Seaweed Chronicles by Susan Hand Shetterly: book review

Seaweed Chronicles: A World at the Water’s Edge (2018) is all about seaweed – the harvesting of seaweed for medicines, cosmetics, soil enrichments, edible oils, bandaging for skin burns, food, and food supplements, as well as prospects for biofuels. It’s in toothpaste, pie fillings, soap, and farm fertilizers. Seaweed are not plants in the true sense because they have no roots, no leaves, and no stems – they are multi-celled macro-algae.

This book is also about the fish, birds, snails, clams, eagles, sea lions, whales, and every animal that lives around seaweed. And it’s a collection of stories about individual people who work and live on the shore, associated in some way with seaweed. Protecting it is at the heart of the author’s passion.

Susan Hand Shetterly writes of fisherpeople, biologists, fishway architects, and physologists. She writes of seaweed in all forms and names – kelp, bladder wrack, rockweed, wakame, kombu, sargassum, Irish moss, carrageenan, porphyra, nori, gambler’s grass, and so on.

She enriches the documentary-style book with writing such as: ‘These mats attract fish and birds such as phalaropes, Bonaparte’s gulls, and Leach’s storm petrels for the sudden gift of food they carry, and often, in migration, birds use them as rest stops. Eventually, all the bits and pieces torn loose in a summer storm, the seaweed detritus, spin into the deep and disintegrate, enriching the planktonic life of the Gulf, and thus enriching all those creatures living in this water, from jellyfish to whales.’

The author is from Maine in America, so much of the information is localized to her state: the people, the Gulf of Maine, the eider ducks, the European green crabs, the coastline, the intertidal zone, the lobsters, the periwinkles, the rockweed, and the world according to Ascophyllum – all leading to seaweed conservation.

This is an interesting book that goes beyond exploring the beauty and complexity of seaweed. It explores wild coastlines and communities and conservation, an essential habitat for both people and animal life, and the interconnectedness of people with their living environment.

MARTINA NICOLLSis an international aid and development consultant, and the authorof:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom(2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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