We take our empirical and theoretical starting point in the practices of ecopreneurship in the making of marine markets. Seaweed has gained renewed relevance in the wake of a growing interest in alternative production and consumption. This coincides with a widespread interest in the environment and the production of sustainable lifestyles. In this context, there are a number of women entrepreneurs who, for various reasons, have chosen to invest their time and work in seaweed. The making of seaweed as a valuable resource takes place, and makes sense, in specific settings. Seaweed is related to different kinds of values and narratives depending on context. To gain a deeper understanding of how these ecopreneurs cope with tensions between different values, we set out to analyse the performative dimensions of a number of ideological narratives. The production of seaweed as a sustainable resource involves sensemaking processes, shaped as scenes and storylines that carry a specific meaning. In the process of sensemaking different seaweed stories are produced and re-produced as narratives. What kind of stories and practices are activated in the making of a sustainable and creative lifestyle? How is seaweed performed and described as a significant resource in green entrepreneurial practices? 

Through reading Latour’s concept of the Terrestrial and Arendt’s concept of storytelling through one another, this article develops a terrestrial ethics for sustainability. This ethics is furthermore developed through reflecting on the work of The Marine Education Center in Malmö with sustaining Öresund, especially its visions of transforming this strait between Copenhagen and Malmö into a biosphere area. It is argued how the Terrestrial is a new location developed from the Gaia hypothesis. It implies that life on earth is inseparable from all other organisms living in the thin layer of matter on top of the earth. An implication of the Terrestrial is the focus on pre-human Gaian stories through which humans are Grounded in the processes and conditions of life. This radical move implies not only an unconditional focus on the stories of land, water, soil, flora and fauna before we begin to talk about their functional utility. It is also grounded in the belief that we do not and cannot control the processes of life. Being terrestrials can create another ground of humanity in managing. This ground implies tending to Gaia’s multispecies stories in the ways we make our stories. A terrestrial ethics is based on the curiosity, care and compassion for multiple lives that are not understood in terms of how they connect and relate to human stories. Such positioning can serve as a ground for a new humanity in managing.

Based on Hannah Arendt’s notion of love, this article develops a life affirmative ethics, which we argue can guard against indifference and evil and enable ethical agency. In being the means through which existential journeys are made to what gave and gives birth to us, storytelling is important for such ethics. The love of our relations, communities, places, landscapes, oceans, family, people and animals is embedded in such storytelling. She referred to it as thinking—what she called a person’s two-in-one conversation with themself. In this storytelling, we engage in conversations with life. We use two stories of new sustainability managers to think through how love of the world—amor mundi—can help enable ethical agency in corporate contexts. Pondering over and thinking about the richness of life including pain, violence, struggle, conflict as well as joy and happiness are parts of an affirmative attitude to life that is part of maturing as a person, and which may help us learn to manage sustainably. Through Arendt, we learn that love is a question of mutual loving, where true solidarity with others relies on curious and compassionate thinking. This happens through revisiting our becoming and our experiences of the good life. Such thinking is the way in which we collect ourselves from dispersion, resist power relations and maintain a curious and caring relationship to the world’s plurality.

In the Anthropocene, it becomes problematic to imagine a sustainable balance between society and the environment. This calls for post-sustainability modes of articulating human/non-human relationships. As an attempt towards an Anthropocenic understanding of society and the environment, we analyse how ecosystem services are mobilised in marine spatial planning in the south of Sweden. The study investigates how ecosystem services are understood and narrated in environmental strategy and interviews with environmental planners. We focus on seaweed and sand. These are two kinds of materials and potential resources that materially circulate and force together society and the environment in planning discourse and practice. Our findings show that although ecosystem services are readily understood as an anthropocentric construction, when mobilised in planning to manage an unruly nature they can be re-storied as an ontological mediator in human/non-human relations.

The fulfillment of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is very much an issue about resources: How are resources articulated, created, and utilized? What is considered a resource, what exists in abundance, what is scarce, and when does something cease to be a resource? In our contribution, we address these issues with a focus on seaweed. By analyzing stories from environmental planners and ecopreneurs about seaweed, we demonstrate the phenomenon called resourcification — the social process that makes something a resource. From the stories, we illustrate the contexts of the resourcification and de-resourcification of seaweed. This allows us to show how resources, such as seaweed, are socially produced and become part of life. To conclude, we suggest that resourcification provides a provisional sustainability storyline suitable for working toward the SDGs in the Anthropocene.

This paper constructs an ethics of managing by reading Latour’s notion of Gaia with Arendt’s notion of storytelling. Gaia implies reframing the ethical foundation for making stories as well as it has ontological consequences for how we perceive stories. We suggest reframing storytelling into storymaking. This concept attunes to how storymaking is part of making life that becomes through, relies on, and is answerable to multiple other lives: human as well as nonhuman. Second, storymaking allows depicting managers’ imagination of themselves and what they do in the complex webs of relations that managers are part of. We put storymaking to work in discussing the processes of translation that occur when new managers transition from management education for sustainability to work life. Our re-storying of their stories attunes to their ethical compass and how they enact it into being. We attune to the tensions involved in building a stable foundation for their storymaking and the compromises they make in coping with fleeting and, at times, chaotic organizational realities. Attuning to how organizations make life and affect the conditions of caring for life is important for judging organizational action. Second, storymaking allows understanding of managing as a process that involves making stories about life spiritually and materially, thereby stabilizing life amid chaos. 

In this chapter, we analyze a number of challenges concerning the possibilities of seaweed reaching a larger Swedish retail market. Consumers seem to be quite open and flexible regarding the positioning of seaweed products in stores. As previous research has shown, certain consumer groups feel like taking responsibility when it comes to consuming more sustainably. These consumer groups could function as early adopters for new seaweed products and be targeted accordingly. Retailers and practitioners could help consumers to understand these new products by educating them about sustainability and providing sustainability services. Vegetarian or vegan alternatives for already-established products could be placed next to these familiar foods in order to make it easy for the consumer to understand how the new product is intended to be used, and how it fits into current cooking and eating practices. The results reveal a disparity and ambivalence in consumers’ attitudes and approaches to seaweed, paving the way for new consumer insights, retail guiding, and in-store services. We emphasize the responsibility of the retail sector in being one of the main actors introducing alternative and new food products. We also raise issues relating to communication, organization, and to how to facilitate sustainable food.

The article addresses the broader relationships between seaweed and algae as a marine resource, destination development, and sustainability. In many European countries, an industry around seaweed has emerged, ranging from high-end restaurants that provide their customers with local, seasonal and sustainable ingredients, to entrepreneurs offering “harvest your own seaweed”-tours. In this explorative study, we focus on different ways of experiencing this marine resource in a Swedish context, to better understand its economic and social potential. Taking a consumer perspective, we investigate through an online questionnaire and reviews from an online consumer-to-consumer travel-planning portal how seaweed and algae are validated. By exploring people's notions, the aim is to understand the potential and value of this marine resource better. Where is seaweed encountered and enjoyed? How is it used? What is experienced to be valuable about this resource? We identify possibilities for utilizing algae and seaweed in order to foster future business opportunities for local communities, as well as to integrate the resource more in our society. We show how algae and seaweed are experienced in diverse settings and dimensions, such as at home, while being a tourist, as part of everyday life, as a special treat, within nature, and as food.

The marine environment has an important role to play in the change-over to a green economy where the blue fields of the sea can form new and expanded cultivation spaces. Over the recent years there has been an increasing interest for seaweed as food in Europe. In this article we follow the seaweed’s journey into the Swedish cuisine by letting it lead us to different places and actors. Seaweed are perceived as timeless and trivial, but is often presented as authentic and forward-looking. Seaweed are described as healthy and useful, but also as dirty and toxic. Seaweed is a contradictory phenomenon and it has like other natural resources the ability to organize culture and society.