Beginning 600 hundred million years ago and for hundreds of millions of years plankton bloomed.

 Here’s a short video letting the plankton speak for themselves.

The Full Plankton Manifesto – Replenish and Restore our Ocean Pastures, or else!

Attention humans of earth. We are the plants, phytoplankton, of the sea, the greatest life-sustaining force in your universe, and we are losing hope and patience fast. You are wantonly destroying our kin and your own survival chances as well. We produce most of the planet’s oxygen, devour over half it’s CO2, feed all ocean creatures, and are the greatest allies you’ve got on this blue planet. Yet you starve us of vital nutrients and scald us with toxic acid forming emissions, thereby decimating our numbers, starving the seas and trashing your climate, too.

This is criminal, senseless and suicidal behaviour and we demand that you cease at once, replenish and restore the vital mineral micro-nutrient dust we need to live – it’s a fact all we are is dust in the wind. Let us get back to work converting acid forming CO2 to our nutritious selves, restoring the ocean pastures, feeding all sea life and cleansing the skies for you.

For those unacquainted with our problems or power, here are some remedial facts:

1) We Are Indispensable. We are the biggest players in the global carbon cycle, photosynthesizing billions tons of airborne CO2 to feed virtually every creature in the sea and create 60% of your breathable air. Trees and grasses help a lot with the oxygen, but most of the heavy lifting is handled by our plankton crowd.

2) We Are Perishing At An Alarming Rate. In 2003 NASA scientists warned you that 17% of ocean plants have disappeared from the North Atlantic, 26% from the North Pacific, and more recently in 2007 you reported 50% of plant life has gone missing from the Tropical Seas. We have been eradicated from what you now call the “Clearest Water on Earth” a vast region of the Eastern South Pacific, now bereft of our life force. Losing this staggering number of our kind means billions of tons less food for sea life everywhere, billions of tons more acid forming in the oceans, and worsened climate change for you.(Update Dec. 2011 – this year numerous reports of the loss of all or nearly all larvae of many species from the phylum mollusca in the N.E. Pacific confirm that the horror of CO2 driven mass extinction is now upon us, 50-100 years before we expected.)

3) It Is Your Fault. In the Eighties, Dr. John Martin, a legendary oceanographer and our favorite biped by far, diagnosed our malaise as iron deficiency. We desperately need natural mineral iron to treat our anemia, grow, and photosynthesize, and in the open sea our principal source is wind-borne dust from arid lands. Today the high CO2 in the air is helping terrestrial plants grow greener, bushier, and live longer in arid regions. Your satellites have measured and you have reported that the ocean-bound dust clouds bearing our life-giving iron have fallen off by a third in the last two decades alone, thanks to your endless CO2 belch and increasingly successful farming. While we don’t begrudge our terrestrial brethren their growth spurt, your force feeding them CO2 makes them better ground cover thus dramatically reducing the dust that blows in the wind that ought to be bringing us our vital mineral micro-nutrients. Just as rain brings life from sea to land we have always received in return lands vital dust. Give it back, we are dying.

4) You Can Turn It All Around. Martin told you, and your finest ocean scientists confirm, that we could be restored to health just by replenishing our vital mineral dust, but he also connected the iron-plankton-climate dots and saw that reviving us could help end global warming, too. “Give me half a tanker of iron and I will give you an ice age,” he quipped, obviously recognizing you would continue to ignore our plight unless there was something in it for you. Martin was a trifle optimistic, but we are in fact incredibly efficient and your own science shows that we only need one kilogram of iron dust to capture 367,000 kilograms of your deadly CO2 in our green organic selves. Got it… we change your prescribed CO2 ocean death into ocean life… which do you choose? Death or Life!

5) Serve yourselves. Most of our restored bounty will recharge the ocean food chain, some will also sink into the abyss, in total we will remove billions of tonnes of greenhouse gas from your skies for centuries and more. And thanks to the Kyoto Protocol and perhaps the new Paris protocol that marine blizzard of settling carbon becomes sunken treasure that you can trade as emission reductions or “carbon credits” making you money. Do the math. Replenish to us one ton of mineral iron dust and we convert deadly CO2 into ocean life instead of acid death and hundreds of thousands of tons of CO2 is safely managed. You can then sell some of this to pay for your work replenishing us, restoring the oceans and repair your climate, too. Just return us to our 1980 levels and we will feed your starving multitudes, sinking billions of tons of carbon dioxide and bring you billions of addtional fish as healthy sustainable food as well as a cooler, safer world.

6) You’ve Got To Move Now. Your scientists tell all that we have only until the year 2030 before it is too late for us, if nothing is done by then the carbonic acid will have sealed our doom. Replenished with our vital dust and restored to health and our original numbers, we will zero out half of all man-made emissions annually or seven times more than called for by the Kyoto Protocol. Working with us to save our common blue home will cost you a couple billion compared to the trillions you are now spending on your financial mess. Help us, replenish and restore our ocean pastures and this would be the same as shutting down every fossil fuel power plant on the planet or running every single car on hydrogen (which still remain splendid ideas, by the way).

So here are our extremely reasonable and non-negotiable demands:

#1: Give Our Vital Mineral Micro-Nutrient Iron Back.

You now have belched hundreds of billions of tonnes of CO2 into the air of all of us. You are dangerously in arrears. Your mortgage is so far underwater only we can bring it back to the surface for you. The IPCC and NASA gave you the target, Martin gave you the technical know how, and Kyoto gave you a hell of a self-serving way to repay this morbid debt. Besides saving our kind and everyone we feed, you could actually profit from protecting your climate, coasts, and fisheries. For those craving justice and real solutions this is admittedly far too sweet a deal, so we insert another point.

#2: Use Some Of The Profits To Help Move Away From Fossil Fuels. 

Burning our ancestors to cruise around town or heat a shopping mall seems irreverent and appalling enough. But then letting those who milk this traffic usurp your governments, trash the peace, and ruin your health seems unspeakably stupid, too. The carbon we’ll be sinking for you is worth a lot of money. Just be sure a fair share of the profits flow to those working to cure your fossil fuel addiction, and not to foment more lobbyists for the deadly status quo.

#3: If You Are Too Afraid To Go All The Way Just Stop At Restoration. 

Just bringing us back to recent par of 30 years ago will solve half of your CO2 problems on land and much of ours at sea. And we can both get there safely without entering any unknown territory. Any further climate cures you need from us we can discuss when we are back to some semblance of health, in the meantime you tackle the emission side where this trouble all began.

#4: Defrock The Spin Doctors For Negligence, Malpractice, And/Or Self-Serving Green Greed. 

Bear witness to and stop those in your so called “green movement” who profit on the back of our mortally wounded planet as they use Mother Earth as a poster victim whose displayed suffering and the angst it creates in the minds of men as the means to seize political power, turn your technological society back to your stone-age, and collect billions in tithes from the faithful. Take note that they attack the most affordable and immediate solution, that would heal our wounds, as a dangerous techno-fix that will allow the multitudes to continue to live, in what they eschew, as the lap of technological luxury. They would rather Mother Earth lie bleeding and dying on display on your super highway, run down by your fossil fuelled planes, trains, and auto-mobiles than to see her and us given first aid and helped back to health where a less pitiful appearance will lessen their revenues.

Equally complicit are those opposing our replenishment and restoration with cries of, “no geo-engineering,” “don’t touch the oceans,” and “beware the precautionary principle.” Translated this means “close your eyes, turn away and let us and the oceans die.”  The fact is you have already beaten us with murderous efficiency and effect. And undoing the harm you’ve done is not “geo-engineering,” it is usually called healing or restitution or just merciful common sense.

Don’t accept that merely screwing in another CF light bulb or buying a fashionable new hybrid car or any amount of recycling or bicycling will suffice. Do those things but don’t imagine that those things alone are not too little too late.

Each year we watch in disbelief as legions of oceanographers and other scientists deliver thousands of papers on the disastrous state of our seas and your climate. But instead of joining forces to fight for us or even championing remedies, the vast majority just shrugs off our demise and moan, “the real problem is our shrinking research budgets.” It’s as though your physician found you tested positive for numerous undeniable cancer symptoms, but instead of trying to heal you said, “Not so fast, we’ve got thirty more really cool expensive tests we’d like to run.” If your doctors had watched you waste away for fifty years, but instead of trying to help you just demanded more research funding, who would you think they are really working for?

Stop the climate banksters, brokers, and carpetbaggers from turning climate change markets into yet another leveraged derivative investment, Ponzi scheme, or Enron-style energy market gaming escapade. Don’t help them destroy low cost replenishment and restoration of ocean plants and pastures that will so dramatically diminish their deadly profits. How dare they project upon the miraculous biotechnology call to replenish and restore plankton that it is a dangerous “killer app” that will dominate their climate marketplace when it is they who are the collaborators with the killers.

Finally tell the advocates of wildly inflated, expensive, and inflatuated engineering and geo-engineering schemes that their hundred billion dollar rocketry plans firing fleets of beach umbrellas into orbit or clouds of noxious gases into the upper atmosphere to shade earth from the sun will only kill us faster. We live on sunlight and we breathe out your air in doing so. We thought Hippocrates taught you and you had learned, “First do no harm.” But every day that you let us perish you compound the harm you’ve done to us, yourselves and the biosphere, and it is so insanely dumb. Doing nothing amid a tragedy is in itself an act of grave direct consequence as you should have learned by now in Auschwitz, Rwanda, and more recently on Wall and High Streets and in the dominion of the Euro.

Closing Summary and Final Offer

So here’s the deal. You replenish the mineral dust and the iron you have taken from us, we take down half your CO2 and we feed your multitudes with incredibly healthy sea food. Working together we could make your so-called civilization carbon neutral and start to defuse the huge hundreds of gigatonne CO2 Carbon Bomb you’ve sent airborne since you first started burning coal and oil. This will also replenish your oxygen, buffer the life dissolving acid seas, and restock our entire blue world with fish and birds and whales and life.

This is a simple, just and even profitable resolution – a win-win situation to the power of ten. If, however, you do not heed our call and start to show some sense damn soon, we shall be unable to avoid siding with the voices now advising Mother Earth to reboot her whole operating system back to the cyanobacterial sea of slime and re-start evolution again in hopes of an intelligent outcome next time. So now it’s up to you. Choose wisely and choose soon. 500 million years of evolution is a terrible thing to waste. With sincere impatience and subsiding levels of regard, The Phytoplankton of Planet Ocean

Here’s some links for more reading:

John Laumer @ TreehuggerHow Can You Tell The Difference Between A Climate Denier & An Environmentalist?

Ice Ages, Dust, and Us…phytoplankton

Anti-Science By The So Called Greens

Alaska Volcano Dusts Northeast Pacific with ash, 2 years later the largest salmon run in history arrives at the Fraser River!

40 Million Salmon Can’t Be Wrong

We Need Some Musical Help – we’ve penned a little ditty that we call the Salmon Rap… it tells the tale of how a miracle of dust from the eruption of the Alaskan volcano Kasatochi in 2008 restored the NE Pacific salmon pastures to a condition as if they were the Garden of Eden. Salmon which were projected to return from those salmon pastures in the lowest numbers in history instead returned in the greatest numbers in history. No trivial effect arguable in the decimal places instead of 1 million salmon 40 million returned.

Maybe you can sing or even arrange and musically orchestrate it… We sure need some help. Make a recording and send it to us… or just post it on YouTube and link to us.

A miracle has happened our music is here!40 Million Salmon Can’t Be Wrong