Description
Why eat seaweed
Seaweed is prized by macrobiotics for its micro-nutrients, iodine and minerals. Notice the seagulls? They are so prosperous and glossy. They live one layer up from the seaweed, eating whelks, sea stars, urchins, arthropods, worms, crabs, and trash.
Context
Everything on earth grew from the sea. We are all beneficiaries of the blue-green algae (cyanobacteria) that invented photosynthesis. They lazed around in shallow waters converting the energy of sunlight into the sugars and carbon bonds of life, producing oxygen and ultimately our atmosphere. At the low trophic level, seaweeds support the critters, oxygenate the waters, and constitute the foundational flourishing of intertidal places.
This seaweed is a wild product of the marine ecosystem, harvested respectfully from a small boat (or by foot) from the intertidal and subtidal zones along the seashore. It grows attached to rocks and ledges, buffeted by wave action in the cold gulf of Maine, a place with extreme tides up to 22 feet. This seaweed comes from very clean waters in well established territories managed by experienced harvesters.
Commons
We hope a love for these plants will motivate you to learn enough to become an ally and believer in the possibilities of commons. Through a commons-informed approach, Seaweed Commons seeks to form ecologically minded seaweed coalitions, support and inform public discourse, and support algal literacy in service to an appropriately scaled, just seaweed economy. We leverage art, film, public forums, research, and online informational resources with critical joy, so as to not overwhelm the lively ecology at the threshold of land and sea.
