"Oysters are what you would call an ecosystem engineer"

Interview with George Birch from Oyster Heaven

George has a background in biology and marine ecology. When he left Edinburgh University he was very excited to go and start saving our oceans. When he started to work for the Blue Marine Foundation, a conservation organization, the work mainly consisted of looking for funding, which he found demotivating. George: “So I decided to find the money first and then make the people around the money as passionate about saving our oceans as the people at the Blue Marine Foundation. I went to work for an asset manager, like a pension fund manager in the UK and tried to educate fund managers about how to do investments with more of an environmental social conscience. But none of these people were investing in our oceans. Working there gave me a lot of information and an interesting contact book and I learned about how and why the money moved around. So I thought to myself, I’m going to start a company around these problems; scale simplicity and return. I left the UK and started a MBA in Rotterdam to learn how to start businesses. Meanwhile, I was thinking about the North Sea, realizing we were missing a lot of oysters. I think 20-30% of the Northsea used to be covered with oyster reefs and 95% of them are gone now. Basically because we ate them to extinction. The most phenomenal thing about nature is if you give it a little bit of space and maybe a little bit of a push, she can come back astonishingly quickly. In most cases that is.”