in two weeks time, the first ever EU summit organized by the European Commission on Seaweed in order to raise awareness around this. So we need to act together. Fragmentation was a big issue in the seaweed industry so far. There's a lot of pioneers, brave pioneers with great ideas, but they were working in isolation. We need to get together if we want this to change. And the last part, and the most important one, it lies with all of us. We are all the drivers of the change. Every day, each time we eat and we drink, we are environmental activists.

We can shape the world of tomorrow. Each time we eat and we drink we can vote for seaweed. Learn to  cook them. I'm always told, wow, seaweed is full of umami, it's very strong. It's not very good. There's 12,000 type of seaweed. They are all edible, first of all. There's no toxic one. And you need to cook them. You need to learn how to cook them. That's the key point. I mean, if you eat raw potatoes or raw cocoa Yeah, you, you, cannot even eat them, actually 

I I mean, they are disgusting, yeah? And they are toxic raw potatoes. But if you eat chips or chocolate, it's cool. The same with seaweed, you know? And the more you will use it, the more the market will grow, the more the demand will grow, the more it will be, the easier it will be for farmers to produce seaweed. I mean there are a few farmers in the US, like, very few. I mean, there's no market for them. And most of the seaweed that is produced, we could not sell them if we produce more. So we need to get a market for seaweed. So once again lies with all of us. We are all actors of this change.

Abigail: Yeah. I've seen that little bit, it's hard because you've got to get the Sequence of events right. Because we don't want these ambitious farmers to go out and fail because they can't sell their seaweed at the prices, they need to sell it. So it's a catch 22 to build these new economies.

Vincent: That's a problem, especially as, once again, the big issue we have is that when it comes to food, we don't know how to farm the right seaweed. So typically, the nori that you have in your sushi or the wakame, the wakame salad that you have in any Japanese restaurant, which is so popular, we cannot farm this here.

We cannot farm wakame because we don't have wakame. and it's not an endemic species. We have some nori in the US and in Europe, but we don't know how to farm them. So most of the seaweed that we consume in the U. S., they are imported.

 Abigail: And you don't want to just wild harvest either because then you were depriving the sea of its natural resources.

Vincent: It needs to be done. It could be done. It doesn't need, but it could be done, but in a very controlled way. And, yeah, you cannot really scale up the production in that aspect.

Abigail: yeah. So, um, you know, we're a show about entrepreneurship. There are people listening that might be interested in creating startups in the seaweed world. Where's a good place to start today? What are some of the problems that need to be solved? There might be a market already in your mind? Should they go to food? Should they go to plastics? 

Vincent: I think plastic will be a waste from the seaweed production, basically. if I can say so. 

Abigail: What does that mean? 

Vincent: Yeah, yeah, we need to understand how to refine the seaweed, how to biorefine the seaweed. And at the end of the day, you will extract the food, the feed. You extract the bio stimulant, you will extract some interesting compounds for cosmetics because the seaweed skin is very similar to our skin, so that's why every skincare has some seaweed

You will extract everything you need, and maybe even the alginate and the carrageenan and the agar agar because that's something important to know that we are all eating seaweed every day in our daily life without even knowing it. Because in any ice cream, in any dessert, in any bread, in any beer, in anything you have which is processed, you have seaweed, which is the biggest gelling agent or texturing agent.

Once again, carrageenan, agar agar, and alginate. So once you have extracted all of this from the seaweed, there are the waste, and that will be the biopackaging that will be the substitute to the plastic. 

That makes it cost effective, because if you cultivate seaweed for just packaging then it might be very expensive.

And that's something we need to learn as well, typically the supply chain has to be built. We need to educate people, we need to train a new generation of scientists. If you are in the U. S. and you want to become a seaweed farmer, I doubt there's any training and education or courses to do that, you know.

So you need, you need to bring that to life, but you need also to learn how to extract these various compounds, and we don't know that yet very well, I think the biostimulant part will be the most urgent part. If you look at phosphate, for instance, we are relying on phosphate production from North Africa. So we right now, and a bit in China, and a lot in Russia, but mostly in North Africa. We know that this mining extraction will end at some point, and the Guardian the journal in the UK, wrote a very good article about the "phospha-ggedon."

The fact that the phosphate prices will... Go higher and higher and higher and at some point there will be no phosphate left in the mines and there will be a big famine in this world because without phosphate there's no agriculture at all. and in the meantime, China, they will be neutral in phosphate in five years from now, using seaweed to recycle and upcycle the phosphate that ends up in the ocean. And we are buying the phosphate more, and I think that once again, using seaweed to support our agriculture will be a very, very interesting solution in the next years, but everything, I mean, and it's good to rely on many different applications because there are many different seaweed and because it will make this industry more resilient, which is good.

But I think if I had, um, some advice for some entrepreneurs that are listening and I mean, we created this coalition for them. So it's a free coalition. Once again, I have nothing to sell. You know, a UN coalition. It's a globalseaweedcoalition.org. you can become a member and then you get all the information. You have a clear mapping of who is doing what and where and where you can do what and so forth.

and decide where, where you want to position your industry into that. And I think in the U. S. you have a huge potential. Once again, the biggest marine territory in the world. Some very interesting cold water, and there's a lot of projects popping up in Alaska, notably. And I think that's, very, very smart, because that's with the climate change, more and more of this area will be de-iced, and they will be suitable for seaweed cultivation. 

Abigail: can you farm seaweed offshore? Like a lot of the farm fishing happens close to shore, but we're talking more, more about trying to get a licensed program together so that you can start to farm fish beyond the coastal waters.

Vincent: well, first of all, we need to farm fish and seaweed together. Uh, we need to stop farming fish alone because nothing grows in isolation in nature. We have to remember this. Uh, and mimicking the nature is the best thing we can do. So we have to farm them together, that one thing. and also you can in certain condition, farm offshore.

the biggest and the most inspiring project we have in terms of farming seaweed right now is off Namibia, in a big upwelling area, which is an area where the nutrients are moving from the bottom of the abyssal sediment to the surface. And then if you put ropes there, you will have a lot of seaweed, because seaweed, they need light and they need sediment.

And most likely this sediment, they come from the soil. So you cannot normally grow them in offshore conditions unless you have specific conditions such as this one. And here we are talking about 70,000 square kilometers, so it's quite a large area and there is a lot of upwelling around the world.

You could think of growing seaweed in very polluted areas as well, which we could be a very good way to de-pollute this area. I'm here in touch with the Shinnecock Nation here in the US in the Long Island region, which are using their traditional knowledge around seaweed to depollute, this area, which should be interesting as well.

So yeah, I mean, you can use seaweed along with offshore wind farms. That could be very smart to put ropes in between offshore wind farms. To create both energy and seaweed. But, there is obviously some, um, some zone in the ocean where you cannot grow seaweed is

Abigail: Yeah it's too deep or you can't anchor 

Vincent: it. 

So there's, there we need a lot creativity.

Abigail: Yeah. So, I ask everybody who comes on this showAre you optimistic about our future and our ability to stay ahead of climate pressures?

Vincent: I'm more and more optimistic about our future and I'm very, very optimistic. First of all, because I think... We need to. If we want to win a fight, you have to believe that you can win it. Otherwise, you will never make it. I'm into sports, and you don't enter into a game thinking you may lose it, because you will lose for sure.

So, we are at war, right now, and, and we should win this fight, and, and we will. And, I'm also optimistic, because being a bit provocative, but once again, out of all my travels, there's... Factually, there's nothing that you cannot deny this. The world is getting better and better. Starvation has declined from 80 percent to 9 percent in less than a century.

Education has, I mean, has never been that high. It was 20 percent 60 years ago, we are talking about 80 percent of educated people now. Uh, the gender parity,even if there is still a lot to be done, it has never been that good. We have eradicated most of the worst disease on this planet, over the last century.

So the world is getting better. We are on the right trend. Uh, we need, it doesn't mean that the world is doing good. I mean, there are still a lot to be done. Uh,we need to keep fighting. but we are on the right trend, I think. And, and the next generation will make it much better. And I think that the next generation will not be the COVID generation, it will not be the climate change generation. I think the next generation will be the first generation on this planet that will be able, by cultivating notably the ocean, will be able to feed the entire population of this world, while mitigating climate change, while restoring biodiversity and alleviating poverty. They will be remembered as such, but they will need all of us, and this revolution needs to start today.

Abigail: Yep. I'm going to have a great afternoon. You've just, you've put me in a wonderful mood. I have learned so much today. 

 And, um, And I'm not new to this. There's a lot to learn. It's just, it's a wonderful, wonderful thing. So, thank you. Thank you for taking the time today.

 Thank you Vincent for joining us today and sharing your deep knowledge about everything seaweed. You can find links to Vincent, his book and his organization, the Global Seaweed Coalition, in our show notes. 

Thank you once again for listening. Please follow Happy Planet wherever you tune in and leave us a rating and review. It really helps new listeners discover the show. Happy Planet was reported and hosted by me, Abigail Carroll. I am also the executive producer. The talented Matt Patterson is our producer and editor. Composer George Brandl Egloff created our theme music. Learn more about my work and get in touch by visiting happyplanetpodcast.com.