Mining the Deep Sea

See →.

In 2015, scholar Anna Zalik identified a configuration of BRIC-plus countries as the main strategic players: Brazil, Russia, China, UK, Netherlands, and Japan. Anna Zalik, “Trading on the Offshore: Territorialization and the Ocean Grab in the International Seabed,” Beyond Free Trade: Alternative Approaches to Trade, Politics and Power, ed. Kate Ervine and Gavin Fridell (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 174. For year, private and state-led corporations have been scrambling to adapt on-land mining technology to the high pressure of underwater extraction. Of these, state-led companies in China and Japan are the most technologically advanced in the adaptation of mining equipment to the high pressure of the deep sea, along with the now bankrupt company Nautilus Minerals. Currently, Global Sea Mineral Resources (GSR), a unit of the Belgian group DEME, and Canada’s DeepGreen are continuing tests and research while China is the best-positioned country, with a total of five contracts in international waters, to inaugurate deep sea mining on the high seas. “China Leads the Race to Exploit Deep Dea Minerals: UN Body,” Reuters, October 23, 2019 →.

See Ben Doherty, “Collapse of PNG Deep-Sea Mining Venture Sparks Calls for Moratorium,” Guardian, September 15, 2019 →; and this press release from the Deep Sea Mining Campaign: “Nautilus Minerals: Still Lost at Sea with No Life Raft in Sight,” November 25, 2019 →.

Susan Reid, “Solwara 1 and the Sessile Ones,” in Blue Legalities: The Life & Laws of the Sea, ed. Irus Braverman and Elizabeth R. Johnson (Duke University Press, 2020), 28. Chemosynthesis is what sustains organisms around hydrothermal vents—aphotic zones where sunlight does not penetrate. Like photosynthesis on land, it is the basis for these ecosystems. In biochemical terms, chemosynthesis is “the biological conversion of one or more carbon-containing molecules (usually carbon dioxide or methane) and nutrients into organic matter using the oxidation of inorganic compounds (e.g., hydrogen gas, hydrogen sulfide) or ferrous ions as a source of energy, rather than sunlight, as in photosynthesis.” See →.

W. Martin, J. Baross, D. Kelley, et al., “Hydrothermal Vents and the Origin of Life,” Nat Rev Microbiol, no. 6 (2008): 805–14 →.

The use of ribosomal RNA (rRNA) for genealogical classification was proposed by the geneticist Carl Woese, the same scientist who proposed archea as a separate domain to bacteria and eukaryota.

See →.

From William J. Broad’s The Universe Below, cited in Stefan Helmreich, Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas (University of California Press, 2009), 100.

Helmreich, Alien Ocean, 100.

See →.

See →.

See →.

Katherine G. Sammler, “Kauri and the Whale: Oceanic Matter and Meaning in New Zealand,” in Blue Legalities, 64.

Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (Duke University Press, 2016).

Povinelli, Geontologies, 8.

Povinelli, Geontologies, 6.

This point regarding mercantilism is made by Anna Zalik in “Trading on the Offshore.”

Povinelli, Geontologies, 9.

Sammler, “Kauri and the Whale,” 68.

Although terra nullius has not been legally invoked in this context, the rhetorics reverberate in how the claim of a barren or empty landscape is never considered as such due to prior ecological devastation.

Because ferro-manganese nodules are potato-shaped minerals found in planes, the notions of “picking” and “harvesting” are often evoked. This obfuscates the millenia that took to form them, and the fact that they are the geological basis of an ecosystem, and that mining would not entail picking them but would in effect scrape a few meters of seafloor—for which the closest reference would be the environmentally disastrous bottom-trawling form of fishing. “Article 77(4) of the UNCLOS defines living natural resources as ‘living organisms belonging to sedentary species, that is to say, organisms which, at the harvestable stage, either are immobile on or under the seabed or are unable to move except in constant physical contact with the seabed or the subsoil.’ If a marine creature’s status is sedentary, UNCLOS deems it ‘harvestable,’ a euphemistic term likening commercial sedentary fisheries to gathering garden fruit. Legal scholars note that the inclusion of living resources, such as sedentary species, came late in the development of the continental shelf regime.” Susan Reid, “Solwara 1 and the Sessile Ones,” 36.

Van Dover et al., “Scientific Rationale and International Obligations for Protection of Active Hydrothermal Vent Ecosystems from Deep-sea Mining,” Marine Policy, no. 90 (2018): 22.

“Bioprospecting, when undertaken using non-harvest approaches, is environmentally friendly, and there are already examples of marine genetic resources derived from vent discoveries. These include enzymes that function under extremes of temperature, chemistry, and pressure (‘extremozymes’ developed from very small samples of vent organisms) that have substantial impact on society, as well as commercial value. The Valley UltraThin™ enzyme, which increases the efficiency of ethanol production from cornstarch and is sourced from a deep-sea hydrothermal vent organism, posted annual sales value of $150M (USD). The market for enzyme products derived from all marine genetic resources has been valued at more than $50B per year. The value of biotechnology products derived from active vent ecosystems may compete well against the value of polymetallic sulfide ores, estimated at $1B annually for each mining operation. Exploration to discover and develop biofuel, nutraceutical, biomimetic, pharmaceutical, cosmetic, and other products from healthy, active vents could be an alternative, sustainable use of vent ecosystems.” Van Dover et al., “Scientific Rationale and International Obligations,” 23.

This point regarding the necessity of actively “foreclosing” futures has been made by philosopher Alexandre Monnin, among others. See →. This point is notorious when it comes to the energy industry: oil has not replaced coal, and renewables will likely not foreclose oil, coal, or nuclear energy. Instead, global energy consumption has risen consistently throughout the twentieth-century in what is known as the Jevon’s paradox. The paradox posits that an economical use of energy may simply lead to increased, not reduced, energy consumption.

I am following Helmreich’s reading of Agamben here. Helmreich, Alien Ocean​, 101.

Helmreich, Alien Ocean, 101. For Povinelli it is the Desert, the Animist, and the Virus that succeed the Foucauldian figures of the masturbating child, the hysterical woman, the Malthusian couple, and the perverted adult.

Helmreich, Alien Ocean, 101.

Povinelli, Geontologies, 8–9. She adds: “In other words, it is increasingly clear that the anthropos remains an element in the set of life only insofar as Life can maintain its distinction from Death/Extinction and Nonlife.”

Povinelli, Geontologies, 10.

Martin J. S. Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2005). “Mineralogy” was the study of fossils, a science of specimens detached from significant field information beyond locality; “physical geography” did involve fieldwork, but it exclusively mapped rock formations on a two-dimensional plane at the soil’s surface; and “geognosy” was the term for the site-specific maps that miners produced, which encompassed depth by describing the three-dimensional structure of rock masses.

Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of Time, 640.

Stefan Helmreich, script for Inhabitants’ series What is Deep Sea Mining?, Episode 2: “Deep Frontiers.” Available at inhabitants-tv.org →.

Helmreich, script for Inhabitants’ series What is Deep Sea Mining?

Helmreich, script for Inhabitants’ series What is Deep Sea Mining?

“A proliferation of conjectural geotheories even offered ambitious accounts of how the earth must have changed in the past and would necessarily change in the future, based on reasoning from the known laws of nature. But attempts to reconstruct the detailed particularities of the earth’s history from the concrete relics or traces of the deep past were few and far between.” Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of Time, 644.

I am riffing here on artist Amy Balkin’s artwork Public Smog (2004–present), which includes a proposal to protect the ozone layer as a UNESCO heritage site. According to the artist’s website: “Public Smog is a park in the atmosphere that fluctuates in location and scale. The park is constructed through financial, legal, or political activities that open it for public use. Activities to create the park have included purchasing and retiring emission offsets in regulated emissions markets, making them inaccessible to polluting industries” →.

Helmreich, Alien Ocean, 100.

“With a wink to corporate extractivists, UNCLOS provides the legal framework for DSM to thrive. Its conservation provisions gesture to environmental concerns but are notably weak and difficult to enforce. UNCLOS imports the precautionary principle supported by the Rio Declaration (1992) and the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity (CDB), placing the burden of proof on corporations whose activities may pose a threat or cause irreversible harm. Such proof is difficult to verify in DSM’s self-regulating environment: miners establish the environmental baselines against which their enterprises are measured; monitor their own progress against these baselines; and report on any changes. Operating several kilometers below the surface also makes it difficult for independent oversight or audit, and neither the International Seabed Authority (ISA) nor PNG or any small island nations have resources to deploy site-specific monitoring teams.” Susan Reid, “Solwara 1 and the Sessile Ones,” 27.

Povinelli, Geontologies, 10.