🌐 AI Mapping & 3D-Printed Reefs: Coastal Climate Adaptation Gets Its Tech Stack

In 2009, I felt like I had nearly arrived. My TV show, The Lazy Environmentalist, was about to air its second season on Sundance Channel. My second book, The Lazy Environmentalist on a Budget, was generating sales, and I was invited to speak at the Hamptons Book Festival at the tip of Long Island.

There was an opening-night party at a swanky spot in Montauk, and the festival producer sent a car for me. My name was at the door.

Inside, the place was packed. The music was thumping. One of the organizers greeted me, then waved over a colleague.

“Would you take Josh in and introduce him around?”

“Of course,” said my new chaperone. She took me by the arm. “Come with me, darling.”

Before we entered the main room, I saw her twist back toward the organizer and mouth, Who is he?

The organizer cupped her hands around her mouth. He’s the Lazy Environmentalist!

We approached a glamorous group.

“Everyone!” my chaperone shouted over the music, grabbing their attention. “I want to introduce you to someone.”

They expanded their circle to let us in.

“This is Josh!” she hollered. “He’s the Last Environmentalist!”

“You are?” one woman asked, somewhere between confused and concerned.

“What? No!” I said to my chaperone and the group. “I’m not the last environmentalist. I’m the Lazy Environmentalist. Lazy!!”

That, somehow, was even more confusing.

“Why are you lazy?” one of them asked.

“No, I have a TV show—”

But before I could explain, they closed ranks.

Around the time President Obama helped secure the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015, he said: “We are the first generation with the knowledge to know what’s coming. And the last generation with a chance to do something about it.”

Both of those memories have weighed on me. Are we the last environmentalists?

But what if we actually solve climate change? Eliminate the use of fossil fuels? Learn to effectively adapt and become resilient to climate impacts?

Maybe last environmentalist is actually the goal. Make environmentalism obsolete. Make it just our normal mode of operating. In other words, win.

Natrx is the kind of company working toward that goal.

The Model is Climate Mitigation and Adaptation

The business world thinks about climate change through two lenses. 

The first is mitigation — how we build and deploy technologies to cut carbon emissions, eliminate fossil fuels, and solve the problem at its source. 

The second is adaptation and resilience — how companies, cities, and countries understand their exposure to climate impacts and deploy solutions to protect themselves.

Few companies tackle both. Yet that is exactly what Natrx and its COO, Tad Schwendler, are working on.

For a long time, the standard response to coastal erosion has been straightforward: build something big, hard, and heavy. Put in the rocks. Pour the concrete. Try to hold the line.

Most climate adaptation infrastructure tries to overpower nature. Natrx integrates into it.

Its software stack uses AI, machine learning, satellite imagery, and geospatial analysis to map erosion across entire coastlines at one-meter resolution — analysis that would otherwise take years — identifying where coastlines are changing and where interventions matter most. 

Then its advanced, custom 3D manufacturing capability creates ExoForms designed not just to reduce wave energy, but to promote sedimentation, support oyster and coral growth, and help natural systems come back to life around them.

Not just infrastructure. Ecological infrastructure.

Here is something I did not fully appreciate until talking with Tad: when we lose salt marshes, mangroves, and other coastal ecosystems, we are not only losing a natural buffer against storms, flooding, and sea level rise. We are also triggering a massive release of carbon. 

When coastal wetlands disappear, they release nearly 2 gigatons of CO₂ a year — 4.5% of annual global greenhouse gas emissions.

Building a business that helps solve and adapt to climate change is inherently complex. And it’s not just the technology stack. It’s navigating complex multi-stakeholder environments, earning the trust of engineers and regulators, and making nature-based solutions commercially viable.

Natrx has deployed more than 80 projects across Louisiana, North Carolina, the Chesapeake Bay, Hawaii, and beyond. Sea level rise, erosion, stronger storms — these are not future risks. They are the current operating conditions, and the work Natrx is tackling right now.

Here’s what stood out from my conversation with Tad.

The old paradigm tries to stop nature. The new one harnesses it.

“Traditional engineering techniques are largely trying to keep nature out — how do we sort of stop nature, stop water from impacting something? The overall thesis of how do we use technology to harness the power of that natural system has been developing for some time.”

Natrx’s co-founders came out of traditional coastal engineering careers. They were good at the old approach. They just grew frustrated with its limitations.

You can’t prescribe a solution if you don’t know your starting conditions.

“It can be very difficult to just even describe what’s there. How do you prescribe a solution if you don’t even know what your starting conditions are?”

A marsh system is not a fixed thing. The boundary between land and water shifts constantly. Natrx’s entire software stack exists to solve this foundational problem before anyone picks up a shovel.

Coastal ecosystems are not just buffers. They are carbon vaults.

“These coastal systems — whether it’s a salt marsh in the southeastern U.S. or some kind of mangrove ecosystem — they are very carbon dense… As they erode, that carbon off-gases into the atmosphere. And in addition, as they erode, you lose the ability to sequester incremental carbon.”

Natrx is one of the few companies operating at that intersection of mitigation and adaptation simultaneously.

A successful project delivers economic, functional, and environmental returns simultaneously.

“We’re bringing economic advantages because there’s less material. We have functional advantages from dissipating the wave energy, and promoting the sedimentation. Then there are the environmental advantages of all this new habitat. A healthy ecosystem is more resilient than one big man-made structure with kind of a dead system behind it.”

Three-part value proposition: cheaper, more functional, and better for the environment.

Technology innovation is necessary but not sufficient.

“There also needs to be innovation around how you actually apply that technology in the real world — how you facilitate across these stakeholders, how the projects get financed, contracted, paid for. Taking friction out of those processes is part of how you build a more commercially viable set of solutions.”

Eighty-plus deployments haven’t just produced better reef structures. They’ve produced a knowledge base for navigating multi-stakeholder complexity that is very hard for competitors to replicate.

If it stays in academia and government, it never scales.

“We all believe we’re passionate about our mission. But part of how more of that work is done is you’ve got to have really commercially viable pathways. If it stays in the land of academia or government, we’re never going to achieve the sort of volume of work that society needs.”

🌐 Supercool Takeaway

Natrx is building a new kind of coastal defense built for the 21st century: AI software that shows where to intervene, and advanced 3D manufacturing of physical structures that protect and restore coastlines.

Operator Takeaways

Map first.
You can’t solve what you haven’t accurately defined.

Design for the system.
The best solutions do the engineering job and help the ecosystem recover.

Make yes easier.
Breakthrough solutions scale when permitting, financing, and contracting get easier every time.

This Week’s Podcast Episode

AI Mapping & 3D-Printed Reefs: Coastal Climate Adaptation Gets Its Tech Stack

🎙️ Listen on Apple, Spotify, and all other platforms.

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This week’s Supercool sponsor

What does a building really cost over its lifetime?

Beyond First Cost
Rethinking building value in the age of Building Performance Standards

When you're weighing retrofit decisions, building performance standards (BPS), energy options, incentives, and budget constraints, the cheapest path up front isn't always the smartest over time.

In this fireside chat, Fred Barry joins Rob Tanner to unpack how owners and operators can think more clearly about lifecycle value in a rapidly shifting market. They’ll explore how to balance first cost with long-term performance, navigate the growing pressure from BPS, and make better investment decisions amid more options and greater complexity.

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What: A Fireside Chat: Optimizing Lifecycle Value: First Cost, Energy Choices, and Market Pressure

When: April 28, 12-1 pm, CST

Register: Reserve Your Spot Here

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Where Supercool is Heading Next

Climate Tech Day at Raleigh Durham Startup Week

I’ll be in Raleigh on April 20 for a live podcast recording with Kathryn Polkoff of Hoofprint Biome. We’ll discuss the growth of climate tech across the Research Triangle in North Carolina, and I’ll share insights from Supercool and Plantd about driving market adoption for climate innovation.

Details and registration are here.

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