Discuss: Weeder

This is a wonderful story with amazing photography. John Ryan is inspiring. It is important to explore the links between work and the environment. They are completely intertwined in John Ryan’s world.  They are actually intertwined in the more modern world as well, but it’s harder to see.  Thanks for bringing this to light.

Excellent photos. This man personifies the older generation of people who worked hard all day every day, living and working on the land, with the land, and understood that we are also of the land.  I am an appreciative consumer of Maine-harvested dulse and other Atlantic seaweeds, but never knew the exact facts of how it is harvested. In spite of the hard and backbreaking work, I hope the mechanical harvesters still won’t work this year.  I suspect that mechanical harvest will disrupt or destroy other species to a much greater degree in the process, and might also create issues of overharvest. I know few people today want to do such hard work, but if we could work out a way to reduce the work load on some and share it among more of us somehow, we’d all be better off. John Ryan would have to stop working such long days, though it’s already too late to undo how his work has shaped and formed him and marked him with nature’s conditions. I suspect he’s fairly content with his life, in spite of having to meditate the pain out of his back. You have to love the natural world in order to work that hard in the outdoors and all its conditions. Applause for both essayist and subject.

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Harvesting rockweed is harvesting habitat. It is not unlike clear cutting of the forest. A multitude of creatures, large and small depend upon rockweed. I have often watched baby eiders just hatched moving near the rocks partially suported by the floating rockweed, without it they would drown.

Beautifully put story of a boatman. Even if the foul mechanical harvesters should work (do they) why would that exclude this man and, any that follow ? Whose rocks are they.