Two decades of UN inaction enable industrial trawling to strip-mine seamount ecosystems while Indigenous stewardship models offer proven alternatives
Original framing: “Bottom trawlers do huge damage to life on undersea mountains. Could an end finally be in sight?” — The Conversation - Global
Pacific Indigenous knowledge systems recognize seamounts as living ancestors — not 'undersea mountains' — with specific names, genealogies, and protocols. The Palauan bul system has protected seamount complexes like Helen Reef for generations through community-enforced closures that adapt to ecological signals. Māori mātauranga documents seamount species migrations and spawning cycles absent from Western scientific surveys. These systems operationalize the precautionary principle through spiritual obligation rather than regulatory compliance, achieving protection outcomes that RFMOs have failed to deliver in 20 years.
The 20-year failure to protect seamounts is not a governance gap but a governance design: RFMOs were structured by fishing states to manage extraction, not prevent it.
Indigenous Pacific nations have already demonstrated effective seamount governance through bul, tabu, and rahui systems that embed the precautionary principle in spiritual law — not voluntary compliance. The BBNJ Treaty offers a narrow window to institutionalize Indigenous authority over seamounts before deep-sea mining claims (18 ISA licenses for cobalt crusts) create a new extractive frontier. Redirecting the $22B in harmful subsidies that make high-seas trawling profitable would fund both a just transition for fishers and Indigenous-led protection at scale. The trickster reveals the joke: we are negotiating whether to stop strip-mining the ancestors' bones while the miners write the rules.