The Call of the Ports

Ann Carpenter Seeks Sustainable Solutions at the Crossroad of Goods and Ideas

By Evelyn McDonnell, Columnist

Ann Carpenter feels the call of the port.  When she was growing up in Michigan, her dad sometimes took her with him on the big laker ships that parked along the banks of the Detroit River, where he worked as a property appraiser. The family would drive to the Upper Peninsula and watch ships heavy with ore rise and fall in the Soo Locks. After college, when she chased her love of the infinite Great Lakes horizon to the Pacific Ocean, she didn’t settle until she found San Pedro. Twenty-eight years later, Carpenter’s still here, a mover and shaker in the emergent “blue tech” industry housed in the old warehouses at the end of Harbor Boulevard. On May 2, at the annual Ignite22 fair hosted by the company she founded, Braid Theory, the Detroit daughter moderated a talk between representatives from six ports, from Los Angeles to Quebec to Singapore.

“I’ve just always been fascinated around ports and shipping,” Carpenter says. “Ports represent this freedom, the crossroads of people and goods, but also of ideas.”

The kayaker, diver, and sailor also acknowledges the contradiction in her attraction to entities that are hotbeds of pollution; she has “a love/hate relationship” with ports, she says. She began the journey that has led to her current position after attending San Pedro community meetings in the early 2000s “at a time when the Port of LA wasn’t such a good environmental steward, let’s just put it that way.” Activists were holding the port accountable for a range of serious environmental injustices, successfully suing the shipping company, Evergreen Marine Corp. for concealing pollution. “At that time, nobody used the phrase ‘blue economy’,” Carpenter says. “They would say, ‘Ports are the economic drivers, but the communities bear the brunt of all the port activities.’”

Because of her childhood romance with ports, and her own prior career at Lockheed, Carpenter came away from these meetings looking not for conflict, but for resolutions. “I never took the path of doing the advocacy. It was always about how do we fix it? How do we make this better? How do we find solutions? How do we bring innovation?”

Now as “tenant number one” at AltaSea, the blue tech hub that celebrates its reopening May 29, Carpenter is perched in a kind of crow’s nest, looking out on the cranes of the ports of LA and Long Beach, with the open sea beckoning beyond the breakwater. It’s a precarious position, a delicate balancing act, neither fish nor fowl, so to speak. Fortunately, Carpenter has six decades of experience sailing through squalls.

FLY AND FLOAT

Michigan is the Great Lakes state. Carpenter grew up on its many inland waterways: swimming, canoeing, sailing a Hobie Cat, catching frogs. But it was standing on the edge of Lake Michigan, looking out on the water stretching to the sky, with no other shore in sight, that determined her future. “To map that limitless horizon — that’s what I needed. I needed that ability to not see the end.”

After getting her bachelor’s in math from the University of Michigan-Dearborn, she and her siblings drove straight from Detroit to Malibu. “We didn’t stop until we landed right at the water.”

A boat brought Carpenter to San Pedro. She and her second husband, whom she met in Bora Bora, lived on a 44-foot sailboat for almost seven years, ultimately living as a “sneak aboard” at Cabrillo Marina. “To this day, I don’t think there’s any other experience like sleeping on a boat. You know, that little clanging of the halyards and the general rocking, the fresh air. It’s just like being in a cocoon.”

Life wasn’t all smooth sailing. Carpenter and her husband were anchored off Anacapa one day when the Santa Ana winds blew in. It took  11 hours to sail the few miles to shore. Waves poured into the cockpit. There were so many cries of “Mayday!” the Coast Guard was asking all vessels to assist. “You get at that point where you can’t even talk, you’re white-knuckled, the adrenaline is just flowing, and you’re completely quiet, and just nothing matters but staying alive.”

Experiences like that don’t scare the entrepreneur away; they deepen her connection to the water. “They make me love it even more … We paint this picture: Oh isn’t it wonderful: the palm tree, the ocean, everything is beautiful. But the power of every level of water — I mean water carves out canyons, water moves rocks. Water is life, the universe, and everything …  All of that just makes you more respectful, more understanding that you have such a responsibility to live up to what the ocean gives us.”

After her second divorce, Carpenter bought a house in Point Fermin, where she still lives. She met her third husband kayaking off the shore. A harbor seal crawled on his vessel, so she figured he had to be all right. They have one child, Zeke.

Carpenter still considers a kayak her “vehicle of choice.” She loves “any body of water where I can’t see the edge, where you can just keep going. I also like tropical waters when you can actually see colorful fish, you don’t have to scuba dive but you could just snorkel and you see so much color and so much life and that beauty.”

The intrepid kayaker has a recurring dream: She is on a sailboat in Tahiti, the kind that’s built like a canoe with an outrigger that you can stand on. She is on the edge of the outrigger “like a flying fish just going right over the ocean. That kind of feeling is what I dream about a lot: That idea that you can skim with and be a part of and above the ocean. You can fly and float simultaneously.”

RETHINKING BUSINESS MODELS

In 1990, Carpenter left Lockheed and formed her own marketing and design firm. Around 2010, she joined PortTechLA, a business incubator. She founded Braid Theory in 2016. In 2017, they became tenant number one at Alta Sea.

It’s a little hard to parse what Braid Theory does. According to its website, “Braid Theory weaves together entrepreneurs, industry influencers, and corporate partners to accelerate the adoption of transformative technology, drive market growth, and create profitable collaborations.” Specifically, BT runs incubator and accelerator programs that help companies with new technologies develop their products, their pitches, and their profile and find financial backing and customers. Ignite22 is their annual showcase. On May 2, dozens of hopeful startups showed their products alongside goliaths such as SoCalGas and the Port of Los Angeles. There was a wine, The Hidden Sea. There was a company that still makes snowboarding goggles out of recycled water bottles. There was the California Seaweed Festival. AltaSea-based companies such as AltaSeads and SeaTopia mingled with entrepreneurs from around the world, while robots skitted about between the piers.

BT emphasizes environmentally conscientious companies. “We’re looking at energy transition, decarbonisation of shipping and goods movement, understanding the ocean,” says Carpenter. “So we’re absolutely not going to do the same kind of exploitative farming practices that we do on land. We can instead go from an extractive economy to a circular economy to a sustainable, regenerative economy. Those are where we focus on solutions.”

But she is not naïve about the fact that there can be an inherent contradiction between capitalism’s endless appetite for economic expansion and the planet’s fragile, finite resources.

“Part of it is, where’s the capitalistic business model when the ocean is your client? Who pays for it? How do you pay for it? So we start thinking like, how do we creatively rethink a lot about this; it can’t always be government or philanthropic funding and grants that does this. That’s core to what keeps me up at night, is how do you rethink business models to still have the market be part of funding the solutions?”

Terms like blue tech and blue economy can be camouflage for bluewashing: when companies hide rapacious practices behind the eco-sounding language (it’s the aquatic version of greenwashing). Should there even be a blue economy? How much more money do people need? As Carpenter – the portophile – says, if you really want zero- emissions, just stop all shipping.

As the saying goes, that ship has sailed – maritime trade has existed for more than a millennium. Braid Theory is about bringing groups together to be thoughtful and creative about progress, not to grow just for growth’s sake. Its founder is well versed in the damage caused by shortsighted past harvesting practices on land and sea, whether it’s the monocropping of corn for ethanol or the adverse effects of salmon farming. She calls BT’s annual gathering Ignite22 because  “it is celebrating innovations that are shaping the 22nd century.”

Braid indicates entwining, and collaboration is Carpenter’s mantra. Before Covid, she founded a co-working space on 6th Street. “You’ve got to bring people together now for solving those long-term problems. You’ve got to be able to find a place where people are fired up, or create an environment where people are fired up, to solve the deeper problems, and not just kick the can down the road for that next century…. You can get out of your own way when you’re collectively looking at that point in the horizon that we all want to see.”

 Evelyn McDonnell is the author or editor of eight books, an internationally recognized award-winning journalist, and a professor at Loyola Marymount University. She writes the series Bodies of Water – portraits of lives aquatic – for Random Lengths.

Copyright Evelyn McDonnell 2024