Martin Schreibman

Martin Schreibman is a man with a vision for the future, and that vision involves a lot of fish tanks - in downtown Brooklyn. Like many progressive thinkers, he is a proponent of creating better food, more jobs, and a better life for people in cities. But his preferred method for accomplishing all this - urban aquaculture - means he is at times viewed as both a revolutionary on the cusp of greatness and as a scientist working on the intellectual fringe. A few years ago, many would have put him in the latter category. But these days, with sustainable and green living en vogue, Schreibman and his ideas are a hot commodity.

Founder and director of the Aquatic Research and Environmental Assessment Center at CUNY’s Brooklyn College, Schreibman is attracting attention for his idea that New York can be a bustling hub of aquaculture-bred commerce, and he’s testing the waters in the basement of the AREAC building in Brooklyn. His belief (and there’s a certain gospel in the numbers of fish in tanks in his basement) is that the time is nigh for urban fisheries to join urban gardens in contributing to sustainable cities. Fisheries create food and jobs, and they replenish depleted fish populations. As far as Schreibman is concerned, it’s a win-win-win, no matter how you slice it. 

TNAC: You are a neuroendocrinologist. Tell me a bit about how you transitioned from studying osmoregulation to becoming a champion of urban aquaculture.

MS: Gee, I like that title - champion of urban aquaculture. This is a driving force with me now. I worked with fish since my graduate school days, which was a long time ago, in lieu of working with rats and hamsters and rabbits - stuff like that. One of the projects we spent a lot of time on was the relationship between environment and genetics and age at puberty and what controls maturation, sexual development, and that sort of stuff. Our interest in reproduction of fishes led us to work on questions of inducing maturation and spawning in captivity by regulating the neuroendocrine system. Further on down the line, we developed a center which had broader implications.

Did you have a light-bulb moment, when you saw that what you were doing could actually lead to something completely different?

I think everything just developed step-by-step. I do get these light-bulb moments, and most people say, “Martin you’re crazy, stupid idea, blahblahblah.” And some of them come to pass. I used to drive by this landfill, a waste treatment plant, and I would see this smoke go up. It’s New York, it’s cold out there, and I would think, “Why don’t they harness that energy that’s being dissipated and grow tropical fish?” And my colleagues would go, “Martin you’re losing it.” But now many places are utilizing the waste energy that is coming out of our landfills and water treatment plants to do that very thing.

Did your interest in sustainability come from your childhood, or did it develop later?

It developed later. The whole issue of aquaculture, urban aquaculture - these systems are perfect for growing a lot of fish in a small area, and they are very environmentally friendly. So working with aquaculture, it became clear that there were a lot of opponents to aquaculture. I always point out that, it’s not my term - people use it, but it’s the Blue Revolution. I point out that we had the Industrial Revolution, and the Green Revolution, and we have all these problems that we’re still living with 100 years later. So whatever problems that we have in aquaculture are problems that we need to address, rather than run from. And one of these is the issue of sustainability. That’s one of the things we’re trying to work on. We’re trying to find alternate food sources for these animals so we don’t have to feed them fish meal and fish oil.

Are you familiar with the Slow Food movement?

Slow Food, yeah, there’s a big push in New York. A magazine just came out called Edible Brooklyn. There’s a big push and great interest, and the proliferation of the green markets is uncanny. This sudden thrust of eating what you’re growing and being the farmer.

The Slow Food movement is actually split over aquaculture. On one hand, it promotes eating locally, but on the other hand, the fish are often not native to the area where you are growing them. Can Slow Food go hand-in-hand with aquaculture?

Back to the Blue Revolution. These are issues that need to be contended with. Certainly there are energy costs associated with this technology, but there are energy costs with flying them and trucking them to the place of consumption. So there are trade-offs on that.

New York is now growing lambs and making cheeses that are not indigenous to this area. I guess it’s called progress.

So why did you choose tilapia as a variety of fish to work with?

We’ve tried other species and they’re okay. They grow. When we first started with tilapia, nobody knew what tilapia was, and now it’s number two in sales in the country. But unfortunately, most of it comes from outside of the country. Tilapia are good because they grow fast, and we can get them to market in six-and-a-half, seven months, so that’s resource saving. They are hardy; they don’t require any drugs or hormones or any of that to grow. They just lend themselves very nicely to the circulating systems. And they’re good tasting!

Logistically, how do you envision aquaculture being integrated into cities’ infrastructures?

I don’t know about infrastructure - this technology is such that you can place it just about anywhere. Right now we’re growing it on the first floor of a university building, but that’s small scale. Land is becoming more and more difficult to find, especially in New York City. There’s just a boom of interest and expansion. A couple of years ago land was available, and it isn’t anymore. So we’ve outlined parts of the city where there’s still some space, like parts of the Bronx or Staten Island. And there’s ways of dealing with it. This is intensive aquaculture, you can grow a lot of fish in a very small area.
I see the wave of something called “aquaponics.” Aquaponics is co-culturing, growing two different products in the same facility, like growing fish and algae. Plants utilize the waste materials of fish metabolism. You’ve heard of hydroponics? Hydroponics is growing plants without soil, growing it in water with nutrients added. A lot of the produce being grown now is with hydroponics. And aquaponics combines fish growth with plant growth so that the water the plants grow in has the nutrients, which are the waste products of fish metabolism. The plants clean the water and the fish provide the nitrogen and the phosphorus, the fertilizer products that the plants need to grow.

How do you see growing tilapia as a way to create jobs?

We worked with a group at Cornell on a white paper which proposes New York becoming the tilapia capital of the country. And we were looking at something [like] producing a billion pounds a year and creating something like 14,000 jobs. The jobs ranged from menial jobs to sophisticated jobs - engineers and people of that sort and people who do not need special training who can monitor meters and feed animals. Then there’s the whole other side, preparing and purveying - selling, and stuff like that.

Do you think urban aquaculture will encourage people to eat more fish?

People are already eating more fish. Actual fisheries are either depleted or severely challenged, so the question is: Where will the fish in the future come from? People are eating more, populations are growing somewhat larger, and we no longer have this traditional food source. So it has to come from aquaculture.

Roger Tollefsen of the New York Seafood Council says that wild caught fish is the only main foodstuff Americans eat that is not farmed. What is the value of raising fish in pools or tanks over catching them in the wild?

They aren’t in the wild anymore. We’ve depleted all our fisheries, the cod industry is gone, this industry is gone - they’re either depleted or severely challenged. Roger Tollefsen, who I’ve met a couple times, five years ago was against aquaculture. Now he’s softened his stance; he’s come around to thinking, “You know, we can’t hunt and gather anymore.” Another issue is this: by growing fish in captivity, you can produce a good quality food product year round without worrying about whether or not the lakes are freezing over or the fish are not in the location where you can naturally catch them. These are issues that are certainly in favor of sustainable aquaculture, and dealing with things like polluted waters and declination of stocks. These are real issues.

Do you see the cleaning up of waterways and replenishing natural fish populations and aquaculture as mutually exclusive?

I’m certainly in favor of all ecological attempts to restore our fisheries. That’s essential. We need to do that. And New York is a prime example of cleaning up our waterways through the Clean Water Act. We’re getting major fish stocks coming back into our area. The fish reserves are coming back with a vengeance. So we need to restore our fisheries, absolutely, but that’s not going to happen if we keep on fishing them. Aquaculture is absolutely an answer to this rehabilitation, working hand in hand to provide for the new increase in interest and consumption of fish products.