After Geoengineering

by Holly Jean Buck

  Sketch: Flowers

  I gather flowers as I walk. A sprig of lavender, a scarlet trumpet, scraps of our landscape for her.

  It’s hot. A dry heat. The only sound is the quiet hum of the pumps under the algae raceways, slowly stirring the bubbly viridian mats.

  There’s a canopy of grapevines, with a rustic bench that I’ve never bothered to sit on before. The gnarled slab of bristlecone pine, under the parabolic curve of the canopy, has my mother’s touch. She likes volumetric, ambitious shapes, but to garner votes for her landscape designs, she tries to balance them with these organic flourishes. Knowing her, this stubbly bench feels like a concession.

  My mother worked on this part of the village, from the plaza up to the solar orchard, with its scruffy sheep roaming around under the panels. I had lobbied for goats as a kid, but she overruled even bringing that idea to committee. Goats are trouble.

  The lab is visible on the ridge; a low building lying in the shadow of the biorefinery. Chira works there. She’s not from here—we met on a collaboration platform. We were interested in the same microorganism, and we started trading notes, making up in-jokes about it. It was luck that a job opened up at a lab in my town right when she was graduating.

  It’s true: I’m dawdling on this bench. She might never want to see me again.

  I rearrange my droopy flowers and follow the stream. It’s lined with shrub willow, all the way down to the treatment plant. We used to have to make baskets with them in school. Mine always had sticks jamming out from every angle. My brother, on the other hand, made baskets that are still storing herbs around my parents’ kitchen. Now, he lives from his monthly ubi and makes pots. I have collected a cabinet of his pots, and whenever someone at work has a birthday, I’ve got a pot with their name on it.

  Little lizards dart across the path. I remember how entranced Chira was with this path, and the tiny yellow LEDs lining it. “The plants need water,” I had explained to her, and paused our walk to step down to the stream, scooping up cold water and drenching them. Soft chime, and the lights went green: she clapped her hands. “There used to be a game where you’d get points for watering them, and then the council would give you a T-shirt or something, but then people decided that was dumb and they’d just water them anyway.” I was trying to show off what a good citizen I was. She was more impressed with the path, and the green-and-pink hummingbirds swooping around. But we had had our first kiss on that walk.

  Here’s what happened. Chira and I were having dinner at my place. I had made a garden vegetable lasagna, the candle was dripping wax all over the table, and it was warm.

  We were listening to the crickets, savoring the evening, I thought, when she said, “How would you feel about going to Kobane?”

  “Kobane? There’s nothing there but dust.” I mean, I had read the Wikipedia article when we started dating, but I had never thought about going there.

  She folded her napkin, placing it neatly on the table.

  “Wait, why? Are you going back to Kobane?” I asked.

  “Well, it’s part of my apprenticeship agreement that I would move back to the region, and contribute what I’ve worked on.” Chira sat back in her chair, and crossed her arms.

  “I know that’s technically the contract, but I don’t know anyone who actually follows through with those.”

  “You hardly know anyone besides people who grew up here. You’ve never even been beyond the borders of this region.”

  “That’s not true,” I protested. “Anyway, what would you do there?”

  “They’re setting up a co-op biorefinery. They need people to train students who are optimizing for the specific plants in their fuelshed. Some of these native crops are still pretty under-studied.”

  “Sure, but anyone could do that.”

  “It doesn’t work as well if some outsider comes in and does it. It needs to be someone that speaks their language. Anyway, it’s clear that you don’t see anything of value there.” She got up and grabbed her bag.

  I stood up. “Wait! I’m sure there’s lots to do in the area. I mean, there’s desert wildlife, mountain climbing … There’s mountains, right?”

  The door clanged shut behind her.

  I started cleaning up the dishes, washing lasagna debris down the drain, but I couldn’t stand the screeching of the crickets in the night. I walked across the village to my brother’s place.

  Jorge lives with eight others in an ubi-house in the center of town. He earns enough from his custom-designed pots that he has his own room, instead of just a bunk. This is good, because I happen to know he snores. I walk in without knocking.

  He was lying on his bed, reading. “What’s new?”

  “I think Chira just dumped me.” I recounted our dinner to him.

  He winced when I get to the part about the dust. “You’re a dick.”

  “You have to admit it’s true, though. They totally mined their aquifers and turned a grassland into a wasteland. It’s horrible.”

  “Have you ever been there?”

  “No.”

  “Well, maybe checking it out in person is step one.”

  “You’ve never been there, either,” I replied. “You barely even leave your house except to go to the studio.”

  “Okay, but listen. You’re too young to remember grandpa always going on about respecting the travelers who come and live with us.”

  “But I do respect Chira.”

  “Sure, you respect her. You respect her journey. But you don’t respect where she comes from. As an actual place, with actual people,” Jorge added. I picked up a one-legged clay heron that’s sitting on his desk. Jorge sat up. “Don’t touch that.”

  “I guess it’s true that I don’t respect where she’s from. I mean, I don’t know anything about it—how could I respect it?”

  “Why don’t you know anything about it? You’ve had a year of Chira’s company to learn something. Didn’t you ask?”

  “No.”

  Jorge sighed. “You think you’re so intellectually curious because you went out and got trained for a job about plant genetics. But if you’d spent some time lying around here reading”—he gestured to his tablet on the nightstand—“then you might know something about what’s going on over there. It’s not like it got dusty all on its own. The world stood by and burned more carbon while it dried out, and they turned a blind eye and let the oppressors just mow everyone down. It’s amazing they are even growing anything out there. Really a miracle.”

  “I didn’t come here for a lecture.” The heron was staring at me from behind its pointy beak. “What am I going to do? I wish I could just take back everything I said.”

  “The problem isn’t the words you said. It’s what it revealed about your character. You can’t take back that revelation. She sees you in a new light, now. All you can do is damage control, by acknowledging your misdeed and explaining what you’re doing to become a better person.”

  I sighed. “Maybe I should go to Kobane.”

  “You could, but if you do it just for her, you’re going to be miserable. I’d be surprised if she wants you along at this point.” Jorge started throwing a ball against the wall. His attention had already wandered from my plight. “Hey, do you want a smoke?” he said, taking out his rolling papers. He knows I don’t smoke.

  I stormed back to my house and spent all night reading and watching virtual reality vids about life in her region. Then I thought about how good she is. What her childhood might have been like. I know the expression on her face when she gets a good idea, and I know what will make her laugh. But maybe that’s all I know.

  The trail up to the top of the ridge is rugged. Hardly anyone comes along this footpath. From up here, I can see the village, the plaza, the green fields and shiny solar orchards and forests beyond—almost to the edge of the fuelshed. The biorefinery is just below the ridge, the railroad tracks and roads sprawling out away from it. The numbers on the biorefinery’s wall have just changed. It’s made
of minimalist LEDs, most of them glowing the color of wood (even though the facility is made from high-carbon concrete—tacky, if you ask me). The eraser reads: 56,201,008 tons removed. I’d never really even paid attention to it, but Chira had noticed it immediately. I’d explained that the idea is to decommission the carbon capture part at half a billion tons. At that point, they’ll take apart the pipelines that transport the carbon dioxide away. “Not in our lifetimes, though,” I’d said, wrapping my arm around her.

  So here I am in the bike lot, with my spindly flowers, among the bicycles and workers heading home. I run my fingers through my hair. Large puffy clouds are drifting overhead, marching out across the hills. Chira’s coming out of the building, now, the glass door revolving. She sees me, and pauses briefly. I can see her roll her eyes.

  2

  Cultivating the Seas

  Within the next fifty years fish farming may change us from hunters and gatherers on the seas into “marine pastoralists”—just as a similar innovation some 10,000 years ago changed our ancestors from hunters and gatherers on the land into agriculturists and pastoralists.

  —Peter Drucker

  If earth’s lands are full and used, where else can be cultivated? While some dreamers in Silicon Valley and beyond hold out hope for eventually moving offworld, others are looking toward the oceans. To enthusiasts of ocean colonization, we are in an epochal moment: one in which domestication claims a new domain. “We’ve pushed agriculture and the Green Revolution to its limits on land, but remained hunter-gatherers on the ocean,” writes the Seasteading Institute, declaring, “A Blue Revolution in ocean farming technology would launch seasteads to center stage.”1 But you don’t have to be a libertarian who dreams of living offshore on an independent floating “seastead” home to be excited about the prospect of a counterpart to the Green Revolution of the mid twentieth century—or even a new form of marine civilization. An apocryphal Jacques Cousteau quote floats around the Internet: “We must plant the sea and herd its animals … using the sea as farmers instead of hunters. That is what civilization is all about—farming replacing hunting.” Technological breakthroughs in cultivation can enable this shift to farming in the blink of an eye, geologically speaking. It took 6,000 years of cultivation to transform the wild grass teosinte into modern-day corn, but domestication of marine species such as seaweeds and marine microalgae can happen within decades.

  Marine cultivation approaches to carbon capture are alluring because the deep ocean is one of the remotest places on earth, and when carbon reaches it, the carbon theoretically could stay there undisturbed for a very long time. A recent study in Nature Geoscience estimated that seaweed floating down to the depths of the ocean naturally sequesters 173 million tons of carbon a year—about as much as New York City emits.2 To increase that sequestration, though, macroalgae would have to be turned into bioenergy, with its carbon separated out and stored, in a BECCS system that uses macroalgae as its feedstock—or some other more inventive way to store the biomass reliably in the ocean depths would have to be devised. But some scientists find the idea worth studying, seeing in the extreme productivity of marine environments an opportunity for carbon capture that progresses more rapidly than on land: kelp can grow two feet in a day. To learn more about what it takes to cultivate seaweed, and what opportunities this presents, I paid a visit to a seaweed cultivation lab.

  More than a new superfood

  I step into the chilled room, irrationally reluctant to let the heavy insulated door close behind me in case I somehow get trapped in here. On the left side of this cavernous refrigerator / plant growth incubator are shelves bearing glass jars filled with water; on the right are flasks, lit by fluorescent tube lighting, temperature-controlled. All of the jars and flasks have tubing threaded into them, and are quietly bubbling away, like futuristic orbs, each bearing a strip of blue masking tape scrawled with Latin names. I kneel down to peer at the material floating inside. Some jars hold delicate brown flakes, curling around the edges, mushroom-like. Others have angry little spheres, or dark crimson tangles. Each flask seems to be inhabited by a different personality.

  This lab, at a campus of the University of Connecticut near Long Island Sound, is where marine biologist Dr. Charles Yarish and his lab group study seaweed. Yarish has spent his forty-plus year career nurturing the emerging seaweed industry in the United States. While seaweed still remains an overlooked crop in the United States, elsewhere in the world, production has skyrocketed. Red, green, or brown seaweed; Eucheuma, Porphyra, or Gracilaria. Domestication of macroalgae began only in the twentieth century, but already one hundred species of macroalgae are produced for a market now worth over $6.7 billion.3 There’s been a sixfold increase in production over the past twenty-five years, mostly in China, which is responsible for over half of production, and in Indonesia, responsible for another third. (US seaweed production doesn’t even make it onto the charts.) The stuff is prolific and is able to attach to hard structures, meaning it can be cultivated wherever you build one. In Europe, wild seaweed is harvested, but in Asia, the main source is cultivation. In places like China, Korea, or Japan, rope lines with seedlings of hatchery-grown brown algae are suspended from floats in the autumn, grown through the winter, and harvested throughout the spring.4 One can see these impressive installations from space.

  In Yarish’s office, beneath cabinets boasting bumper stickers like “I brake for algae” and newspaper clippings celebrating his seaweed cultivation triumphs, I show him something I’ve found in the archives. It’s a little book entitled Alchemy for the ’80s: Riches from Our Coastal Resources, which details a vision of scaling up a seaweed industry in the wake of concerns about fossil fuel resources.

  “That’s an oldie but a goodie, right there,” Yarish says. “We’re in the same place, and going back to the same issues.”

  In the 1970s and ’80s, soaring fuel prices provoked a brief but strong interest in the possibility of offshore cultivation of biofuel feedstock. At the time I spoke to Yarish, he was more interested in food production—or other high-value products. “The lowest-value product you can get out of marine biomass is biofuels. Absolutely the lowest. But when you take a look at other applications … if it’s edible, it is a high-value product. Then there are other uses for seaweeds as well.” He ticks off the phycocolloids, like alginate or carrageenan, which are used in antiaging and other cosmetic products; nutraceuticals, stuff you’d find in the vitamin aisle; biomedical applications, like antitumor and anticancer compounds. “Seaweeds, since they can’t move, have to develop chemical defenses,” he explains, making them a rich source of new discoveries of medically interesting compounds. The recent increase in production is driven largely by food demand, their main end use, though there are others: for example, the hydrocolloids that act as the skeleton of seaweeds can be extracted as clear, flavorless thickeners, which you’ll find in ice cream, shampoos, toothpaste, baked goods, paper, fish feed, animal feed, and more.5

  Currently, Yarish is taking a fresh look at developing techniques for mass production of seaweed with an eye toward biofuels. He received a government grant as part of the MARINER (Macroalgae Research Inspiring Novel Energy Resources) program of ARPA-E, the US government’s Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (DARPA’s progressive, green cousin). Projects funded by the grants include cultivation and harvesting systems, monitoring tools, and breeding and genetic tools—all technologies aimed at making the United States a global leader in seaweed production, aimed at eventually developing liquid transportation fuels. What separates MARINER from previous work in the 1970s–1980s is that it sees current opportunities in foods and feeds as steps that can lead to bringing down the cost of biomass production for biofuels.

  From a biofuel standpoint, seaweed is an attractive feedstock because it doesn’t contain lignin, the structure-giving component of plants that is expensive to break down. Seaweed as a biofuel would, of course, be only carbon neutral at best, since the carbon would return t
o the air when the biofuels are burned. However, if you also processed the feedstock in a way that would sequester carbon, you could have a kind of seaweed BECCS system. (Another way seaweed might mitigate climate change isn’t as biofuels, but as cattle feed: one lab-based study found that adding a specific seaweed species to the diet of cattle—Asparagopsis taxiformis, which contains a compound that inhibits methane formation—could reduce cows’ methane production by 99 percent. Scaling this cattle superfood up toward 2 percent of a cows’ diet, globally, would take a sizable seaweed cultivation industry.)6

  Because coastal areas are often biodiversity hot spots in need of protection—not to mention desirable for other human uses—attention has flowed toward growing seaweed biofuels farther off the coasts, utilizing the exclusive economic zones (EEZs) of nation-states, which stretch out to 200 miles offshore. However, as it turns out, it can actually be quite difficult to farm the open ocean. One example from history illustrates the challenges—and showcases the innovators still experimenting with this approach.

  Ocean Food and Energy Farms

  Capture sunlight, turn it into fuel: it sounds like a futuristic formula. Yet one of the pioneering efforts in kelp cultivation, the Ocean Food and Energy Farm project, began in 1972 with an infusion of US Navy funding. OFEF also gleaned funding from the United States Energy Research and Development Administration (the forerunner of the Department of Energy), the National Science Foundation, and the American Gas Association, which hoped that methane production on a significant scale could contribute to the national gas supply. (Just imagine a constellation of players like this interested in seaweed fuels today.) “If successfully realized, this technology would enable the planet’s oceans to become a huge new source of feeds, foods, fuels, and chemicals—fixed carbon and fixed nitrogen—for the benefit of humanity,” wrote the project leader, Dr. Howard Wilcox, noting that the major question was economic feasibility. “But” he added, “the issue is more one of ‘when’ rather than ‘whether’ the concept will eventually pay off.”7