Report on global connections in ocean NETs

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.