Photo by Naja Bertolt Jensen on Unsplash
A giant, reeking mass in the Atlantic, coming to invade the Florida coast – this is the language used by media coverage to characterize an unusual seasonal swell and bloom of sargassum seaweed. This year, we are to have a bumper crop, and there will be more than ever that comes to collapse upon our shores. In an attempt to sow blind panic at this unusual phenomenon, these headlines appear on my feed everyday.
In the height of summer, the ocean warms over with Portuguese man-of-war jellyfish, sea lice, and reams of sargasso. The man-of-war hid in the piles on the shore, looking like plastic sandwich bags leftover from a picnic, filled with blue Gatorade. As a child, I often stepped in tar on the beach and at home had to clean it off with baby oil. I haven’t seen tar on the beach here in years. The seaweed came up year after year, mainly in the summer, during the off season when locals retook the beaches. It was widely hated and avoided, the sargasso. There would be a mass of it coating the water, and with goggles, swimming underneath it, you could see the light filtered through it and made golden.
After years of agreeing to hate it along with everyone else, I changed my mind when I started trying organic gardening. Working with sandy soil, I could never get enough nutrients to grow anything but the most sad and insect ridden cherry tomatoes and the spiciest, completely unpalatable radishes, overgrown papayas, and snail-eaten lettuces. The seaweed suddenly came to me as a gift from the sea, which, after being washed off, could be emulsified in a month-long bath and then used to treat the soil. All the kitchen scraps and yard waste was brought in to feed the garden.
Flotsam. Jetsam.
The sea brought so many gifts to our shore.
“I love the sea because it looks different every day. The mountains are the same day after day, but the ocean always shifts and changes.”
So the ocean, vast and always changing, some days rough and heady, ready to kill, other days warm and gentle, blissful; it had my moods.
What right did we have to hate the things it brings us, even if those things are hurricanes?
Seaweed is nothing like a hurricane. It is an abundance of fertility from the sea, to put back into our land. The world is mostly ocean, and the ocean is always coming up with new ways of giving things to us. There are the mullet runs, the pods of dolphins, the manatees that swim right against the shore near our legs.
When I read the disgusted tone of those articles decrying the mass of seaweed, I wonder, what isn’t to love about it?
Trucks dispatched by the Fort Lauderdale city government occasionally collect the mass left on the beaches, and then it is dispatched to the far end of Snyder Park, piled into a mound, and left to rot down into compost, which is then trucked back out to use as a soil amendment in various city landscaping projects.
City-managed Seaweed Compost Pile at a local park
The mound at the seaweed dumping site was smaller than one would imagine, given the look of the seaweed as it is spread all across the shore. The pile was overgrown with castor plants, clinging to the fertility of the pile. There was plastic waste creeping up the edges of it, blue plastic marine rope, single flip-flops, water bottles, and mystery chips. The soil was grey, sandy, not the mythical loam described by compost aficionados, just light, sandy Florida coastal soil, with overly efficient drainage. I didn’t taste it, so I don’t know about the salt. We climbed to the top of it, following the rutted paths that the trucks take, where it smelled like the fishy rot that usually attracts seagulls, though there were none. It was quiet, the cars hummed through the concrete overpass in the distance.
A close-up of the seaweed pile being left to compost at Snyder Park
I can’t help but love the sargasso, when its plump and shiny leaves and hard, bead-like seeds first carpet the shore, thick and springy, and seagulls and sandpipers bounce on top, gleaning for crabs and fish. Glistening, rotting plant matter, the gift of fertility. Another society would take it for a delicacy, serving it in small dishes at the height of the season. But we’ve decided to disdain it.
What would happen if we just left it where it landed? Would the pen-like mangrove propagules take root in it and grow? Then the easily defined coastline – this is land and that is sea – would become muddled and porous, with the flying buttress arched roots of mangroves creating cathedrals for the juvenile sea life. Would the land rise higher if more biomass was continually being added to it? That is to say, if left to its own devices, would our Floridian dilemma solve itself?
That’s probably wishful thinking, from a woman who doesn’t want to let go of the fantasy image of wild Florida, a place that my never have existed in the first place for anyone, that probably always existed for everyone else as plots of land to be defined, cut up, flattened, presented as commodities and offered at the altar of the market.
But let’s just focus on the status quo, which I can’t really fight anyway. Seaweed has potential (someone even made $5 million for their start up by pouncing on this news cycle). It wraps itself around the beaches, the lost swimsuit top, the single sandal. Let’s wrap the market around it. Let’s allow it to become part of our society, instead of rejecting it for being too reeking, squishy, amorphous. Let’s change it from a scourge into a gift.
As a note, I'd like to consider and reconsider the arsenic problem, the lead problem, that people say has poisoned the seaweed, has made it useless. Hopefully, there is some way to resolve this problem by cleaning it up, and maybe the composting process can reduce the concentrations of heavy metals. Based on non-scientific personal observation, the problem of plastic waste entangled with the seaweed seems to be the larger issue.
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