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Seaweed

Chapter of: Solarities: Elemental Encounters and Refractions(pp. 277–286)

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Metadata
TitleSeaweed
ContributorSarah Besky(author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.53288/0404.1.23
Landing pagehttps://punctumbooks.com/titles/solarities-elemental-encounters-and-refractions/
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
CopyrightSarah Besky
Publisherpunctum books
Published on2023-11-22
Long abstractAcross the globe, as air temperatures steadily climb, so too do ocean temperatures. This rise is particularly acute in New England. Temperatures in the Gulf of Maine have risen nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit in the past century. Warming waters have meant that once-plentiful species—lobsters most prominent among them—are moving to colder northern waters. With fewer and fewer lobsters to catch, lobster fishing in southern New England is no longer financially viable. Those still making a living from the ocean must find different species to exploit. As New England fisheries collapse, seaweed appears as a hopeful alternative. This essay asks, What is regenerated in “regenerative ocean farming” projects, in which seaweed is a key figure? A critical reflection on the turn to seaweed in the context of climate crisis and highlights how seaweed’s potentiality—as healthy food, biofuel, binding agent, carbon sink, and a hopeful alternative to depleted ocean industries—rearticulates capitalist logics of productivism, gender inequality, and settler colonial property relations. Solar-based and “green” economies still operate on economic grammars rooted in the forms of extraction to which they serve as a foil and a regenerative alternative.
Page rangepp. 277–286
Print length10 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Keywords
  • aquaculture
  • climate change
  • settler colonialism
  • Maine
  • New England
Contributors

Sarah Besky

(author)
Associate Professor in the ILR School at Cornell University
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2353-0074

Sarah Besky is an anthropologist and Associate Professor in the ILR School at Cornell University. She is the author of The Darjeeling Distinction: Labor and Justice on Fair-Trade Tea Plantations in India (2014) and Tasting Qualities: The Past and Future of Tea (2020), both with the University of California Press, as well as the co-editor of How Nature Works: Rethinking Labor on a Troubled Planet (SAR Press, 2019). Her current research examines the past and present of small-scale farming in India’s eastern Himalayas.