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“A balm for the soul”
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This fisherman's incredible, hidden underwater forests may change food as you know it.

When Bren Smith was 14, he dropped out of high school and went to sea.

Photo from GreenWave, used with permission.

Smith was born and raised in a small fishing village called Petty Harbour, in Newfoundland, Canada. Petty Harbour is 700 miles east of Maine, and it juts out into the Atlantic like the herald of the entire North American continent. It's so tiny that it's basically just a few saltbox houses painted in bright colors, helping fishermen find their way home in the fog.


Smith worked on boats for years, and he loved his job.

"That's where I want to spend my days," he said. Smith is now in his mid-40s. Pictures of him show a lean, bald man with varying stages of beard. He says that like a lot of fishermen, he fell in love — not so much with the ocean itself, but with the feeling of working on the ocean.

"Farming the ocean is really meaningful work," he said. "There are certain jobs, traditional jobs, like coal workers who help power the country, steel workers who helped build the country, and fishermen and farmers, who help feed the country — there's real satisfaction and meaning that comes with that."

But under the ocean's surface, things weren't going too well. One day, the jobs seemed to just disappear.

Photo from GreenWave, used with permission.

The Grand Banks, off the coast of Newfoundland, are some of the richest fishing grounds in the world. And at some point, they must have seemed endless. In 1968, fishermen brought home over 800,000 tons of cod from those waters, for instance. That's more than the weight of eight full aircraft carriers.

But starting in the 1970s, the cod's numbers started to fall. Overfishing, trawling, dragging, and government mismanagement destroyed the cod stock. And after centuries of being one of nature's greatest wonders, in 1992, the Canadian government told Newfoundland's cod fishermen that they couldn't go out fishing anymore. There were essentially no cod left to catch.

As the Earth changes, jobs go away.

The ban on cod fishing snapped the economic backbone of hundreds of rural Newfoundland communities. Over 40,000 people lost their jobs. Some fishermen got government assistance or found new jobs on land, but Smith says the real shock ran much deeper than that.

There's a famous story in Newfoundland, Smith said, about a former fisherman who got a government buyout — a check to beach his boat, essentially — "and then every morning he drives down to the dock at 5 in the morning, with his brand-new truck he bought with that government check, and drinks himself to death looking out over the ocean, wishing he was working at sea."

This tragedy wasn't about money, you see. It was never about the money. Instead, losing that job meant losing part of their culture. It meant losing a sense of meaning.

Smith had been working elsewhere, but watching his hometown's collapse affected him. So Smith changed jobs, looking for work that was truly sustainable. Over the years, he tried a bunch of different things, but it never seemed to work out. Hurricanes Irene and Sandy put an end to his oyster farming idea, for instance.

Realizing that he needed to adapt, Smith decided to invent a new job altogether. Now, he's what he calls a "3D ocean farmer."

Photo from GreenWave, used with permission.

Smith owns and runs the Thimble Island Oyster Company in Connecticut, but oysters are only part of what he does. He's actually growing an entire forest underwater.

From the shore, Smith's farms don't look like much — just a few buoys bobbing up and down in the surf. But running beneath those buoy are long ropes from which dangle kelp, seaweed, mussels, and scallop nests. Below, resting on the sea floor, Smith has cages full of oysters. Clams live in the mud below those cages. And holding it all together are heavy, hurricane-proof anchors studded along the edges.

The result looks a lot like an underwater garden or kelp forest.

A naturally occurring kelp forest. Photo from NOAA's National Ocean Service/Flickr.

These 3D farms might actually be one of the most sustainable forms of agriculture in the world.

Unlike many common foods, Smith's seaweed and shellfish need no land, fresh water, or fertilizer. Kelp also grows extremely quickly.

And while seaweed is largely absent from the American diet, it's a really common food in other parts of the world, especially in Asia. Many American chefs are now testing it in their menus.

Mmm, seaweed. Photo from GreenWave, used with permission.

There are secondary benefits to the environment from the underwater farms as well. The kelp can trap carbon, removing it from the atmosphere and reducing the impact of global warming. Shellfish can help filter pollutants and excess nitrogen out of the water. The farms can even act like coral reefs, providing a hiding place and habitat for other creatures.

"The best fishing in the entire area is surrounding our farms," said Smith. "We have seals, we have ducks, we have sea horses — all these different species that are returning to our areas."

Because of what he's learned, Smith is now helping other fishermen start underwater farms too.

Smith hauls up an oyster cage. Photo from Greenwave, used with permission.

In addition to running his farm, Smith is in charge of GreenWave, a nonprofit that helps other farmers start their own 3D ocean farms. They have a blueprint for 3D farmers to get started as easily as possible. The GreenWave team also helps farmers evaluate locations and feasibility, get permits, and set up and expand their farms.

GreenWave is still a small operation — just a handful of people working toward something they believe could change the world. But what they're doing is actually working, and they've even been awarded the 2015 Buckminster Fuller Prize for ecological design. They've also just opened a big new project, a seaweed hatchery, to help farmers supply other farmers with seed.

Ultimately, Smith thinks we could build a whole new food system using 3D ocean farms.

He wants to break the logic that leads to big, industrial farms on land and create a whole new kind of food industry — one that has sustainability and food justice at its heart.

For example, GreenWave doesn't charge farmers extra for seed, and it encourages farmers to only use local species. A farm in California won't grow the same kind of seaweed and shellfish as a farm in Maine, a practice that can help keep our food system safe from climate change and disease. And Smith says the minimum wage in their processing plants starts at $15 an hour.

There are still a lot of hurdles, of course. Americans still aren't known for their love of seaweed. And it seems like GreenWave will need to build a lot of their infrastructure from scratch, too. But these obstacles do not seem insurmountable.

To me, the most encouraging part of this story is that we can revive the kind of job Smith fell in love with.

Photo from GreenWave, used with permission.

Sometimes it's easy to think of conservation like a museum, trying to capture the world in some unchanging, static preservation, like a bug under glass.

But that's not what Smith is interested in. For him, the question has always been as much about economics as environmentalism. The question isn't "How do we make sure things never change?" The question is "How do we prepare for the future?"

"We need to build a new economy, we need to feed people, we need to create jobs, and we have to give people meaning if we're going to save the planet," Smith said. He finds that the work on his farm still has that meaningful heart that propelled him to the ocean as a teen.

As Smith put it, we have to find the space for "jobs we can still sing songs about." And we can.

Whether that's transitioning coal miners to solar power-plant workers, oil drillers to dam workers, or fishermen to ocean farmers, we can reinvent the old industries into the new.

We can still have jobs you fall in love with.

Family

'It's not Little Sun': Mom admits she's having trouble pronouncing her newborn's name

It was fine 'til other people tried to say it and now she's confused.

via JustusMoms29/TikTok (used with permission)

Justus Stroup is starting to realize her baby's name isn't that common.

One of the many surprises that come with parenthood is how the world reacts to your child’s name. It’s less of a surprise if your child has a common name like John, Mohammed, or Lisa. But if you give your child a non-traditional name that’s gender-neutral, you’re going to throw a lot of folks off-guard and mispronunciations are going to be an issue.

This exact situation happened with TikTok user Justus Stroup, who recently had her second child, but there’s a twist: she isn’t quite sure how to pronounce her child’s name either.

"I may have named my daughter a name I can't even pronounce," Stroup opens the video. "Now, I think I can pronounce it, but I've told a couple of people her name and there are two people who thought I said the same exact thing. So, I don't know that I know how to [pronounce] her name correctly."



@justusmoms29

Just when you think you name your child something normal! #2under2mom #postpartum #newborn #momsoftiktok #uniquenames #babyname #babygirl #sahm #momhumor

Stroup’s daughter is named Sutton and the big problem is how people around her pronounce the Ts. Stroup tends to gloss over the Ts, so it sounds like Suh-en. However, some people go hard on the Ts and call her “Sut-ton.”

"I'm not gonna enunciate the 'Ts' like that. It drives me absolutely nuts," she noted in her TikTok video. "I told a friend her name one time, and she goes, 'Oh, that's cute.' And then she repeated the name back to me and I was like, 'No, that is not what I said.'"

Stroup also had a problem with her 2-year-old son’s speech therapist, who thought the baby’s name was Sun and that there weren’t any Ts in the name at all. "My speech therapist, when I corrected her and spelled it out, she goes, 'You know, living out in California, I have friends who named their kids River and Ocean, so I didn't think it was that far off.'"

Stroup told People that she got the name from a TV show called “The Lying Game,” which she used to watch in high school. "Truthfully, this was never a name on my list before finding out I was pregnant with a girl, but after finding out the gender, it was a name I mentioned and my husband fell in love with," says Stroup. "I still love the name. I honestly thought I was picking a strong yet still unique name. I still find it to be a pretty name, and I love that it is gender neutral as those are the type of names I love for girls."

The mother could choose the name because her husband named their son Greyson.



The commenters thought Stroup should tell people it’s Sutton, pronounced like a button. “I hear it correctly! Sutton like Button. I would pronounce it like you, too!” Amanda wrote.

“My daughter’s name is Sutton. I say it the same way as you. When people struggle with her name, I say it’s Button but with a S. That normally immediately gets them to pronounce it correctly,” Megan added.

After the video went viral, Stroup heard from people named Hunter and Peyton, who are dealing with a similar situation. “I've also noticed the two most common names who run into the same issue are Hunter (people pronouncing it as Hunner or HUNT-ER) and Payton (pronounced Pey-Ton or Pey-tin, most prefer it as Pey-tin),” she told Upworthy.

“Another person commented saying her name is Susan and people always think it is Season or Steven,” Stroup told Upworthy. After having her second child, she learned that people mix up even the simplest names. “No name is safe at this point,” she joked.

The whole situation has Stroup rethinking how she pronounces her daughter’s name. Hopefully, she got some advance on how to tell people how to pronounce it, or else she’ll have years of correcting people in front of her. "Good lord, I did not think this was going to be my issue with this name," she said.

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Science

Florida meteorologist applauded for getting emotional in live coverage of Hurricane Milton

People are finding John Morales' genuine empathy refreshing, and very much needed.

Photo credit: NASA (public domain), NBC 6 South Florida/YouTube

“I apologize — this is just horrific,” said John Morales during live coverage of Hurricane Milton.

Venerated meteorologist John Morales couldn’t help but get choked up during his report on the potentially devastating impact of Hurricane Milton closing in on Florida—a mere two weeks after being pummeled by Hurricane Helene.

“It’s just an incredible, incredible, incredible hurricane,” Morales began, the weather forecast map almost completely in red.

Tears welled up in his eyes as Morales tried to notify viewers that “it has dropped 50 millibars in 10 hours.”

To most of us, those wouldn’t mean anything. But the anguish in Morales’s voice says it all.


Trying to gain composure, Morales quickly said, “I apologize — this is just horrific,” and continued with his broadcast offscreen, showing just the water map. His voice was still noticeably shaken.

We live in a 24-hour new cycle, which has made us aware of so many global catastrophes and also desensitized to them. But when moments like this happen, when even our ever-stoic messengers are so moved that it also touches us on an emotional level, we are reminded that what happens to one of us, happens to all of us.

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

That's probably why so many people commented to commend Morales for showing a bit of humanity—which they found particularly refreshing for a news anchor.

"Please don't apologize. Showing some empathy shows you care and aren't fear mongering. <3 We appreciate it."

"No apology is ever needed for being human and showing what we see so little of these days: genuine empathy. Thank you, sir."

"Your kindness and humanity are not a weakness, but the strength that we all need right now. Thank you."

"No apologies needed sir...for someone to show real emotions for other people...is real concern, real caring."

"He showed a vanishingly rare moment of authenticity and actual empathy, in an incredibly cynical and ugly world - a beautiful thing to see in this scary time. As someone whose family lives in the area that is about to be pummeled by this storm, I am very grateful to him for his decency and humanity in the face of this possible horror that my family are facing. He deserves SO much credit for this beautiful display of transparency and empathy - though he obviously didn't do it for the credit but rather, out of empathy."

"I debated whether to share this. I did apologize on the air," Morales would later post on X.

He also urged folks to read his coverage of the relationships between climate change and extreme weather on The Bulletin, calling these recent hurricanes are “harbingers of the future.”

Global warming has changed me. Frankly, YOU should be shaken too," he wrote.

If a professional of 35 years is saying this…yikes.

These are actually really helpful.

Almost all of us at one point have attempted to reduce our screentime in an effort to thwart its addictive tendencies. Whether that’s incorporating some kind of app usage monitoring, keeping the phone away from arms reach in the morning, using one of those fancy phone locking pouches, etc. But boy, is it hard not to fall right back into the same pattern.

That’s why it always feels appropriate to hear from folks who have somehow managed to not only do the impossible, but stay consistent with it. You never know what tips and tricks you might find to make your own screen reduction dream a reality.

Recently someone shared how they were able to rescue their screen time by a whopping 80%. Here’s how they did it.


On the r/productivity subreddit, user u/jjohn6646 (whom we'll just call "John") shared how previously he would spend 4+ hours on social media (including Reddit) and 2+ hours on messaging and work stuff.

The biggest things that helped him go from going from 6 hours of phone usage a day to only 1 measly hour were as follows:

Creating a 30-day weaning off plan.

John shared that rather than going cold turkey, each week he would cut back by one hour (though he ended up doing more than that).

Incorporating a tangible reminder.

Placing a rubber band over his phone reminded John to ask himself, “Is this the best usage of mental energy right now?” each time he reached for his device.

Having a go-to "redirect."

For John, it was a book. For others it could be a journal, a simple craft, stretching, sprucing up around the house…you get the idea.

Using an app blocker with stricter settings than iOS screen time.

Quite simply because “iOS defaults are too easy to skip.” AppBlock comes highly recommended for its strict mode settings.

On that note, John added that it helped to set up "morning" and "evening" downtime blocks with the app to eliminate any distracting app during crucial parts of the day. He also only allotted a specific amount of opens for each individual distracting app.

Embracing the boredom.

This one is perhaps the most important of all. It can be so difficult to withstand the pressures of needing to fill every second of time. Even when we’re trying to let go of bad habits, there’s the inherent obligation to replace it with a “productive” one. Social media (and almost all technology we use on a daily basis, really) only exacerbates this. But in reality, we are not designed to be productive or stimulated 24/7.

But as John reminds us, “Our minds tend to panic when we don't have ‘something to do,’ but if you can push through the initial panic, there is a real sense of calm on the other side.”


Having successfully met his goal, John also took away some valuable insights sure to give anyone a little inspiration for their own screen reduction endeavors:

  • There is more time in the day than you realize
  • It's extremely easy to "slip," as I have many times in the past
  • Being "productive" doesn't always mean reaching for your phone just for the sake of doing something — sometimes doing nothing can set you up for more long term productivity
  • We are meant to be bored sometimes (and being bored can make you enjoy the little things more)

John prompted a number of readers to thank him for his advice and even share their own helpful tidbits as well.

“Once I realized all of these notifications and apps were just fancy fidget spinners, and I was designing my own hamster wheel, my interest in smartphones greatly decreased,” one person wrote.

“Great advice, thanks for sharing! Another tip I find helps is to keep a small notebook to hand. I found myself reaching for my phone all the time to check something or look something up. Write down any questions or things to look up online in the notepad, then spend a short allocated time at some point in the day to look them all up in one hit, rather than constantly reaching for the phone,” added another.

Another gushed, “Wow this is really inspiring and helpful. I went through a phase where I deleted all social media from my phone and my creativity, reading, meditation time skyrocketed. I fell back into the habit after a while and am back to 5-6 hours of screen time a day. I delete Reddit, then redownload it the same day. 😭 But this post just gave me the push I need, broke it down in an easy practical way. Thank you op!”

Sometimes we just need to see that a hard thing can be done in order for us to commit to doing it ourselves. If you're looking to reduce your screen time (which let’s be honest, is all of us) take it from John:

It’s “hard, but life changing.”

Photo credit: RepliCarter (left), Marc Piscotty (right)

Céline Dion and Kelly Clarkson are two of the best vocalists of our time.

There are lots of great singers out there, but only a small handful can rightfully be listed among the greatest vocalists of all time. Icons like Whitney Houston, Aretha Franklin, Mariah Carey and Céline Dion earned their place on that list long ago, and Kelly Clarkson has made a strong case for herself ever since she came to fame as the first "American Idol" winner in 2002.

Clarkson has serious pipes, there's no question about it. That woman can sing her face off, and she just seems to be getting better and better year by year.

Céline Dion apparently agrees. In a heartfelt video shared on social media, Dion enthusiastically praised Clarkson's performance of "My Heart Will Go On" before sharing the video of it from "The Kelly Clarkson Show."


Watch:

Dion said that she was moved to tears by Kelly Clarkson's own emotional reaction to Dion's performance on the Eiffel Tower at the 2024 Paris Olympics. "It touched me so tremendously," she said. "You were crying, and then you made me start crying. What's up with all this frickin' crying?" Then she said she was crying again seeing Clarkson sing the Titanic theme song, the biggest hit of Dion's career. "You were absolutely incredible, fantastic. I loved it so much," she said.

People praised Clarkson's vocals as well as Dion's strength of spirit, especially considering the formidable health challenges Dion has faced in the past couple of years.

Céline Dion has been fighting a disease that impacts her ability to perform

In December of 2022, Dion announced she had been diagnosed with an incurable disease that was affecting her ability to sing and perform.

"I have been diagnosed with a very rare neurological disorder called stiff person syndrome, which affects something like one in a million people," Dion said in an announcement posted to Instagram. "While we're still learning about this rare condition, we now know this is what's been causing all of the spasms that I've been having. Unfortunately, these spasms affect every aspect of my daily life, sometimes causing difficulties when I walk and not allowing me to use my vocal cords to sing the way I'm used to."

Since then, Dion has shared her health journey with updates through social media and in the film "I Am: Céline Dion," on Prime Video. She worked for months leading up to the Olympics to gain strength to be able to perform “L’Hymne à L’Amour” by Edith Piaf. It was a highlight of the opening ceremonies and Kelly Clarkson's tearful reaction to it was shared by millions around the world who knew what Dion had been dealing with.

Kelly Clarkson took on the notoriously difficult "My Heart Will Go On" and nailed it

People also praised Dion's generosity of spirit in complimenting Clarkson for her "My Heart Will Go On" rendition. That song is incredibly difficult to sing due to its belted high notes, but Clarkson can belt with the best of them. She took an iconic song that's hard to imagine anyone but Dion singing and made it her own while fully honoring the original, an homage that Dion clearly took to heart.

Clarkson has long been a fan of Dion's, often citing her influence on her as a singer and performer. Imagine having one of your idols praising you the way Dion did Clarkson here. It must feel like a dream come true, but Clarkson has earned every bit of those accolades.

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

Seeing these two incredible singers express so much awe and respect for one another is just beautiful. So often, people who rise to the top have a competitive spirit that can get in the way of camaraderie, but there's nothing but love flowing between these two. Icons recognizing icons. Talent praising talent. Women lifting up women. People love to see it.