Bren Smith is an aquaculture professional and former commercial fisherman, best known for pioneering Regenerative Ocean Farming via co-founding the non-profit GreenWave.
Born in Maddox Cove, Newfoundland, Canada, Smith left school aged 14 to become a commercial fisherman, plying his trade in the Grand Banks and the Bering Sea.[1] [2] Having left the commercial fishing and subsequently the fish farming industries, he founded the Thimble Island Ocean Farm, on the Thimbles Islands in Long Island Sound, before co-founding GreenWave to promote the co-existent aquaculture of kelp and shellfish by local communities.
Smith gave one of the two 35th Annual E.F. Schumacher Lectures, organised by the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, entitled Ecological Redemption: Ocean Farming in the Era of Climate Change.[3]
Smith graduated from Cornell Law School.
In 2015, Smith won the Buckminster Fuller Challenge prize for the GreenWave design.[4] In 2017, he was named by Rolling Stone as one of its 25 People Shaping the Future.[5] Also in 2017, the GreenWave 3D Farm was named one of Time's 25 Best Inventions of 2017.[6] In 2019, his semi-autobiographical work Eat Like A Fish, published by Penguin Random House, won a James Beard Foundation Book Award.[7]
Eat Like A Fish - My adventures as a fisherman turned restorative ocean farmer, 2019, Vintage Books[8]