I recently finished reading Seaweed Chronicles, A World At the Waters Edge by Susan Hand Shetterly, and as you can guess it talked a lot about seaweed. However, I would say it was more so about the ecology and culture of Down East Maine. Coincidentally, these depend on seaweed and the wildlife it supports. The book has a "background focus" on the growing seaweed harvesting industry in the Gulf of Maine, and all the stories and interviews seemed to relate back to this. I would say there were three main ways this was done.
The first was by her simply writing about the ecological community of the Gulf of Maine, and describing the different species and happenings in an easy to read memoir manner. The second was through interviews, lots and lots of interviews. She got so much input from a wide variety of people with different occupations and outlooks on the harvesting of seaweed. The third was through historical accounts, largely about how we have seen this happen before. How people started exploiting a particular resource or species thinking it was infinite, and caused the industry and species to collapse as a result. All of these methods are weaved together in a book that teaches a ton, but reads like an autobiography.
The two things, more so than anything I took from this book, is that although we have severely diminished coastal ecosystems of their former grandeur, this does not mean harvest of remaining resources is automatically a bad thing. There is a right and a wrong way, and so long as we learn from historical mistakes, this (seaweed harvesting in this case) can be done the right way. If we do not however, we already know how it will end.
Highly recommended!
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