Seas of significance: a biosemiotic exploration of seaweed in New Bedford’s coastal cultural heritage

Abstract

New Bedford, Massachusetts, celebrated for its whaling past and immortalized in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, occupies a central place in the American maritime imagination. Yet amid this storied legacy, one coastal presence has remained largely unacknowledged: seaweed. Often considered biologically mundane or visually peripheral, seaweed has been overlooked in cultural narratives despite its enduring material, sensory, and symbolic roles in coastal communities. This paper reframes seaweed as a heritage species and a more-than-human participant in shaping New Bedford’s identity, memory, and environmental rhythm. Drawing on biosemiotics, narrative ecology, and cultural heritage theory, it explores how seaweed functions simultaneously as sign and species. Working with a curated collection of 100 archival items, including pressed seaweed albums, whaling logbooks, oral histories, and maritime ephemera, the article traces how algae have acted as co-creators of cultural practice from the 19th century to the present. A biosemiotic lens positions seaweed within a relational framework of ecological responsiveness and cultural memory. From practical uses in agriculture and maritime labor to its presence in Victorian art, eco-design, and culinary revival, seaweed emerges as a material of continuity and care. Its tactile qualities, symbolic renderings, and seasonal rhythms invite ways of knowing grounded in interrelation. Seaweed’s cultural invisibility stems not from insignificance but from the anthropocentric lens that has shaped heritage frameworks. This study offers a relational model, grounded in biosemiotic feedback and multispecies ethics, that recognizes algae as co-authors of cultural meaning and contributes to emerging conversations in more-than-human geography and environmental humanities. It contributes to ongoing conversations in environmental ethics, public history, and sensory heritage by encouraging new approaches to storytelling, conservation, and governance that foreground the interdependence of human and ecological memory.

Introduction: margins of memory

New Bedford is a city long defined by water, salt, and story. As the famed home port of Melville’s Moby-Dick, it occupies a central place in American maritime imagination, symbolizing whaling legacy, global trade, and nautical endurance. Its streets, museums, and collective memory echo with the rhythms of whale oil, scrimshaw, and shipbuilding. Yet when we shift the lens away from these monumental narratives and instead focus on quieter, vegetal presences, a different coastal history begins to surface.

Drawing on multisensory archival analysis and field observation, this study centers on seaweed, a ubiquitous but culturally overlooked feature of New Bedford’s intertidal landscape. Far from being mere shoreline debris, seaweed has long served as both a practical material and a semiotic actor in local life. It was gathered after storms, packed around casks, used to insulate homes, fertilize fields, and ornament album pages with poetic inscriptions. Though interwoven with the region’s ecological rhythms and domestic practices, seaweed remains largely absent from official heritage narratives.

At the heart of the cultural-political debates surrounding coastal heritage are questions of whose histories are told, which species and landscapes are deemed worthy of preservation, and how power shapes these decisions. As a researcher grounded in semiotics and working across cultural geography and environmental humanities, I approach seaweed not merely as an ecological resource, but as a semiotic site, one that reveals how cultural values, exclusions, and identities are encoded in the coastal landscape. My motivation arises from a desire to illuminate the unnoticed actors in maritime histories, challenging the anthropocentric focus that has historically guided heritage frameworks. Seaweed’s marginal status highlights how cultural politics can obscure the significance of nonhuman presences, even when they are selectively displayed in museum exhibitions, or excluded entirely from civic symbols and policy discourse.

As this article foregrounds the cultural significance of seaweed in New Bedford, a brief terminological clarification is warranted. The word seaweed is often used interchangeably with algae, kelp, Irish moss, or even seagrass, although each term refers to a different biological and cultural category. Seaweed is best understood as an informal umbrella term for macroscopic marine algae; algae denotes a broader group that includes both microscopic phytoplankton and large marine and freshwater algae. Kelp refers specifically to large brown algae in the order Laminariales, known for forming extensive underwater forests in cooler waters. Irish moss (Chondrus crispus) is a red alga long harvested for culinary and medicinal purposes, while seagrass is not algae at all but a flowering plant with true roots and seeds. Historical travel logs rarely observed these distinctions. Shoreline growths were broadly labeled kelp, and 19th-century collectors often used sea moss to describe pressed algae artworks. In this article, I retain the vernacular term seaweed, reflecting the everyday language through which New Bedford residents describe the organisms that gather along the wrackline. Whatever their precise taxonomic identity, these forms function collectively as cultural material, shaping local labor, narrative, memory, and multispecies relation.

This paper proposes that seaweed, rather than being passive or peripheral, is culturally significant, acting as a living archive of place that participates in shaping coastal identity and memory. Drawing on field notes, archival traces, artistic ephemera, and multispecies theory, the research reframes seaweed as a heritage species. By tracing its material uses, symbolic resonances, and aesthetic appearances from the 19th century to the present, the study positions seaweed as a subtle but enduring agent of meaning-making.

This research draws from ecosemiotics in its broader sense, as well as cultural heritage theory, to move beyond anthropocentric perspectives and toward a multispecies understanding of place. Robin Wall Kimmerer reminds us that plants are not passive; they are teachers and record-keepers. ¹ Merlin Sheldrake explores the entangled ways fungi and other organisms shape cognition and communication. ² James Bridle challenges human-centered models of intelligence, advocating for multispecies cognition that emerges through networks of relation, perception, and mutual becoming. ³ Read in dialogue, these thinkers invite us to reimagine heritage not as static inheritance but as an unfolding, co-authored story told through fronds and tides as well as through text and monument.

By situating seaweed at the intersection of ecological signification and cultural representation, this study contributes to cultural geography’s evolving discourse on more-than-human heritage. It speaks to ongoing efforts to develop interpretive approaches that foreground the materiality, agency, and symbolic potency of overlooked species. In doing so, the project aligns with emergent work on ecological entanglements, offering a microcosm of the ways nonhuman life can reshape our understanding of space, place, and historical memory.

Although rooted in the coastal landscape of New Bedford, this study aspires toward a broader reframing of cultural heritage. It emphasizes how nonhuman actors contribute to meaning-making and how sensory, symbolic, and ecological practices shape what we remember and protect.

As these intertidal histories unfold, several questions ripple beneath the surface of this inquiry. How has seaweed, in its material, sensory, and symbolic forms, participated in shaping coastal identity in New Bedford? What traces of its presence linger in the historical and sensory archives of the region? And how might algae be understood not as background matter or coastal residue, but as a heritage-bearing actor whose rhythms, uses, and appearances shape community, ecology, and cultural imagination?

These questions guide the pages that follow, tracing seaweed’s roles across agriculture and maritime labor, domestic arts and visual culture, ecological rhythms and aesthetic sensibilities. In this sense, the work is less an investigation than an attunement: an attempt to read seaweed’s biological and cultural presences as entwined threads within New Bedford’s coastal heritage.

Reading wracklines: archives, embodiment, and encounter

The wrackline is a place where the sea leaves its traces. It gathers fronds, salt, drift, and memory in a shifting margin that registers storms, seasons, and human response. Reading this intertidal assemblage requires attention not only to biological residue but also to the cultural markings that accumulate along the shore.

Looking to the region’s archival record reveals a similarly uneven accumulation. The core of this study draws from a curated collection of 100 cataloged items, including paintings, pressed specimens, ledger books, shipping logs, and photographic records spanning the 19th to the 21st centuries. These materials were selected not for institutional prestige but for narrative resonance. Any artifact, visual, textual, or material, that directly referenced seaweed, whether as kelp, sea moss, wrack, or in depictions of maritime tangles, was included. Across this collection, a recurring pattern emerged: seaweed often appeared in liminal zones, situated between utility and ornamentation, between waste and wonder. Many items were multimodal, featuring annotations, dedications, or artistic embellishments. Pressed specimens labeled with species and site details, albums exchanged as gifts, etchings of gatherers, and images of oxen-drawn carts hauling algae all illustrated seaweed’s multifaceted role in coastal life. Viewed together, these artifacts chart seaweed’s evolution from subsistence material to ecological and relational co-author.

Archival work also involved examining the holdings of the New Bedford Whaling Museum and the New Bedford Fishing Heritage Center. Shipping logs referenced seaweed management, farming and fishing ledgers described the use of wrack in soil amendment, and albums and photographs conveyed algae’s presence in domestic, artistic, and maritime settings. Many of these mentions were brief, even incidental, yet when read collectively they underscored seaweed’s persistent role in everyday labor, sensory experience, and coastal rhythm.

A key encounter in this research took place during a 2023 visit to the New Bedford Whaling Museum, where the exhibition A Singularly Marine and Fabulous Produce, curated by Naomi Slipp and Maura Coughlin, foregrounded seaweed’s narrative and aesthetic value. ⁴ Framed specimens, historical etchings, and the crunch of wrack underfoot offered a multisensory experience that reinforced algae’s cultural presence and its relative invisibility in official heritage narratives. The exhibition demonstrated how curatorial framing can transform seaweed from overlooked material into a lens for ecological storytelling.

Field encounters along the shoreline further deepened this perspective. Walks across the intertidal zone, visits to maritime festivals, and participation in museum events revealed algae’s continued resonance in contemporary cultural practices. Artisanal soaps labeled as wild sea moss blend, children dragging strands of wrack along the beach, and the scent of kelp traveling on the wind all contributed to a phenomenological map of the coast. These experiences echoed what Deely describes as the Lebenswelt, a shared world shaped through sensory encounter and ecological presence. ⁵

These archival and embodied engagements converge through an interpretive framework grounded in biosemiotics and cultural heritage studies. Drawing on Saussure’s distinction between signifier and signified and extending it through biosemiotic accounts of symbol–matter coupling, this study approaches cultural identity as emerging through ecological sign systems. ⁶ Seaweed, in this context, is understood not merely as organic matter but as a cultural participant whose material form becomes associated with meanings such as labor, care, seasonality, and memory. Rather than treating these relations as fixed, the analysis emphasizes how meanings shift across historical moments, aesthetic framings, and lived encounters. This approach aligns with ecosemiotic accounts that treat environments as structured fields of signification rather than passive backdrops. As Maran argues through the concept of ‘nature-text’, ecological materials such as shorelines, wracklines, and species assemblages can be read as semiotically active without being reduced to symbolic representation alone. ⁷

What this framework reveals is a layered semiotic field rather than a single mode of meaning. At the level of sign-making, seaweed albums, artistic compositions, and botanical specimens operate as signs whose meanings emerge through cultural interpretation. A pressed frond becomes not only an object of beauty but a mediator of memory, linking natural material to social meaning. The relation between signifier and signified is treated here as dynamic and historically situated, with meanings that often take the form of nostalgia, ecological attentiveness, or aesthetic appreciation.

Seaweed also appears as an ecological index, a natural marker of seasonal change and marine rhythm. Its position along the wrackline signals the history of tides and storms, functioning as a nonhuman indicator that coastal communities have long read and responded to. These indices reveal seaweed’s capacity to communicate environmental conditions, allowing its material presence to serve as a kind of marine chronicle. ⁸

Biosemiotic feedback further illuminates the recursive loops through which seaweed and human practice shape one another. When algae were used in whale oil casks or applied as soil amendment, these actions altered both ecological availability and cultural meaning, producing shifts in how seaweed was valued, harvested, and understood. In this feedback loop, human interpretation becomes part of the ecological story, shaping future interactions and cultural expectations. ⁹

Seaweed simultaneously serves as a sensory heritage cue. Its smell, texture, and visual form evoke powerful associations with coastal life, anchoring memory in embodied experience. The scent of drying seaweed or the feel of fronds underfoot becomes part of a lived archive that exceeds written documentation, carrying histories that are tactile, affective, and atmospheric.

Finally, cultural reframing marks the processes through which algae move from marginality to significance. In museum contexts, artistic compositions, and community workshops, seaweed is repositioned from waste to wonder. Such reframing reflects broader symbolic transformations and underscores algae’s potential to become a heritage-bearing presence rather than a peripheral ecological actor.

Taken together, these semiotic, ecological, and sensory dimensions reveal the multiple ways in which seaweed circulates through systems of meaning. They demonstrate how algae participate in heritage practices and interpretive frameworks, ¹⁰ multispecies entanglements and ethical reorientations, ¹¹ and relational forms of care grounded in reciprocity, ¹² making visible a coastal heritage co-authored through ecological and cultural signification.

Seaweed, sentiment, and the tactile politics of memory

Seaweed’s cultural presence in New Bedford emerges not through monuments or plaques but through tide lines, album pages, logbook scribbles, and the faint perfume of wrack after a storm. The sensory archive of the shoreline offers its own narrative: in the 19th century, seaweed appeared as a seasonal presence anticipated by farmers and gatherers alike. After strong storms, it washed up in abundance along the wrackline, dense with nutrients and rich with promise. Shipping ledgers and coastal journals, while sparse in commentary, confirm the pattern. Seaweed was not only collected; it was read as signal, residue, and resource, marking both the storm’s aftermath and the beginning of clambake season. This multisensory quality resonates with Bryony Gillard’s Unctuous Between Fingers, which foregrounds the tactile and affective dimensions of seaweed and shows how meaning often begins in sensation before it is named. ¹³

This recursive relationship between environmental event and cultural response reflects forms of biosemiotic feedback, where signs are produced and interpreted through interspecies interaction. ¹⁴ In maritime labor, seaweed was packed around whale-oil casks for insulation, embedded in fishing nets, and dried on docks. Its absorbent, insulating, and pliable material properties shaped its practical uses, while its pungent scent and fleshy texture made it memorable. Logbooks such as the Laurens of Sag Harbor vividly illustrate seaweed’s embeddedness in the maritime Umwelt, as they describe kelp as ‘a wonderful marine vegetable whose movement in the surf tells much of storm or stillness’, a phrasing that reads seaweed as both material presence and environmental signal. ¹⁵ Seaweed becomes a barometer of weather and mood, a nonhuman agent within a wider interpretive ecology.

Similarly, in Barclay: Bark of the West, the presence of seaweed is captured in visceral detail: ‘tangled with driftwood and kelp . . . steaming in the morning sun’. ¹⁶ This imagery resonates with the embodied texture of place, where warmth, scent, and grit converge into a sensory tapestry that shaped daily experience. ¹⁷ To walk among steaming fronds in morning light is to dwell in multispecies semiotics, where each sensory cue triggers awareness, memory, or action.

Contemporary recollections echo these impressions. The New Bedford Fishing Heritage Center preserves stories of fishermen who remember the smell of drying kelp as part of their childhood landscapes. These recollections underscore that seaweed was not only seen and used but lived with, part of a shared affective and ecological field. This olfactory dimension aligns with scholarship by Hsuan L. Hsu on environmental smell and with Anicka Yi’s explorations of olfactory aesthetics, both of whom show how scent fundamentally shapes ecological perception and cultural memory. ¹⁸ As Anna Tsing reminds us, attending to seemingly peripheral species can reveal how lifeways adapt and endure within uncertain ecological futures. ¹⁹

Aesthetic artifacts and sentimental archives

Seaweed entered New Bedford’s visual and domestic culture in intricate, embodied ways. Most striking are the pressed seaweed albums, like the 1876 set catalogued as item 2019.51 at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. Bound between scallop shells, these albums contain delicately arranged algae, inscriptions such as ‘Christmas 1875’, and dedications like ‘Mrs. T.R. Green from Genie M. Lovell . . . Remember the Giver, New Bedford, March 31, 1876’. These objects offer both visual beauty and emotional intimacy.

In the language of cultural semiotics, these albums are not merely representations but performative signs; as Lotman would argue, they enact care, memory, and relationship. ²⁰ Kimmerer writes that gifts from the earth and sea are never free, they come with responsibility. ²¹ Pressed seaweed becomes such a gift: a dried echo of place, passed hand to hand. The act of pressing, labeling, and gifting reflects a tactile storytelling that is both ecological and emotional. Lucy Lippard highlights how localized, everyday artistic practices can embed landscapes with personal and communal significance, transforming algae into a conduit for place-based identity. ²²

Essays such as ‘Flowers from the Ocean’ in Newport History illustrate how seaweed collecting allowed 19th-century women to render coastal ecologies visible in ways that combined aesthetic sensibility with scientific curiosity. ²³ These pressed specimens, often arranged in elaborate compositions and annotated with location, date, or dedication, were not only works of visual care but also embodied ecological attentiveness. In this sense, such albums were more than decorative; they served as relational texts that reflected tactile engagement with the shoreline and offered a mode of environmental storytelling that blurred the lines between art, science, and domestic practice.

Artworks and maritime photographs from the late 19th and early 20th centuries also show the visual grammar of seaweed. Uncovered imagery reveals flat-bottom skiffs laden with seaweed, often rowed into shallow bays for harvesting at low tide. Archival photographs and exhibition prints depict seaweed gatherers, figures hunched in effort, working in intertidal silence. These scenes are not romanticized but grounded in labor, ritual, and repetition.

Robert Swain Gifford’s etchings frequently included shoreline wrack and weed-strewn rocks, lending algae a subtle but persistent place in the coastal visual field. William Winchester Dana’s Gathering Seaweed goes further, placing algae not in the background but as the very subject of coastal engagement. In this image, seaweed is not just context; it is livelihood, effort, and elemental relationship, framed through light and posture. By bringing seaweed to the foreground, artists and archival materials alike illustrate how marginal organisms become powerful symbols of coastal livelihood.

In many paintings, kelp appears as background motif, thick, tangled, suggestive of abundance or storm aftermath. In the margins of maritime nostalgia, seaweed anchors the visual and sensory palette of coastal life. As cultural theorist Mieke Bal reminds us, framing is always interpretive: what is pushed to the edge tells us what the center refuses to hold. In this sense, seaweed’s marginality is itself a narrative. ²⁴

Semiotic actors and evolving cultural practices

Across archival layers, seaweed functions as a material mnemonic, shaping and being shaped by human narratives. In early cookbooks and domestic manuals from the region, Irish moss appears as a thickener in jellies and remedies. These recipes, as Shetterly rightfully shows, while medicinal or culinary on the surface, enact a deeper cultural logic: they incorporate the ocean into the body, binding human health to marine cycles. ²⁵

By the mid-20th century, seaweed began to appear in coastal souvenirs, framed under glass, lacquered onto boxes, or embedded in resin jewelry. These objects mark a shift from seaweed as tool to seaweed as token, nostalgic, aesthetic, commodified. The sensory properties remain, the texture, translucence, marine scent, but they are curated for consumption. This reflects what cultural ecologist Kate Rigby terms the ‘aestheticization of ecology’, where multispecies encounters are preserved in curated, often decontextualized forms. ²⁶

In recent decades, seaweed has been reimagined yet again as sustainable superfood, climate-resilient crop, and design inspiration. One notable example is Mary Jameson’s Eco-Sea Snowflake, a delicately constructed ornament made entirely of preserved local seaweed. Created to celebrate oceanic ecology through craft, the piece exemplifies how algae can serve both as aesthetic material and as an agent of environmental storytelling, framing seaweed not as waste, but as witness, pattern, and memory. Culinary projects like Kate Masury’s Simmering the Sea integrate local seaweeds into recipes that honor both flavor and ecological ethics. ²⁷ This marks a partial return to relationality, framing seaweed not only as product but as partner in resilient foodways.

Artists and educators in New Bedford have similarly experimented with seaweed-based dyes, homemade inks, and children’s workshops designed to teach sensory awareness. Such material storytelling indicates what Tim Ingold describes as an embodied, processual engagement with the world around us, where learning arises through direct, tactile encounters. ²⁸

This cultural revalorization aligns with biosemiotic feedback: as seaweed becomes more visible in design, cuisine, and policy, its ecological roles gain recognition. Artists and educators alike have turned to algae not simply as subject but as collaborator. Seaweed workshops at coastal museums invite children to feel, smell, and draw with kelp, echoing what Sheldrake describes as learning through entanglement. ²⁹

Through these evolving practices, seaweed continues to shape the meanings of coastal life, quietly, resiliently, and with fronds unfurled toward the future.

Margins and meanings: seaweed as absence, signal, and symbol

Heritage is never simply what is preserved; it is what societies choose to remember, protect, and elevate as culturally meaningful. Traditional heritage frameworks have prioritized monumental human achievements, privileging structures, events, or individuals, but recent scholarship reconceptualizes heritage as threshold rather than monument, emphasizing the relational, the sensory, and the affective dimensions of place. Heritage emerges through ongoing encounters rather than fixed inheritances. In this broader understanding, seaweed becomes legible not as residue or peripheral matter but as a heritage-bearing organism whose rhythms, textures, and sensory presences have long shaped the cultural life of the coast.

Read across archival, artistic, and ecological traces, seaweed appears not merely as a biological substance drifting in the intertidal zone but as a tidal narrator, a witness to evolving relationships between environment and community. Its material humility belies a symbolic richness. Shipping ledgers, logbooks, souvenir crafts, seaweed albums, and culinary revivals all reveal seaweed’s role in what Robin Wall Kimmerer describes as a multispecies ethics of reciprocity. ³⁰ Its tactile and olfactory traces, seasonal abundance, and symbolic reframings contribute to a dynamic Umwelt, an environment saturated with signs and meanings co-authored by algae and humans.

The archival silences surrounding seaweed speak as forcefully as its appearances. Its consistent marginality, barely noted in maritime texts such as The St. George, Benjamin Cummings, or Falcon: Bark of New Bedford, reflects a long-standing hierarchy in what counts as worthy of remembrance. ³¹ Cultural ecologist Kate Rigby names this phenomenon ecological invisibility, in which nonhuman actors central to daily life are excluded from formal memory. ³²

Echoing silences shape early travel writing. Caroline Pomeroy’s 1824 journal, though rich in observations of shoreline textures and coastal flora, omits seaweed completely. ³³ Her description that ‘the roughness of the shore, scattered with pebbles, shells, and driftwood, told of last night’s storm long before the sky confirmed it’ demonstrates deep ecological attentiveness, yet the absence of algae from her account reflects aesthetic and genre constraints. Susan Bassnett notes that 19th-century women’s travel writing often favored the picturesque and introspective over empiricism, ³⁴ distancing itself from the scientific authority of male-authored narratives. Sara Mills extends this insight by showing how relational and emotionally resonant modes of description contributed to selective silences around materials considered too mundane to merit textual attention. ³⁵ In this light, Pomeroy’s silence is not incidental but patterned, shaped by representational norms that rendered seaweed culturally peripheral in early environmental storytelling.

The same pattern appears in civic and historical narratives. Eileen Cox Donahue’s 1959 dissertation on New Bedford’s early printing history, although meticulous in charting the city’s ascent during the whaling boom, mentions seaweed only in passing. ³⁶ Such omissions underscore a broader archival tendency to overlook nonhuman presences, reinforcing the need for heritage frameworks that account for the more-than-human materialities that sustain coastal life.

Environmental humanities scholarship has increasingly challenged the anthropocentric limits of heritage discourse. Rodney Harrison, Caitlin DeSilvey, and Emma Waterton and Laurajane Smith advocate for recognizing landscapes, species, and ecosystems as co-creators of cultural meaning. ³⁷ These approaches, which range from multispecies ethnography and more-than-human geography to ecological philosophy, resonate strongly with Indigenous, Andean, and African relational ontologies. Thinkers such as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson emphasize land-based knowledge, kinship with nonhuman beings, and ethical responsibilities of care. ³⁸ Reciprocity becomes a foundational principle for cultural and ecological resurgence, offering models of memory and stewardship attuned to multispecies entanglements. ³⁹

As Lorimer shows, conservation and heritage practices often privilege charismatic or aesthetically legible species, with less visible organisms such as seaweed remaining at the margins of recognition and care. ⁴⁰

Biosemiotic traditions also diverge in emphasis: Jesper Hoffmeyer foregrounds material semiosis across species, while Eduardo Kohn situates semiosis within Indigenous relational ontologies. This article draws from both to frame algae as communicative presences embedded in place-based ecological relations. ⁴¹

From this perspective, seaweed’s exclusion from heritage narratives stems not from insignificance but from entrenched anthropocentric lenses. UNESCO’s 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage expanded heritage beyond monumental traditions to include practices and ecological knowledge systems. ⁴² Reframing algae as heritage-bearing moves us away from preservation as freeze-frame and toward what Hooper describes institutionally and Kimmerer frames relationally as living, embodied, relational heritage. ⁴³ Anderson develops this reorientation by critiquing extractive approaches in marine science and advocating for thinking with kelp as a relational partner in knowledge-making, a rhetorical and ethical stance that opens new pathways for environmental understanding. ⁴⁴

Biosemiotics illuminates these relations as both symbolic and functional. Feedback loops between seaweed’s seasonal rhythms and cultural practices in agriculture, fishing, cooking, and craft demonstrate that semiosis is never unidirectional. Hoffmeyer and Cobley emphasize that signs circulate and reshape behaviors across species boundaries. ⁴⁵ Heise adds that these loops are discursive: the stories told, or untold, about nonhuman species shape conservation priorities, determining which lives are safeguarded. ⁴⁶ When algae remain off the map, their potential inclusion in policy diminishes, perpetuating a cycle of neglect.

More-than-human theorists further enrich this interpretive landscape. David Abram argues that language arises from sensory engagement with the more-than-human world. ⁴⁷ Anna Tsing urges attentiveness to the arts of noticing within capitalist ruins, highlighting collaborative survival in entangled landscapes. ⁴⁸ Thom van Dooren frames mourning as an ecological narrative practice, a way of staying accountable to disappearing species. ⁴⁹ Astrida Neimanis calls for a watery ethics that foregrounds ecological entanglement in a shared hydrocommons. ⁵⁰ Ogden and colleagues articulate multispecies justice, extending ethical consideration to ecological kin. ⁵¹ Marisol de la Cadena’s earth-beings concept interrupts Western nature–culture binaries, offering ontological openings for recognizing nonhuman agency in world-making. ⁵² These perspectives resonate with the interpretive stance of this study, which views algae as narrative and semiotic actors.

The semiotic force of marginality becomes especially visible in New Bedford’s civic iconography. The 1877 city seal presents a classic maritime tableau of sailing vessels, lighthouse, and steamship, yet along the lower tide line lies a small cluster of frond-like markings, unlabeled and barely noticeable. This subtle presence reflects seaweed’s longstanding symbolic marginality. Gapp and Ireland’s work on liminal ecotones helps illuminate how intertidal zones operate as thresholds where human and marine meaning-making converge. ⁵³ Mieke Bal’s insight that framing reveals both what is shown and what is silenced further clarifies how the seal enunciates New Bedford’s maritime identity while relegating the ecological substrate, including seaweed, to the periphery. ⁵⁴

A recent redesign of the city seal in 2025, featuring the ‘Busty Seagull’, humorously embraces coastal fauna and marks a shift toward acknowledging nonhuman life in civic symbolism. Although algae remain absent, the reorientation toward coastal fauna signals an openness to future recognitions of intertidal flora as heritage-bearing in their own right.

These interpretive layers extend into aesthetics and material culture. Pressed seaweed albums, Eco-Sea Snowflake ornaments, and Dana’s Gathering Seaweed offer portals into what Donna Haraway calls staying with the trouble, a practice of dwelling within multispecies entanglements rather than seeking to simplify or extract. ⁵⁵ Seaweed destabilizes boundaries between waste and wonder, appearing in labor and leisure, agriculture and artistry, foodways and folk memory. It is gathered not only from beaches but from the shared interpretive space of coastal dwelling, the Lebenswelt.

Interpreting seaweed’s cultural presence also requires acknowledging the partiality of the historical record. Many archival sources were not designed to recognize the sensory or semiotic dimensions of nonhuman life, and seaweed’s material ephemerality further complicates documentation. These gaps call for a reflexive stance that recognizes the role of researcher perspective in interpreting presence, absence, and relational meaning. By triangulating archival traces, material artifacts, and experiential fieldwork, this study foregrounds both the possibilities and limits of reading ecological actors within heritage discourse.

Peter Johnson’s engagement with Michel Serres in more-than-human geography offers a philosophical deepening of these insights. ⁵⁶ Serres’s nonrepresentational philosophy of sensation, Lucretian atomism, and decentered humanism illuminate the flows, signals, and textures through which materialities participate in cultural formation. ⁵⁷ Seaweed’s rustle underfoot, its salt-thickened air after storms, and the visual clutter of tide lines exemplify these affective agents. As Johnson notes, Serres discloses inventive trajectories for understanding how nonhuman entities such as algae not only appear in but actively shape cultural memory, ecological ethics, and the symbolic fabric of heritage. ⁵⁸

Futures of seaweed in policy, practice, and imagination

Seaweed’s ecological value is gaining recognition in global conversations around regenerative aquaculture, carbon capture, and nutrient cycling. In New Bedford, the 2018 South Coast Aquaculture Sector Analysis ⁵⁹ identified kelp as a resilient species for winter cropping and water-quality improvement. Globally, The Seaweed Manifesto ⁶⁰ has positioned macroalgae as a climate ally, a quietly proliferating organism that can feed, restore, and rebalance ecosystems. Still, in permitting systems and planning models, seaweed often drifts in a liminal space, acknowledged, but not fully embraced.

Rather than viewing algae as biomass to be extracted, this paper suggests we consider it as a responsive, co-generative force in marine planning. Policies that treat seaweed as a collaborator, as something that signals, shelters, and shapes, allow for more dynamic forms of coastal stewardship. Within this model, seaweed is not only grown but listened to. It becomes a partner in shaping how coastlines adapt to shifting tides, rising seas, and the hunger for renewal.

Melody Jue’s work on seaweed aquaculture expands this perspective by framing marine farming as an imaginative site where future food, energy, and climatic systems are conceptualized. In Recipes for the Future of Seaweed Aquaculture, she encourages cultivation practices that support rather than suppress ecological rhythms. Conversely, in A Seaweed Goes to War, she shows how kelp became entangled in militarized extraction, revealing how marine life is absorbed into geopolitical and industrial infrastructures that obscure ecological agency. Integrating these insights into New Bedford’s aquaculture discourse invites approaches to seaweed futures that are attentive to relational ethics and alert to the possibility of replicating extractive traditions under the guise of sustainability.

Artists and theorists have also traced how seaweed’s futures are entangled with infrastructures of risk, industry, and care. J. Armando Arbona’s exploration of kelp’s explosivity reveals how marine plants participate in volatile material ecologies with political, industrial, and climatological implications. Seaweed’s biochemical capacities, once valued solely for industrial production, now gain renewed relevance as humanity confronts warming waters, acidification, and shifting coastal economies. These dynamics underline the need for marine planning that foregrounds ecological reciprocity over industrial scalability and that recognizes algae as an organism capable of signaling environmental change through its very presence or decline.

This relational approach aligns with ethical frameworks outside Western conservation discourse. Aanuoluwapo Fifebo Sunday, for instance, offers a perspective rooted in Yorùbá environmental ethics. In his account of water as a caring agent within Yorùbá ontology, he introduces the concept of mutual courteousness, a relational ethic in which humans and nonhumans engage in reciprocal respect and responsibility. ⁶¹ This resonates with the present study’s emphasis on seaweed as a heritage-bearing species and co-actor in ecological memory. Sunday’s framework challenges Western models of conservation that often foreground extractive or technocratic approaches, advocating instead for a more holistic and culturally embedded ethic of care. By drawing on relational epistemologies such as those in Yorùbá philosophy, we can better reimagine algae-based stewardship as not only biosemiotic but also interculturally grounded.

A stewardship model attuned to seaweed’s ecological rhythms would respond not to market demand alone but to the organism’s own cycles and spatial movements. Recognizing seaweed as a living collaborator allows its seasonal patterns, ecological contributions, and tactile presences to guide more responsive place-based practices. In such an approach, stewardship emerges through dialogue between human and nonhuman needs, fostering biodiversity and coastal resilience through shared attentiveness and adaptive care.

In educational contexts, seaweed offers an embodied portal into ecological thinking. Through its textures, scents, and seasonal appearances, algae draw people, especially the young, into a form of knowledge that is felt before it is named. Institutions like the New Bedford Whaling Museum and the Fishing Heritage Center have already begun offering algae-focused programming, including seaweed pressing workshops, intertidal ecology events, and educational exhibits. These programs form the early layers of a deeper experiential ecology. Wrackline walks, kelp tastings, shoreline storytelling, and creative collaborations can build on this foundation, expanding into a more immersive, biosemiotically informed model of learning.

Research on marine documentaries highlight the importance of rhetorical appeal in shaping public attitudes toward ocean conservation. Mat N.H.B. found that emotional strategies, particularly those grounded in local marine life and conveyed through narrative and visual immersion, were especially effective in promoting social change. ⁶² Ethos, pathos, and logos each played a role, but pathos proved most persuasive in fostering affective identification with marine ecosystems. This aligns with the goals of biosemiotic stewardship, which seeks to draw learners into multispecies relationships through story, sensation, and place-based experience. By centering seaweed in visual culture and environmental communication, educators and curators can cultivate emotional resonance that strengthens response-ability and civic ecological engagement.

Rachel Carson emphasized the importance of wonder as a gateway to knowledge. ⁶³ Seaweed, with its tangles, filaments, and translucence, evokes precisely this kind of quiet awe. Puig de la Bellacasa reminds us that care begins in contact, and seaweed makes contact unavoidable. ⁶⁴ It clings, curls, and reappears again. To teach with seaweed is to teach through encounter.

Seaweed has long been a medium of quiet artistry, pressed into albums, lacquered into souvenirs, and gifted as tokens of care and place. Today, artists like Mary Jameson continue this tradition, reimagining algae as a material that can hold stories, reflect fragility, and evoke intertidal memory. Her Eco-Sea Snowflake preserves the marine moment in ornament, drawing attention not just to the beauty of algae, but to its presence in everyday life.

Looking ahead, its role in cultural work may be deepened through collaboration. Artists and scientists, fishers and poets, children and elders can co-create seaweed-based maps, rituals, and installations. As Tim Ingold observes, making is a form of thinking, and working with seaweed is a way of thinking that moves with the tide, absorbing change while holding form. ⁶⁵

As climate cycles redraw our coastlines, seaweed will continue to gather along new wracklines. These accumulations are not waste; they are markers of continuity, fertility, and collapse. A strand of algae curling at the tide’s edge may contain the residue of storms, migrations, and seasonal shifts. It may also hold stories.

A future-facing heritage does not rely only on plaques and preservation. It grows outward into the entanglements of multispecies life. Seaweed models this ethic. It binds, it shelters, it feeds. It forms floating forests, porous boundaries, and tactile maps. Its future is neither fixed nor ornamental. It is generative, tidal, and thick with meaning.

Building on biosemiotic insights, coastal communities can formalize these relationships by establishing living heritage zones, integrating seaweed’s ecological rhythms into conservation guidelines and interpretive materials. Partnerships with local schools could promote hands-on, algae-focused curricula, while conservationists and cultural heritage managers could collaborate to protect critical seaweed habitats. By situating algae at the center of heritage practice, through signage, seasonal festivals, and interactive exhibits, stakeholders can foster a reciprocal ethic that recognizes seaweed’s role as both historical witness and ecological ally. In this way, seaweed becomes a cornerstone of coastal imagination, policy, and identity.

Conclusion: tides that carry memory

Attending to seaweed as cultural heritage opens a different coastal story, one grounded not only in human intention but in the quiet agencies of intertidal life. Seaweed is not merely biological matter or coastal debris, but a semiotic and ecological actor woven into the lifeworld of New Bedford. It fertilizes fields, insulates homes, adorns albums, and evokes multisensory memories. These roles illuminate how heritage is produced not only through monumental events, but through material and relational entanglements.

Through the frameworks of biosemiotics, cultural heritage theory, and narrative ecology, the research has shown that seaweed participates in shaping coastal identity. It exists within an Umwelt of seasonal responsiveness and a Lebenswelt shared with humans through touch, rhythm, and meaning. As a heritage-bearing organism, seaweed invites us to read signs in wracklines, memories in fronds, and futures in the cultural imagination of the shore.

Recognizing seaweed as a cultural agent invites a broader shift in how we conceive of heritage. It calls for frameworks rooted in reciprocity and ecological responsiveness, where algae are understood not as passive matter but as partners in coastal knowledge and care. This shift is not only about content but about orientation: from preservation to participation, from static memory to dynamic relation. Local policymakers could integrate algae’s seasonal rhythms into zoning and aquaculture guidelines, while heritage institutions might foreground the sensory and ecological dimensions of seaweed through exhibitions and educational programming. Such initiatives would bolster community resilience by recognizing ecological actors as contributors to cultural continuity.

These insights reach beyond New Bedford. As coastlines transform under climate pressure, seaweed’s shifting distributions, thermal limits, and sensory cues position it as an indicator of coastal futures, signaling environmental change through presence as much as through loss.

Climate adaptation plans might incorporate buffer zones for seaweed growth, supporting both environmental stabilization and emerging forms of coastal livelihood. Collaboration among ecologists, historians, Indigenous knowledge-keepers, and local residents can help reshape how development is envisioned, ensuring that heritage practices align with ecological well-being. In this way, seaweed offers a template for more inclusive policy-making, one that values environmental signals alongside human stories.

Seaweed, in its quiet persistence, reminds us that heritage is not only archived in stone and ink, but also in scent, texture, and change. Its presence at the wrackline marks the threshold between what has been forgotten and what might yet be reclaimed. Embracing seaweed in cultural discourse invites us to attend to the fluid overlaps between natural and social worlds. By recognizing algae’s agency, we expand the meaning of heritage and open new possibilities for collaborative stewardship in an era of ecological transformation.