Why Algae?

Don't call it a comeback! Earth's original game changer is poised for a return.

When we think of sustainable infrastructure and the built world, what comes to mind?

Free associations probably center around the means with which humans connect, through their physical interactions and digital communications: steel and concrete, cables, electrons, waves, roads, bridges, tunnels, and pipes.

We less readily think of microbial life in this context, or the bottom of the aquatic food chain, but perhaps we should.

Zoom in to algae — Earth’s fundamental organism with the potential to sequester carbon, provide food, nurture ecosystems, and form the basis of compostable chemicals and biomass. From sustainable concrete to bio-plastics to the generation of electricity — algae is nature’s ultimate building block and can play a key role in the transition to a sustainable future.

One of the reasons algae are so compelling is that they are so diverse. As the oldest living organisms on the planet, they’ve conducted billions of years of evolutionary iteration. They have capabilities we are now starting to understand. And we have technologies that can finally harness and apply these properties.

They’ve fundamentally changed life on Earth once, and I think they can do it again.

Enter The Blob 👋🏼

The Blob is a newsletter about a 3 billion-year-old disruptor that’s still making waves, focusing on the people and products that are changing the way we interact with the built world.

Content intent:

Periodic overviews of the developments, companies, products, and people driving the burgeoning algae-industrial complex. Aiming to post something interesting once or twice a month —

The name is an ode to the protean nature of algae, the physical shape and movement of the organism (or an algal bloom), and the implications of inexorable momentum!

Very briefly about me:

I’m a project manager in the built environment in New York City, and I’ve been harboring (pun intended) an obsession with seaweed and the oceans since Superiority Burger first served their Kelp Burger in the East Village in 2015. That led me to learn about Bren Smith and Greenwave, and the rest, as they say, is search history.

In 2023, I began working with RETI Center, a non-profit environmental education and workforce development organization in Brooklyn, to obtain the first permit to cultivate Sugar Kelp in the Gowanus Bay.

So hello! 🙌🏼

Thanks! 🙏

And see you out there! 🏙️