THE ROCKWEED RUSH
Corporate harvesters are ripping up native seaweed—for use in everything from dog food to fracking.
by Rowan Jacobsen
Oct 25, 2016
4 minutes
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
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