OPR Alaska, Inc., is an Alaskan company created by and for both fishermen and all Alaskans who are in love with and treasure its legendary and extraordinary Nature.
We are pioneer ‘good shepherds’ of the world’s ocean ecosystems, its ocean pastures, and more. Our innovative ‘nature based’ solutions deliver proven, immediately deployable, and profitable large-scale ocean eco-restoration. Being good shepherds regenerates the oceans to the state of health, productivity, and biodiversity that existed centuries ago.
Our privately financed ‘public-private-partnership business’ is ‘good news for the planet.’ As a for-profit enterprise, we intend to become major taxpayers, not just another greenwash scheme that plans to feast at troughs of public tax money.
Ocean pastures nourish and sustain life on 72% of this blue planet, and they are in desperate trouble as evidenced by catastrophic declines of fish, seabirds, whales, and almost every form of ocean life.
Collapse of the oceans green phyto-plankton, responsible for the vast majority of global photosynthesis, is turning what once were lush green ocean Gardens of Eden into clear blue lifeless ocean deserts.
The OPR Alaska team of fishermen, scientists, and business people are now working to repeat our dramatic success of ocean pasture restoration to bring fish back to Alaska at historic levels of health and abundance every year. Referencing the chart below, the arrow points to where we labored to restore our first Gulf of Alaska ocean pasture, about 5,000 sq. miles in size, a small fraction of the 600,000 sq. miles that makes up the Gulf of Alaska. The circle shows the result in the form of hundreds of millions of additional fat Pink Salmon that survived, thrived, came back and were caught in Alaska because of our work.
Our work in 2012 clearly and repeatedly produced the largest catches of salmon in Alaskan history! These bountiful catches injected upwards of a billion dollars of economic stimulus into the Alaskan economy.
In our new series of ocean pasture restorations we will prove that we can safely, sustainably, and profitably regenerate and return Alaska’s vital ocean pastures to historic health and abundance. The five species of salmon will once again fill Alaska’s rivers with more fish than we can catch.
Puffins in Alaska are dying off due to loss of their food fish on the ocean pastures they live in. Many reports state as much as 80% have disappeared.
In addition to the salmon, pollock, black cod, ground fish, herring, eulachon, will all return to historic high numbers. Our replenished and restored pasture will sustainably feed all ocean life: the sea-birds, whales, seals, sea lions, bears, everything, including people.
Restoring Ocean Pastures Brings Back The Fish
Restoring ocean pastures is vital to sustain fish in the world’s oceans, indeed all of ocean life.
Ocean plankton blooms, like the one in the image above of a spring bloom in the Gulf of Alaska, have been diminishing and disappearing dramatically for more than 50 years. The deadly toll of lost ocean plant life is 100 times greater than the toll of global deforestation. Plankton is the grass of ocean pastures. It feeds all of ocean life, from the tiniest copepod and krill to the largest whale.
Poet Walt Whitman wrote, “All beef is grass.”
We remind you, “All fish is plankton.”
The oceans plankton is dying because humanity’s CO2 has made the grass that covers pastures on land grow more abundant. While this greening is good news for the land, it is terrible news for the oceans.
More grass growing, means less dust blowing.
It is the dust from the land that blows in the wind that nourishes ocean plant life. The world’s cataclysmic drought of dust is starving ocean life to death.
Our work is to replenish some part of the oceans vital missing mineral dust and in doing so sustainably restore this blue planets oceans to health.
Mineral dust spread over a vast area of ocean, approximately 10,000 km2, spreads out and replenishes vital mineral nutrients without which the ocean plants, phyto-plankton, cannot thrive. When the plankton blooms, fish find food and in turn thrive.
It Just Works! Some unexpected benefits.
Alaskan all-woman boat ‘ Cricket’ lands their share of the 2013 largest catch of salmon in history.
The state of Alaska has reported the additional catch delivered more than half a billions dollars of economic stimulus, a blessing to the state economy. So much fish was on hand that the U.S. Department of Agriculture started buying large amounts of the “surplus” salmon to make space in the fish processing industry to handle more fish.
Beginning in 2014 part of that bountiful “surplus” of salmon went to American children in US Domestic Food Aid programs, 300 million meals of nutritious Alaskan salmon were served to those American kids in need. To this day that news still brings tears to our eyes in gratitude that our second miracle of the fishes was such a blessing to those children.
The fish kept coming back as the following news story reveals, again because the vital ocean dust was replenished at the right place and time.
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In 2014, projections throughout the ocean and fisheries science venues are advising another miracle is in the offing.
From our archives: This year’s 2014 Fraser River Sockeye Salmon runs will be the all-time historic high, twice the previous record of 1900.
2014 Fraser River Sockeye Salmon Run Shatters Expectations
As many as 72 million of the bright red fish are expected where the largest runs in all of history have never exceeded 45 million. Even if the run is in the mid-range of the estimates at 25 million fish, it will be in the top 6 in all of recorded history.
This year’s ‘Sockeye miracle’ follows last fall’s record runs and catch of Pink Salmon from Alaska south. Instead of the expected 50 million fish being caught in SE Alaska in 2013, 226 million Pinks were caught. The data proves that ocean pastures replenished with vital dust return to health and abundance and that brings back the fish to historic abundance.
Canadian Television News Reports On Historic Run
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While our restored ocean pastures deliver fish that become our food, jobs, and money, they also sustain many other natural ocean values.
Below, continue to read about how our work to bring back the fish also led to an Orca Whale baby boom in the Lower 48!
This newborn Orca baby is one of a miracle of many newborn Orcas whose barren mothers, well fed by our bounty of salmon, once again began to deliver healthy calves.
April 2015 : News media in Seattle make note of a delightfully unusual Orca baby boom in the NE Pacific just now, 9 new babies.
The gestation period of an orca, at 17 months, is the longest known of all whales. All these new baby Orcas, following years of declining births, says something wonderful must have already happened in 2013 to bring the mother Orcas back to healthy fertility so they could deliver their new babies into their/our world.
Mother Orcas may bear a single calf in the best of times only every 3 to 5 years; tragically, in recent times, more than a decade has passed between even one Orca birth.
Orca Baby Number 9 born this week ~Jan 20 aka calf j-55. Being well cared for by the extended family!
Orcas, aka “killer whales,” roaming the ocean pastures of the NE Pacific are experiencing a joyous Orca whale baby boom with a fourth baby orca now seen in the waters of the Salish Sea, making this a winter of record births. The latest healthy newborn was spotted Monday by whale-watching crews and a naturalist in the waters of British Columbia, according to the Pacific Whale Watch Association, which represents 29 whale-watching operators in Washington and British Columbia.
The new baby Orca, seen above, was swimming with other members of the J-pod, one of three families of Orcas that are protected in Washington and British Columbia. Ken Balcomb, a senior scientist with the Center for Whale Research at Friday Harbor, confirmed the birth to the Associated Press on Tuesday. The center keeps the official census of endangered southern resident killer whales for the federal government.
With so many new baby Orcas being seen in the tiny region covered by the whale-watching tourist fleet, a great many more are sure to be born in the vastly larger and remoter regions of the west coast of North America.
Read our NEWS section for current events in the world of Ocean Pastures
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Our privately financed public-private business plan is ‘good news for the planet.’ As a for-profit enterprise, we intend to become major taxpayers not just another greenwash scheme that plans to feast at troughs of public tax money.
