Humans

How Did We Get Here? 

Seaweed has been supporting the human species since the very beginning. In 1975 the archaeological remains of a twelve-thousand-year-old human settlement at Monte Verde in Southern Chile was discovered. Among the artifacts preserved in the peat bogs were the clear remains of nine species of marine algae from distant beaches and estuaries. These seaweed relics, confirmed to be used as food and medicine by these ancient people, have stirred debate as to how the earliest Americans came to inhabit the continents.

The Monte Verde site predates the glacier melt throughout Canada, when overland routes would have been impassable, and suggests that the kelp beds along the west coasts of North and South America created a nutrition highway along which the first humans traveled either by boat or along the shore, eating the abundant shellfish and seaweed there. Oysters, clams, seaweed, crab, and fish from the shallow ocean estuaries and beaches of the time (many miles out from today’s shoreline) provided the fatty acids (important omega-3s), iodine, and other minerals essential for human development. The complex human brain requires a very specific mix of nutrients found only in these resources. Iodine, in particular, gave our evolving brains the boost it needed to create language and fully realized societies. 

Bull kelp evolved before humans arrived, under pressure from pre-historic grazers as well as nutrient-loading of nearshore waters by the guano of prehistoric bird colonies. But ever since humans arrived, they have been part of the ecological mix of each coastal region along the eastern edge of the Pacific. The Indigenous practices of selectively culling sea otter, the wholesale extirpation of the sea otter in the mid 1700s–mid 1800s by predominantly European fur traders, the 19th Century seabird guano harvesting trade by European ships, and the more recent otter reintroductions and protections are clear ways humans have affected the kelp forest ecologies in major ways. Humans have used bull kelp as vessels, picked it to eat, used its stipe as fishing line, woven it into basketry, and integrated it into art and storytelling. The salmon and fish that humans depend on in turn depend on the kelp forest for habitat and juvenile development. In the 1990s, the introduction of sushi into American cuisine and the booming Japanese economy instigated a red urchin fishery in California and Oregon, with humans filling in as top predator pulling thousands of pounds of urchin from the kelp forest waters. The abundant and healthy bull kelp forests of the early 2000 resulted. Currently, tremendous human effort is going into culling purple sea urchin, researching kelp genomes, and outplanting kelp in efforts to restore lost kelp forests. Humans, for better or worse, are intertwined with the health of the kelp forest.

What Makes Humans Pay Attention? 

The sea otter's disappearance allows us an interesting look into human relationships to the riches and bounty (aka biodiversity) of the kelp forest along the northern Pacific Coast. By the 1990s, sea otter had been missing from the coastal landscape in so many places for so long that their role in the narrative had been forgotten. The intertidal ecology without them, replete in clams, abalone, urchins, and crab, sustained and nurtured the coastal Indigenous communities and, like elsewhere along the Pacific Coast from Alaska to San Diego, came to be understood as a new standard. Since the early 1900s, up and down the West Coast, fisheries, economies, lifestyles, and expectations of coastal communities of all sorts arose from the abundance of shellfish in the absence of otter. Shellfish and fish, having commercial value, gained attention and study. The bull kelp, on the other hand, despite being the foundational habitat, did not have commercial value, so its particular study and management was more obscure.

These invertebrate riches came from an unnatural act but came to be seen by humans as normal or “a natural” state. This lack of historicity leads to a “shifting baseline,” a false sense of what is the natural state of an ecosystem. The shifting baseline syndrome plagues scientists, policymakers, fisheries experts, and community stakeholders alike. It has been at play for years and even manifests in the notion of a “sustainable” fisheries—sustainable implies just enough to maintain a status quo. It is a misnomer. 

To avoid depletion from natural and human caused acts of devastation, a state of overabundance is required, not sustainable abundance. About a decade ago, a network of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) was established all along the western seaboard, putting sections of coastal ocean waters under federal or state supervision to control fishing and other human activities. MPAs are being studied intensively to see if “removing” human activity has an effect on biodiversity and health of these ecologies. Often, Tribes are rightly skeptical of new designations which might place more barriers between Indigenous people and first foods their families have managed sustainably for millennia; when consulted early and often, Tribes have become valued partners in creating and stewarding MPAs. At their worst, MPAs are another chapter in the attempts to alienate indigenous people from ancestral lands, at their best they are a mutual safeguard of our intertwined future on this thin rim of the ocean.

Recognized by marine ecologists for fifty years, the bull kelp forest is just beginning to be recognized by the general public as foundational to the biodiversity of coastal ocean waters. As we humans slowly try to shift from systems of resource extraction—which results in the extraction of resilience out of the kelp forests and other essential ocean and terrestrial habitats—to the project of rebuilding resilience, there is wonderful work at hand. Kelp restoration sites abound and research into kelp life cycles, and genomics is finally getting the funding and attention it deserves. Amazing partnerships and collaborations are offering inspiration and mentorship from one region to another. Kelp forest restoration is becoming a major focus for agencies, academics, Tribes, and artists alike. Bull kelp farming is being explored as a new industry for human consumption and also experimentally as a carbon sequestration strategy. The 30 x 30 initiative, (an initiative to conserve 30% of terrestrial and marine habitat by 2030) is taking hold in regional, state and national programs that have real teeth for action. We humans need to do all we can to allow the opportunism, the resilience and majesty of the ocean forests of bull kelp to heal themselves, to work their wonder and magic.