Every year scores of thousands of ships move 11 billion tons of cargo across the world’s oceans.

If just one ship, just one out of the nearly 100,000 in the fleet, were drafted/seconded to perform ocean restoration work instead of commerce our ocean pastures would be immediately and sustainably regenerated bringing sea-life back to historic abundance.

The additional ocean life would be seen as billions of additional fish swim into nets of fishers to inexpensively feed hundreds of millions of people every year. In the bargain, billions of tonnes of CO2 would be repurposed, via regenerated ocean photosynthesis, into new life.

Yet humanity refuses to allocate even just one ship of our nearly 100,000 large ships to care for, restore, and replenish our ocean pastures to bring back the fish.

Every year 11 billion tons of cargo is shipped around the world by more than 60,000 large cargo ships. They carry hundreds of millions of tons of iron and other ores, countless barrels of oil, thousands of trainloads of grain, millions of new cars and trucks, clothes, TVs, computers, frozen and canned fish, cattle, sheep, fruits, vegetables… the list is nearly endless. Transporting these goods from port to port is what makes and keeps the world’s human economies and societies needs well-fed and prosperous. But for the oceans themselves, these ships do nothing but leave hurt and harm in their wakes, all for the miserly denial of just one ship.

Futuristic 50,000 ton bulk carrier, such 50 kiloton ships cost just a few thousands of dollars per day to transport their cargo across oceans. The 50,000 tonnes of iron-rich mineral dust my proposed OCEAN GREEN ship carries is more than sufficient to regenerate, restore, and replenish ocean pastures around the world each year. China last year shipped 20,000 times more iron ore than is needed to revive the world’s ocean pastures.

Here’s my proposition, if the world were to come together and contribute just one ship of this vast fleet of cargo vessels every year, or better yet 12 vessels contribute just one month’s service each year to give something vital back to the oceans they cross – life in the world’s oceans would be regenerated, restored, and immediately returned back to the condition of health and abundance that we and all of sea-life enjoyed before man began to sail the Seven Seas. Is just one ship out of nearly 100,000 too much to ask?

Here’s a great video that visualizes this entire process from the UCL Energy Institute in the UK.

UK researchers assembled data from tens of thousands of commercial ships that moved across the ocean in 2012. They then worked with the data visualization studio Kiln to make this map. Here are a few neat highlights from playing around with the map/app.

Interacting with the map you may trace the outlines of continents solely by looking at shipping routes. You can toggle the map so that it only shows major shipping routes and nothing else. Even here, you can clearly see the continents, save for the region above the Arctic circle, where few ships travel. (Though that may change as summer sea ice keeps receding.)

It’s also easy to spot some hubs of the global economy with this map. The red lines above trace ships carrying liquid fuels — crude oil or gasoline. As you can see, both Louisiana and Texas are major hydrocarbon hubs. There are also thick red lines streaming out of the Valdez Terminal in Alaska, which is at the southern end of the Alaska Pipeline, bringing oil from fields in the north.

In addition to carrying civilizations, vital cargos around the world the vast fleet of large cargo ships are a major source of ocean killing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. The ships burn an incredible amount of bunker fuel oil and in 2012 that burned fuel resulted in the emission of  796 million tons of carbon dioxide. The researchers note that that’s far more than “the whole of the UK, Canada or Brazil emit in any given year.”

One Ship To Save Them All

You might be wondering how could just one ship save the world’s Seven Seas each year. Or as I have suggested my better alternative 12 ships contributing just 1 month of work each year. Here’s what the ship(s) would do and why.

Choosing a more ocean point of view of our Blue Planet as seen from space makes one wonder why we call our home Earth. click to enlarge

Our oceans that cover 72% of this Blue Planet are not all a single uniform bowl of distant blue water. Just like land, there are areas of the oceans where pastures flourish or in times of drought perish. We all know that it is from our pastures that we obtain our food, this is true whether those pastures be on land or out at sea. When we take good care of our pastures and we are blessed with plenty of rainfall those pastures flourish and provide us with a cornucopia of food in abundance.

The Ocean Drought

There is an ocean crisis that has been proceeding largely out of the public eye for decades. It is an ocean pasture drought, though it is not a drought where no rain falling rather it is a drought where no dust is falling. As everyone knows pastures on land are filled with growing green grass when there is plenty of rainfall. Pasture grass grows in rich mineral soil and all it needs is for the blessing of rainfall and all of life is rewarded.

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

Ocean pastures contain their own form of ‘grass’ it’s called plankton or more properly phytoplankton, plant plankton. The ocean pasture is all water so the grass of ocean pastures doesn’t need water it grows in it. What ocean pastures must have is what pastures on land have in super-abundance – dirt containing the vital minerals that plants must have to grow. For decades the amount of dust blowing in the wind and the ‘dustfall’ blessing for ocean pastures around the world has been in the death grip of a terrible drought. The result is that ocean pastures today are producing half or less of the plant life they did 50 years ago.

The English writer Walt Whitman once said, “All beef is grass.” Truer words were never spoken. And indeed I say “all fish is plankton.”

The reason for the terrible ocean dust drought is all about our CO2. We humans have emitted nearly a trillion tonnes of CO2 in the past 100 years of our fossil fuel age – that CO2 is changing our planet. First and foremost CO2 is nourishing plants on land and even helping them not need nearly as much rainfall to be well watered and flourishing – covering the ground. It is called ‘global greening.”

But MORE GRASS GROWING MEANS LESS DUST BLOWING

So as our CO2 is resulting in global greening which we terrestrial pasture people think is wonderful, the converse is true for the ocean pastures. They are turning from being rich abundant blue-green pastures into clear blue deserts unable to sustain hardly any ocean life, aka fish. Perhaps far worse our ocean pasture plants are no longer producing the abundant oxygen life everywhere on this planet depends upon. Ocean plant life used to produce 85% of this world’s oxygen, think of this as 8 out of every 10 breaths of air you take in delivers life-giving oxygen once produced mostly by ocean phytoplankton.

Overfishing or Pasture Collapse – the usual suspects vs. us

Sardines and anchovies around the world are collapsing as their plankton food disappears and changes

If you think the disappearance of ocean fish is due to those bad overfishing industrial fishermen you are only partially right. As much as those overfishing men are wreaking havoc on ocean pastures catching the last of the fish, the real culprits in the decline of global fish is you and I.  Each and everyone of us has been and is contributing to high and rising CO2 that is greening the globe, depriving the ocean pastures of vital dustfall. The result is the ‘carrying capacity’ of ocean fish pastures has collapsed. Present day overfishing is so bad because it is taking the last of fish populations starved into near extinction by our CO2 – dust denial fossil fuel age.

But thanks to a quarter-century of scientific research, discovery, and technological invention we now know how to regenerate our ocean pastures and return them to the condition of health and abundance they and we enjoyed centuries ago before our civilization began to destroy ocean pasture life.

Dust For The Oceans Will Restore The Plankton Blooms

By drafting or seconding one ship out of the world’s vast fleet to carry mineral-rich rock dust out to replenish selected dying ocean pastures those pastures will immediately, within weeks, return to the condition of health and abundance of time before mans technological carbon boot began destroying ocean pastures. The cost of this work is most remarkable because the work can be done at an incredibly low cost. Suitable mineral prescriptions will globally cost mere millions each year, carrying the life regenerating mineral dust to the ocean again just a few millions each year. Compare this with the trillions of dollars proposed for new carbon taxes by the Paris Accord and you might see why the miserly refusal to supply just one ship is happening. You need do nothing more than follow the money to understand.

This ocean science and technology has been the focus of intensive academic study for a quarter of a century at the expense of a quarter of a billion dollars in research funding. It has now been proven via my work to be safe, sustainable, effective, inexpensive, and immediately available for global deployment. The cost is barely measurable in the total cost of global ocean shipping. The only question why this is not being deployed to save the oceans and our world immediately.

How To Bring Back Billions Of Fish, Feed The World’s Hungry – Ocean Pasture Restoration Repurposes Billions Of Tonnes Of CO2 Into Ocean Life

IT JUST WORKS!

My 2012 ocean pasture replenishment and restoration work in the NE Pacific returned the ocean to life as seen in the largest catch of salmon in all of history in Alaska the very next year, instead of the expected catch of 52 million fish 226 million were caught. The state of Alaska has reported that the resulting record catch delivered $696 million dollars of revenue to citizens, cash registers, and revenues.

From the Columbia River north to Alaska salmon returns are proving to be among best in recorded history, according to reports by Fish and Wildlife officials and confirmed by throngs of happy fishermen. Seattle Times 14 June 2014

It’s not just some lucky accident of nature.

In 2012 after many years of development work I completed a commercial-scale pilot project designed to restore and replenish a vital ocean salmon pasture in the N.E. Pacific. Ocean Pastures provided the technology, methodology, and scientific and engineering expertise.