Bright, Damien and Schaefer, Stefan (2024) Report on global connections in ocean NETs. . OceanNets Deliverable, D2.2 . OceanNETs, Kiel, Germany, 16 pp. DOI 10.3289/oceannets_d2.2.

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Abstract

In this paper, we asked: Why is farming seaweed an all-purpose solution to the Earth’s
problems? Who is making such a claim, and with what background assumptions about
seaweed, farming, and the planet? How can ongoing climate derangement, which is frequently
depicted as an unintended outcome of global industrialization, be something to respond to by
“scaling up” seaweed production across the globe? We addressed these questions by taking a
step back from the much circulated and disputed claims of seaweed entrepreneurs to be able
to farm the global oceans. Instead, we investigated the semiotic, scalar, and affective
dimensions of seaweed as a would-be ratchet for managing rising atmospheric greenhouse gas
concentrations. Seaweed, we submit, is a useful medium for bringing into view the global
connections that marine geoengineering research makes and breaks, which have implications
for the practical conduct of geopolitics as well as its study. One of seaweed’s distinctive powers
is its tendency to thrive in disorderly conditions, and thereby lend itself to a wide variety of
ordering projects. Such thriving is, however, more than a matter of biology and chemistry.
Seaweed’s narrative plasticity, as much as its putative powers of carbon fixation, lends it
currency in the build out of marine geoengineering.

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