MrBeast is back at it again! Except, this time, instead of planting trees, he’s saving the seas. 

In case you don’t already know, MrBeast is one of the top YouTubers on the platform, starting his career by counting to 100,000 over the course of 44 hours, and continuing now with over 73 million subscribers, as he gives away thousands to millions of dollars to subscribers, organizations. Although already performing notable acts of charity through his main channel videos and even his own charity called “Beast Philanthropy,” two years ago MrBeast also created a YouTube wide fundraiser with another YouTuber by the name of Mark Rober, in which each dollar donated equated to one tree planted into the ground, in order to fight back against deforestation, with the help of the Arbor Day Foundation. The fundraiser, tagged with the line “20 Million Trees Before 2020,” was a huge success, raising enough money to plant over 23 million trees- with 9 million already planted today. Although this incredible fundraiser is still in progress, MrBeast wouldn’t stop there, and decided, on October 29th, 2021, to announce his next big fundraiser, Team Seas. 

With the help from YouTube Originals and The Ocean Cleanup project, MrBeast and Mark Rober announced their plan to save the seas with Team Seas. If you’ve taken Honors Chemistry before, the topic of this fundraiser should not be too unfamiliar for you. In today’s society, water pollution is a known issue, with people throwing their garbage and especially plastics, into nearby water sources, or on the ground which is then swept up by the wind and into the water. This trash, especially plastics, serve as a big endangerment to the wildlife and to the health of our planet. As taught later in the year of Honors Chemistry, the majority and most commonly polluting plastics are non-degradable, meaning that they’ll never dissolve and thus, once in the ocean, will never leave unless physically removed or taken by the tides to the beaches, polluting them in turn. And so, a large spread execution as being done by MrBeast has been needed for years. 

This year, the fundraiser, with the less popular tagline of “Help us remove 30 million pounds of trash by January 1st, 2022,” equates each dollar to one last pound of trash in the ocean, specifically saying on the website that “Every $1 is one less pound of trash in the ocean.” Although a bit more complicated than the prior fundraiser, this year, half of the donated money will go towards worldwide trash fishing and volunteer beach cleanup projects, with the other going towards robots that physically remove the trash from specific rivers that are believed to be the main source of the trash flow into oceans. 

Instead of YouTubers simply making #TeamTrees related videos that require little to no effort, such as the very commonly uploaded video where PewDiePie, LDShadowLady, UnspeakableGaming, and other YouTubers simply planted “20 million trees in Minecraft,” this year YouTubers are going all out. With YouTuber CG5 writing a song called “Ocean Blue,” for the campaign, with YouTuber JustDustin spending fifty hours buried alive in garbage, and even with the Jimmy Kimmel Live YouTube Channel and Jimmy Kimmel show featuring and promoting MrBeast and Mark Rober’s goal. In addition to this, famous YouTubers such as TommyInnit, LEMMiNO, Linus Tech Tips, TierZoo, AzzyLand, The Infographics Show, and DanTDM have also teamed up with Team Seas to help promote the fundraiser. 

In addition to this, using the fame of the Dream SMP, all of the members, with big names ranging from GeorgeNotFound to TommyInnit, to even newer members like Eryn, BoomerNA, and the ultimate winner, Hannahxxrose, amassing over one million viewers by TommyInnit alone, to the event where the Minecraft server members entertainingly collected trash around the server over the course of two hours, for the first person to obtain a rare Minecraft item called an “elytra,” on the server, in order to raise awareness. 

As of November 4th, only 5 days after the start of the campaign, the fundraiser has already amoused $12,583, 976 towards #TeamSeas, making the goal of barely over double this in the next two months, seem extremely plausible. 

Although he is also facing criticism for being a hypocrite as technically all the planted trees can cause a large sum of oxygen pollution that is, in itself, detrimental to the sea life he is trying to protect, and due to the lack of specifics stated in MrBeast’s own video, I nonetheless think that Team Seas is a fantastic campaign we should all partake in. Although, unlike with Team Trees, small YouTubers and everyday people aren’t being pushed to make their own videos on the topic nor did MrBeast explain the effect of his fundraiser, other than simply taking trash out of the other, it should still be our responsibility to educate ourselves and at least spread the word about the fundraiser. Even if we can’t donate ourselves, ocean pollution has been a prominent issue with our seas for decades now and, although deemed a “scam” or “hypocritical” by many, the fundraiser presents the first necessary step in tackling this previously thought impossible task head on.