Seaweed, sea vegetables, kelp... habitat? Which is the right word? How should we be thinking of this resource?
This very personal and readable book offers opinions about how we should be thinking about feeding ourselves from the ocean.
This page from the book more or less says it all in a simple picture: Kelp hanging off your line alongside lantern nets for scallops and mussel socks, and deeper down, cages for oysters and then clams. It may not be quite that simple here in Penobscot Bay. As they say, the devil is in the details. "Sea vegetables" rather than "seaweed" seems pretty benign. However, Bren Smith surely has a point when he suggests that it's time we talk about "regeneration" rather than settle for merely " sustainable". We need to move beyond the status quo and move toward solutions.
His vision of a "Green Wave Reef" made up fifty ocean farms, clustered around a seafood hub rather than corporate vertically structured monopolies ought to be tantalizing enough to merit a further look at this book. We really do not live in a world that can feed itself by foraging and we probably need to take a look whether "selective cutting " is a phrase than can accurately describe harvesting in an ocean ecosystem. How long can that go on? How many, how much....