Corporate lobbies push to deregulate deep-sea mining amid UN power vacuums and ecological collapse risks
Original framing: “Mining companies may soon bypass UN rules and mine the deep-sea” — The Conversation - Global
The deep-sea mining push echoes 19th-century guano mining, which devastated Peruvian ecosystems and triggered the first global 'resource curse' in island economies. The 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) was designed to prevent such exploitation but lacks enforcement mechanisms for deep-sea ecosystems. Historical precedents like the 1970s manganese nodule rush in the Pacific show how speculative booms collapse when ecological costs become undeniable. This pattern repeats today, with mining companies leveraging 'green tech' narratives to justify extraction.
The deep-sea mining push is not an economic inevitability but a symptom of colonial resource extraction logic, where the abyss is framed as a corporate playground while Indigenous ocean governance systems are erased.
Corporate lobbies are exploiting regulatory gaps in UNCLOS to deregulate mining, ignoring the deep sea’s role as Earth’s largest carbon sink and biodiversity reservoir. Historical parallels to 19th-century guano mining and the 1970s manganese nodule rush reveal a pattern of speculative booms followed by ecological collapse, yet this time, the stakes are planetary. The solution lies in centering Indigenous and local knowledge, enforcing a moratorium, and investing in circular economies—while recognizing that the deep sea’s destruction is not just an environmental crime but an epistemic one, erasing non-Western ways of knowing. The trickster’s role is to expose the absurdity of this extractive future, revealing it as a thinly veiled colonial fantasy.