Seaweed is devouring Aotea Great Barrier Island.
"To save the ocean we're going to have to kill the ocean"
https://www.salient.org.nz/post/to-save-the-ocean-we-re-going-to-have-to-kill-the-ocean
"The former Federated Farmers president turned ACT MP is as fresh as can be. Elected in 2023, a month after becoming an MP he was Minister of Biosecurity."
#DanMoskovitz, 2024
https://www.salient.org.nz/post/to-save-the-ocean-we-re-going-to-have-to-kill-the-ocean
You what now? We've got Queen St Farmers into charge of f%&king biosecurity? The people who wanted to import an infectious disease to kill rabbits (and eventually did in violation of biosecurity rules)?!?
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Speaking of which, one thing I didn't notice was any discussion of what's *feeding* the algal bloom. FedFarmers types love to deflect from that question by babbling techno-solutionism at us. Just like the coal industry love to babble about carbon capture (a mythical technology right up there with zero-point energy).
Why? Because what's feeding the algae is most likely the same thing it usually is; nitrogen-overloaded farm runoff.
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I don't know enough about the ocean currents around Aotea to speculate on where that runoff might be coming from. But someone who does could tell you which major rivers feed into the waters around the island. I guarantee you that the industrial farms bordering those rivers are the true source of the algal problem.
So that's the supply side. So what kind of intervention might actually help, *without* killing the ocean to save the ocean?
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As the late, great Bill Mollison once quipped, "the problem is the solution". The example he gave was that a gardener doesn't have an oversupply of slugs, but a deficiency of ducks : P
I once heard another permaculturist, USAmerican David Blume, talking about using weighted nets to grow kelp in nitrogen-poisoned oceanic dead zones. Then harvesting it for food, salt, biofuel, whatever.
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Just as ducks turn slugs into eggs, the people of Aotea could be turning the poison feeding their algal problem into a fuel source.
If they can grow and harvest enough noninvasive algae, maybe they can get toasters? ; )
It's like, people look at landfills and see a problem of all that garbage, but you can also think of it as this spot with all this reusable stuff or recyclable material. People talk about the great plastic patch in the ocean, but that's potentially material that could be extracted from that location and we've got a spot the size of texas we can use to get all kinds of interesting material for many things.
The big thing that the Standard Oil company did that most companies didn't at the time is they had a lot of byproducts of kerosene production (the thing most people wanted to replace whale oil). Instead of throwing it out (or likely just burning it off) like many oil companies did, they found uses for the different distillates of crude oil that weren't prime kerosene. That way you got gasoline, diesel, bunker fuel, plastics, all from the same feedstock you previously only got kerosene from.
People might think that's a bad example because fossil fuels destroy the environment through climate change, but given that the byproducts were to be disposed of likely by burning without doing anything productive with it, you're getting a lot more useful energy out of one unit of crude oil, making things much more efficient. In the same way, we could be looking at society's byproducts or polluting elements and asking "Ok, this is bad, but can we turn this negative into a positive by taking this thing we don't want and turning it into something we do want?"
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@sj_zero
> but given that the byproducts were to be disposed of likely by burning without doing anything productive with it, you're getting a lot more useful energy out of one unit of crude oil, making things much more efficient
Agreed. If you're going to kill the bison, use the whole bison.
Of course, with both fossil fuels and bison, you reach a point where you realise that in most cases you shouldn't be killing the bison at all. But as you say, that's a separate issue.