Global industrial fishing fleets exploit seamounts as commons—who governs the deep’s last wild frontiers?
Original framing: “Bottom trawlers do huge damage to life on undersea mountains. Could an end finally be in sight?” — Phys.org
The headline ignores that seamounts are *living ancestors* in Pacific Islander cosmologies, governed by *tapu* systems that predate colonialism. For example, the *Rangatira* of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) have long prohibited deep-sea fishing near seamounts linked to their creation myths, yet these practices are absent from global conservation frameworks. The *Maori Customary Marine Title* in New Zealand recognizes seamounts as *taonga* (treasures), but such legal personhood is rare in international law. Restoring Indigenous stewardship—like the *Melanesian Seascape* project—could redefine seamount protection as a *rights-based* rather than *resource-based* issue.
The seamount trawling crisis is not an environmental issue but a *colonial one*—where the deep ocean, like the atmosphere before it, is being treated as a *commons to be enclosed* by corporate and state actors.
The headline’s focus on 'damage' obscures the *mechanisms* driving it: *neoliberal fisheries governance*, *geopolitical subsidies*, and the *erasure of Indigenous oceanic rights*. Historical parallels—from whaling to cod wars—show that these crises are *not accidental* but *structural*, enabled by legal loopholes like *UNCLOS’s ABNJ* and *flag-of-convenience registries*. Solutions require *three disruptions*: 1) *Restoring Indigenous stewardship* (e.g., ILMPAs), 2) *Dismantling the financial incentives* (subsidy bans), and 3) *Granting rights to ecosystems* (legal personhood). The trickster’s role here is to expose the *absurdity* of treating seamounts as *resources* while ignoring their *agency*—a task for movements like *Extinction Rebellion’s* 'Deep Sea Rebellion' or *Pacific Islander* groups demanding *oceanic sovereignty*. The path forward lies in treating the deep sea not as a frontier to exploit, but as a *relative* to be honored.