What Keeps Washing Ashore (Part 1: Living with Sargasso)

When we first arrived in Mahahual, I thought of sargasso mostly as a mild inconvenience. 5 years ago, it was light and intermittent in the summers.

Like many people living and working along the Caribbean coast as the volumes have increased, I experience it as something overwhelming and difficult — mountains of seaweed arriving unpredictably, changing the shoreline, creating difficult odors as it decomposed, and constantly forcing us to adapt.

But over time, living with it began changing the way I saw it.

Not because it became easier.

And not because the challenges disappeared.

But because I started realizing the sargasso itself might be telling a much larger story about the condition of our oceans.

The massive blooms now arriving throughout the Caribbean are linked to changing ocean temperatures, nutrient runoff, deforestation, industrial agriculture, and larger shifts happening throughout interconnected marine systems.

Researchers have also found that sargassum absorbs heavy metals and other pollutants from the water around it. Over time, I began wondering whether part of what we are witnessing is not simply an invasion of seaweed, but an ocean trying to process enormous amounts of imbalance and contamination moving through global systems.

And once you begin looking closely at the sargasso floating offshore, something else becomes impossible to ignore.

Plastic.

Again and again, we would see floating plastic tangled into the sargasso mats as they drifted toward shore. Bottles. Fragments. Fishing debris. Tiny broken pieces of human consumption traveling alongside this massive floating ecosystem.

It started changing the way I thought about the seaweed itself.

At sea, sargassum is not inherently harmful. In fact, floating sargasso ecosystems provide shelter and habitat for fish, turtles, crabs, and countless marine organisms. But when unprecedented quantities wash ashore and begin decomposing on coastlines, the effects can become devastating for beaches, reefs, tourism, and coastal ecosystems.

Living with it means constantly holding both truths at once.

Over time, I stopped seeing the sargasso as simply “bad.”

Instead, I began seeing it as part of a much larger conversation between humanity and the ocean itself — a visible reminder that nothing we do disappears completely. Fertilizers, pollution, warming waters, plastic, deforestation, industrial systems: eventually, the consequences move somewhere.

And sometimes the sea brings them back to shore for us to confront directly.

At Mahai, we are still learning how to live with these changing realities. Some seasons are manageable. Others feel overwhelming. But over time, the process of adapting to sargasso has also taught us something unexpected:

The natural world is not separate from us.

The ocean is responding to the way we live.