Join DIESEL Bookstore on Tuesday April 21st at 6:30 pm as we welcome Josie Iselin and Ellen Litwiller to the store to discuss and sign The Mysterious World of the Bull Kelp Forest. 

This event is free to attend and will be held in the courtyard at DIESEL, A Bookstore in Brentwood.

Free seating is limited. To reserve a seat, please purchase one copy of a book for one seat. 

Stretching from the central coast of California through the Pacific Northwest and into Alaska is a sliver of nutrient-dense ocean where sunlight penetrates down to the ocean floor feeding a flourishing ocean kelp forest hidden deep offshore. Integral to marine ecosystems, these kelp forests are home to a plethora of organisms and underpin a food web that extends from fathoms below to the skies above. The keystone of this underwater ecology is the bull kelp.

Undervalued yet foundational, resilient and yet precipitously vulnerable, bull kelp are the most dominant seaweed of the underwater glades of the North Pacific Sunlight Zone, whose carbon cycles mitigate ocean acidification, boost nearshore ecologies, and moderate sea level rise—and they are presently experiencing an alarming decline in the face of warming waters, urchin overgrazing, and pollution. Their diminution threatens the vitality of an extensive network of interconnected species—including that of their apex predator: humans.

In The Mysterious World of the Bull Kelp Forest, Josie Iselin and Ellen Litwiller vividly illustrate the intricate web of interdependency that bull kelp forests sustain.  From urchins to otters, plovers to pink salmon, Iselin and Litwiller dive into the delicate dance of ocean systems balanced by this ubiquitous and too little understood algae. Litwiller’s evocative science illustration features throughout,, depicting portraits of spotlit species, trophic diagrams, and billowing bull kelp blades.

Concluding the book, Iselin and Litwiller reflect on the human relationship with bull kelp—from millennia of Indigenous kinship to contemporary human-made stressors as well as a nod to the burgeoning restoration efforts led by scientists, tribes, and other kelp lovers. Along the way, they reveal the incredible environmental significance of this bulbous tangle of seaswept wrack coughed up on ocean shorelines from Oxnard to Anchorage, that, all too often, we blithely take for granted.

Josie Iselin is an artist, author, and designer who has been telling seaweed and kelp stories for over a decade. Her two books An Ocean Garden: The Secret Life of Seaweed (2014, 2023) and The Curious World of Seaweed (2019) display her profound understanding of seaweed natural history and her deep connections within the seaweed science community. Iselin directs content development for the Above/Below campaign and is the lead author of the campaign’s web story, The Mysterious World of Bull Kelp (bullkelp.info). She teaches in the School of Design at San Francisco State University and lives in San Francisco. 

Ellen Litwiller is a freelance illustrator whose work brings art and science together in imaginative ways. She loves exploring how creativity and curiosity intersect, using a variety of mediums to tell stories that are both visually striking and scientifically accurate. She began her career creating exhibits for natural history museums, where she worked as a muralist, illustrator, model maker, and preparator. With years of hands-on experience in exhibition design and installation, she developed a deep appreciation for detail and storytelling. Through collaboration with scientists, she enjoys the shared curiosity that unite art and science—both rooted in observation and appreciation of the world around us and the universe beyond.

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