Kelp Can Help Build More Just Futures

This essay on Earth Equity and the relationship between kelp recovery and decarceration is part of the Companion Species series, which investigates a complex, interconnected, and co-constituted web of beyond-human relating. Series editors: Tessa Archambault, Dylan Couch, Kuhelika Ghosh, Ellie Kincaid, and Bri Meyer.

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Underwater photographs featuring bull kelp (Nereocystis luetkeana) appear frequently on the covers of marine planning documents. Sunlight gleams through translucent fronds, suspended elegantly in their watery surroundings. These images suggest enormous potential, especially in the context of ocean conservation. 

Although it resembles a tree, kelp is a macroalgae, or seaweed. It anchors to rocky surfaces by a holdfast (root-like structure) and has a vertical stipe (stem) that extends thirty to sixty feet towards the surface. A plumage of blades (resembling leaves) emerges from a single gas-filled float, which buoys kelp upward toward the sunlight for photosynthesis. 

Assembled communities of bull kelp form “forests” that host a mosaic of multispecies life, both underwater and on the shore. Beached nests of wrack (kelp washed ashore) dot winter beaches, sheltering invertebrate life that feeds migrating shorebirds. Endangered juvenile salmon and forage fishes use kelp’s canopy as nursery grounds, and otters find stability in floating rafts of kelp blades. Bits of kelp feed abalone and other shellfish, which in turn feed others, including people, sunflower sea stars, and otters. 

Kelp forests link the Eastern Pacific Ocean from central California to southern Alaska in a chain of biotic connectivity and primary productivity. They form the foundation of marine ecosystems, act as a carbon sink, and may even mitigate climate change. For some seaweed futurists, kelp also presents the promise of a fast-growing source of food, fuel, and compostable bioplastics. According to Eyak kelp practitioners Jen Rose Smith and Jim Smith, kelp is a “golden child” of climate change. Bull kelp is, indeed, remarkable.

Kelp Collapse and Response

But bull kelp communities, and with them the ecological worlds they sustain, are slipping away at alarming rates. Researchers recorded a 95 percent reduction in kelp canopy off the North Coast of California following what they call a “perfect storm” of cascading biotic and abiotic disruptions.

Kelp thrives in cool, nutrient-rich waters. But several ocean warming events, including a marine heatwave called the Blob (2013-2016), El Niño, and climate-driven warming, made kelp especially vulnerable. A surge in the mysterious sea star wasting syndrome devastated sunflower sea star populations, leaving no predators to herbivorous purple urchin. 

Without sunflower star predation, purple urchin populations swelled. They consumed nearly all the kelp, transforming kelp forests into alternate-state ecosystems called urchin barrens. Today, spikey blankets of purple urchins envelop historical kelp forests previously defined by interdependency between kelp, abalone, red and purple sea urchin, sea otter, and sunflower sea star. 

The unraveling of kelp ecologies makes clear that without kelp, abalone can’t eat, otters can’t raft, and forage fishes can’t hide. Bull kelp collapse is a foundational loss for marine ecosystems with implications for a wide range of species, coastal communities, and ways of practicing marine restoration. 

Scientists, conservationists, and restorationists frame the rapid transformation of kelp forests to urchin barrens in terms of crisis. In response, they’ve initiated ecosystem-scale recovery efforts that include captive breeding programs for sunflower star and abalone, urchin ranches, kelp seeding, and even underwater urchin culling. 

Kelp communities come together through their interspecies relationships—between kelp, sunflower star, urchin, and sea otter. Just as kelp communities are made through their relations, people, too, become members of the kelp community through processes of kelp recovery. When we register kelp collapse, trace its impacts, initiate recovery plans, and imagine kelp futures, we make relationships that shape kelp forests.

Seaweed Futures at California Seaweed Festival

That’s what brought me to the California Seaweed Festival, where I met Julia Dunn, co-founder of Earth Equity. Earth Equity is an organization that works at the intersection of kelp recovery and decarceration. Decarceration, the opposite of incarceration, involves efforts at the structural level to end mass incarceration by reducing both prison sentences and sentence lengths, to keep people out of prison.

Seaweed excitement finds a home among a wide range of stakeholders and rights-holders. They include an abalone farmer whose operation spread disease to wild populations in the 1980s, but whose cultivation infrastructure has been crucial to the design of conservation programs responsible for stewarding endangered abalone; a bioplastics startup; the Rou Dalagurr Food Sovereignty Lab, whose presentation of Ghvtlh-k’vsh shu’-srnelh-‘i~ (Kelp Guardians) reminds us, “YOU ARE ON WIYOT LAND”; kelp ecology researchers; and a company manufacturing aquatic robots to monitor seaweed farms. 

At the same time that a hopeful solutionism is being projected onto seaweeds as allies in the fight against climate change, wild bull kelp communities are suffering from changing ocean conditions. This range of perspectives is typical of the seaweed space, where seaweeds in general—and kelps in particular—are being enrolled in multiple projects for ocean futures. These range from habitat recovery to marine carbon dioxide removal, to food sovereignty, animated by the slogan, “Kelp can Help!”

Marine Conservation and Environmental Justice 

The fifth annual California Seaweed Festival, held on Wiyot territory in Wigi (Humboldt Bay), was the first to include an Indigenous Peoples’ Forum and Environmental Justice panel. “It’s ironic that the environmental justice panel is at the end of the day,” comments Dunn, gesturing at marine conservation’s lack of engagement with environmental justice frameworks—which span procedural, distributive, recognitional, and restorative modes of justice. 

Kelp collapse and its response come at a time when environmental, climate, and multispecies justice are being increasingly amplified. Yet, marine conservation remains narrowly confined to scientific frameworks that are based on Euro-Western ways of knowing the world. Environmental justice frameworks are all but absent from dominant models for kelp recovery. This approach to conservation and management is limited by the regulatory authorities that govern marine and nearshore ecologies. 

Institutional efforts to recover marine ecosystems are vital. For example, scientists at the University of Washington’s Friday Harbor Marine Labs collected twenty-nine surviving sunflower stars and bred them in a laboratory setting for the first time. Years later, several lab-raised sea stars survived a three-month-long sleepover in Friday Harbor, some even growing new arms. At UC Davis, researchers are designing underwater infrastructures to protect baby kelp from hungry sea urchins using ARKEV modules, or Array to Recover Kelp Ecosystem Vegetation. Meanwhile, the White Abalone Captive Breeding Program has returned three lab-raised abalone cohorts back to the ocean.

However, a disconnect between experts and communities can emerge when marine science and conservation become overly centralized within large organizations, labs, and government agencies. Coastal communities, whose lives and traditions are intertwined with the ocean, often find themselves distanced from these kinds of recovery efforts. This exclusion not only erodes trust but risks sidelining local knowledge that could make conservation efforts more equitable and effective.

Kelp Restoration from the Inside Out

While there may not be commensurate values among participants at the California Seaweed Festival, Earth Equity’s values are clear. They were created in 2022 by co-founders Kelton O’Connor (who is incarcerated) and Julia Dunn (who is free) at San Quentin Penitentiary. 

Self-determination, liberation, access, sustainability, and wholeness guide Earth Equity’s decarceral and ecological restoration work. Their values are informed by the seventeen principles of environmental justice created at the first multinational People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in 1991, and the ten principles of disability justice, given the disproportionate incarceration of BIPOC and Disabled people. Earth Equity’s mission “to facilitate nurturing relationships between system-impacted people and ecosystems, to cultivate just food practices in prisons, jails, and fence line communities, and to reduce recidivism through holistic community care and workforce development for a blue economy” articulates the intersections of kelp recovery and decarceration. 

Earth Equity identifies axes of reciprocity and mutuality between people impacted by the carceral system and kelp forest ecologies. “Kelp Restoration from the Inside Out” (KRIO) begins from the premise that system-impacted people need kelp, and kelp needs them, too. 

In addition to poor nutrition, inadequate medical care, and neglect, environmental harms such as exposure to water and air pollution accumulate at some of the highest rates in carceral ecologies. When eaten, sodium alginate—a component of kelp—initiates physical detoxification of environmental harms. Thus, seaweeds can support both food justice and sovereignty programs and be used medicinally to resist chronic illnesses produced by the carceral system. 

By necessity, incarcerated people are resourceful, innovative, powerful, creative, and resilient. KRIO emphasizes that kelp communities need system-impacted people’s attention and brilliance to address the complexities of kelp recovery. Kelp Restoration from the Inside Out understands participants not as recipients, but as active agents of healing, justice, and change. Inside San Quentin, KIRO is co-facilitated by incarcerated and free participants, and spans ocean education workshops, job training, and environmental justice curriculum.

Outside of San Quentin, KRIO’s Abolition Ecology Researchers are creating California’s first Reentry Support and Kelp Reforestation Cooperative in Humboldt County. When established in Fall 2025, this cooperative will facilitate pathways to business ownership for people in reentry, fostering relationships among a variety of stakeholders in kelp reforestation, and seaweed-based food sovereignty initiatives which incorporate sustainable gathering and restorative farming.

Abolition, according to Critical Resistance, “is a political vision with the goal of eliminating imprisonment, policing, and surveillance and creating lasting alternatives to punishment and imprisonment.” Abolitionist movements work to create collective practices of safety, accountability, and healing untethered from existing carceral and criminal legal systems. 

Abolitions’ creative, abundant, world-building impulses inform the work of Earth Equity’s Abolition Ecology Researchers, who are modeling their programs based on kelp’s seasonality. In autumn, when ocean water is clear and warm, researchers cultivate their collective vision. They establish shared values, accountability processes, and theories that guide program development and practice.  

Wintertime wave surges uproot kelp from its holdfast. Currents wash kelp ashore in a process that transforms kelp forests into beached wrack. These ecological transformations, which follow kelps’ annual reproductive cycles, coincide with research on human-kelp relationships. Researchers study and practice “unsettling” through engagement with Indigenous food sovereignty. 

During the spring, nutrient-rich waters move from the cold depths of the ocean to the sea’s surface in a process called upwelling. Patterns of marine nutrient cycling, like upwelling, inform research on resistance histories and cooperative economic models.

In the summer, when the coast is foggy and kelp is abundant, researchers consider the “two faces” of reentry: the abundance of returning to community and the carceral fog of parole, soft policing, isolation, and system-driven recidivism. Kelp Restoration from the Inside Out’s developmental practice resists an isolated single-species approach to kelp recovery. Instead, it embeds the work of social transformation and ecological restoration in environments, communities, relationships, and seasons. 

Kelp’s Solidarities

Dunn draws parallels between the conditions of environmental racism that produce chronic illness in carceral systems and those that plague bull kelp ecologies. For example, Impact Justice’s 2020 report found that 75 percent of the respondents cited being served rotten food in prison. Additionally, incarcerated people are more than six times more susceptible to foodborne illness than the general public. Dunn asks, “Could you ‘rehabilitate’ if you were completely ill from the environment that you were in?” 

Earth Equity’s Right2Heal program contributes to the development of four in-prison food security programs: worker-operated co-ops utilizing aquaculture techniques, a consumer food co-op, a “green trades” education and skill-building program, and a Food is Medicine program that subsidizes healing foods for San Quentin’s chronically ill residents. These programs serve as the proof of concept for a network of cooperatives within and beyond California’s prisons. 

The Reentry Support & Kelp Reforestation Co-op exemplifies the possibilities outlined in the Let Us Contribute Initiative, a policy campaign to legalize worker-owned cooperatives in California Prisons. It seeks to reinvest profits into business development grants for people in reentry and victims of violent crimes. Throughout these programs, Earth Equity is developing an ethic of solidarity with seaweeds. Seaweeds are collaborators, friends, allies, and companions in building more just futures.

Earth Equity is working with seaweeds not just as study subjects or resources to be managed, but as relational companions in the decarceral movement. Their creative, healing, and holistic practices push the limits of dominant ways of studying and conserving the environment as something separate from human communities. By emphasizing mutually restorative relationships between system-impacted people and kelp, Earth Equity’s programs foreground kelp’s agency and unsettle kelp research and restoration. 

Kelp can help to build a more just, abundant, and free future. Kelp Restoration from the Inside Out is transforming relationships between people and kelp—from unidirectional relations based on “resources” to reciprocal ones based on self-determination, solidarity, collaboration, world-building, and liberation. In doing so, they extend an ethic of companionship that goes beyond the binary of single-species relationships and isolationist approaches to environmentalism. Instead, Earth Equity draws connections between cooperativism, solidarity, and interdependence to articulate visions of healing with kelp. 

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Featured image: Bull kelp in Fort Bragg, California. Photo by author, 2023.

Lydia Lapporte is an M.A. student in the Environmental Studies program at the University of Oregon. Her research focuses on the collapse of bull kelp communities in the Eastern Pacific and explores the possibilities of acting in solidarity with kelp and kelp-connected communities by attending to the conditions of possibility that produce kelp collapse and futures. Contact.