[[HOME]] | [[RESEARCH]] | [[TEACHING]] | [[DESIGN]] | [[CV]] ![[SeaLab-2020-screen.png]] _By the 1970s, kelp farming came to represent a new relationship with marine environments, one where humans transformed the wild oceans into pastoral landscapes, as seen here in the Hollywood imaginary of_ Sealab 2020 _(1972)._ ## Dissertation Research ### Project Title: A Race for Inner Space: Post-terrestrial Ecologies, the Domestication of Giant Kelp, and Ocean Farms in the Twentieth Century **ABSTRACT:** Although space is often cited as a critical vantage point shaping the emerging ideals of ecological holism and planetary perspectives in the United States after the Second World War, this dissertation qualifies such claims by comparatively addressing the importance of marine environments, research programs, engineering endeavors, and cultural practices in the environmental futures of the last century. Oceans, like space, not only served as a new frontier of extraction and human inhabitation, as many scholars in the ocean humanities have clearly shown, but they were also seen as sites for producing renewable futures, I argue. I show the how Earth's oceans were imagined and enacted as environments to be modernized, enhanced, and cultivated through the extension of terrestrial agriculture to marine environments. The dissertation explores cultured seas by centering on a network of marine biomass research programs (funded by military, federal, and industry sponsors) aimed at cultivating macroalgae (seaweeds) as sources of food, biofuels, material production, and as instruments for environmental regulation and management at global and planetary scales. Frequently the core of these research and development programs was _Macrocystis pyrifera_ or “giant kelp,” a species long recognized for its superlative growth and its capacity to produce a surplus of habitable space for other species. Across three chapters, I investigate how algal culture systems were imagined as extensible technologies of agricultural production and environmental control, how giant kelp came to be domesticated in California, and how this seaweed was enrolled in experiments during the 1970s and 1980s in the hopes of transitioning the United States to an economy powered by renewable solar bioenergy. The dissertation brings together a mixed set of cultural and scientific archives to make the case that “post- terrestrial ecologies” were widely pursued in the dreams the Blue Revolution, not just agricultural extensions and intensifications of the Green Revolution or in idealism of the ecological colonization of space. ![[transects-small.gif]] _Learning the field methods of marine ecology by collecting data on_ Macrocystis pyrifera _stipes and algal cover offshore from Hopkins Marine Station, Pacific Grove, California._ (Video credit: Freya Sommer, 2019) ![[Scripps Archives.jpeg]] _Working with the Wheeler J. North papers. Scripps Institute of Oceanography, La Jolla, California, 2022._ (Photo credit: Author)