a letter to Dr. Chela Zabin, Ecologist and Program Manager for the San Francisco Bay branch of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center
hi!
i was reading the NYTimes article about the wakame in san francisco bay. you're probably getting tons of email and maybe you won't even be able to read them all, but i have some ideas for the wakame problems. i'm a clinical herbalist in boston, and we know some things about invasive plants.
to start on a tangent, there is a kind of intelligence about plants. we never say that a species is "invasive"—opportunistic maybe!—but not invasive. we've found that "invasive species" turn out to be plants that are really needed in the areas they've "invaded". japanese knotweed is a great example—it's very high in resveratrol, which is critical in healing lyme disease. the areas in which japanese knotweed is "invasive" are the same areas with the overall highest rates of lyme disease!
i think we can consider this wakame that way! it's not ok for it to grow unchecked in san francisco bay, but the wakame can actually be an opportunity for us. all americans should be eating more seaweed—that's probably a really hard sell, and that's a shame, but if we could just sell all that seaweed as food, we'd be all set! and maybe some of it can be sold that way, but certainly not the majority.
however—seaweed makes amazing fertilizer!! it replenishes minerals lost in the soil faster and more completely than any other fertilizer. because the seaweed is "invasive", there's no need to worry about harvesting practices—just yank all of it up, dry it out, and sell it to farmers! here is a link to a fellow in northern maine who does that, though on a small scale. if you're interested, he can teach you how to do it. you can hire college kids studying marine biology to do the work for you, in fact, with a little effort, you can probably make some arrangement to get college credits for them and they'll do it for free! even if you market the fertilizer only in california AND sold it at a super-subsidized price, i think you'd still make enough money to cover the cost of the program and then some—california is full of farms, and particularly organic farms. you might not be able to market it to conventional farmers, but organic farmers will totally be into the idea. you'll probably have this problem for a while—like you said, wakame is like dandelions—but that's actually good for you: you (or the college kids!) can rip it out indiscriminately and over the years the farmers will come to see how valuable the fertilizer is. you can sell it subsidized for the first two years, say, and after that you can charge normal fertilizer rates for it, and you'll make good money! not only that, but you'll be healing the depleted soils we're farming in at the same time!
it's just a thought. but when i was reading the NYtimes article, all i could think was, here is this plant who is coming in force to give up its life to heal our soil. when we harvest herbs normally, we must be careful to take no more than 1/3 of the plant available, so that we don't affect the overall population—what a gift to have a plant we can just yank out right down to the roots and in complete overabundance! in this country, iodine depletion is a tremendous problem; most americans have slow thyroid function. this country needs seaweeds so badly for our depleted thyroids and our depleted soils—i know it's a terrible problem for you and i know it's threatening other life in the bay, but i am grateful for the wakame anyway: her value is in her willingness to be aggressively harvested. as long as we humans can figure out a way to do that, the other life in the bay will be preserved and we will all benefit.
thanks for reading! good luck with the wakame!
sincerely,
katja swift
boston, ma