(of a plant or animal) of indigenous origin or growth.
a person born in a specified place or associated with a place by birth, whether subsequently resident there or not.
Rockweed
Rockweed [Ascophyllum Nodosum] is native to both The North Sea (The Netherlands) and The Northern Atlantic (Maine). The Blue Hill Peninsula beaches are simply covered with it. This incredibly common and hardy seaweed provides a habitat for countless marine creatures, cleans the ocean, locks in carbon, and protects the beleaguered shoreline from erosion.
Rockweed vessels show the beauty of this ancient algae, while drawing attention to its environmental value.
Rockweed, as a species, is three and a half billion years old, but my recent work lead to seaweed being added to the Future Materials Bank.
The Future Materials Bank is a meeting place of materials for artists, that proposes non-toxic, biodegradable or otherwise sustainable alternative materials. It is an initiative by the Nature Research department at the Jan van Eyck Academie in The Netherlands in collaboration with the Masters program of Materials Futures at Central St Martins in London.
To construct the work, only seaweed, linen, and wax were used. Where a finer thread was required, horsehair has been used instead.
Sustainable
Rockweed has always had a use as mulch and fertilizer, and packing material for bait and lobster. Commercially it is harvested to produce nutritional additives for pet and livestock feed and as thickeners for food, cosmetics, and some paints.
It is extremely important that Rockweed is harvested in a responsible way, so the ocean’s forest stays intact. The Rockweed Coalition’s mission is to promote conservation of intertidal marine habitat, including rockweed. Watch their short video here.
RECOMMENDATIONS FOR A SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT OF SEAWEED AQUACULTURE IN EUROPE
'Seaweed plays a key ecological role in coastal ecosystems and can be used for various applications. The development of the seaweed aquaculture sector can help to address global challenges related to human health, human consumption and sustainable circular bioeconomy. The applications are various from medical, cosmetics, food, animal feed sectors to agriculture (as a biofertiliser) and aquaculture development.'
'The global seaweed industry has a total estimated value of €8.1 billion per year and is continuing to expand (Bixler and Porse 2011; FAO 2016). Yet the rapid expansion of this industry can have unforeseen ecological and societal consequences. The lack of biosecurity measures and global legislation governing the cultivation and movement of seaweeds between regions and continents has been identified as one of the main challenges to tackle in order to safeguard a sustainable seaweed industry (Cottier-Cook et al. 2016).'
'Markets show increasing interest in seaweed resources and their potential role in European Blue Growth and Bioeconomy. The development of seaweed aquaculture thus involves, in the medium and long term, the expansion of cultivation at sea due to the unlimited space offered by the latter. However, offshore cultivation may bring meaningful impacts on the environment and on biodiversity owing to the risk of escape of propagules with the potential to affect local genetic biodiversity.
To support the sustainable development of seaweed aquaculture, all stakeholders – industry, farmers, researchers and policy- makers – must collaborate to establish European strategic-development plans.'
Read the full report here: researchgate.net/publication/333893901_PEGASUS_CONCLUDING_RECOMMENDATIONS
Come snorkel in the kelp forest with Josie and on into Josie's studio as Sir David Attenborough narrates the story of the bull kelp forest off the California coast as an introduction to global kelp forest issues.
An exhibit featuring forty prints, large and small, from the portfolios that generated the research for the book, The Curious World of Seaweed. Specimens from Beaty's extensive algal collection will be on view in cases below the artwork. An extensive website brings captions, videos, and explanations to your fingertips, truly a marriage of art and science.
The seeds Orth and his team planted grew into plants which, in turn, produced their own seeds. “Nature kind of took over,” says Orth. Credit: TNC
When Karen McGlathery used to swim in the coastal bays off Virginia’s Eastern Shore, the water would quickly turn cloudy and brown as sediment swirled around her. Now, 25 years later, for as far as she can swim the water remains clear. The sediment is anchored in place by lush green seagrass meadows, teeming with fish, scallops and crustaceans. “It’s like this beautiful underwater prairie,” says McGlathery. “It’s just gorgeous.”
McGlathery, an environmental sciences professor at the University of Virginia, is part of a team running the largest seagrass restoration project in the world in these coastal bays — and one of the most successful. The two-decade-long project is a “blueprint for restoring and maintaining healthy ecosystems,” according to a 2020 research paper, and proof that marine habitats can be brought back to life in a way that’s self-sustaining.
In the 1930s, a wasting disease swept along the U.S. east coast, wiping out huge swaths of eelgrass. Where Virginia’s coastal bays used to be carpeted in this species of seagrass, suddenly they were barren. “Everyone thought that eelgrass could never, ever get back,” says Robert Orth, who was a marine biologist at the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences (VIMS) until his retirement this year, “but nobody really started doing any kind of experiments to see.”
That changed in the late 1990s with the discovery of some small patches of seagrass in the bay, the existence of which proved that conditions could once again support the plants.
A volunteer working on Orth’s seagrass restoration project. Credit: TNC
Orth started with small-scale experiments, digging up adult seagrass from other areas and transplanting it into the bay. The seagrass survived, but the process wasn’t scalable — restoring thousands of acres through transplanting would have been a huge logistical challenge. So, says Orth, “We said, well, why not try to launch a restoration program using seeds?”
In 2001, he started an effort to physically rebuild the ocean ecosystem, seed by seed. From a moving boat, he and his team scattered seeds across four bays: South, Cobb, Spider Crab and Hog Island. The seeds survived, growing into plants which, in turn, produced their own seeds. “Nature kind of took over,” says Orth. “While we continue to put seeds in areas that don’t have eelgrass, nature has been spreading eelgrass naturally.”
This graph shows how seagrass has reestablished itself in the four targeted bays. Credit: Science Advances
Over the last 20 years, supported by an army of volunteers, the project team has sown nearly 75 million seeds. Around 9,000 acres of coastal bays are now blanketed with eelgrass, which has improved water quality, increased marine biodiversity and helped mitigate climate change by capturing and storing carbon.
The project is “game changing,” says Carlos Duarte, a seagrass expert and marine science professor at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, both in its sheer scale and the raft of long-term data it provides on the climate benefits of seagrass.
A decade ago, Duarte and Orth nicknamed seagrass “the ugly duckling” of environmental conservation, because so few cared about it. That’s slowly changing as the huge benefits it offers are recognized. Despite covering less than 0.2 percent of the ocean, it is responsible for about 10 percent of the ocean’s ability to store carbon. It provides a vital habitat for marine life, boosts commercial fishing, helps purify water, protects coastlines and even traps and stores microplastics.
But seagrass is also one of the most at-risk ecosystems, threatened by coastal development, nutrient runoff from agriculture and stormwater, and rising ocean temperatures.
“I like to say these grasses are sort of the canary in the coal mine,” says Jill Bieri, the Virginia Coast reserve program director at The Nature Conservancy, who has been involved in the restoration for the past seven years. They will thrive if the water quality is good, and die off if it’s not. It’s a lesson for other coastal regions, says Chris Patrick, the VIMS professor who has taken over the project since Orth’s retirement. “If you can fix the water quality issues, you can restore the grass very quickly, within a few decades.”
Restoration projects around the world are looking to Virginia for lessons. Richard Unsworth, associate professor of biosciences at Swansea University, is leading the U.K.’s biggest seagrass restoration project in the waters of Dale Bay in Pembrokeshire, Wales. “We’ve been using their science as a yardstick,” he says. So far he and his team have planted more than a million seeds, but his ambitions are bolder. “We want to apply the techniques that they’re using [in Virginia] to rejuvenate the coastal seas of the U.K., at a similar scale if not bigger.”
Back in Virginia’s bays, the next phase of the project is to see if they can convert the carbon stored in the seagrass meadows into carbon credits to raise money for further restoration. That’s where McGlathery’s work feeds in; the long-term research from the project has allowed her to calculate precise data about how much carbon the seagrass stores. The project is in the process of registering with Verra, a leading certifier of carbon credits. If successful, it will be the world’s first verified seagrass carbon offset program.
In the meantime, the team is working towards restoring every one of the coastal bays to the way they were before the wasting disease claimed the eelgrass. The project, says Unsworth, “is demonstrating to the world that you can actually restore the oceans.” While plenty of projects have restored coastal habitats such as mangroves and salt marshes, he adds, few have been able to restore the ecosystems that lie beneath the surface of the water. “It’s quite fundamental what they achieved.”
Local legend has it that Beinn Ghobhlach mountain in the Scottish Highlands was once home to a witch. Resentful of sharing the area with people, she planned to cast a spell that would destroy the surrounding forests, making the land uninhabitable. Before she could unleash the destruction, an enraged god used his sword to split her and the mountain in half, saving the forests and the people who relied on them.
Beinn Ghobhlach’s distinctive double peak sits on the Scoraig peninsula, which forms a barrier between two long, narrow lochs that cut into the jagged west Highlands coastline. This far north, in the region of Wester Ross, it is still bracingly cold in late spring. Among the wildest places left in Britain, it feels intact and unspoiled by humans.
But in reality, it is far from intact. Despite the protective rage of the god in the story, Wester Ross and the rest of the Highlands have seen rampant deforestation. Overfishing obliterated herring in the lochs decades ago. White-tailed eagles went extinct in Scotland by 1916. Lynxes, wolves, and wild boars are long gone. Even the language has stared down extinction—just over one percent of Scotland’s people speak Gaelic.
Scotland’s final truly untouched wilderness is underwater: the huge kelp forests that border the Highlands and surrounding islands. On a crisp May morning, Ailsa McLellan takes me to visit them.
A tornado of yellow and blue—hair, eyes, jacket, boots—McLellan’s vivid colors seem of a piece with the blue sea and bright-green algae covering the rocks of her home coastline. She grew up by the ocean a few hours south of Wester Ross, learning from her parents to pick seaweed for food and garden fertilizer. These days, McLellan lives near Ullapool, a small village on the shore of one of the lochs around the Scoraig peninsula. When the tides are in her favor, she drives 40 minutes to uninhabited Garvie Bay, where she has a license to harvest seaweed for small-scale commercial use.
The vibrant yellow blooms of gorse line the hillsides near Ullapool, Scotland. Photo by Tillman Schlageter/Alamy Stock Photo
On the drive out to the bay, every turn brings a new view of the ocean, mottled navy and turquoise. The craggy islands of the Outer Hebrides loom on the horizon. Golden gorse bushes flank the road, filling the air with a buttery peach smell. “There’s a saying in Scotland that when there aren’t any gorse flowers, there’s no kissing. Or something like that,” McLellan tells me. Fortunately for locals, “the gorse flowers all year up here.”
Garvie Bay is an excellent spot for seaweeds. They coat the intertidal rocks in purple, brown, and near-fluorescent green. McLellan sells some of the seaweeds dried and coarsely ground into chunks as snacks or flavorful additions to soups and stews; others she sells fresh to seafood companies that supply restaurants. But lately, the tangles of kelp that darken the water below the tideline have been commanding her attention for different reasons.
In August 2018, a Scottish company called Marine Biopolymers proposed the first-ever industrial-scale harvest of kelp from Scotland’s wild and watery forests—including those here at Garvie Bay. The company argues that because kelp regrows quickly, the project would be an eco-friendly economic boon.
But kelp plays a crucial role in the environment, providing food and habitat to commercially important species like cod and lobster as well as the charismatic otters and seals that draw tourists to the Highlands, among other ecological benefits. Coastal community groups, environmentalists, and fishing industry organizations aligned against Marine Biopolymers’ proposal.
Ailsa McLellan on the beach at Garvie Bay, Scotland, where she harvests seaweeds. Photo by Cathleen O’Grady
McLellan is one of their standard-bearers: she led the opposition’s social media campaign and started a petition that racked up over 26,000 signatures. She is worried that industrial harvesting would open the door to potentially massive collateral damage. And with the world’s kelp forests facing a range of anthropogenic threats, from pollution to climate change, the sustainability of an industrial harvest is far from clear cut.
The kelp forests that Marine Biopolymers was proposing to dredge have been there for thousands of years untouched, McLellan argues. “Imagine a kelp dredger going up and down in there,” she says, gesturing at the water. “I actually couldn’t bear it.”
Had McLellan and I slipped below the waves, the murky forests we glimpsed from shore would spring to life. Kelp washed up on the beach is sticky and brown, but in sunlit water it glows as gold as the gorse.
The species at the center of Scotland’s kelp controversy is Laminaria hyperborea. People sometimes call it cuvie or tangle, but they often refer to it as just hyperborea. Unlike the seaweeds coating Garvie Bay’s rocky shore, it prefers deeper waters that cover it even at low tide. The mottling of the ocean hints at its ubiquity—the turquoise patches overlay bare sand; the navy patches are thick with kelp.
This giant alga—not a plant, although it resembles one—grows from rootlike holdfasts that clutch the rocks. Its central stalks, called stipes, can stretch much taller than a human and are topped by long fronds, forming a canopy that whips back and forth in turbulent water like branches in a blustery wood. Small fish flit through the chaos. Iridescent purple Irish moss clings to the underwater rocks gripped by the kelp holdfasts, and creatures like blue-rayed limpets cling to the kelp.
Hyperborea can live for more than a decade. Its role in the ocean resembles that of forests on land: kelp forests teem with life, from tiny invertebrates that live on holdfasts and stipes to larger animals that feed on this seaweedy buffet. The thickets shelter young sea creatures and form the foundation of a food web that sustains otters, seals, porpoises, and seabirds—as well as fish that feed humans. And like terrestrial forests, kelp forests shape their landscape: they buffer the force of turbulent ocean waves, protecting the coast against erosion, storm surges, and flooding.
Seaweed has long been a direct part of the Scottish economy as well. In the 17th and 18th centuries, several kinds were burned to produce sodium carbonate, or kelp ash, for making soap and glass. These days, the industry is mostly made up of small-scale hand harvesters like McLellan.
But interest in Scotland’s seaweed has ramped up. In 2016, the Scottish government committed to setting guidelines for a large-scale kelp harvest, even as it examined the environmental pitfalls. In 2018, a different government agency explored whether kelp could offer an opportunity for Highlands fishermen to diversify their inherently unstable businesses as major fish stocks face the threat of collapse.
Forests of Laminaria hyperborea and other kelps provide habitat for a myriad of marine creatures. Photo by Andrey Nekrasov/Alamy Stock Photo
Eager to capitalize on the opportunities offered by seaweed, Marine Biopolymers set its sights on the Highlands’ plentiful hyperborea. Some seaweeds store a gooey substance called alginate, which has a range of industrial applications, including stabilizers in beer foam and heartburn medication. Different alginates have different uses, and China dominates the market for many types. But hyperborea, which produces a high-quality alginate with unique properties that make it particularly good at forming a gel, grows only in the North Atlantic, where Norway is its main harvester. Marine Biopolymers hoped to edge in with a new process for extracting alginate from hyperborea, while producing other useful industrial substances from what would otherwise be waste.
The company planned to apply the Norwegian harvesting method, using a comblike device called a kelp dredge to yank the kelp out whole rather than cutting it like wheat. Because of the spacing of its teeth, and the half meter it hovers above the seabed, the dredge is designed to snag mature kelp, holdfast and all, but leave juvenile kelp intact. New kelp colonizes the patches of bare rock more quickly than it would if the holdfasts were left to rot.
Scotland’s waters hold an estimated 20 million tonnes of hyperborea. Over seven years, Marine Biopolymers planned to harvest 125,700 tonnes—around six hectares for every 1,000. Each year, they planned to take less than a severe storm might remove, according to the company.
Before applying for a license, Marine Biopolymers needed to file a report with the government explaining what questions they would address in a formal study of the project’s environmental impacts and open that report to public comment and government feedback. So, in July 2018, the company published a scoping report about the proposal, which included leaving harvested patches alone for five years. Research from Norway suggests that this time frame allows kelp to recover its density and size. That, combined with the relatively small harvest, makes the process sustainable, says Sandy Dobbie, chairman of Marine Biopolymers. “Norway demonstrates that to us.”
The backlash that followed the report took the company by surprise. They have been miscast as “millionaires in suits,” Dobbie says. “We’re just a small team of Scottish scientists and engineers under attack from environmental organizations with an agenda.”
The environmentalists’ outcry against kelp dredging was particularly loud in Ullapool, a community whose engagement in environmental issues is visible at every turn. The long finger of Loch Broom, which separates the village from the Scoraig peninsula, is within a marine protected area. Café and pub bathroom posters describe how flushed wipes and cotton swabs end up in the ocean, and restaurants don’t offer plastic straws. Signs ask drivers to watch out for rare red squirrels—a species nearly ousted from Britain by invasive North American gray squirrels.
The squirrel signs are the work of the Ullapool Sea Savers, an environmental group led by children—and facilitated by adults—with a track record of successful activism. When the kelp dredge proposal emerged, the Sea Savers joined the opposition. But it wasn’t just environmentalists protesting.
The great spider crab is one species that finds food and shelter in Atlantic Ocean kelp forests. Photo by Nature Picture Library/Alamy Stock Photo
Marine Scotland, the branch of the civil service that manages marine licensing, received an avalanche of critical responses to Marine Biopolymers’ scoping report. “We understand that the potential for employment in fragile areas is of course a benefit of the proposal,” the Clyde Fishermen’s Association wrote, “but we remain unconvinced that the potential harm to wild fisheries would be worth the trade-off.”
More than 80 fishing and tourism businesses signed an open letter asking the Scottish government to refuse to grant a license. A coalition of grassroots organizations that aims to represent the voices of community members on questions of marine management also responded with alarm. Even famed television naturalist David Attenborough came out against the project.
Objections pointed out that kelp benefits not just ecosystems, but also people directly by gobbling atmospheric carbon and protecting against coastal erosion. They also rejected the idea that industrial harvesting was anything like a storm, even if the quantities of kelp torn free are comparable. Storms are likely to remove the weakest individuals, while industrial harvesting is less discriminating. And kelp in some areas faces little natural disturbance, which means that pulling it might disrupt established local ecosystems in ways they’re not adapted to withstand.
Some places could see heavier impacts for other reasons, too. In certain harvest blocks, Marine Biopolymers planned to take up to 15 percent of kelp in a year. The impact this would have on nearby fishing businesses is unknown—both from the lost habitat itself, and from potential disturbance to the surviving forests caused by the dredging vessels and newly dredged patches of forest. A dredging block in the neighborhood could be a serious concern “if you’re the one that fished there or lived next to it,” says McLellan, who has worked in marine science and fisheries management for nearly 20 years.
Back at Garvie Bay, McLellan looks out over the dappled sea. Her own license to harvest here is restrictive, specifying that she must cut kelp in ways that allow individual alga to regenerate, leaving the holdfast, stipe, and part of the frond. “I’ve got to record every single invertebrate by-catch,” she adds, “which is no problem. Because I’m cutting it by hand, I can flick it back into the sea.”
But McLellan’s license, which limits her to just 500 kilograms of seaweed per year, is a small-scale permit. Industrial dredging wasn’t on the radar when these rules were established and would need new rules allowing holdfasts to be uprooted and by-catch to be ignored. McLellan is deeply worried that changing regulations to accommodate one industrial operation will open the door to more prospectors, something she argues Scotland’s kelp forests couldn’t withstand.
Ailsa McLellan stands on the shore of Garvie Bay, where she selectively harvests seaweed by hand. McLellan and others are concerned about a proposal for a large-scale commercial seaweed harvest in Garvie Bay and elsewhere along the Scottish coastline. Photo by Cathleen O’Grady
As she leaps over slippery rocks, yellow bucket strapped to her back, McLellan hands me different species of seaweed to taste. Pepper dulse is, as its name suggests, a little fiery; crunchy sea spaghetti reminds me of snap peas. As eager as McLellan is to share this place and its flavors, defending it for months has come at a steep personal cost. “I made myself ill fighting this campaign,” she tells me. “I had a really physical response to the stress of it.”
At the heart of the battle is deep disagreement about what “sustainable harvest” means. Marine Biopolymers’ version involves waiting until there’s enough resource regrown for more harvest. McLellan’s and other opponents’ versions involve a kelp forest that thrives as if never harvested, supporting its full complement of creatures and the businesses and communities that rely on it.
The problem is that, regardless of core values, no one actually knows what dredging’s effects here would be. There’s a dearth of information on Britain’s kelp, says ecologist Dan Smale, making it nearly impossible to judge impacts. But Smale’s work may help.
Smale’s lab is based at the Marine Biological Association in Plymouth, England, a fortress of a structure overlooking a yacht-speckled harbor. When Smale returned to England after working in Antarctica and Australia, he was surprised to discover that research on North Atlantic kelp lagged behind that on kelp elsewhere. So in 2014, he teamed up with other researchers to fill in the blanks. One of the studies they undertook was unintentionally prescient to Scotland’s fight: examining how hyperborea responds to disturbances like storms, sea urchin grazing, and harvesting.
The Marine Biological Association’s lab in Plymouth, England. Photo by UrbanImages/Alamy Stock Photo
Hyperborea’s range stretches from northern Norway and Iceland as far south as Portugal, and the forests across this range differ dramatically. Unlike in Norway, hyperborea in warmer southerly waters is smaller and must jostle for space with other kelp species, which may change the effects of storms, harvests, and other things that rip out kelp, Smale says.
To drill down on those potential differences, his study sites run across the water temperature gradient of the British Isles, from the colder Orkney Islands off northern Scotland to southerly Plymouth’s comparatively balmy waters. At each field site, researchers have created disturbance plots in the kelp forest by hacking out the kelp and scrubbing the rock clean with wire brushes. Every year since, the team has returned to observe regrowth, comparing the recovering canopy height to the surrounding forest. They bring souvenirs back with them: samples of kelp from both the disturbed and the untouched sites.
A big outdoor deep freeze at Smale’s lab is stacked with grubby plastic boxes containing sacks full of kelp samples, which lab intern Nadia Frontier has been processing all summer. When I visit at the stickiest height of July, I join Frontier, armed with tea and podcasts, as she gingerly opens a sack and pulls out a section of stipe from an untouched kelp forest. The stipe—about the size of a medium zucchini—is nearly invisible beneath feathery red algae that has colonized its surface along with tiny animals.
Biologist Dan Smale prepares to dive on his study plots. He and his team monitor the biodiversity of kelp forests. Photo courtesy of Dan Smale
She collects the algae and the clinging beasties in a pan of water, and then, with a pair of tweezers, she separates mussels from snails, crabs from sea stars, and spends hours classifying them. To me, the hitchhikers look like a mound of quinoa, but under the microscope, the complexity dazzles.
One piece of kelp stipe from an untouched forest can yield thousands of tiny animals, which she counts with a tally clicker. That doesn’t include immobile creatures like barnacles and mussels that are weighed rather than counted. By contrast, the two most biodiverse kelp samples from a disturbance plot two years into the study each yielded two animals. The others had zero.
The experiment is still underway, so all results are provisional. From what Smale has seen, the kelp canopy might recover within four years, but the biodiversity is still much lower in disturbed areas compared with undisturbed. The scrubbed rock in Smale’s experiment doesn’t perfectly replicate the process of dredging though—a gap that research needs to fill.
But Marine Biopolymers won’t be the beneficiary of that research. As the company and its opponents tussled in the newspapers and on social media, Scottish Parliament ground through an unrelated, laborious revision of the law that governs natural resource management. Mark Ruskell from the Scottish Green Party saw an opportunity to formally protect kelp with an amendment banning any commercial harvest method that would harm the regrowth of individuals—including dredging. The final debate unfolded as the Ullapool Sea Savers watched from the gallery, and in November 2018, the legislation passed with Ruskell’s amendment.
A diver from Dan Smale’s lab surveys the regeneration of disturbance plots where kelp has been removed. Photo courtesy of Dan Smale
Dobbie argues that the ban sidestepped Scotland’s regulatory process and prevented an informed decision. “That’s not the kind of country I grew up in or want to have for my grandchildren,” he says. “I want a country that evaluates evidence and then decides.” Others were uneasy about the ban, too. Smale opposed Marine Biopolymers’ proposal, but balked at a decision based on outcry rather than careful study. Some politicians expressed misgivings about the legislative hammer even as they voted it in.
Kelp dredging will now be possible only with another legislative amendment. But the door might one day open again: parliament is now reviewing existing kelp regulations, which could lead to more research on Scotland’s kelp and the sustainability of industrial harvests. Marine Scotland has already scheduled mechanical harvesting field trials on seaweed species that pass an initial environmental and socioeconomic screening process, starting in summer of 2020.
Gaining a robust understanding of the region’s kelp forests will be laborious but imperative as global harvests of wild kelp gallop ahead of research on impacts. Norway dredges hundreds of thousands of tonnes of hyperborea annually, while Chile, China, and Japan harvest local species in large quantities. The United Nations warns that over-exploitation, climate change, and pollution could all lead to declines in wild harvesting.
Despite the remaining uncertainties about mechanical harvesting in Scotland, there is still a chance that McLellan’s more comprehensive vision of sustainability will find its footing in Scotland. Shortly before I leave Ullapool, local Scottish Wildlife Trust conservationist Noel Hawkins takes me out on the Loch Broom. We pause on the uninhabited Isle Martin, owned and managed by a community trust, where a row of abandoned cottages is the only reminder of the herring industry that once thrived there. These days, it’s a bird sanctuary where volunteers maintain a small garden. Seaweed fertilizer covers the ground beneath the shrubs.
The boat Hawkins helms is called Mada-Chuain, meaning “ocean wolf”—the term for killer whale in Gaelic. The threatened language is slowly making a comeback in Ullapool and other parts of Scotland. McLellan doesn’t speak Gaelic, but her grandparents did—and now her son does, part of the new generation of native speakers built by immersive language programs in schools.
It’s a recovery curve echoed at every turn: hints of a Scotland that was nearly destroyed but is beginning to resurface. Beavers have been reintroduced in places, and there has been talk of bringing back lynxes and wolves. In the past few decades, the people of the Scoraig peninsula have steadily reforested the land. Along with the handful of Highlands communities that have bought their land from wealthy landowners and now manage it in community trusts, their vision of Scotland’s natural resources is one of shared ownership and shared benefit.
The loch is choppy and we launch into brief flight with each wave, drenched in freezing spray. From wide Annat Bay, An Teallach, a craggy mountain capped in cloud, dominates the view toward Ullapool. Long ago, that cloud cap prompted its own local myth: the mountain was the forge where the gods created the world, and it was from An Teallach that the god came down to deal Beinn Ghobhlach’s witch her doom.
As we navigate the south side of Loch Broom, Hawkins points out white-tailed eagles nesting on a stretch of forbidding cliffs. They’re one of a few breeding pairs to have returned to the region and had their first chick in 2014. Last year, divers spotted a large herring spawning ground in a nearby loch for the first time in decades. Patches of recovered forest dot the mountains. And the water is marked with telltale patches of navy—healthy kelp, offering a chance to tread carefully right from the start.
The Marion Natural History Museum’s focus on timely science and matters pertaining to the natural world was once again brought to the fore when the museum hosted Scott Lindell of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on September 30. Lindell is a researcher whose primary interests are in finding ways to make the oceans a viable source for foods and fuel for the masses.
Lindell presented significant evidence of the importance of exploring new food sources for both animals and humans as pressure from rising CO2 levels are now an everyday reality.
A cornerstone of the researcher’s talk was just how the production and consumption of cattle and hogs negatively impact Earth’s delicate balance. At the very top of the list are beef cattle and hogs, reigning supreme in the need and use of land, fresh water, and feed. And then there are the gas emissions that add to the complexity of the problem. Livestock alone release a whooping 7.1 gigatons of CO2, or 15-percent of all animal emissions into the atmosphere annually.
Seaweed produces none.
From that platform, Lindell went on to discuss research activities he and others are exploring in an effort to come up with seaweed production and marketing strategies that are not only viable, but sustainable.
The importance of this work also touched on the need to find new food source as human populations continue to grow, outstripping standard farming and food production methods. Lindell said projections now stand at well over 10 billion people living on Earth by 2050, roughly 3 billion more than today’s estimated population. The question is: How will the planet support the people?
The production of seaweeds for foods is currently very small, Lindell pointed out, with U.S. consumption negligible versus Asian nations that consume 90-percent of seaweeds as a traditional food source. Marketing seaweed as food will be part of the answer, he said.
Lindell shared that the U.S. government is pumping dollars into finding and funding seaweed farming techniques that can help with food demands from hungry animals of the four and two-legged varieties. Lindell said that presently the U.S. Department of Energy is supporting 18 projects with $50 million invested thus far. The projection for seaweed production for 2021 was 1 million pounds, not nearly enough for full-scale usage by man and beast
Lindell discussed some of the methods currently used to propagate seaweed beds as well as explaining the lifecycle of seaweeds.
Each strand of kelp is called a “blade,” which can reach many tens of feet in length. The plant itself is a rather amazing life form, requiring both male and female spores (which start life as unisex cells) in order to produce the blades. These cells are called “gametophyte.” Once these have combined to create juvenile “sporophyte,” they are sprayed onto seed strings wound around cylinders and placed into the ocean farms.
Lindell said the process of finding the best spores for propagation evolves over several growing seasons. The entire process has 10 steps, as he noted. Those are: spawn spores from blades, separate individual male and female spores, vegetatively culture, cross-select best males and females, apply baby blades to farm, plant, maintain farm from November to May, harvest and evaluate cross breeds, conduct genetic analyses, and select spores for the next generation.
It is through this continuance crossbreeding process that the best kelp plants are produced.
Another aspect of Lindell’s research is the concept of “sinking seaweed to capture or sequester CO2.” Here’s how that works. After the kelp spores are cultivated and sprayed onto the strings, those strings are eventually attached to ropes that are sunk to as much as 1,000 meters deep. They decay over time, not returning to the surface where they could rejoin the carbon cycle.
There are questions as to the viability of sequestering carbon through kelp on a scale large enough to make an impact, but as Heather Smith of Sierra Magazine wrote in her June 20, 2021 article, “Seaweed farming has promise. In addition to sequestering carbon, it can provide habitat for fish and mitigate local effects of ocean acidification …[yet] the most effective way to sequester carbon is to not release it in the first place.”
One question Lindell received from the audience was, what can we as individuals do to help mitigate the problem with CO2 and promote more aquaculture activities? Lindell responded that one of the biggest hurdles to farming at sea is going through a permitting process that can be cumbersome, expensive, and time-consuming. He suggested talking to and working with local licensing agencies, making them aware of the need to explore this type of food production and to find new ways to get licensing approved.
Lindell said that in Maine and other commercial fishing areas, kelp farming can help support working waterfronts by creating jobs and sustaining boat owners when and where fish stocks may be depleting. He also suggested that anyone who hasn’t yet eaten a recipe that contains seaweed should try it. It might not be an acquired taste after all.
To learn more about this and other research taking place at Woods Hole Oceanography Institution, visit www.whoi.edu. For more information on upcoming presentations offered by the Marion Natural History Museum, visit www.marionmuseum.org.
Sargassum algae piles up along Mexico's Punta Piedra beach. (Reuters)
In 2018, as seaweed piled up on beaches throughout the Caribbean, it began to rot. Already stinking and sulfurous, the thick layers began to attract insects and repel tourists. The seaweed—a type of brown algae called sargassum—had grown in the ocean and washed ashore in unprecedented quantities. It prevented fishers from getting into the water, and entangled their nets and propellers. It entangled sea turtles and dolphins, too, fatally preventing them from surfacing for air. It died and sank offshore, smothering seagrass meadows and coral reefs. Barbados declared a national emergency.
In normal years, sargassum is a blessing rather than a curse. Mats of it drift around the ocean, held afloat by gas-filled bladders that look like grapes. They accumulate in the North Atlantic, forming the Sargasso Sea—a region that the explorer Sylvia Earle has described as a “golden floating rainforest.” The fronds are a breeding site for American eels, a sanctuary for turtle hatchlings, and a haven for hundreds of other species, some of which live nowhere else. The Sargassum fish, for example, is a small, frog-faced predator whose body has adapted to perfectly mimic the seaweed.
The Caribbean would usually experience a few small mats of sargassum washing ashore in a given year, until 2011, when the seaweed first began arriving in unexpectedly large waves. Similar pileups have occurred almost every year since; 2015 and 2018 saw especially bad blooms. Some countries have set up nets to block the incoming algae, or hired people to clear affected beaches with rakes and backhoes. And still the sargassum comes.
The seaweed does have one very convenient trait: The chlorophyll pigment within it reflects infrared light more strongly than the surrounding seawater does. To satellites that detect infrared, sargassum blazes like a bonfire. Six years ago, Jim Gower from Fisheries and Oceans Canada used satellite images to show that the 2011 bloom had an unusual origin. In April, sargassum had begun growing off the coast of Brazil and near the mouth of the Amazon River, in an area far south of its normal range. By July, it had spread across the entire Atlantic.
Now Mengqiu Wang, from the University of South Florida, and her colleagues have shown that this ocean-spanning bloom, which they’ve dubbed the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt, is now an annual feature. By analyzing 19 years of satellite images, they showed that the belt first appeared in 2011, and has reappeared almost every summer since (except for 2013). Last June, when the belt was at its thickest, it contained more than 22 million tons of seaweed, and stretched fully across the Atlantic’s waters, from the Gulf of Mexico to the western coast of Africa.
That figure is likely to be an underestimate: With a spatial resolution of one kilometer, the satellite data doesn’t capture small chunks of Sargassum. “It highlights the most aggregated areas rather than describing the entirety of what is present,” says Deb Goodwin, an oceanographer at the Sea Education Association.
The Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt is a loose collection of seaweed scattered over a very large area, not a continuous bridge. It’s also not produced by the Sargasso Sea, which lies further north; Wang’s team confirmed that by simulating how particles of seaweed would move in the Atlantic’s currents. They concluded that the belt likely develops from local patches of sargassum that occur naturally in the tropics. But such patches have always existed. Why have they only recently started to form sprawling blooms?
Wang’s team thinks that the new growth was connected to two factors on opposite sides of the Atlantic: the water discharged by the Amazon and upwelling currents rising off West Africa. These two phenomena pump nutrients into the tropical Atlantic. When they’re unusually strong, as they apparently were in 2009, they effectively flood the ocean with fertilizer, allowing sargassum to run amok.
But why, then, did the seaweed not bloom in 2010? Wang’s team thinks that it was delayed by low salinity (due to the influx of Amazon freshwater) and abnormally high temperatures—conditions that suppress the growth of sargassum. Only in 2011, when temperatures returned to normal, could the seaweed make use of the influx of nutrients from previous years, and go wild.
And the bigger the blooms in the summer, the more likely they are to leave behind patches that survive through the winter. If the conditions are right the following year, these “seed populations” can restart another bloom. “Each successive bloom makes it difficult to imagine an end to this self-reinforcing cycle,” says Amy Siuda, an ecologist and oceanographer at Eckerd College. “This is likely the new normal.”
So, a quartet of factors—strong Amazon discharge, strong West African upwelling, moderate temperatures, and the presence of a seed population—could potentially explain the Sargassum Belt, including why it appears every summer, and why it was especially thick in 2015 and 2018. But such factors “have impacted the central Atlantic Ocean for decades, if not centuries,” says Siuda “Why are we only seeing sargassum bloom in this region now? What tipped the balance? There is clearly still more to learn.”
Chuanmin Hu, who led the study, agrees. “I have to emphasize that we have no direct evidence to prove any of this,” he says. “These are our speculations, some educated and some hand-waving.” They’ve been forced into that because many of the factors they identified aren’t regularly measured. For example, they could only find data on the nutrients in the Amazon for two years: 2010 and 2018. The latter levels were much higher, which might explain why sargassum blooms were so big that year. Or it might not. The river might have more nutrients due to increased fertilizer use, and stronger runoffs due to deforestation. Or it might not. “I don’t think there’s enough data,” Hu says. “It takes a huge amount of money to go there and take measurements.”
Of the four factors that the team identified, only sea surface temperatures are regularly measured. And while many scientists have suggested that hot water could speed the growth of sargassum, “we found the opposite,” Hu says. That’s not to say climate change is irrelevant, he cautions: Changing patterns of rain and wind could, for example, influence the strength of the West African upwelling. Nor should the Caribbean count on rising temperatures to solve its sargassum woes, because the pace of change is likely too slow to make a difference in the near future.
Hu adds that other factors could be behind the rise of the Sargassum Belt, including nutrient-rich dust blowing in from the Sahara and changes in ocean currents. And several aspects of the blooms still don’t make sense. “If I were you, I would ask: If you have so much nitrogen and phosphorus, why do other [algae] in the ocean not grow as fast?” he says. “I can’t answer that.”
Goodwin adds that “scientific understanding of Sargassum growth and bloom dynamics under natural, open ocean conditions is extremely limited,” since scientists have only addressed these questions in lab experiments. And the sargassum itself is changing, too. Siuda says that the recent blooms have included “a previously rare and genetically distinct form of sargassum” that comes from the south, differs from those in the Sargasso Sea, and harbors a slightly different community of organisms.
Little is known about this strain, or how the bloom is affecting the ecology around it, which makes it hard to predict how it will react to future conditions. And since it likely evolved in relative isolation from its northerly relatives, its northward expansion suggests that “environmental conditions and ocean circulation patterns in the central Atlantic may have been shifting, undetected, for longer than the time interval examined by [Wang and her colleagues],” says Goodwin. “A critical larger question emerges: What drove such an ecological transformation at unprecedented scale?”
In the absence of such knowledge, it is very hard to predict when and where future blooms will occur. “Like hurricanes or nor’easters, we will likely be able to predict the severity of the upcoming season, but we won’t be able to predict exactly where the inundations will come ashore,” Siuda adds.
As Molwyn Joseph, Antigua’s environment minister, said last summer, “We have made the assumption that this is going to be an annual thing, and the same way we prepare for hurricanes we have to prepare for Sargassum.”
Dear friends, lovers and seaweeders,
Exciting news today! Becoming CLIMAVORE, the Cooking Sections project for the 2021 Turner Prize exhibition, opens at the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum in Coventry. It consists of a collaboration with 21 museums across the UK that have removed farmed salmon from their menus and introduced CLIMAVORE dishes instead. Alongside this transition, at the Herbert we present a new installation, Salmon: Traces of Escapees. That and much more below.
Becoming CLIMAVORE explores the gap between the appearance and the reality of salmon—their inability to escape intensive farms. For this UK-wide project, 21 museums have removed farmed salmon from the menus of their cafés and restaurants, and introduced CLIMAVORE dishes made with ingredients that improve soil and water quality, and cultivate marine habitats. This move continues a multi-year collaboration between Cooking Sections and restaurants in Skye and Raasay since 2017.
From today, you can taste CLIMAVORE dishes at: Aberdeen Art Gallery
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead
BFI Southbank, London
Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Coventry
Holburne Museum, Bath
London Transport Museum
Manchester Art Gallery
Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh
Royal Museums Greenwich
Science Museum, London
Science and Industry Museum, Manchester
Serpentine, London
Tate Britain, London
Tate Liverpool
Tate Modern, London
Tate St Ives
The Whitworth, The University of Manchester
Turner Contemporary, Margate
Victoria & Albert Museum, London
Wellcome Collection, London
And in Skye and Raasay: Edinbane Lodge
Eòlach
Isle of Skye Baking Company
Loch Bay
Raasay House
Rosedale Hotel
Scorrybreac
The Ferry Inn
Three Chimneys
Visitors can taste a CLIMAVORE meal and collect one of the postcards from a twelve-part mosaic at participating restaurants.
Following the exhibition Salmon: A Red Herring at Tate Britain this year, in the 2021 Turner Prize exhibition you will find the installation Salmon: Traces of Escapees, the second chapter of the salmon trilogy, which explores the environmental impact of salmon farms in Scotland through the traces they leave beyond the circumference of open-net pens. Excrement, drugs, synthetic colour and parasites billow out, polluting the surrounding waters. But even if the nets break, farmed salmon remain captive; they can no longer escape their own modified bodies. Salmon: Traces of Escapees is a recognition that nothing can be removed without leaving traces, no divestment can be disassociated from extractivism, and no domestication comes without the colonisation of the gut.
Becoming CLIMAVORE was developed as a Back to Earth campaign at the Serpentine in collaboration with Benugo. SUCH A Big Thank you to all those who have supported its realisation.
Project team: Katharine Barrington, Dani Burrows, Shona Cameron, Remi Kuforiji, Rosa Whiteley
Graphic design: An Endless Supply
Salmon: Traces of Escapees team: Jesse Connuck (text editing), Gemma Brockis (voice), Antonia Luxem (film editing), Richy Carey (sound), Gareth Watkins (voice recording), Nick Middleton (aerial footage and sound recording)
This work could not have been made possible without the research and writings of: Alex Blanchette, Stefan Helmreich, Hannah Landecker, Martin Lee Muller, Marianne Elizabeth Lien, James Merryweather, Alexandra Morton, Reviel Netz, Susan Schuppli, Nicole Shukin, Corin Smith, Heather Swanson, Zoe Todd, Elizabeth A. Wilson.
Special thanks: Hamish Anderson, Atlas Arts, Emma Bal, Tuur van Balen, Benugo, British Art Show 9, Revital Cohen, Danny De Ruiter, Martin Dibben, Gaia Art Foundation, Nicoletta Fiorucci, Shane Kavanagh, Emre Keskin, Tomas Kolkus, Nathan Ladd, Rebecca Lewin, Tonderai Maboreke, Sophie Mccready, Emma Nicolson, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Meriç Onur, Rita Pacheco Da Conceição, Lucia Pietroiusti, Theodor Ringborg, SALT, Serpentine, Amy Sherlock, Tate Eats, The Otolith Group, Tyra Tingleff, Kelly Tsipni-Kolaza, Ben Warner, Eyal Weizman.
Salmon : Traces of Escapees. Cooking Sections, 2021 Turner Prize Exhibition, Herbert Art Gallery, Coventry. Installation view.
CLIMAVORE: On Tidal Zones
Weekend Celebration, Isle of Skye
8-10 October 2021
Climavore: On Tidal Zones, Cooking Sections, 2017. Atlas Arts. Photo: Nick Middleton
After five years of meals, workshops, discussions, recipe sharings, and talks we’re saying a fond farewell to the Oyster Table as we are growing and developing new ways of being CLIMAVORE across the island. Come along for one final celebration at the table, where we will reflect on the last 5 years, and share what the future holds for CLIMAVORE.
CLIMAVORE: SEASONS MADE TO DRIFT - last weeks!
SALT Beyoğlu, Istanbul
April 7 – October 24, 2021
Weathered, Seasons Made To Drift, Cooking Sections, SALT Beyoğlu, Istanbul. 2021. Installation View.
CLIMAVORE: Seasons Made to Drift continues for a final few weeks at SALT Beyoğlu. This exhibition proposes a journey into the seasons that once were, the regions that no longer are, and the shores that may be.
Exhausted (2021), one of the new site-responsive projects developed for the exhibition, undoes the tales of soil and human fertility from the Neolithic age in the so-called Fertile Crescent, to explore the crisis of infertility and the subsequent expansion of IVF facilities and treatments in contemporary Istanbul. A collection of artefacts are displayed in anachronic order, counter-narratives around (in)fertile bodies, exhausted soil, misinterpreted figurines, records of controlled reproduction, engineered hyper-fertile grains, state policies and visions of family planning, synthetic fertilisers, pesticides, and herbicides, and how all these technologies eventually 'domesticated' humans.
Over the course of the exhibition, this scenography is used for a series of lectures that create diverging narratives of soil and bodily exhaustion. An online series of commissioned essays by Elizabeth Hoover, Onur İnal, Calvin Po, Sharmila Rudrappa, Rickie Solinger, and Rami Zurayk expands these contemporary frictions around in/fertility.
Previous lectures include Gülhan Balsoy and Ulaş Karakoç, and are available via the Exhausted website.
Salmon is usually thought of as “salmon pink”. Today this farmed fish should be grey, but synthetic pigments added in their feed make them the desired salmon colour, changing the tones of their flesh. In this lecture performance we explore the relationship between our diet and the climate emergency and redress our assumptions around food production and consumption.
Kelp can clean New York’s polluted waters, tackle climate change and is sustainable – but growers need a law change first
Motoring out of Montauk Harbor aboard a research vessel, Sean Barrett waves hello to a commercial fishing boat, yelling “What up, Jay! Any slipper snails in there?”
It is a crisp, sunny day – the kind that brings tourists to Montauk, a small fishing village at the end of Long Island, New York. Although the town is better-known as a resort destination, it is the state’s largest commercial fishing port, only one of two major ports that are still in operation.
More than 10 years ago, Barrett, 46, created Dock to Dish, the nation’s first restaurant-supported fishery – essentially an alternative model for selling seafood sustainably where members pay a fee for a share of a local catch.
A commercial fishing dock in Montauk, New York. Montauk is the state’s largest commercial fishing port. Photograph: Desiree Rios/The Guardian
More recently he has been focusing on the bottom of the ocean food chain and a different kind of marine life: kelp. Earlier this year, he founded the Montauk Seaweed Supply Co and today the Guardian is accompanying him as he travels out to look at native seaweeds at nearby Fort Pond.
In his new venture, Barrett has been mindful of the Indigenous uses of seaweed as a fertilizer, and devised a kelp-based soil amendment that home gardeners and golf courses can use on their plants rather than chemical-laden fertilizers. Describing kelp as the “ocean’s first regenerative crop”, Barrett believes that by localizing seaweed production in New York he can revive the stymied maritime industry.
“Seafood import rates in the US are around 90%. Seaweed is more than 94%. We try to bring it all back to being more local,” said Barrett. He adds that most seafood and seaweed products go through upwards of 15 purveyors, and that he is trying “to get that chain of custody down to three hands: a farmer, the company and a consumer”.
Butthere’s just one catch: it is illegal to farm seaweed in New York state, despite activists’ best efforts.
Alaska and Maine are currently the leading seaweed producers in the US as both states allow seaweed farming. Meanwhile, New York is struggling to keep up, with growers losing yet another season as they await a law change. Although the Kelp Bill passed the state’s legislature in June, it still needs to be signed into law by New York’s governor. The recent resignation of Governor Andrew Cuomo has activists worried about further delay.
Sean Barrett is the founder of Montauk Seaweed Supply Company, a company that processes and distributes raw kelp. Photograph: Desiree Rios/The Guardian
“Other states seem to be ahead of us,” said assemblyman Fred Thiele, who first proposed the so-called Kelp Bill to New York state’s legislature five years ago. The bill would allow state bottomlands in Peconic and Gardiners Bay to be leased for commercial kelp cultivation. A similar piece of legislation gave birth to the state’s vibrant oyster industry in 2009, giving rise to more than a dozen aquaculture businesses across Long Island.
In addition to bolstering the state’s floundering maritime industries, the brown, fibrous sea vegetable is effective at absorbing carbon, in addition to fighting ocean acidification. Scientists at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Red Sea Research Center estimate that coastal habitats and wetlands absorb five times more carbon than terrestrial forests.
This is a critical measure as the globe’s temperatures are likely to rise more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, according to the recent International Panel on Climate Change Report, stemming in large part from excess carbon in the atmosphere.
“Sugar kelp offers scientists another tool in the tool box to address issues with climate change [relating] to increasing carbon,” said Dr Charles Yarish, of the University of Connecticut, a seaweed biologist.
The US has more than 95,000 miles (154,000km) of coastline – the second most in the world – and Yarish believes that it could become the leading producer of the ocean’s first-ever regenerative crop. He envisions that this could be achieved by creating large-scale farms in the US’s exclusive economic zone, whichextends 200 nautical miles offshore. Kelp is “scalable”, Yarish added.
Jason Havelin, dressed in dive gear, harvests knotted wrack, sargassum and rockweeds from Fort Pond Bay in Montauk, New York. Photograph: Desiree Rios/The Guardian
There are also big potential benefits in tackling pollution.
The drinking water on eastern Long Island is some of the most nitrogen-loaded groundwater in the country, ranking in the top 5%. Most of this pollution stems from outdated septic systems, which have also contributed to nearly 60% of nutrient loading on Long Island’s Peconic estuary.
Local officials are trying to convince homeowners to replace thousands of systems – but seaweed could boost these efforts. “If everyone’s homes got upgraded today, the contaminated groundwater that was created yesterday is still creeping towards the bays and estuaries,” said Dr Christopher Gobler of Stony Brook University. Working with Stony Brook labs on a three-year experiment on ocean acidification, carbon drawdown and nitrogen extraction of seaweeds, Gobler’s lab found that one acre of kelp farm over six months of propagation is equivalent to replacing 10–20 older septic systems each year.
Although scientists are elated about kelp’s capacity as a carbon sink, the atmosphere only nets a benefit if the kelp is harvested and used. If the seaweed stays in the sea it disintegrates in the summer sun, releasing the carbon and nitrogen it has absorbed from the ocean to dissolve back into the water.
Enter: kelp as food.
Many consumers are already familiar with nori seaweed in sushi rolls, and seaweed salads, but there is a widening interest in kelp from top chefs, and health food grocery stores stocking products such as kelp cubes which can be added to scones or pasta sauces, cookies or soups.
Akua debuted a kelp burger earlier this year, and it had many climate activists thinking this could be the new shift.
Their original products like a kelp jerky tasted “earthy” or kelp noodle for “diehard” fans of the sea vegetable, said CEO Courtney Boyd Myers. A seaweed fan herself, Courtney loved the products, but knew it wasn’t “moving the needle” for investors. Now, with a kelp burger that was heavily beta-tested during quarantine, they are selling about $80,000 a month and are on track to garner $1m in sales this year, said Boyd Myers. The company sources most of their kelp from Maine farmers.
“People want to know how their food is produced, where it is coming from and how they can eat to support the right kind of agriculture,” said Dan Barber, 51, chef and co-owner of Blue Hill restaurants and author of The Third Plate, who is a prominent supporter of Sean Barrett’s work. “Kelp becomes an obvious go-to. That is an important moment.”
Barber, who has been a leader in the slow food movement since his book on the future of food, sees kelp as the culinary world’s next kale or cauliflower, as high-end chefs, such as Victoria Blamey who recently had a residency at Barber’s restaurant Blue Hill incorporate the seaweed into their menu. Acknowledging the Indigenous cultural roots of the vegetable, Barber believes that eating lower on the food chain is one of the best ways that consumers can eat sustainably.
“How does what we eat affect the world around us? With kelp, it is a slight net positive,” said Bri Warner, president of Atlantic Sea Farms, the Maine company which became the nation’s first commercial seaweed farm in 2009.
Sean Barrett holds out a sample of RegenSea, finely milled kelp meal fertilizer. Photograph: Desiree Rios/The Guardian
Describing kelp as “truly regenerative”, Warner points out that “it is a miracle crop in many ways. It doesn’t use fresh water. It doesn’t use land. It doesn’t need fertilizer.”
Atlantic Sea Farms works with 24 partner farms, making up more than 95% of Maine’s line-grown seaweed supply. Since 2018, they have grown 12,000% in supply, with their products such as a kelp seaweed cube being sold in 350 Sprouts grocery stores across the country or their fermented seaweed salad sold in Whole Foods, according to Warner.
‘I'm not a quitter’: lobstermen turn to kelp farming in the face of climate crisis
Read more
Their business focus is around securing these kinds of supply deals. “Kelp is not like lobster … There are a million buyers for lobster,” said Greg Perkins, a Maine lobsterman turned kelp grower for Atlantic Sea Farms. “There are not a whole lot of buyers for kelp.” That is why deals such as the ones with Sprouts and Whole Foods are so important. “If you didn’t have that guaranteed market I don’t know if I would be one to do it.”
Perkins, 31, estimates it cost him about $6,000 to $7,000 to enter the kelp business, with most of that investment covering expenses such as moorings, buoys and line. Perkins, who farms in Penobscot Bay, Maine, originally got into kelp aquaculture as a way to supplement his lobstering and crabbing businesses, which remain his main source of income.
In the next five years, Atlantic Sea Farms plans to triple its kelp supply, working with more growers, like Perkins. The Gulf of Maine is warming 99% faster than any other waters in the United States, so Atlantic Sea Farms – and their farmers – see the importance of scaling as quickly as possible.
On the other coast of the US, Alaska’s kelp food industry is also booming.
Kelp “is a perfectly circular tube. When you slice it, it makes the aesthetically beautiful pickle ring,” said Matt Kern, 34, of Alaska-based Barnacle Foods. With partner Lia Heifetz, Kern started Barnacle Foods after making bull kelp salsa – a homesteading recipe – on failed fishing trips, filling their empty buckets up with wild bull kelp on their way back to shore. What began as a passion project quickly grew to an obsession and by 2016 they were selling kelp salsas and sauces across Alaska. Now, they are on track to produce around 250,000 units of product, a number that has doubled year over year since 2019, said Kern.
Members of the Shinnecock Kelp Farmers, clockwise from top left, Tela Sasweena ‘She Shall Harvest’ Troge, Darlene Mishannock ‘Morning Star’ Troge, Waban Neetskeh ‘Healing Wind’ Tarrant, Danielle Munnannock ‘First Born Star’ Hopson Begun, and Rebecca Genia. Photograph: Desiree Rios/The Guardian
Seaweed for food and fertilizer is not a new idea. For thousands of years it was eaten and used on crops by coastal communities worldwide. Charter agreements between early settlers in the United States and Indigenous peoples on the east coast mentioned seaweed rights while tribes in the Pacific north-west used seaweed as insulation.
On Heady Creek, 30 miles (48km) west of Montauk, the Shinnecock Kelp Farmers just pulled out their first-ever kelp lines in 2021, as part of their initiative to raise seaweed for fertilizer in the waters surrounding the Shinnecock tribal territory. Working with Bren Smith of GreenWave, a non-profit dedicated to regenerative ocean farming and an early pioneer of kelp, the group comprises six women. Their goal is to fight climate change and clean their water, while using a traditional crop.
“Shinnecock has been so connected to the seaweed industry … we really think that kelp is a solution to climate change”, as well as environmental degradation of waterways, said Tela Troge, 34, the tribe’s lawyer. “I grew up on Heady Creek. When I was a kid, there were all kinds of things living there. Now you are lucky if you see a couple of dead fish. It is really a scary situation. It is real for us.”
And while other seaweed farmers in New York are circumscribed by regulations, the Shinnecock operate as a sovereign nation and can farm seaweed without the Kelp Bill passing. They plan on ramping up production in fall, seeding 10 times more lines than previously. For Barrett’s Montauk Seaweed Supply, their farming initiative could be his golden ticket.
Waban Neetskeh ‘Healing Wind’ Tarrant, a member of the Shinnecock Kelp Farmers, assesses where the collective’s kelp lines go in the Shinnecock Bay. Photograph: Desiree Rios/The Guardian
Out on Fort Pond, Barrett listens to Stephen Schott, marine botany and habitat restoration educator at Cornell Cooperative, discuss the myriad ways seaweed extractions are already in use, showing up as a thickening agents in ice cream or even chocolate milk. Ever the entrepreneur, Barrett then organizes a photo shoot with native rockweeds on the boat’s deck for his company’s Instagram page, before launching into a discussion of how resort destinations in Montauk end up in user-conflict fights with Bonackers, the name for local fishermen. Pointing along the hilly skyline laden with greenery, Barrett details how fish traps in front of the popular Navy Beach eatery created a dispute that Barrett was called in to mediate. Although he hopes to rejuvenate the region’s traditional maritime industries, he knows that will require working with aquaculture growers and tourist hotspots alike.
Later, back on the Montauk commercial docks, Barrett jumps off the research vessel with packets of his Sea to Soil kelp meal in hand. Seemingly at home among the fishy and salty smells of a working waterfront, Barrett speaks in Spanish to a dockhand before showing the commercial fisheries’ refrigeration rooms where kelp can be stored post-harvest.
Steve Schott, holds up sugar kelp harvested on Fishers Island. Photograph: Desiree Rios/The Guardian
Describing kelp as a “tricky” business, Barrett explains that the seaplant begins to ferment immediately after harvest, eventually exploding, unless quickly refrigerated. It is something Barrett has personal experience with, as he laughs and recounts a recent kelp explosion that left his Jeep Wrangler still smelling fishy.
Referring to the Maine kelp industry as the “north star”, Barrett sees kelp as a way to revive New York’s commercial fishing industry. “The east end of Long Island, over the past 50 years, intensively over the past 20, has transitioned from working waterfronts to high-end residential.
“My earliest memories on the planet are fishing on the Shinnecock canal when the locks closed,” said Barrett. “It has changed … when we’ve tried to re-introduce fishing infrastructure, people say, ‘not in my backyard’.”
As temperature records across the world break for another sweltering summer and the international climate change authorities task each country to reduce their carbon output, crops like kelp provide a possible way forward – for industry and environmentalists alike.
“You pay attention to your surroundings if you are fisherman or fisherperson … things have changed dramatically,” said Scott Lord, 39, a third-generation Maine lobsterman who also now farms kelp. “I really enjoy working with something that could make a difference. I do believe in that.”
When Karen McGlathery used to swim in the coastal bays off Virginia’s Eastern Shore, the water would quickly turn cloudy and brown as sediment swirled around her. Now, 25 years later, for as far as she can swim, the water remains clear. The sediment is anchored in place by lush green seagrass meadows, teeming with fish, scallops, and crustaceans. “It’s like this beautiful underwater prairie,” says McGlathery. “It’s just gorgeous.”
McGlathery, an environmental sciences professor at the University of Virginia, is part of a team running the largest seagrass restoration project in the world in these coastal bays—and one of the most successful. The two-decade-long project is a “blueprint for restoring and maintaining healthy ecosystems,” according to a 2020 research paper, and proof that marine habitats can be brought back to life in a way that’s self-sustaining.
In the 1930s, a wasting disease swept along the U.S. east coast, wiping out huge swaths of eelgrass. Where Virginia’s coastal bays used to be carpeted in this species of seagrass, suddenly they were barren. “Everyone thought that eelgrass could never, ever get back,” says Robert Orth, who was a marine biologist at the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences (VIMS) until he retired this year, “but nobody really started doing any kind of experiments to see.”
That changed in the late 1990s with the discovery of small patches of seagrass in the bay, the existence of which proved that conditions could once again support the plants.
A volunteer working on Robert Orth’s seagrass restoration project. Photo from The Nature Conservancy.
Orth started with small-scale experiments, digging up adult seagrass from other areas and transplanting it into the bay. The seagrass survived, but the process wasn’t scalable—restoring thousands of acres through transplanting would have been a huge logistical challenge. So, says Orth, “We said, well, why not try to launch a restoration program using seeds?”
In 2001, he started an effort to physically rebuild the ocean ecosystem, seed by seed. From a moving boat, he and his team scattered seeds across four bays: South, Cobb, Spider Crab, and Hog Island. The seeds survived, growing into plants which, in turn, produced their own seeds. “Nature kind of took over,” says Orth. “While we continue to put seeds in areas that don’t have eelgrass, nature has been spreading eelgrass naturally.”
This graph shows how seagrass has reestablished itself in the four targeted bays. Credit: Science Advances
Over the past 20 years, supported by an army of volunteers, the project team has sown nearly 75 million seeds. About 9,000 acres of coastal bays are now blanketed with eelgrass, which has improved water quality, increased marine biodiversity, and helped mitigate climate change by capturing and storing carbon.
The project is “game changing,” says Carlos Duarte, a seagrass expert and marine science professor at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, both in its sheer scale and the raft of long-term data it provides on the climate benefits of seagrass.
A decade ago, Duarte and Orth nicknamed seagrass “the ugly duckling” of environmental conservation, because so few cared about it. That’s slowly changing as its huge benefits are recognized. Despite covering less than 0.2% of the ocean, it is responsible for about 10% of the ocean’s ability to store carbon. It provides a vital habitat for marine life, boosts commercial fishing, helps purify water, protects coastlines, and even traps and stores microplastics.
But seagrass is also one of the most at-risk ecosystems, threatened by coastal development, nutrient runoff from agriculture and stormwater, and rising ocean temperatures.
“I like to say these grasses are sort of the canary in the coal mine,” says Jill Bieri, the Virginia Coast reserve program director at The Nature Conservancy, who has been involved in the restoration for the past seven years. They will thrive if the water quality is good, and die off if it’s not. It’s a lesson for other coastal regions, says Chris Patrick, the VIMS professor who has taken over the project since Orth retired. “If you can fix the water quality issues, you can restore the grass very quickly, within a few decades.”
Restoration projects around the world are looking to Virginia for lessons. Richard Unsworth, associate professor of biosciences at Swansea University, is leading the U.K.’s biggest seagrass restoration project in the waters of Dale Bay in Pembrokeshire, Wales. “We’ve been using their science as a yardstick,” he says. So far, he and his team have planted more than 1 million seeds, but his ambitions are bolder. “We want to apply the techniques that they’re using [in Virginia] to rejuvenate the coastal seas of the U.K., at a similar scale, if not bigger.”
Back in Virginia’s bays, the next phase of the project is to see whether they can convert the carbon stored in the seagrass meadows into carbon credits to raise money for further restoration. That’s where McGlathery’s work feeds in; the long-term research from the project has allowed her to calculate precise data about how much carbon the seagrass stores. The project is in the process of registering with Verra, a leading certifier of carbon credits. If successful, it will be the world’s first verified seagrass carbon offset program.
In the meantime, the team is working towards restoring every one of the coastal bays to the way they were before the wasting disease claimed the eelgrass. The project, says Unsworth, “is demonstrating to the world that you can actually restore the oceans.” While plenty of projects have restored coastal habitats such as mangroves and salt marshes, he adds, few have been able to restore the ecosystems that lie beneath the surface of the water. “It’s quite fundamental what they achieved.”
