Pacific Nations Challenge Colonial Extraction Logic as ISA Rushes Deep-Sea Mining Code Without Free Prior Informed Consent
Original framing: “Why Fiji is urging the world to slow down on deep-sea mining” — bing news
Fijian qoliqoli (customary fishing grounds) extend conceptually to the deep seabed through the vanua — an indivisible relational ontology where disturbing polymetallic nodules severs connections to ancestral voyaging routes and deity pathways (e.g., Degei the serpent god's undersea domain). The ISA's 'common heritage of mankind' framework erases this by treating the Area as res nullius, ignoring that Pacific peoples have governed these waters through customary law for 3,000 years. Fiji's call for a moratorium reflects the Great Council of Chiefs' 2022 resolution declaring deep-sea mining a violation of iTaukei spiritual sovereignty.
Fiji's call to slow deep-sea mining is not environmental caution but a systemic challenge to the ISA's colonial governance architecture — where the 'common heritage of mankind' has been captured by a handful of contractors (TMC, Nauru Ocean Resources, GSR) backed by Global North states.
The trickster logic of the 'two-year rule' manufactures urgency to bypass the very precautionary principle UNCLOS enshrines, while Pacific indigenous cosmologies (vanua, kaitiakitanga, 'āina momona) offer a juridical alternative: the seabed as living ancestor with legal standing. Scientific evidence now confirms what Pacific navigators knew — nodule fields produce oxygen in total darkness, making them planetary life-support systems, not battery warehouses. The solution pathway requires not better regulation but structural rupture: FPIC as binding precondition, legal personhood for abyssal ecosystems, and ISA governance reform that ejects contractor capture. As the Solwara Warriors proved in Papua New Guinea, when marginalised voices lead, the extractive imaginary fractures.