The urgency of the environmental crisis demands societal change – reducing our collective carbon footprint, adopting sustainable energies, food alternatives and new lifestyles. Whether as carbon sinks or food alternatives, algae can play a crucial role in the ecological transition. They can be used as biomaterials, pharmaceuticals and cosmetics. Their nutritional role is well recognized, and the food cultures of Northeast Asia did not wait for the environmental crises of the 20th century to incorporate macro-algae such as kombu, wakame and nori into their diets.

In an interview filmed in 2021 at the Roscoff Marine Station on the northern coast of Brittany, France, Philippe Potin, a world-renowned researcher in the study of algae, told us the story of Kathleen Drew-Baker – how this algologist, who struggled as a woman in the pre-war Western scientific world, became a quasi-saintly figure in Japan, acquiring the legendary status of umi no oya – mother of the sea. We saw in her singular destiny many reasons to seek out more on site.

Indeed, we are both convinced that we need new narratives to help us meet the challenges raised by the Anthropocene era. We’re working on this attentively, and in many different artistic and narrative forms. But as we went to meet Kathleen Drew-Baker and the community that honors her in Japan, it was film that stood out as the medium that could allow us to share the common sensibilities between science and culture at the heart of our rich encounters with the Ariake Sea fishing communities.

The perspectives of science are always place-specific and context-dependent: there are many sciences, just as there are many modernities. Drew-Baker’s drive and enthusiasm helped spread her methodology not only to Japan, but throughout East Asia, as far afield as Korea and China. Through her story, it is remarkable to see how science could be made accessible to farmers simply by using tools such as the microscope, an exemplary case of citizen science. From this emerged in Kyushu a resilient, DIY biology method that led to the development of an aquaculture industry and the globalization of sushi culture.

With this film, we also salute a passionate woman who overcame patriarchal obstacles and the enmities of a world war to advance her scientific field. Drew-Baker wasn’t paid most of her career because she was married with another research from Manchester University. But we are not trying to glorify her as a heroic, hypothetical English savior of Japan. Rather, we wish to tell the story of how her scientific generosity stimulated the resilience of an entire community of scientists and fishermen, on the other side of the world, in the years following the atomic bombs of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

At a time when TEPCO is discharging contaminated water off the coast of Fukushima, the protection of ocean ecosystems is a sensitive issue in Japan. Algae do not need pesticides or fertilizers to grow naturally. But the watersheds that release them into the waters of the Ariake Sea cause micro-algae to proliferate, disrupting sensitive marine areas that are generally devoted to nori aquaculture. How can farmers remedy these unbalanced ecosystems?

60 years ago, the scientists and fishermen of this Ariake Sea community decided to pay tribute to Drew-Baker. With this film, we seek to pay tribute to this community and suggest how it can draw on its own history of resilience to imagine ways to overcome current problems linked to disrupted ecosystems and global warming.

The film’s title reflects our interest in the animism of nature’s bounty that lies at the heart of Shintoism, the bounty of the sea revealed here by the deity status conferred on Kathleen Drew-Baker. But this story, which borrows from venerable traditions, also reveals the inseparable “nature-culture” relationship advanced by philosopher Donna Haraway or anthropologists Philippe Descola and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing.

“We evolve through what we eat” is the film’s final invitation to reflect on our deep intimacy with food, but also an invitation to pursue this film’s research into new types of narratives – narratives that highlight the major role played by algae in human evolution, and our conviction that they can also play a role in food and ecological transitions to come.