Mare Nullius and the wishful audacity of deep sea seaweed sinking
One proposed climate solution for rapidly sequestering atmospheric carbon, is to grow, and then sink in the ocean, massive quantities of seaweed. Seaweed grows quickly and research has shown theoretical potential for significant carbon capture. Private sector in the scheme is also surging, as investors set their sights on the opportunities that will be created by carbon markets. However, a newly published overview reveals that abyssal, or deep sea seaweed sinking, is both hastily conceived and ethically questionable, arguing ultimately that the development and deployment of business models has outpaced the science regarding its potential and potential risks.
Societies in the Global North face an imperative: implement the dramatic but achievable changes necessary to mitigate the global climate crisis and do it quickly. This imperative has, among other things, created a clamor of firms scurrying to develop profit models and business cases around technological solutions, from plant-based meats to carbon capture and storage. But many of these would-be solutions treat climate change as merely bug rather than a fundamental design flaw in the system — that is, if we find the right new technologies, the thinking goes, we can continue business as usual and make even more money in the process.
The case of seaweed sinking in particular exhibits two problems common to this capitalistic approach to quick fixes. The first is the overemphasis of solutions that can provide fossil fuel offsets and direct atmospheric capture, which are often leveraged to delay the abatement of fossil fuels. That is, these technologies are often discussed with the language of greenhouse gas (GHG) emission offsets rather than GHGe reductions. This paper by Haley Froehlich and colleagues, for example, looks at the potential to use seaweed to offset the carbon emissions of the aquaculture sector. As Froehlich and her colleagues show, offsetting via seaweed can be a valuable part of mitigating some GHG producing activities, with added environmental benefits for coastlines. However, the build up around deep sea sinking has much grander aspirations for nor just offsetting current emissions but drawing down past ones as well.
At such a scale, technologies like seaweed sinking can be used in spurious arguments to justify a delay or abandonment of this more central goal. What we need right now, however, are not reasons to delay fossil fuel abatement but strategies to accellerate it.
Mare Nullius
The more pernicious problem with seaweed sinking is that it embodies the very same violent way of thinking that fueled the colonial occupation of Indigenous lands around the world: terra nullius, or in this case, mare nullius. This is the assumption that places we don’t understand, places that appear to us to be devoid of inhabitants or of intrinsic value, are free for our taking and use.
As Max Liboiron masterfully explores in their book, Pollution is Colonialism, the act of deciding that purportedly “unused” places in the world can be the recipients of waste is a colonial act of taking and dominion over land.
Gazing into the dark abyss of the deep ocean, about which we know so little, and deciding that we can be free to dump tons and tons of harvested kelp there, as a way to absolve ourselves of our violence against this planet, would be an act no different than when European settlers looked out over the so-called “American Frontier” and saw an empty wasteland begging to be developed.
I honestly can’t understand the rationale behind those that think this is a good idea. We’re talking about capturing vast amounts of geologic carbon, carbon created by burning fossil fuels, and introducing it as biologic carbon to a part of the global oceanic system we hardly understand. What could possibly go wrong?
Even if we had a robust scientific understanding of the deep ocean it still would be an act of colonial violence to decide, unilaterally, that this space is ours to use as a carbon landfill. Life doesn’t have to be legible to us to have intrinsic value and moral standing — this is true for the deep ocean, true for the moon and for Mars and for all the alien places of the cosmos that Elon Musk and other colonizers gaze at hungrily from afar. These are not ours simply because we think them to be empty, unrealized, or undeveloped. Empty is not quite the right word; empty of human owners and occupiers is more accurate.
The ocean is already doing everything it can to be our ally in the fight against climate change, absorbing as much as 30% of the GHGs we’ve put into the atmosphere since the dawn of the Industrial age and 90% of the warming we’ve experienced in recent decades. I think of this as a tremendous kindness from a part of this planet that we already repeatedly and consistently abuse with pollution and drilling and bottom trawling and overfishing. We keep treating this planet like our own personal Giving Tree, abusing it over and over and expecting it to keep taking more and more and more until there is nothing left.
This is why I am so passionate about the emergence of regenerative practices, and why I talk so much about healing and building relationships in Finding Our Niche. To solve the problems we face, we need to stop devising new ways to take, and instead deploy a tapestry of solutions that give back.
There are exists so many options for us to address climate change that don’t require us to make risky decisions that we don’t have the right to make on behalf of the planet. This is not to say that we don’t have to make hard decisions (we do), or that seaweed farming isn’t a critical solution (it is). But we need to be very skeptical of the solutions that are rapidly and eagerly taken up by the private sector because they fit well into existing industrial logics for profit and scalability. You can’t solve a problem from the same cultural paradigm that created it. The proposition of deep sea seaweed sinking is, I believe, a case in point.
