It's not easy being greenish

The Kelp Rescue Initiative

Kelp has a communication problem. Most people don’t know it’s there. It’s not cute like baby animals. It’s not pretty like coral reefs. And when people have seen it, it’s usually with flies buzzing around as it rots on the beach. That’s a tough brief for a species on the decline. One that could help reverse climate change. In 2021, a group of scientists got together to research and develop a solution to repopulating kelp, and making it resilient. We created a brand positioning, identity, initial marketing strategy, and landing page, to enable them to get some love for this algae.

By Vanessa Richmond
Principal and strategy director
February, 2023
Estimated reading time 8 minutes

Dr. Jonathan Page remembers whipping his brother with the long pieces of bull kelp that were washed up on the beach near his childhood home. Growing up in the Comox Valley on Vancouver Island, he also remembers floating on an inner tube, looking down into the undulating blades of the kelp bed that fringed the shoreline. There were once kelp forests everywhere around the northern Salish Sea. “And now it’s gone. It’s just gone,” Page told me. He misses it.

But it’s fair to say most people don’t notice kelp. And when they do see it, it’s washed up on the beach, where they find it slimy, ugly, and gross.

Like everything unlovable, a few people love it. One is Page, who has a PhD in Botany. He didn’t start his career in kelp, but researching medicinal plants. Even though he is a scientist, he was fascinated by the cultural reverence for these plants — why people love them. As a result of his research, he was the first to sequence the cannabis genome.

Then he founded a research company, and sold that to one of the largest, legal cannabis producers. After that, while on sabbatical, he started thinking again about the disappearance of those kelp forests, and also wondering how he could contribute his scientific expertise and startup knowledge to helping climate change in some way.

Another kelp lover is Dr. Chris Neufeld, an adjunct professor and marine scientist who’d been the director of education at Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre (BMSC), a remote marine station and research centre on the edge of the Pacific. Neufeld was also looking for a way to use his scientific knowledge to have an impact. The two didn’t know each other, but like so many beginnings, the internet brought them together.

About a year ago, from his BMSC office off the west coast of Vancouver Island, Neufeld tweeted about his research on kelp. That tweet appeared in Page’s feed, and he DM’d Neufeld. Within a few months, the two had founded The Kelp Rescue Initiative and joined up with BMSC. Neufeld is now the project lead, and Page is a scientific advisor. And the Ngan-Page Family Fund sustains the work with a grant.

“Science is the only tool that can unlock solutions when you have complex problems. But we don’t want to focus on science for science’s sake — we want solutions that can be put into practice.” – Dr. Jonathan Page

British Columbia has the richest diversity of kelp in the world. There are more species here than anywhere.

And kelp’s disappearance is due to, yes, climate change. Rising water temperatures and marine heat waves are killing kelp at the water’s surface. A few years ago, the longest marine heatwave ever recorded in the Northeast Pacific, called “The Blob,” led to a die-off of kelp on the B.C. coast. At the same time, a new disease started killing off the sea stars, which are an integral part of kelp forest ecosystems. Sea stars feed on urchins, which themselves graze on kelp. Without sea stars, urchin populations are exploding, and eating far more kelp than usual. Kelp is literally getting hit from both ends.

Which is a problem because kelp is valuable. An underwater kelp forest provides food and habitat for dozens of species from salmon to otters and whales. It keeps coastlines from eroding. It cleans the water. And maybe most presciently, Giant Kelp and Bull Kelp— which grow abundantly in B.C. — absorb carbon, and hold on to it.

When he founded The Kelp Rescue Initiative, Page wanted to combine the best of what he’d learned about the startup approach with the academic one. “Science is the only tool that can unlock solutions when you have complex problems. With kelp, we need to start by figuring out exactly what is causing the die off.

“But we don’t want to focus on science for science’s sake. As soon as possible, we want to translate the science into solutions that can be put into practice.”

Neufeld and Page knew they’d need scientific partners. Neufeld had already been working closely with Dr. Sam Starko — a Killam Scholar at UBC, then a Mitacs Fellow at UVic, and now a postdoc on a Forrest Fellowship at the University of Western Australia on a Forrest Fellowship, all focusing on the ecology and evolution of kelp — to get a handle on what had been happening with kelp in B.C. since the heat wave.

Neufeld and Page approached Dr. Julia Baum, a professor and President’s Chair at UVic, who was previously working on coral reef declines in the South Pacific. Baum is currently working on a huge accounting exercise — looking at all of Canada’s coastal oceans, to determine how much carbon kelp and the sea grasses absorb. Her past work focused on the decline of coral reefs in the South Pacific. And they also approached Dr. Sean Rogers, a professor at the University of Calgary, and the director of BMSC, to help establish the kelp project.

All shared a desire to be of service. “I feel like I have a duty to apply the skills I have,” is the way Neufeld put it.

“People have described the role of scientists as coroners — presiding over disappearance and disaster, and trying to document what happened and why. But if you don’t take the science and change something with it, then what’s it for?” says Neufeld.

And they aligned on one other key belief. “Getting the ideas out there, getting the problem communicated, getting people excited about it is crucial,” said Page.

They set out to find a way to restore kelp on B.C.’s coasts, in a way that means it is more resilient than before. Then scale that solution.

The Kelp Rescue Initiative needs to raise awareness. But that’s a challenge because there are so many problems out there, and so many other groups competing for attention. And it’s an extra challenge because kelp isn’t a baby animal that easily draws eyeballs and clicks. So Vigilantes set out to help The Kelp Rescue Initiative win the attention war. First, we needed to identify what made them distinct.

“The Kelp Rescue Initiative is trying to take the best of academia and activism, while mitigating the weaknesses. Or as we like to call it: science-based actionism” says Vigilantes co-founder and creative director Arndt Klos.

“What’s interesting is that as much as everyone in The Kelp Rescue Initiative is involved in academia, they’re also embarking on a critique of it. We know academia’s weak spot is knowledge for knowledge’s sake. And The Kelp Rescue Initiative knows it’s critical to their success to do something meaningful with it.”

“And on the other hand, there’s a critique of activism, where there’s an urge to act first and think later — just to make something happen. But we know the risk is that you waste time and resources, do something futile, or inadvertently make things worse, despite being well intentioned,” he says.

“It’s not enough to educate people on the importance of kelp. We need to reach them on an emotional level, by showing the mesmerizing beauty of these water-based forests.” — Arndt Klos

“There’s a lot of competition for attention to dire topics right now: we have forest fires, climate change, political protests, social and economic inequalities, Covid, floodings, the war in Ukraine,” says Klos.

“And people have a natural inclination to avoid sickness, stress, danger, and risk. So instead of showing that things are dire for kelp, and having people feel a sense of doom, we want people to think, ‘How great would it be to do something about this?’”

We knew we needed inspiring and optimistic personality traits for the brand. And ones that are unpretentious, so the identity works against the elitist perception of academia.

We also knew we needed to show the beauty of kelp forests, and make them the hero. That’s because most people have walked in land forests, and are aware of the damage from forest fires. But unaware that kelp forests even exist — because they’re out of sight and out of mind.

And when people do know about kelp, they think of rotten, slimy stuff at the beach with flies buzzing around it. We get tangled in it when we swim. If anything, people might say, “I wouldn’t be sad if there was less of this.”

It’s easier to raise awareness of something like coral because they’re colourful, and there are playful fish around. “It’s not enough to educate people on the importance of kelp. We need to reach them on an emotional level, by showing the mesmerizing beauty of these water-based forests.” says Klos.

In our explorations for the logo, we took some visual cues from some of kelp’s recognizable features like the blades and the bladder. And explored pictograms as a potential form of abstract representation.

“We knew we didn’t want to get too much into the illustrative world — it’s too tied to the activist scene. Or too quaint, like painted seashells. Or too scientific, like what we see in a biology book.”

“We wanted the right combination of maturity and professionalism while still being rooted in public service.”

We looked at government and institutional organisations, which are often both mature and abstract in their representation, whether a craft council or the US Environmental Protection Agency.

“The final logo blends an abstract representation of kelp’s blade structure and air-filled bladder with an exclamation mark, reinforcing the urgency and actionism behind our undertaking.”

We wanted to show the tonal range that we find on the North American West Coast, which is home to these kelp species. “It’s not as vibrant or colourful as a coral reef. But our world has a rugged and wild beauty. It’s more muted — like Tofino during the foggy season.

And rather than using a distinct, primary brand colour in the logo, we brought in most of the colour through photography of the environment itself, which kept the logo more understated.

For the verbal identity, we used some irreverence, which is unconventional for both academia and environmental initiatives. “When it’s a serious topic, people often think they need to be sincere and factual. But in order to inspire people, we need to have some charm and even humour. You can talk about a serious topic in a light way without diminishing the issue.”

“Instead of showing that things are dire for kelp, and having people feel a sense of doom, we want people to think, ‘How great would it be to do something about this?’” — Arndt Klos

The brief for the website was to create a home base for the other awareness efforts — like talks, social media, earned media, and reach outs to other scientists and groups. The website needs to provide instant credibility, and inspire people. It also needs to demonstrate positioning — how is The Kelp Rescue Initiative’s work different from the many other groups working on it.

The key tension is that the website experience needs to be concise and light, given the stage they’re at, but also needs to feel special.

Academia tends to throw lots of content at people — it’s prone to completeness, correctness. But that doesn’t reflect how people engage in an online environment. If someone spends two minutes on a website, that’s a lot. We saw our job as inspiring them to engage with kelp’s beauty, and with why the project is needed at all.

Because so much of what The Kelp Rescue Initiative is doing is engaging in conversations at this stage, we wanted to create a business card that could be a conversation-starter. We wanted the scientists to be able to hand someone a card made out of kelp, so that person could say, “What is this?!?”

Business cards aren’t standard anymore. Unless you’re in an old-school industry that’s not on social media, or you’re in an industry that still goes to a lot of events and trade shows, there aren’t many functional uses for a card. We can all look up someone’s email address on Google or LinkedIn.

That said, a business card can be special — like reading a paperback compared to reading on your iPhone. Done well, it reflects the quality of your business. And according to Forbes, creative business cards are remarkable – that is to say, they get shared, which creates more awareness of your organisation.

When you do something interesting, your friends and family want a tshirt.

Swag matters, even when you’re just starting out. Soon, through their research, The Kelp Rescue Initiative will have a call to action that involves not just scientists but the public. And until then, we thought swag could be a lovely way to enable people to feel like they’re part of something, to articulate their own identity and values, and even to create some belonging.

As the awareness efforts gain momentum, The Kelp Rescue Initiative is researching at sites along British Columbia’s coast. One site is just off Hornby Island. There, they’re researching the resilience of different kelp genotypes to summer water temperatures — Hornby has some of the warmest water in B.C. They’re also trialling a method called green gravel, to see how well it supports healthy kelp growth. It’s part of their plan to restore kelp forests on B.C.’s coast, and secure resilient and vibrant ecosystems. Visit The Kelp Rescue Initiative to find out more.