Uncovering kelp’s hidden past as an ingredient in explosives may have the answer to preserving its future survival under climate change.
The word kelp (Middle English) has a surprising and revealing history. It was first coined by potash makers in the 16th century, used at that time for glass and soap-making. According to the OED, kelp first referred to seaweeds “burnt for the sake of the substances found in the ashes.” Kelp was a substitute, in fact, for a decline in wood ash —which is itself a revealing insight into the politics of naming and extinction—to conjure from nature a partial remedy to losses, along strictly human priorities. Kelp is a word meant to conjure chemicals from disparate reactions in several distinct species, and to appear to human vision as one substance. Furthermore, kelp is a term that exists to force nature to solve commodity crises. What we call kelp is a confusing distortion. This distortion also makes the present disappearance of “kelp” all the more difficult to resolve, because these enormously diverse coastal ecosystems, made up of various species, have long been named as flammable.
In turn, I suggest that we can think of California's fragile kelp forests—at times mere splotches on the surface of the water, just underneath the register of visibility, in the background of the idyllic postcard view—as part of a continuum of explosivity. Although seemingly passing through several disparate and distinct crises—from their weaponized past to recent times when kelp was proposed as a potential green energy fuel, and then to a borderline casualty of global warming (a heartbreaking and ironic reversal in the present)—these crises can all be related back to naming seaweeds for their conflagration.
The kelp decline portends to eliminate a vital “carbon sink” for no less than the survival of humans and many more species on this planet. The kelp forest and its extinction are interconnected by seemingly conflicting kinds of extractivism: in short, the activity to retrieve and burn substances that add carbon to the atmosphere, and the farming that exploits photosynthesis to remove that carbon. Regimes of greening the environment continue to treat photosynthesis in plants like kelp as a base environmental service to compensate for human follies. This is what Jane Bennett might single out as a negation of the “thing-power” in non-human species (Bennett, 2004). Even when seemingly fighting different wars—against armies or against climate change—these various applications of sea plants subsume photosynthesis to human subjectivity. This is done to balance a spreadsheet of a certain amount of carbon in the environment, defeated by global warming and foreclosing on new chemical possibilities. The Hercules ruins are also the ruins of a very elemental reaction prefigured by the needs of explosivity. The ordinariness of this chemical reaction, produced with what was back then a quite plentiful and freely plundered resource—as free as oxygen itself—nevertheless left us with this enduring carcass of an imagined future of permanent war. Why?
Because as any improvised bombmaker can explain, explosives are nothing but everyday chemicals and compounds, even when symphonically composed into extremely sensitive and complex assemblages. Visiting the Hercules ruins can be a way to perceive the materialization of the latent explosivity in the natures around us. Preventing such combustion, and possibly saving our species, could mean doing away with “kelp” as a combustion-related term, lest we want to restore these sea forests back to some condition of potential exploitation for wars yet to come. The ruins of the Hercules Powder Company could be treated as an archive in the landscape, one that contains the codes with which to continually revitalize violence that begins with elemental natures—or a dire warning of what to prevent. The ruins are sarcophagi that can “re-kelpify” the seaweeds if humanity is not vigilant. And if environmental remediation succeeds, we are still committed to the same chemical relationships that advanced wars, and that can be weaponized once again.
