sea lion pups rescued

Sea Lions Mass Starvation On Pacific Coast Can Be Prevented

Last year saw a tripling of the number of starving sea lions and seals previously found on California beaches as their vital ocean pastures turn into blue deserts.

This winter is already proving to be far worse!

We have the proven tools at hand to act and in 2016 we’ll take those tools to sea to restore and replenish the world’s dying ocean pastures – join us!

The Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, just outside San Francisco, has records of going back decades and its typical bad year used to see 600 to 800 starving seals and sea lions rescued from the 600 miles of Northern California coastline the centre covers.

starving_sealions

Sealion pups are washing ashore starving as their mothers cannot find sufficient fish at sea to be able make milk to nurse their babies.

Tragically their records are being dramatically over-turned again. Last year (2015) the center received a record 1,799 starving animals 2-3 times what it expected, the victims of the collapse of the California ocean pasture are California sea lions, Guadalupe fur seals and northern fur seals.

The 106 Northern fur seals it rescued more than tripled its previous record. Keep in mind this one rescue centre sees on a fraction of the animals rescued in the state, last year the state total was over 4200 ‘rescued’ starving sea mammals. A far larger number, many times the rescued number, die at sea and are never counted. It’s not just cute sea lion pups that are dying in horrifying record numbers, to the north in Alaska sea birds are being hit even harder.

The crisis of ocean pasture collapse

There is no debate about the fact of the sea lions and seal starving to death, of that everyone agrees. Records of fish populations especially the vital anchovies, sardines, and herring once swimming in vast abundance on California ocean pastures is also irrefutably in a state of terrible collapse. Many decades ago hundreds of thousands of tonnes of anchovies and sardines were caught every year in waters off Monterey Bay just South of San Francisco. Today the catch allowed catch of 20,000 tonnes is rarely even met due to a shortage of fish. The same is true for herring, a larger cousin to the anchovy and sardines, former million tonne catches are now reduced to tens of thousands if any at all!

bantam_cannery_row

Read more about the eco-tragedy of California’s anchovies and sardines describe by John Steinbeck – click to read more

The collapse of the key ocean plankton feeding fish, anchovies, sardines and herring, are indicative of the collapse of the carrying capacity of their ocean pastures. Along with the disappearance of the ocean pasture fish the ocean plankton has also been seen in devastating decline. But identifying the cause of collapsing ocean pastures has been a more than a ‘sound bite’ and doesn’t come with a handy villain to blame, such as those dastardly greedy overfishing fishermen.

Ocean pastures upon which the anchovies, herring, sea lions, seals, seabirds and myriad other forms of ocean life live their grazing lives are in a state of collapse and WE are collectively the villains. So how are we wreaking such havoc of our precious and vital ocean pastures?

(And yes the dastardly fishermen who pillage the last of the starving fish as once verdant ocean pastures turn into blue deserts is also part of the crisis.)

Stop listeing to the sound bite spin mastering

No matter how dominant the ‘Sound Bite Spin Mastering’ is that everything is about global warming and climate change the crisis on our ocean pastures and its disappearing fish and starving wildlife is NOT appropriately a victim of the ever popular climate change spin. It’s closely related though, and it is all about our CO2 but not via the pork barrel ‘climate change /aka El Nino’ mechanism so popular with researcher, regulator, and ‘donate here’ sound bite whores. While CO2 is unquestionably a ‘greenhouse gas’ in so far as the atmosphere of this blue planet is concerned it is orders of magnitude more dangerous via its far more rapid and rampant effects on pastures on land and at sea.

Our high and rising CO2 first and foremost stimulates plant growth and on the planets lands are covered mostly with grass not trees. All over the world there has been a dramatic global greening! That extra green is in the form of more, bushier, and longer living grass, you know grass it’s that pant life that is green in the wet season and brown in dry dusty season. So what does that have to do with starving sea lions?

More grass growing means less dust blowing!

yin and yang

Rain and Dust in the wind are the Yin and Yang for pastures on land and at sea.

In the same way that pastures on land, growing in dirt, depend on vital water that comes to them in the form of rain blown on the wind, ocean pastures are home to ocean plant-life, the phytoplankton, that grows in water and survives and thrives only when it receives vital mineral dust that blows to them on the wind. It is the most important Yin and Yang relationship in all of nature on this Blue Planet!

California’s ocean pastures depend on dust that blows from China and Mongolia for their survival, the prevailing winds almost always blow from West to East! Rivers and streams send meager amounts of minerals into the Pacific ocean and none of those riverine minerals make it even 100 miles offshore! Staggaring changes to the grassland ecosystems of western China and Mongolia are turning those once super dusty regions of the planet into rich grain producing regions and green oases.

green-wall-of_china1

Greening the “bread-basket” lands of China and Mongolia – cilck to read more

Just as the USA was successful in ending its ‘dust bowl days’ of the dirty thirties and seeing the conversion of the midwest into the world’s greatest breadbasket, China has followed suit beginning some decades later in the late 1950’s. But as potent or more than soil conservation and modern agriculture has come the massive amounts of CO2 pouring into post WWII super-industrial air.

OK that might seem like a pretty complex ecology lesson but just keep the mantra in mind, ‘more grass growing means less dust blowing’.

What is the solution to save ocean lives

First off we have been spewing CO2 in the global air at an incredible rate for most of a century. All together we have added something nearing a trillion tonnes of CO2 to the world’s air. That is “yesterday’s CO2” and it is already an incredibly dangerous, perhaps lethal dose of CO2 as far as ocean pastures are concerned. The problem with this monstrous ‘yesterday’s CO2’ dose is that while eventually, over the course of 100-200 years the global ecosystem may dispose of it, that is a time frame so slow, especially in this era of greatly diminished ocean pasture capacity, that higher forms of sea life, fish, sea lions, and sea birds cannot endure, they are doomed unless someone steps in and helps Mother Nature immediately recover her lost ocean pasture photosynthetic capacity to manage CO2.

AND NO, while slowing down the additional dose of CO2 we will all spew into our air in all of our ‘tomorrows’ through all manner of conservation and green energy switching is good and will perhaps forestall forcing a second lethal dose of CO2 down the throat of Mother Ocean, the first deadly dose ‘yesterday’s CO2’ is already killing her fish, sea lions, seals, and sea birds!

Don’t despair there is a proven cure that is safe, sustainable, immediately effective, and incredibly low cost!

Remember that global greening that is working overtime as potent ground cover and preventing ocean pastures from receiving their vital mineral dust. A remarkable man, an ocean scientist that NASA honors with a special web page titled “On The Shoulders Of Giants” – John Martin who ran the Monterey Bay Marine Research Statin unravelled the Gordian Knot that is ocean pasture dust ecology back in the 1980’s. John proclaimed with classically talented professorial flair to the worlds most important gathering of earth scientists around 1989 by describing his lifetime of work.

Below is the political cartoon his earth shattering scientific announcement sparked. John Martin received a higher calling as he succumbed to a sudden cancer just weeks before the first of many open sea tests of his idea was performed. My demonstration in 2012 in the world’s largest ocean ‘John Martin’ experiment proved without a shadow of doubt that John’s math was spot on, just a half a ship load of iron ore rock dust is more than sufficient to bring all of the world’s ocean pastures back to health and abundance. The bit about creating an ice age was hyperbole. Restored ocean pastures can manage the lions share of mankinds CO2, but not all.

JohnMartinCartoon

Unravelling the Gordian Knot of Ocean Pasture Dust Ecology. It seems the elder President Bush approved.

Just a few of us can do it

To replenish and restore vast ocean pastures is a simple task, it doesn’t require large numbers of people mere tens of folks not tens of thousands. It doesn’t take much time to carry out the work of being ocean stewards months every year, think of it like the care of any pasture. It doesn’t cost a fortune, nothing like the trillions of dollars approved at the recent Paris Climate Change meeting and being promoted by billionaires and movie stars, mere millions every year in each of the World’s Seven Seas will bring all the world’s ocean pastures back to a condition of health and abundance they and we once enjoyed. We don’t need a single penny of your tax dollars!

The proof of our success will be immediately revealed to us as billions of additional fish swim from our restored ocean pastures into our nets and onto our plates with far more remaining to feed all the sea lions, seals, sea birds, and all of ocean life.

How do I know this? I have done it!

The Fish Came Back From Our Restored Ocean Pasture Producing The Largest Catch Of Salmon In Alaskan History

The Fish Came Back From Our Restored Ocean Pasture Producing The Largest Catch Of Salmon In Alaskan History – click to read more

Read more about how we can replenish and restore ocean pastures in all of the World’s Seven Seas and in the bargain grow enough fish to end world hunger by repurposing billions of tonnes of our deadly CO2 into new ocean life!