The Lives of Seaweeds is a stunning work. Hard-back, richly illustrated and visually beautiful, author Julie A. Phillips should be lauded for the work’s breadth and critical importance – not just to lovers of the natural world or marine ecologists, but to the rest of us. You.
The author is part of the invisible strata of human civilisation; those who quietly go forth, and ask questions about what they find – in this case algae, one form of which we call seaweed. Phillips’ breadth of knowledge, and extensive career, are on show here, and both she and this book deserve every accolade.
The importance of seaweeds and all types of algae can’t be overstated; they’re everywhere, in every ecological community, and they’re critical to our planet and to our survival.
While most of us dimly register greenwash about adding seaweeds to the feedstock of industrialised meat production to lower methane emissions, and that algal blooms are a (mostly) bad thing, we don’t attribute seaweeds and algae with the same significance we give to trees and forests.
We still have the mindset that the natural world we admire, as our toes dig into the sand at the beach, is mostly separate from the things we do and need; we don’t have the naturalist’s eye which sees each life-form as existing in a system interacting within other systems, all operating within even greater systems.
From giant kelp along a coastline to riverine and marine microalgae, all species also serve as canaries in a coalmine to warn us of the climate tipping points we continue to ignore. We fully ignore the most critical functions of algae in the global carbon cycle, preferring to bang on about a debunked technology (“carbon capture and storage”) so we can pretend we don’t have to do anything substantive about climate heating.
As we bulldoze native forests, which fix around 54% of global carbon, 46% of the Earth’s carbon is captured, long-term, by oceanic algae, mostly in the cold bits of our planet – the planet we’re rapidly heating by refusing to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions or stop bulldozing our native forests. Algae also convert nitrogen, fertilising the planet, while releasing sulphur compounds which cool the atmosphere.
The tiniest of microalgae have a planetary-scale set of beneficial impacts.
Here in Tasmania, we’re watching giant kelp die, and subtropical marine animal species begin to thrive, as our seas rapidly warm. Our rivers, over-extracted, polluted, dammed and damned by political and agricultural indifference, bloom with algae in a climate with less consistent rain patterns.
Meanwhile, the agricultural, industrial and pharmacological potentials of seaweed and microalgae are significant, possibly enormous, but still somehow less worthy of government support for R&D than the ongoing exploration for more fossil fuels.
Around 70% of our planet’s oxygen is produced by various algae which, fun fact, made Earth habitable for animals, and were only relatively recently classified into not one but four of the six Kingdoms of life on Earth – plants, bacteria, protozoa and their own special Kingdom, Chromista – if you’re an evolution nerd, this is exciting stuff.
And they’re beautiful, as this stunning book will show. Ernst Haeckel introduced the world to the intricate and exquisite designs of these myriads of life-forms a century ago, but rapidly increasing marine temperatures and acidification is killing them or shifting them toward the poles, which themselves are rapidly warming.
We’re killing the creatures who gave us life, and are keeping us alive.
Send a copy of this fabulous book to any lover of nature, the marine world or, heck, your favourite Federal or State Environment Minister – we all need to know and love algae.
The Lives of Seaweeds – A Natural History of Our Planet’s Seaweeds and Other Algae, by Julie A. Phillips, 2024, NewSouth Books, 280pp, ISBN: $59.99
B.P. Marshall is a scriptwriter and author.
