 and she's also a contributor to our beloved daddy's magazine, Danny Magazine, and the On The Rock magazine. Josh Rogers will be our discussion with her. He's the owner of a cup of tea, which is a mousse leaf tea company, which I've actually had in my life. She grew up eating seaweed with his grandmother, which is where his passion came from. And he has recently opened a brick-and-mortar store called Heritage Seaweed, which is on India Street. So thank you both for being here, and thanks for coming. Thank you, Rachel and Sarah, for inviting us. And Josh and I are going to... I'm going to talk some about my book and read some of Josh's books. And then we're going to talk about his new store, which is a very exciting venture. Things are changing in the seaweed world. And we'll talk about that. Before I tell you how I came to write the book, I think I'd like to read to you from the beginning of the prologue. And I'm leaning too far over. I'm going to fall right out of my seat. I have to tell you that I've just had an eye operation. And so if I kind of stumble in my reading, it's because I can't see it that clearly. Or maybe it's because I never wrote this in the first place. Okay. So I come from Surrey, which is in Hancock County. Down East Maine. Down East Maine, where I live. Can everybody hear me? It's for me the most beautiful place on earth, even in February, even on a dark day and a sharp wind. It is ledge and cobble, spruce and white pine, mudflats that glisten like a harbor seal's wet pelt, low tide rocks covered in the wind. And a horizon straight east across the water into sunrise in Canada. No frills. It has been for me, and I think for so many others who live here, William Blake's Grain of Sand, a teaching place. And we have learned something of the world from it. Within the wild fabric of this shore, in its many coves and bays, seaweeds and other lives from barnacles to fish to birds are bound together as they are along the shores of other places in the world. It is a tightly woven warp and wolf of life, an ancient and essential system of give and take. In April, we can stand at the shore and see long lines of blackbirds rising and falling in undulating flight at the water's horizon, homing to their nesting islands. They are double-crested cormorants. They build their nests out of sticks and grass, and the seaweeds they've ripped from underwater. Flocks of robins return. Eastern Phoebes come back to the poor chiefs. Both in a cold snap seek out the windrows of seaweeds that lie in the sun above the high tide line. They're in the warm rotting tangles, kelp flies, and their larvae flourish. I just want to say one word about why this seems awfully loud. Is it too loud for you? Why I began like that? And that is because I didn't want this to be a narrow book on seaweed. I wanted everybody to read it because I thought seaweed was pretty important. So I tried to lure you in and then bring you up against robins and Phoebes and double-crested cormorants and show you very slowly, step by step, the complexity of this world. Most of us before it became a thing that's so popular now seemed so simple and just something we slipped over. So do you feel, Josh, that there's been a change in the way we look at seaweed in the last five or six years? Absolutely. I mean, everyone that's been coming into the shop recently has been talking about the 60 minutes segment that was on seaweed farming. So that's put it big into the consciousness. I think just the rise of sushi, the fact that you can get it in the Hannaford cold case now. And then anyone who has kids knows that seaweed snacks are this hugely popular thing. So there's a lot of interest in it. And I just wanted to say along the lines of what you were just talking about, I really thought that this was going to be some, like, very a deep dive into seaweed, kind of akin to, I think it was the secret life of Lobsters. There was a book like that maybe 10 or 15 years ago. But what I've, after reading it, what I've been telling people is it's really this kind of overview snapshot of the Gulf of Maine, like, right now, in time, and kind of, as you were talking about, this web that seaweed is a big important part of, but kind of what's at stake against the backdrop of what we did to cod and sea urchins and shrimp and all these fisheries that have kind of gone away. So when I kind of get up to speed on the Gulf of Maine right now, it's a good place to start. Thank you. Thank you. Which brings up another part. Maybe I'll read the Winslow Homer part. Do you think I should? So then I have a chapter. I think it's the first chapter, actually. Yeah, the Gulf of Maine. And I start with Winslow Homer. And it's the same thing I was trying to do. First of all, I consider myself an essayist, and this is a chapter book. So that really is a different way to think of it, because in essay, it's over when it's over. And a chapter book has to kind of go like that. The chapters have to stick together. But this tries to connect the Gulf of Maine to the bigger world. This whole part here. At his studio on Prout's neck in 1885, Winslow Homer completed his iconic painting of a Gulf of Maine fisherman, The Fog Warning. In 1883, when he was 47 years old, Homer had moved to this peninsula, which lies in the east side of the Scarborough River Estuary, a few miles south of Massacre Pond, the site of the 17th century battles between settlers and the native tribes. The peninsula reaches straight into the Gulf of Maine without any island buffers. From his studio on the second floor of his converted carriage house, the painter began his late great works of weather and rocks and water, and of course the people for whom this was home, that have become part of the American imagination. In a real immediate sense, the Gulf of Maine belongs to all of us through these canvases, which tell us something of who we are in the world. You probably know The Fog Warning, the fisherman rowing his dory to the mothership, a dark bank of fog rolling in across the water toward him. Because of the water's swell, the inside of his dory is pitched upward in our direction, and in the hull lie two enormous dead halibut, the beautiful, tasty monster fish that were once common in our inshore waters. By Homer's time, the halibut catch had just started its nosedive, and inshore halibut fishermen hired themselves out to larger ships that sailed offshore for the fish that remained. This is what you see in the painting, a fisherman rowing his catch to the ship, hoping to close the gap before the fog erases all sign of her. He is no longer an independent inshore operator of his own boat, and the fish he's caught are at the end of plenty. Today, the painting shocks us with a wild beauty and formidable danger of our former fisheries, and a warning, not a fog, but of how quickly a good thing can disappear. This passage really moved me when I read it the first time, partly because I grew up with a painting of a reproduction of Homer's in my house that was similar to this, not the same painting, but what really struck me was this idea of that sort of way of life going away, the sort of owner-operator of a fishing boat, kind of having to hire himself out as just a hired gun to like a larger sort of corporate entity. And how that kind of was the harbinger of kind of the end. And I mean, it's really sad, and we just had a cooking class at our shop a couple of weeks ago, and Micah Woodcock, who I think you probably know. He's in the book. I thought he was. He is a wild harvester, seaweed harvester in Maine, and he works in Penobscot Bay, and he's an owner-operator, so he's just one guy. Sometimes he works with a couple other people, but it's basically one person who, you know, it is this sort of traditional way of life. And when he goes out, it's him against the waves, kind of like you were talking about. But he gets to make all the decisions. And we're kind of coming to a time where somewhat with harvesting, but also with seaweed farming, there's starting to be more corporate interests coming into the field, which is exciting in some ways, because it means the seaweed industry is growing. But it kind of echoes that painting by Winsill Homer, where we kind of know what happened next, not only to the resources, but also to these individuals who were once the masters of their own destiny, and now they kind of ended up working for less and probably in worse conditions because they were hired out to these big corporations. Well, you know, it's kind of interesting. I've been asked now to write a column for Down East, and my second essay is about Sarah Redmond, who has a whole chapter here. And she also is an independent operator, but she's not a wild harvester. She grows seaweed aquacultureally out in a bay in Gulesboro. And it's her first full ownership of a company. And the thing is, in this essay I'm writing, which is only 600 words, so it feels like a haiku, is I'm trying to say without beating my readers on the head, because if I did that, Down East wouldn't publish it. Is, you know, that's the great thing about Maine. Is the independence and hard work that we still think is an ethic here. And it's in the seaweed business still. It's probably, like everything else, will be overwhelmed by big corporations. But I hope not, because I see people who are very conscientious, who go out in the bays, who study the seaweeds like Micah does, I mean, he didn't even start harvesting for a couple of years because he wanted to find out where the best kelps were and where he could cut and they could grow back. In other words, he's a caretaker, as well as a harvester. And I love these people and I love their courage. So I don't want them to be swept away in a tsunami of corporate America. That's my prejudice. Yeah. Well, and along those lines, I think, like you said, that Maine does have this tradition of sort of, I guess, small-scale operators. You know, the lobster industry is still pretty much, you know, one person, one boat to some degree. And other places aren't like that. You know, this spring, actually, as I was starting up the shop, the seaweed company from Alaska came to visit Maine on what essentially amounted to, like, a little research grant from the Alaskan government. They make kelp salsa. And I said, wow, you know, you must, there must be all sorts of amazing stuff happening with seaweed in Alaska because they have some amazing species. And they said, no, we're the first and only people doing anything with seaweed. And I said, why? And they said, you know, the fishing industry in Alaska has so corporate and so large and has such a dominance over everything that no one, just there was no interest, no one, there was no room for it, no one really gave it a chance. And so they're this young couple who's starting this, but whereas they came to Maine because we have an industry that's 40 or more years old, it's fairly mature. There's a bunch of different companies. We probably, in terms of the United States, have the most well-developed and diverse set of companies doing seaweed, which means that at least we have a chance to kind of keep it, keep some independence, which I think is really exciting. A couple of things I was thinking about when you brought that up is one thing I should tell you is even though Josh said that my book is mainly about the Gulf of Maine, which is true, I take you to Ireland, I also take you to the Pacific Coast because I want to tell the story about the bulk helps and the giant helps, the work of whales, the grave whales, and the sea otters, and the, now I forgot what they're called, sea urchins. And how, because what I'm trying to learn and teach, I'm learning as I write as well as teaching and what I'm trying to learn and teach is this, that these systems are so tightly woven that we break them without even knowing that we're doing so. And we can't afford to do it anymore. We have to pay close attention. And the thing about paying attention is research. And research is fabulous, but it costs money. So I believe that if citizens are interested in seaweed as habitat for wildlife, as good things for them to eat and go to Josh's store and buy, and as supplements, careful supplements for the great big industrial soybean and corn farms out in the Midwest and stuff, if we can take good care of it, which we haven't done before, but we've learned a lot about what happens if you don't take good care of something. And it seems to me we want to do well. Am I being Pollyanna-ish about this, do you think? I think you're right. I think just like many of the people you talk to in the book, it's one of those things, everyone wants to do the right thing, but I think you mentioned someone wearing here the tragedy of the commons. Right. Also have this innate desire to want a little bit more. Right. So it's this tension probably within most people that everyone wants to be a good person, but we also want... Just a little bit more. Yeah. As a matter of fact, I have a quote here if I can find it. You don't mind if I take... Oh, here. Paul Mullano is in the book and he was a fisherman. He's up in Washington County. He also won a Fulbright. I think it was a Fulbright to write a book about fisheries. Really smart guy. I mean, it's so exciting to go visit people about seaweed because they're really smart and they're really interesting, don't you think? Yeah. And they've got opinions. They don't always agree either, by the way. Anyhow, he said the most wonderful thing. We don't know how to assess the value of species within their ecological communities. So we tend to think of them as worthless rather than priceless. Isn't that great? Would you like me to read you a bit more? How can you say no? No. Let's see if I can find the part about my kids. Before I wrote after I wrote the part called the underwater forest because I knew I had to introduce you to the science of seaweed. How they've survived in the water and everything. But I wanted to start out with when my children were little and how we used to go to the shore. Actually, their dad dug clams for a living and I worked in a fish factory and I have to tell you this was in Prospect Harbor. I have to tell you that I was told that I was the slowest cutter fish they had ever seen at the factory. But after this chapter I take you out to meet a woman who is a shepherd and her sheep are on an island and I explain how they overwinter there and how the Scottish and Irish tradition of keeping sheep on islands was brought to this coast with the first white people. When my children were small I took them to the shore. It would be low tide and we walked over the pebbly mud and parted the seaweed strands the bladder racks, the knotted racks attached to the big rocks that the glacier had dragged for miles away. We peered beneath the seaweeds the outer layers had dried in the air but the under layers held a briny wetness that made the creatures we found within especially bright starfish, the egg capsules of dog welts small sea snails whose eggs looked like tiny Greek amphora green crabs as new and small as my children's fingernails young green sea urchins limpets sideways swimming scuds yellow periwinkles and sometimes a hermit crab or a sea anemone. It seemed right somehow to be bringing young and growing children to the edge of the bay where life had evolved so far back in time that it was hardly imaginable as if this place with its seaweeds were proof we needed that we had come from a world of water and that everything might have looked at one time at something like this. When we are children our psyches tend to become imprinted on the places we know and love and for many of us that edge where water and land meet is one that stays with us all our lives. I didn't think of it then but now I believe I was offering them exactly this their home place to imprint upon so that they might go into the larger world with a sense of where they come from and thus a sense of who they are. I have a question for you. So your grandmother ate seaweed. Yeah, so I was just thinking about that in my childhood when you were reading that and it was very moving. So my grandparents were from St. Stephen, New Brunswick which is just over the border in Canada and she moved down to the loose and Auburn area in the 30s when she was just a kid with her parents. They came to work in the shoe mills and so they sort of brought in Canada and it was more of a tradition to eat Dulce which is this reddish purple seaweed that's really delicious and so in the 80s I guess when I was a kid you really could not find it anywhere around maybe by the end of that decade maybe it was in a few health food stores but every couple of summers we would go up to St. Stephen New Brunswick and my dad says they would only sell you so much like you could get a couple bags but he would try to get more and we got it all kind of marked out to different people and I remember going to the visitor center right over the border and they had to display about Dulce and big wooden barrels where you could just get it for free which was amazing to me as a kid but that rings so true it was this thing that I was brought up with and just really stuck with me just that connection to the ocean we loved going to the ocean we loved eating seaweed and it just always stuck with me and it was when I was living away from Maine for a long time that I really got back into seaweed and started really getting excited about it and thinking how could I get into this world I can't go back to school for like marine biology but what could I do to sort of get my foot in there and like you said meet these people who are super interesting yeah so you figured out how to do it well I learned from writing this book and it's in this book that Shep and Lynette Earhart who own the Maine Coast Sea Vegetables and I spent a day working with their workers there cleaning delts you know and stuff like that but they said Canada Grand Manin Island is the best place in the world for delts and here's why they take wooden boxes they pick the delts and then they weight the delts down but they keep it slightly damp and it begins to not rot isn't the word it's a live enzyme food so the enzymes start changing the flavor almost like a good cheese or something like that it's active and it changes over time right and so it's very easy to eat and it has a delicious quality and so everybody wants delts from Grand Manin yeah supposedly so what should we talk about now did you have another reading oh sure but before I want to tell you how I started this book because as I said I'm an essayist and so I was reading my agent she was in an office in New York on the phone and a list of essays that would be in a new book that I thought were just overwhelmingly fascinating and she was totally silent for a minute I thought she had hung up the truth was as you already know is that she didn't find it very compelling until I got to wanting to go out with somebody I know Andrea de Francesca who is a seaweed harvester near where I live and Andrea told me she'd take me out for the day and we'd harvest kelps together which is also in this book because I ended up doing it and my agent said Susan write a book about seaweed and I hung up and I thought that is the stupidest idea I've ever really nobody cares about seaweed and also how could you write a book about seaweed because there's only about two sentences you can say about it but because she was my agent I decided to look into it and it is like falling down a rabbit hole and so I began to write about it and I said okay and I wrote a book proposal you know which you send around she sends around to other publishers so she was sending around to these big publishers and they got back to her well it may be well written but you know nobody's going to buy a book on seaweed or well maybe this would make a good article you know and that was about five or six years ago and the world has changed and I think one reason it's changed now oh Algonquin by the way bought the book they took a big chance on it and then they had no idea it would take me five years to write they thought maybe two and I said at about year three I said I'm still doing research and they said oh come on you know everything about you well they don't you know I have to go ask people but we have lost so many species in the ocean we have so much attention about that as well as climate change that now every new species that we find every new encounter with something that still is robust in the ocean we want to make sure we can protect as well as harvest and if I can just follow up I think part of the interest too is that we all have to be interested in seaweed one of the reasons is that the UN we know that the population is exploding and by 2050 I think it's going to be like 35% larger on the earth the UN has also kind of reported that most of the arable land on the surface of the earth is already being used there's not a whole lot left and currently we are only getting 2% of the world's food from the oceans and we all know that that is in large part we're doing it in a pretty poor way so it's pretty clear that we need to start getting more food from the ocean and so but at the same time we need to be careful about it and we do have the potential to be really sustainable and actually mitigate some of these issues helps at least in a sort of local setting where it is it does help mitigate carbon dioxide it sequesters carbon it produces oxygen so there's a lot of promising things with seaweed in terms of that so the funny thing is we've always actually been using it we just didn't know it there's a part let's see if I can find it here here this is still in the prologue I'm going back instead of forward here how much time do we have good if you ask people to guess the next big harvest that we will take from the world's oceans how many of them would say seaweed they might turn over in their minds what they know about the Atlantic cod fishery and its collapse maybe the American and European eel fisheries and their collapse or the collapse of the sardine fishery in Northern California and the North Atlantic sorry about this list here or the vanishing of the anchovy fishery off the coast of Chile they might mention the loss of the wild salmon or the recent implosion of the shrimp fisheries in the Gulf of Maine in the Gulf of Mexico they'd say right it isn't those nor could it be the Atlantic halibut or swordfish, yellotail flounder, abalone or Alaskan king crab they too are depleted what's left they'd ask most of us cannot get through a day without meeting seaweed in a disguised and processed form in toothpaste, puddings pie fillings and other soft foods in makeup soaps dog and cat foods, cattle feed and firm fertilizers many people in the world especially in Asia eat seaweed daily as vegetables sugar kelp, malaria and laver, carrageenan and dulce wrapped, stirred, chopped or sprinkled dried or steamed or simmered in soups so what's in your store yeah, all those things that you mentioned yeah it's seaweed I think you mentioned elsewhere in your book that it has the word weed in it and I think a lot of people really think of it all they know is it's on the beach and it smells bad because it's rotting and I always just say well all we knew of tomatoes was them rotting in the sun, we wouldn't like tomatoes either but yeah, one of the great things about seaweed is a little goes a long way and a lot of these cultures that have sort of continued to use it like a lot of Asian cultures they don't need a lot it's a little bit sprinkled on or just a little bit wrapped around something, it imparts a lot of flavor and also provides tons of really important nutrients so yeah, we I think in order to preserve something and to really understand the value of what we have we need to get, we need to see it as this valuable food I think first and foremost ahead of anything else it's an additive in toothpaste and ice cream and all these things where it's invisible to us but especially now with this huge growth of eating local and organic it's just elevated food and farmers to this you know almost godlike status and I think if we can do that with something like seaweed we'll see the value in it and so a lot of the things that we have obviously we have the dried seaweed where you can cook with them but a lot of things are sort of to get people to dip their toe into the seaweed waters as it were so I started doing seaweeds combined with caffeinated and herbal teas a few years ago that's kind of how I got started in it and the idea was like oh tea is something that people drink every day and these taste maybe have a bit of a seaweed taste but they taste you know together it tastes pretty good so it could become part of a daily habit and there are other companies that are doing things like sprinkles so you just sprinkle a little bit on whatever food you're having and we have another company here in Portland Oceans Balance that has kelp puree which doesn't sound very appealing but it makes it easy and so you can just scoop a couple scoops into soup, tomato sauce pizza sauce, smoothies they had a smoothie demo at the shop recently and it was delicious it's like putting kale in your smoothie and you know you can just eat that so I think you know we need to just find creative ways to get this into more people's diets and I think that will really up this perceived value of what we have all around us Sarah Redmond who I just told you I was writing about and I have written about she's one of my go-to people to follow up on Josh's point it's the nutrient density of seaweed it's not that as he said a little bit will go a long way but we're doing a lot of studies now about what is the best way to take in seaweed because we found that for instance the Japanese that have had a long tradition of eating seaweeds their the bacteria in their guts can digest that seaweed better than perhaps some other cultures it's not that we it's not useful to us because it is but that we may not know or our bodies may not know yet how to use all the aspects of it that's open to question but they are studying it and some biologists believe that a good way to use seaweed is to put it for instance on your garden or to feed it to fish so that you eat something that has sort of metabolized the seaweed in a different place I don't know if that makes sense you know and I mean a lot of people eat fish for the omegas which is a great example fish don't produce omegas on their own they get it from seaweed down the food chain so that's an interesting sort of thing we all know about fish have omegas but where are they getting it from well then it's really important that we take it from the seaweed source and not take all those fish because we're over fishing for the omega oils go talk to your health food store let's see shall I read you something else kind of quickly we have about five more minutes chapter 5 page 70 I loved I I have to tell you I loved writing this part about Ireland my I'm part Irish and part English and the English part of my family was overpowering Irish were very quiet about being Irish so when I grew up I was very loud about being Irish for a while so here is here's something about what I found out about who I am occasionally you can still find them out on the islands crumbling near the water's edge the old 18th and 19th century kilns built out of stones gathered from the shore people on the Irish and Scottish coasts and in Brittany cut and burn seaweeds in the pits of those kilns to make potash and pearlash valuable potassium salts the wet seaweeds ascafillum fugus and the kelps had to be lugged up from the shore carefully turned and dried and then burned at a temperature that would render them into products that were sold to make glass and soap to bleach linens to encourage bread to rise and to use as fertilizer to sweeten fields in the boom time around 1809 Ireland was exporting about 5,410 tons of potash a year it was backbreaking work that the whole neighbourhoods engaged in and at its height the many kilnfires created smoke so thick it endangered the lives of nearby pasturing cows it wasn't long before the seaweeds in some places were over cut the shores laid bare then as suddenly as it had appeared the market vanished when potassium salts deposits were discovered underground in Germany and in Chile and mines were open they had resurfaced with the discovery that the ash residue could be used to extract iodine but that too disappeared when deposits of iodine were found below ground left alone seaweeds regroup with farmers coming to the shore to harvest them for their gardens and gatherers cutting favourite species to eat and to feed to their domestic animals over time the old kilns were disassembled by wind and rain and snow my great-grandfather was born in county Mayo a land of blanket bogs and clay on the western shore of Ireland facing the North Atlantic he was just a boy when he sailed to America with his parents in the 1860s somehow they had survived the famine even today you can see the ghosts of the famine that provoked their flight and that of so many others in the ridges on the Mayo hills old shapes of potato gardens suddenly abandoned as if time had stopped and in a sense it had so I write about how to make a potato garden but I want to read you about the Aaron Islands is that okay? yeah on the Aaron Islands there is only an occasional thin skin of turf over bare rock to make a lazy bed a lazy bed is a potato garden that the Irish developed and it is very hard work so of course they called it a lazy bed anyhow the old time farmers would collect sand from the beach coves mix it with decomposing seaweeds and what little there was of turf ground soil into which they set the potato seed then shoveled more of the dirt and sand and seaweed mixture over the seed building up the beds with channels for rain runoff on either side in his 1907 book the Aaron Islands J.M. Singh wrote quote the other day the men of this house made a new field there was a slight bank of earth and another in the corner of the cabbage garden the old man and his eldest son dug out the clay with the care of men working in a gold mine for transport to a flat rock in a sheltered corner of their holding where it was mixed with sand and seaweed and spread out in a layer upon the stone end of quote it may be a seaside farmer's prejudice but it's claimed that nothing tastes quite so good as a potato grown in seaweed gathered from a nearby shore I want something right now well we have 15 minutes left and I should say open it up to questions and also just point out if anyone is really into birds there's a lot about birds in this book as well so if anyone has any questions about how that relates to feel free to speak up it's true my passion is birds yes what would you consider a daily consumption appropriate of a seabed I think I'd like to post each stamp size somewhere I am fairly good friends with Micah Woodcock who we talked about earlier who's a harvester so he's much more wide-read than I am but I believe it's much higher you know people say different things the seaweed in the Gulf of Maine is extremely clean the Gulf itself is fairly clean so there's no radiation or heavy metals anything like that which I think is the big concern with things from the ocean especially fish and then really the only thing that I think concerns people with overeating of seaweed is iodine which is really good for you and I've had it explained to me different ways I think if you have thyroid issues you should probably talk to your doctor you may need more iodine in your diet you may need less but other than that basically your body takes as much as it needs and the rest flushes out so like everything it's kind of like you know everything in moderation but I've been eating seaweed my whole life and I've been fine he looks pretty good actually Micah is like 100 years old exactly yeah I think it's fairly good I kind of always just direct people back to do your own research but there's a lot of it out there that you can find online but I would certainly say a percentage size is probably way smaller than you need to worry about may I yeah you wouldn't want to eat seaweed right where the Penobscot River flows into the bay because they're still cleaning up contaminants there our Gulf of Maine of all places is so clean that people who cite their seaweed farms or who are cutting seaweed know that they can actually get MAFCA to certify them as organic MAFCA is pretty darn strict and if you remember correctly when Fukushima happened people on the west coast were very afraid of eating seaweeds there because seaweeds will take in whatever's in the water and if what's in the water isn't good for you they'll take it in and so they began to buy seaweeds from here from the Gulf of Maine and so suddenly somebody else's bad luck became a possibility for us and now we're trying to step up because however much we produce people will buy more they want more yeah so just to follow do you address the fact that seaweeds are the canary in the mines like for example over a growth of seaweeds in the Gulf of Mexico at the moment usually it was like a cyclical or seasonal sandstone sea origin now it's coming from the Amazon because it's one of Naira's and Nantos for us so do you address the fact that also we get signs from the ocean and from the seaweeds about actually what we've been dumping into the sea for the last four years are you from Brazil? you're French Brittany Brittany's in my book yes I address that because that's very important I think is first of all the two kinds of sargassum this might go on too long let's see how do I keep it small the kind in the sargassum sea that floats out there in the southern Atlantic is not the same kind that's washing up on the beaches in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean and it's true exactly what he said the Amazon because of all the cattle farming and the cutting of the trees and the new towns nitrogen is coming out of the Amazon you won't believe it it hits north that stream it's like a dark ribbon of water that mixes with our lack of being careful about what we on the islands put into water and in the Yucatan and along the coast of Mexico so in other words my idea is this having learned it from reading this book I mean writing the book I haven't read it in a while but I've wrote it is this has to be an international effort it can't be country by country look at all the countries that that pollution goes through and the thing that is terrible is this so they got piles of this sargassum it's a different species of sargassum than the sargassum sea piled up on the beaches the tourists come the people depend on tourism and the tourists are just appalled not only that but that sea turtles the babies that struggle out from the sand they're just struggling out under a wall of seaweed and they can't make it up through it but it's not good and I would like to know how we're going to make the Amazon a good conservative conservation minded place we as all the people of the world as well as making the Arctic a place that also it doesn't get too dirty so we have a lot of work and we have to do it internationally and I see somebody walking up here so I think our time is up