- They sent in the largest SWAT team assault
in Canada's history to crush myself
and six researchers looking through microscopes
at plankton samples.
That scares the living daylights out of most people.
I'm Russ George, and I'm considered a heretic
because I want to restore the oceans
and restore the climate of the planet and save the world,
and not make a whole bunch of money as the goal.
- Radicals, dissidents, rebels, and misfits.
You can call them whatever you like.
But what if they're right?
- My life these days is dedicated to restoring the health
health of the ocean to its historic
levels of abundance,
and we do that by treating the ocean
as a series of ocean pastures,
which is common sense on land.
The process of restoring ocean plant life
to its historic abundance is not my invention.
A great scientist, John Martin,
pointed out in 1988, if you take a tiny bit
of mineral dust back to the ocean,
that will help the plankton bloom,
and can allow the oceans to remove the vast majority
of humanity's carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
That's a few hundred thousand tons of Iron ore rock dust.
Well, Australia sells to China, every year, 600 million tons
of Iron ore rock dust.
So if we wanted to restore the world's oceans to health
and save the world from climate change,
we merely need to deploy a team of people
with brooms and dust pans to sweep up the dust
around the great Iron ore shipping ports in Australia.
If we use the ocean and the sun to power photosynthesis,
we can mitigate climate change.
And it won't take decades to do that,
it will take mere years.
Instead of costing trillions of dollars,
it will merely cost millions of dollars.
Ocean pasture restoration has the capacity
to pull 30 to 35 billion tons of carbon dioxide
out of the atmosphere every year
and repurpose it into new ocean life.
Humanity only emits 45 billion tons,
so that's three-quarters of the burden of the fossil fuel age.
The knee-jerk reaction that many people have
about humans putting anything
in the ocean is often completely out of context.
When the dust blows out of the Sahara Desert
and blows towards the Amazon,
700 million tons a year of African dust lands
in the Amazon basin,
and it provides minerals and nutrients
that allow the Amazon rainforest to grow.
On the way to the Amazon,
more dust than that lands in the ocean.
In 2012, with a small, native Indian village
in British Columbia,
we took our dust out to their ocean pasture.
We sprinkled the dust over 10,000 square kilometers.
The plankton grew into a
50,000-square-kilometer bloom.
All of ocean life came to the bloom and feasted.
That project took probably a half a billion tons
of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere,
and repurposed it into that ocean life.
And the measure of success was intending
to bring the fish back.
Well, the very next year,
the Pink salmon that we targeted in Alaska,
they were expecting to catch 50 million Pink salmon,
which was gonna be a very healthy catch.
But following our pasture restoration,
the Alaskans had to stop fishing
after catching 225 million salmon,
which was the largest catch of salmon in all of history.
It just works, right?
There's no question about it, it simply works.
- So if what you're saying is accurate,
it doesn't cost trillions, it costs millions,
well, there's people out there with millions.
There's people with millions to burn,
like I've seen what Nic Cage spends his money on.
- Well, they don't because of the attacks
that have taken place on
the people who have worked in this.
So when John Martin in 1988 said he had the solution
for climate change,
he was declared a heretic
because the solution was too good, too fast, too easy.
So the people today who expect
to be spending those trillions of dollars,
this is the worst news ever.
So when I did the work with my village of 800 native people
village of 800 Native people in British Columbia,
we thought nothing could be better.
We dotted every i, crossed every t.
And then the week before Easter in 2013,
there was a pounding bang on our research office
and laboratory in Vancouver,
and in burst an 11-man
Canadian government SWAT team
with body armor and automatic weapons.
Even though the government of Canada
was our full, formal contractual partner
in the project, they decided to raid the office
and destroy the data collections
and our ability to complete the science.
So I was declared a rogue, American oligarch
who swindled the poor,
hapless Natives into doing this illegal activity.
When there's an example of what happens to a heretic,
nobody wants to repeat that.
In the last, say, 50 to 70 years,
we've horrifically destroyed half of all ocean life.
And so we have to restore it.
It's a life-or-death situation.
Ocean pasture restoration is about
becoming good shepherds of the oceans.
We need every invention that has ever been invented
to tend to the land in the agricultural sense
as a good shepherd recreated,
to tend to the 72% of this planet
that is ocean.
You take care of Mother Nature, she takes care of you.
My name is Russ George, R-U-S-S G-E-O-R-G-E.
- Great, perfect.
- And you can remember that 'cause I work with rust.
- Iron, right?