On a small seaweed-farming island called Alumar in the Philippines, I follow the narrow dirt and stone path lined with mesh matts covered in piles of drying seaweed to the ocean, treading on shredded pieces of straw line. Long strings of used line hang drying from fence posts and wooden racks along the beach. Seawater laps against the wooden stakes in the shallows along the beach, marking a permitted farming area. A farmer ties seaweed seedlings, squares of styrofoam, and empty plastic bottles to lines and then coils them into a basket. She wades into the ocean and gently unfurls her lines, fastening them to the stakes in horizontal rows. 

I traveled to Bohol, Philippines, in July 2024 to conduct two weeks of ethnographic fieldwork as a participant observer of subsistence seaweed farming in collaboration with Dr. Jesrelljane Aaron-Amper and her students and staff at Bohol Island State University (BISU).  This followed my four weeks of studies of burgeoning industrialized seaweed production in Norway with Dr. Jenny Goldstein. I traced the path of seaweed through the value chain to gain a view of the global seaweed industry both as a long-standing development project in the Philippines and as a speculative market in Norway. With pressure mounting to expand the seaweed industry in response to climate change, I investigated the current obstacles to production to understand what these examples of seaweed production reveal about global efforts toward a low-carbon energy transition.

On my first day in Bohol, I secured permissions from mayors and local government unit leaders of various seaweed-farming barangays–the smallest administrative division of each seaweed-farming area we planned to visit–Handumon, Alumar, Cogtong Bay, Pinamgo, and Hingotanan. Several BISU students provided translation during these meetings and our visits to the barangays. We quickly developed a rhythm for our collaborative work. 

Having studied Tagalog for two semesters, I understood some of the local dialect and quickly discovered that each time one of my BISU collaborators explained my affiliation with Cornell University and my research on seaweed and seaweed diseases, our interlocutors readily consented to sit with us for an interview. Philippine seaweed farmers have struggled to achieve the same profits as before ice-ice disease worsened with rising sea temperatures. Then Typhoon Odette leveled the region in 2022, and subsistence farmers lost everything. Many chose to rebuild their seaweed farms first so that they could one day rebuild their homes and safeguard their survival.  

Upon arriving in each barangay, we first looked for the Captain, sometimes enlisting locals to help locate their houses. My BISU colleagues expected that we would be welcomed, and we were. Barangay Captains, often seaweed traders themselves, would Facebook message other local farmers to meet me for an interview. After I interviewed the Captains, they would invite us to their tables to share a lunch of various types of fish or shrimp, vegetables, and rice. After eating, another interlocutor would take us on a tour of their seaweed farm in their bangka boat. 

In addition to researching the sociocultural potential and obstacles of using Philippine seaweed for climate mitigation, I also collected swabs of healthy and diseased seaweed tissues for Dr. Ian Hewson’s efforts to conduct RNA tests on ice-ice disease at Cornell and GPS points using a mapping app on my phone for Dr. Andrew Fricke at California Polytechnic Institute to build a training dataset for a future algorithm to measure ice-ice disease spread via satellite imagery.

Southeast Asian seaweed farming began in the 1970s as a governmental development project. It has become a crucial livelihood opportunity for tens of thousands of coastal families, especially on remote islands. Seaweed farming is etched into the marrow of Bohol’s local communities. They entrusted me with their farming and industry knowledge, just as they shared their tables and rice. In each of the barangays I visited, I made a tacit promise to my interlocutors to use my findings to tie together Bohol and Cornell in a research partnership with hopes that it would improve their lives and futures.