THE ROCKWEED RUSH
Corporate harvesters are ripping up native seaweed—for use in everything from dog food to fracking.
ROBIN SEELEY SAW them back in the summer of 2008, in Cobscook Bay, a pristine Maine estuary near the Canadian border. “All of a sudden this small fleet of blue boats appeared,” she recalled as we walked along the shore of the sparkling bay at low tide. “They all looked the same. I thought, ‘What on earth are they doing?’” As Seeley watched, the skiffs fanned out along the shoreline, and the pilot of each boat lifted a strange metal rake fitted with a cutting blade, reached out over the side, and filled his boat with rockweed, the dominant seaweed of the North Atlantic intertidal zone. Each skiff delivered it to a central raft, where it was bagged in one-ton sacks, floated to shore, loaded
