Oceans Used to Clean Themselves, Before We Ate the Cleaners - George Birch

This is a clip from our conversation with George Birch. Like to know more? Find the full episode here on "The art of co-existence" podcast.

Hosted by: Daphne Frühmann
Editing: Axel Frühmann
Music: Mark Oomen
Instagram: @theartofcoexistence
An Ourcelium Publishers podcast

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

You're about to listen to a short clip from a previous conversation. For the full episode, go to our podcast channel.

SPEAKER_01 0:12

No, during my MBA, I was interested in starting a business based on um some sort of ecosystem restoration. And this was triggered by there's a big movement called rewilding, which has become super popular in the UK, and it was actually probably invented to some degree in the Netherlands. Um this place was far understood.

SPEAKER_00 0:36

And there's also rewilding Europe, and there's rewilding per country, right? So yeah.

SPEAKER_01 0:41

Yeah, yeah, indeed. And so a bit of it was how can we get some of the business models from rewilding, which were very nascent but looking interesting, and how do we make them work in the ocean? And yeah, what to look at to make rewilding work.

SPEAKER_00 0:58

And the rewilding from this rewilding organization is focused on rewilding on land.

SPEAKER_01 1:04

Yeah, that was what I was I was looking at. I was looking at a terrestrial rewilding project. So my mum and dad have this farm, this which was very agricultural, like that was making no money. And so we decided that something new needed to happen. And there were these interesting sort of government schemes that you could get into where they would sort of pay you roughly for ecosystem services. So I think Oyster Heaven to some degree has been inspired by this kind of like how can you get society or governments or businesses to pay you for the value of nature? Ecosystem service is yeah, it's uh, and I want to get this right, that our nature or our nature, nature, very often invisible, or we take for granted, like the product production of oxygen from trees, or the cleaning of water through bivalves, or the quality of our soil through mushrooms and microhorizal interactions, and many of these things you you can call them services, and many organizations, or our society depend on the value of these services to function. So the North Sea, and say that all of the fish, all of the um carbon sequestration, the heating that is provided by the the uh North Atlantic drift or whatever, whatever current is called, these are all services that are provided by ecosystems, which we rely on, but because they've just been given to us for free, we kind of take for granted.

SPEAKER_00 2:42

Okay. So that's an ecosystem service. And then if you combine that with a conversation with rewelding or a conversation with Oyster Heaven, what is it then that you how do you work with an ecosystem service?

SPEAKER_01 2:58

Maybe taking one step back, something I regularly say to people is nature has been the most persistently and seriously mispriced asset in history. And you'll forgive my incredibly capitalistic language around this. And I I don't think capitalism is a great idea. It's just is the idea that we've got, and so you can try and work with that language and work on that system. I think we've been treating forests as basically timber, right? We value a tree by the value of its wood, we value an oyster by the value of the protein that you can sell it for to eat, but actually that's missing all of these incredible functions. So, you know, the the oxygen that trees produce, the microclimate, it's holding soils together.

SPEAKER_00 3:43

It's giving life to us as well, basically. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:47

Indeed. And so oysters do three really important things. Firstly, is this water cleaning facility, and you can imagine, you know, one oyster filter, 200 litres of water a day, and there were uh hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of them in the North Sea. Until not that long ago. We were getting pretty good at fin we were basically finishing them off at the s the start of the 19th, uh sorry, the 20th century.

SPEAKER_00 4:18

And this is because people were over harvesting them just for a like a protein source, right? Just for a food.

SPEAKER_01 4:25

It was indeed the most common form of marine protein was oysters. And one of my most horrifying facts is a population of two million people in London ate almost a billion oysters in one year in 1864 or 1863. Um, it was like 400 and something oysters per person. Yeah, astonishing.

SPEAKER_00 4:44

Do you like oysters? Do you eat them yourself?

SPEAKER_01 4:46

Um, yeah, I eat oysters. Um the majority of oysters that you'll ever eat are Japanese oysters in Europe that have been brought over either to be farmed or they've just become invasive. So you'll very rarely eat the native oyster, which is the one that we're working on because they're just not around.

SPEAKER_00 5:07

I can imagine that it would also be a bit weird to eat what you work with. Like they're basic, they're also your they're also your assets in your in your business. So you don't but you don't feel funny about that.

SPEAKER_01 5:19

So I really um we believe a lot in trying to avoid fortress ecology, the idea that nature is over there and we're over here, and we shouldn't have an interaction between them. And I think in lots of different conceptual ways, we're trying to break down this idea of fortress ecology and trying to work out how we can have positive, mutually beneficial, regenerative relationships with nature. And I think that a sustainable consumption of oysters, oysters are a nature-positive protein. Every oyster in the water is better for the ocean. Unlike maybe an extra cow is not necessarily better for the land. So if we're farming more oysters, there's never harm done.

SPEAKER_00 6:08

There's no no no thing as overpopulation by oysters.

SPEAKER_01 6:12

We uh it will be generations and generations before we get anywhere near the possibility of overpopulation of oysters, unfortunately. Um and then back to the the other two ecosystem services, which we think are really important. Um so the second one is um they create these complex 3D reef structures like coral reefs, which form a home or feeding ground or nursery for hundreds of different species of fish, crab, lobster.

SPEAKER_00 6:45

How do they create them? Because they have to have a surface first, like a surface that they can attach to, right?

SPEAKER_01 6:51

Indeed. And that surface used to just be their mums and dads.

SPEAKER_00 6:55

Right. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 6:55

So they would just settle on top of each other and form these growing reefs. But now a lot of the North Sea is just sand and mud, so they can't settle on it. So it's an inhospitable terrain.

SPEAKER_00 7:07

And this is where you come in.

SPEAKER_01 7:09

Um, indeed. This is the one of the interventions that we need to make.

SPEAKER_00 7:13

But go ahead. You were you were talking about the ecosystem services still.

SPEAKER_01 7:17

Yeah, so uh yeah. So if you're if you're at all relying on, you know, marine protein, which a lot of our society does rely on, you know, fatty acids and fish oils are really important for human brain development, for example. And, you know, lots of people still get the majority of their protein from the ocean. Um, so we look at you can look at oyster reefs like natural fish factories, they're just spitting out reefs and uh reefs, spitting out fish. And then the final thing is they used to form this almost living concrete along our coastlines. Sandy beaches in many places are a relatively modern phenomena because we've eaten the oysters that used to dominate these beaches. And so when you have places which are, you know, having coastlines eroded or houses falling underwater, this is this is new and potentially avoidable. And you could have oysters which are adding massive amounts of stability to the coastline.

SPEAKER_00 8:17

So when you say sorry, when you say concrete coastlines, it's because there were all these layers of oysters that have a strong shell and that they got it.

SPEAKER_01 8:28

So I think these three things, the water quality, um, the sort of biodiversity enhancement, you can look at it, just like fisheries, health, and coastal stability are the three services that we really lean into. But then there are all sorts of other things like recreation, you know, tourism that you can also talk about as maybe ecosystem services as well.

SPEAKER_00 8:49

You are listening to a short clip from a previous conversation. For the full episode, go to our podcast channel. Thank you for listening to The Art of Coexistence, a podcast produced by our Celian publishers, editing by Axel Frumann, music by Mark Omen, and hosted by me, Darthur Frumann. Find us on your favorite podcast app and give us a follow, like, subscribe, and or share, and we'll see you again soon!