Truthdig Live Event: Should We Mine the Final Frontier?

Zuade Kaufman: Hello, I’m Zuade Kaufman, publisher and CEO of Truthdig. We’d like to welcome you to our event today, “Should We Mine the Final Frontier?” 

Our moderator is Rachel Reeves, curator of the Dig series “The Scramble for Deep Sea Minerals,” which explores the international competition to plumb and exploit the ocean floor of the minerals required for renewable energy technologies. Rachel is a journalist from California, with heritage and family in the South Pacific nation of the Cook Islands, which is one of the countries aiming to be the first, or among the first, to conduct deep-sea mining within its territorial waters. She has been covering the development of the deep-sea mining industry in the Cook Islands for over a decade.

During this event, Rachel and our panelists will discuss the risks and consequences of deep-sea mining, and explore whether deep-sea mining is humanity’s hope, or if it’s leading us into ecological disaster. It’s an important topic because our society’s transition away from fossil fuels depends on technology that requires enormous amounts of minerals that exist in limited quantities on land, which is leading to an intensified scramble for resources in the oceans. Minerals found in deep-sea excavation ,such as manganese and cobalt, are essential for batteries, which power a range of products including cell phones, laptops and electrical vehicles. But opponents of deep-sea mining point out that the process is likely to inject toxic heavy metals into food sources that connect the ocean to ocean peoples, particularly those in the Pacific Islands, which is home to the highest concentration of seabed minerals. 

And now for our brief introductions. Joining Rachel is Dr. Lisa Levin, a distinguished professor emeritus at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Dr. Levin has been visiting the deep sea for over four decades, and specializes in ethnic ecosystems. Also joining her are two individuals from the Cook Islands, representing various perspectives on deep-sea mining. Imogen Ingram is on the executive committee of the Koutu Nui, a formal body of traditional chiefs.  Alanna Matamaru Smith is the director of the Te Ipukarea Society, a nonprofit organization focused on environmental issues. 

At Truthdig, we understand the urgency of taking measures geared towards sustaining our planet, while supporting those who live on it. Thank you for joining us in our discussion today. And thank you to our guests for your illumination on this topic. I’ll hand it over to you, Rachel.

Rachel Reeves: Great, thank you so much Zuade, for that introduction, and to you and your team for this platform and just this opportunity to have a discussion about deep-sea minerals and the prospect of mining them. You know, I know deep-sea mining sort of sounds technical and scientific and faraway, you know, whether you live in proximity to the ocean or not. But I think that really what we’re talking about here is how we, as human beings, intend to continue to exist on this planet, right? Because this whole conversation is predicated on a pretty existential question. We’re proposing to use deep-sea minerals to power electric vehicles and other renewable energy systems in order to sort of clean up the mess that we’ve made by burning fossil fuels. 

But the question is, is further extraction the most effective, most wise and most innovative solution? And then there are questions around who does that extraction impact most, and how and why does it matter? So I think this conversation is relevant to all of us. It’s about population growth, energy production, climate, macro economics, development, technology, governance and really what it means to respect the natural systems that give us life. So there’s a ton of ground to cover this morning. And I’m really excited to get started. 

So first, I just want to say thank you so much to each of the women on this call, for making time to be with us to share, this morning, your expertise and knowledge and perspective. And then I just want to elaborate a little bit on Zuade’s introductions, which sort of set the stage, if that’s okay. So we have Dr. Lisa Levin, who has been visiting the deep sea as a researcher, really, since deep-sea minerals became a commercial possibility, right, because we’ve known, humans have known about these minerals for a long time, you know a century but we’ve been working at designing technologies to access them in a commercial sense, sort of since the ’70s, I’d say. So she’s a really rich resource. And I’m just really grateful that you could join us today, Dr. Levin. And then, as also mentioned, our other guests are based in the Cook Islands, which is a nation in the South Pacific with 15 islands, 15,000 people and an ocean the size of Mexico. And so, as mentioned, the Cook Islands possess some of the world’s densest concentrations of polymetallic nodules, excuse me, which are one form of deep-sea minerals. And its government is actively partnering with corporations to bring this emerging industry to fruition.

I am also in the Cook Islands. So please excuse any delays in internet service, or any roosters crowing. We have Imogen Ingram, as mentioned, who is the holder of a traditional title in the Cook Islands. But speaking on behalf of herself this morning, as opposed to speaking on behalf of the Koutu Nui, which is a formal body, I just wanted to provide a little more context. A formal body in the Cook Islands is comprised of many chiefs who traditionally were the hands and feet of the high chiefs. And so Imogen attends all the meetings of the Koutu Nui and has her finger on the pulse, really, of what village leaders are thinking and talking about. And then Alana Smith, who as mentioned is the director of Te Ipukarea society. Alana has also been to the International Seabed Authority as an observer. And so we’ll talk more about what that means, but excited to have both of you here too. And then, just wanted to mention that when we had advertised this event, we were excited to have Rima Browne join us, which is why her face was on all the promotional materials. Rima is a representative of the branch of the Cook Islands government that’s responsible for regulating access to deep-sea minerals. In the end, she couldn’t join us. So I’m just going to try, based on my reporting and research, to shed a little light on the government’s position, which is pretty similar to the positions held by the companies that the government is partnering with. 

So there’s a lot of perspectives on deep-sea mining, both here in the Cook Islands and further afield. It’s a big issue. It’s a sensitive issue. It’s an emotive issue. But we’re just here this morning to think and reflect and talk. So we’re all coming from different backgrounds and perspectives and experiences. But hopefully, we can all leave with a richer and more nuanced understanding of this issue, so that ultimately, we can make more informed choices as consumers and as voters and as human beings. So I know I’ve already talked so much, but I just want to give sort of a broad overview of what’s happening in this space, very broad, because it’s all so layered and complex. There’s no way that we have time to go over it all. But after that, we’ll jump into some questions from readers of this Dig series that we’ve been publishing through Truthdig. We’re also seeing and receiving your questions in real time. So keep them coming and they’ll get fed to me and we can hopefully get to as many of them as we have time for. 

Okay, so we’re talking about deep-sea minerals, including cobalt and manganese and nickel and rare earth elements. This might be redundant for some of you, but I just want to make sure we’re all on the same page and sort of give you a sense of what these things are and why you’re seeing them in the news and why we’re here to talk about them today. So these are deposits of minerals on the seafloor. They’re found miles deep in the deep sea, which is an environment that’s been really difficult for humans to understand, because it’s a really difficult environment for humans to access. You know, we saw recently with the Titan, the submersible that took passengers down to the deep sea to view the remains of the Titanic, which, you know, tragically imploded killing everybody on board. So the pressure at these depths is really great, and really intense. And I know it’s a really tough place to work, as Dr. Levin can attest. Actually, we did have a question along these lines. So I’ll just pose that to you, Dr. Levin. Could you speak to the challenges of doing research in the deep sea?

Lisa Levin: Sure! The challenges come on many fronts; it can be remote, so far away, which means you have to take a ship and travel for a long time to get there. And then, once you’re there, if you actually want to visit or put equipment down, the pressure is very high, goes up an atmosphere for every 10 meters of water depth. So you have to have, if you’re using a submarine or a RV, you have to have equipment that can withstand those pressures. And all of this adds up to making it a very expensive proposition. It’s not something that anybody can do. And so deep-sea research has really been limited to a handful, maybe 20, 25 countries of the world. And then it’s vast, it is so huge, the deep sea is so big, that we have not had the chance to look at very much of it. So in terms of understanding ecosystems and biodiversity, we’ve probably seen 5% or less of what’s there. Most of the species in the deep sea remain undescribed. So this gives you… and, we don’t know what they do. We know about some, and we know they’re extremely long lived, up to thousands of years, in some cases. But we don’t know much about how the populations are connected. And this vastness really creates an immense challenge for us. How do you manage effectively an environment that has barely been described?

Rachel Reeves: Right. And so, you know, there’s so much that we don’t know about this environment, but we do know that these minerals exist. And currently, we get a lot of minerals from land-based mines, mostly in Africa. And they’re used not only in our consumer electronics, our phones or laptops, but also in electric vehicles, as Zuade mentioned, and the battery cathodes that power other renewable energy systems. So we’ve got climate change, the global pivot away from fossil fuels, and the pursuit of electrification as a solution, right batteries. This is how we intend to keep our emissions within the limits that the experts have told us will shield us from the worst impacts of climate change.

So we’ve got governments pursuing ambitious policies toward electrification, which means we’re seeing this fresh surge of interest in the deep sea, right. And we’ve got companies marketing deep- sea minerals as the solution to one of the great crises of our age or perhaps the great crisis of our age. And they’re telling us it’s more sustainable, less destructive than getting our minerals from land because there are all these problems associated with land-based mining, right, including child labor and the leveling of forests. I promise I’m almost done with this huge, long overview that I said was going to be brief. But the last thing I wanted to mention is that we have the International Seabed Authority, which is a U.N.-mandated body authorized by the Law of the Sea to make decisions about the seabed in international waters, so waters beyond any nation’s jurisdiction, and trying to negotiate with all its member countries and the corporations that countries sponsor about how… I hope my internet’s okay. So those negotiations are tricky right? There are a lot of people advocating for a 10- year hiatus on mining saying we don’t know enough about the deep sea to know what happens if we mined it. But then we’ve got this market demand coming up against that. 

So while the ISA deliberates, we’ve got corporations from countries in Canada and the U.S. and Belgium, partnering with governments, right, that have big oceans and lots of minerals. So that’s why I’ve asked some Cook Islanders to join us. I think that the issues that they can speak to are happening on a wider scale, but the Cook Islands is sort of our microcosm for today and also a key player in this emerging industry. You know, we saw that several weeks ago, Florida lawmaker Marco Rubio had asked President Biden to allocate a lot of funding to the Cook Islands to develop seabed mining specifically. So that’s sort of the general foundation. 

But let’s now get into your questions. I’m going to ask Dr. Levin some questions geared toward her first, because she has to leave right at noon. She’s heading to Chile to teach. So anyone who’s watching and has questions for her specifically make sure to get those in. But the first question is, you know, Dr. Levin, you’ve been in this space for a while. And as mentioned, you sort of watched this interest in deep-sea minerals ramp up decades ago, and then peter out, because no one wanted to spend the money that it costs to set up industry. And so now you’re watching interest ramp up again. The question is, what’s different in terms of what we know about the deep sea and the planet now? I know you mentioned not a lot of, you know, in terms of what we know about the deep sea, but what’s different about what we know now versus what we knew then? So are we having the same conversation now about the viability and the impact of a deep-sea mining industry that we weren’t during that first wave of entrance?

Internet briefly cuts out.

Lisa Levin: Yeah, when the Law of the Sea was generated, the standard belief was that the deep sea didn’t have much life, or that it was homogeneous and a muddy desert floor. That really changed completely since the early negotiations and, you know, ratification of the Law of the Sea. We discovered hydrothermal vents, methane seeps and whole ecosystems that rely on chemical energy and the vents are one of the ecosystems being targeted for mining. These have really highly evolved unique species that only live in vents and, in some cases, now are threatened or endangered by mining. We discovered how important the ocean is to the climate cycle, for example, and how biodiversity underpins the carbon cycle and the uptake of CO2. 

So we now understand how connected the ocean is, to everything that involves the health of the planet. In many ways, we’ve discovered that what you do on the seafloor in one place can affect the surface waters where you might have important fisheries, or what you do on the seafloor in one place can affect some other side of the ocean, because animals are migrating across whole ocean basins. We can now tag animals, you know, over thousands and thousands of miles of migration. We’ve discovered how long the animals live in the deep sea, because we have radioactive dating tools and other kinds of dating tools. So now we do know that single corals can be four or 5000 years old, and sponges can be 18,000 years old. And actually, people did some mining experiments 25 or 30 years ago, and we’ve discovered recently that those disturbances haven’t recovered in terms of the animals, the microbes, microbial function and so on. So this gives us a timescale now for mining disturbance and recovery, you know, more than human lifetimes, probably on the order of centuries, if recovery is possible at all. So we know a lot more now about the ocean that might make us want to rethink how we manage those mineral resources. I’ll just add one last thing that over this entire time battery technology has started to take off. We’ve just had recycling and reuse and philosophy about these things. And we may not need these minerals for electric car batteries.

Rachel Reeves: Thank you for that answer. It’s pretty wild to think about time. That scale is so far beyond our lifetimes, but I mean, that sort of, you know, I just wanted to expound a little bit on, you had mentioned carbon cycling. We had a question here about carbon sequestration in the deep sea and how that works and what we know about that. So I just wondered if you could elaborate a little bit.

Lisa Levin: Yeah, the deep sea is the greatest repository of carbon. It’s one of the reasons that people are thinking of dumping excess carbon dioxide into the deep sea now, because it stays sequestered for a very long time. But the way it gets there involves animal life in the ocean, it involves plant life and involves the uptake by phytoplankton, and then the consumption of that by zooplankton and fish that migrate down and move the carbon into deep water, and in the Mizo, what we call the Mesopelagic zone, and then other animals move the dead remains, move that carbon into the deep sea where it’s stored. And this helps actually regulate the climate on the planet. It keeps there from being too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, although there already is. And so, those processes, which we call the carbon cycle, the marine carbon cycle, are threatened by disturbances in the ocean. I mean, the whales and the fish also store a lot of carbon and move it around. So anything that threatens them can be a threat, and then mining itself can disrupt the seafloor and release carbon that’s already buried in the sediments up into the water column. I do believe that that might not be the most serious of all the disturbances because the nodule zones, for example, have relatively low carbon content in the sediments. But the areas being disturbed potentially are very large. And we’re still in the learning phase of understanding what the consequences would be.

Rachel Reeves: And I think that leads into another question that we have here, which is how long, based on what we know now, could it take us to really see impacts of any mining activity? And what are some sort of measures or indicators we could use to gauge that impact and maybe plan for it?

Lisa Levin: I’ll turn it back to you and say, who could see the impacts? I mean, if you happen to be a deep-sea organism, you would feel the impacts immediately, if you were in the mining footprint. If the mining happened to happen, where your primary population lived, or your source of offspring lived, you know, you might go extinct. Whether humans would feel that in terms of our food supply, or our health, immediately, I think we might not, we might not see it, it’s very hard to know about the extinction of species that haven’t even been described yet, in most cases. So in terms of feeling an impact, it’s not necessarily going to cause rising sea level, you know, or something that might directly affect us in terms, you know, in the Pacific Islands, for example, in terms of more severe storms, there might not be an impact immediately. But we are still understanding the functions and roles of deep-sea organisms. They’re a source of tremendous genetic diversity, and a lot of potential drugs and new pharmaceuticals and other kinds of products, industrial agents. And so what we might be doing is compromising what’s available to future generations, in terms of use and services from the deep sea.

Rachel Reeves: Yeah, and, you know, I mean, it’s tough to sort of draw the line at, you know, that this is enough data with which to make an informed decision. I think that it’s common for scientists to say we don’t have enough data because well, I guess, because science is based on experimentation and good experimentation that takes time and money and expertise. And also, I think, because, you know, the more we understand, the more we realize how much we don’t understand. So we don’t have enough data to make an informed decision is the view held by many marine science experts. But at what point do we have enough data and how do we know? I know that’s sort of an abstract question, but how do we sort of make that call?

Lisa Levin: Well, I think there’s certain things you want to know. And I forgot to mention, one of the immediate impacts might be a disruption of fisheries. And that would be something that does hit home directly to people’s livelihoods to their food security. You know, many countries rely on tuna as an important source of income for that country, even if they aren’t doing the fishing, you know, they sell the fishing rights. I’m not sure about the Cook Islands in that regard, but I think enough data might be models with enough certainty to tell you that a sediment plume or the return water or the release of contaminants definitely would not harm your fisheries or fish supply or your coastal coral reefs, things like that. You would want some certainty because the… really right now we know there’s a huge amount of risk. And depending on who you talk to, you know, it’s a high or a low amount of risk. But I feel like there can be more information that can allow a decision about whether to mine or not. Now, that’s not something the International Seabed Authority is looking at, you know, making a decision about whether to mine or not, but the rest of the world, and certainly countries, are making decisions about whether to mine in their exclusive economic zones.

Rachel Reeves: Yeah, thank you for that. I think that maybe we can turn it over to you, Imogen. Dr. Levin had mentioned food security, right, and people who rely on fish, as you know, for subsistence and so could you sort of speak to what village leaders and people in the Cook Islands are thinking about in terms of potential impacts on food security? Or maybe that is just a question for you personally. What are you thinking about in terms of the intersection between mining and fish?

Imogen Ingram: Thank you, right. Yes, we are very dependent upon fish. And typically, the fish that we catch through foreign fishers are centered around the equatorial area. And so the area where the deep-sea mining is predicted to take place is in the northern Cook Islands, near the island of Manihikii, which is also very close to the fishing areas. So we don’t think that that idea of deep-sea mining is at all common sense. It does not make sense to dig up your sediment and endanger your fish. I know that Dr. Levin and other oceanographers have shown that disturbing the sediment will create a plume, which then ends up polluting large areas, and then might actually kill the diatoms that the smaller creatures live on. And then the bigger creatures live on the smaller creatures. And so you get this effect of starvation, right through the food chain. And so there’s two impacts on fish. One is the ability of fish to breed and so that you have something next year, and the other one is, you know, kill off the species or force them to move to less polluted waters. So when you have small atolls that are very dependent upon fish daily, because there are not many stores, and then what is in those stores, it’s very expensive. You are actually threatening the food security of those people. So typically in Rarotonga, the capital, which is the staff of the Cook Islands, it’s sort of an area that we don’t think about too much. But when the Koutu Nui interviewed leaders some years ago and our late President Te Tika Mataiapo, the northern group leader said to us, or nobody explained to us, that this was going to be involved, you know. So then the issue of prior informed consent comes in, where indigenous peoples like us should be given an unbalanced and biased view of what the likely impact is going to be and right now, we are not getting much negative in Cook Islands press on the social media. Everybody is very keen on the positive impacts. And yet, we’re not clear what the actual impacts will be. In Tonga in June, the mining authority had a workshop on benefit sharing. And we got a photograph of an algebraic equation, which we think personally was designed to shock and awe because your average Indigenous person couldn’t make head or tail of it. But at the end, as part of the benefit sharing, Pacific island nations really get less than 1% of anything that’s mined within the areas. Thanks.

Rachel Reeves: Yeah, thank you for that. And, you know, the big questions here are what could go right, and what could go wrong? And I think that what the Cook Islands government and corporate representatives would say, is that what could go right is that countries with small budgets and relatively limited means of generating revenue for, you know, health, education or higher standards of living, could make a lot of money. And what could go right, is that we have all these minerals that allow us to produce cheaper electric cars, and that sort of thing, to reach global targets for reducing emissions. You know, and they would say that what could go right is that we could bring the minerals up, find out what the level of damage or impact is we can deal with, right, because all of our activity does have impact. But we have to decide what kind of impact we can sustain. And so that’s sort of what could go right. But then what could go wrong is the other big question. And I think that you’ve spoken, begun to speak a little bit to what are some real possible consequences that we should be considering. And I just…I wanted to address this idea of the moratorium. There’s sort of this global movement for a pause on deep-sea mining as we reflect on a lot of these really big questions. And so the question is sort of what is the point of the moratorium? How does holding off change anything? And Alanna, you might be a good person to talk about the moratorium because the idea was originally introduced by civil society organizations in the Pacific, which is a network you’re part of. So thank you.

Alanna Matamaru Smith: Thanks, Rachel and everyone. Yeah, I mean, the moratorium basically provides a space of time to collect more data and research. Because right now, the best available information we have is just not enough. This moratorium, I believe, should be a time where, yes, the data is collected, but who is collecting that data? And who is providing that information to make these informed management decisions. Ideally, we would want independent research to be carried out to provide this information. If we look at the Cook Islands for an example, we are basing our information on data being collected by three mining companies. We currently have no independent research being done to make informed management decisions on whether to proceed with the exploitation phase or not. So that’s how we see the moratorium, ideally a minimum of 10 years, but a space for independent research to be done.

Rachel Reeves: Makes sense. We have a question here about this idea that electrification and batteries are our only solution. I know Dr. Levin, you mentioned earlier that the technology is changing, right, that batteries are developing in such a way that we might not even need cobalt to produce them. But the question is, you know, are there others solutions? Could we just have a discussion; anyone who wants to weigh in about it? I think this person’s asking for other solutions to the problems that our rate of consumption worldwide has created. Yeah, Imogen.

Imogen Ingram: Well, right now and in Rarotonga, we are doing an e-waste collection. So there’s a lot of these important minerals in the scattered articles, which could be as they call it mined and reused instead of going out and getting more of these rare earth minerals, we would do better to recover those that have already been mined from articles that have been discarded. Currently, they don’t have a high market value, because the cost of disposal is not being included in the price of the initial mining. That’s one obvious area for us. We were very pleased when the carmakers in California said they would not use batteries in electric cars, which had been sourced from deep-sea mining. The fallacy that mining in the deep sea is less environmentally damaging is something I would seriously challenge. You know, we live here, it is not an empty space. If it is so safe, then I would say to Sen. Rubio, why don’t you start mining in the agglomeration of nodules just off Martha’s Vineyard? You know, because I don’t believe it is safe. I don’t understand how people can consider this complicated. It does not make sense to pollute the area where you live and the source of the food you eat.

Rachel Reeves: Yeah, which I think connects very well to another question we have here about trade-offs. This person is talking about acid leaching technology to convert low grade laterite nickel ore into higher grade materials suitable for batteries. So this is found in abundance in Indonesia but this person is talking about the deforestation and the waste created by this particular method of extraction. So, you know, in order to protect the environment in Indonesia, is this a trade-off? How does the world balance such trade-offs? And you know, that’s a really tough question. But if anybody wants to weigh in, or Imogen, if you wanted to speak to that, feel free.

Lisa Levin: I’ll just say that, you know, after being in several workshops with land-based mining experts, there are a lot of improvements being made to land mining. And so when we weigh a balance and talk about deep seabed versus land-based mining for the same minerals, you know, you can’t compare it to what was done 20 or 30 years ago. There’s been improvements to the point where some mining now happens underground without disturbing the surface. There are improvements to effects on water quality and many other aspects including child labor and all of this, you know, the social aspects. It’s not perfect by far, but I’ve also learned that there’s actually a lot of reserves on land that aren’t tapped, that people haven’t gone to. So you know, posing it as land being horrible and the deep sea being impervious and not caring whether we mind or not, is a false choice for us. So there are new opportunities on land, there are new reserves, but there’s also the opportunity for us to focus on how to make land-based mining better. You know, if half the energy that went into deep seabed mining went into improving land mining we could make a lot of progress.

Alanna Matamaru Smith: I’d just add on, you know, we also need to start switching our mindsets to how do we mine our landfills. It adds on to what Imogen said about e-waste. There’s lots of these metals already within our landfills. As a result worldwide, we’ve created this culture of waste and disregard for items that actually hold quite a bit of value. So whilst we’re mining our landfills, maybe we can start working with people to change our mindsets into valuing trash and recognizing the value that are in metals and lots of our electronics that we hold today.

Rachel Reeves: So would you say Alanna that part of the moratorium is not only to collect data, but also to sort of investigate these other potential solutions?

Alanna Matamaru Smith: Yes, yeah, that’s a great way to look at it as well. It’s just, you know, time to collect more information, time to work with people, to better inform people with what’s going on and how we can do better to live sustainably.

Rachel Reeves: Yeah, Imogen?

Imogen Ingram: And it really doesn’t make sense to despoil the environment that we live in because a mining company decides the cost or remediation of the overburden on land-based mining is too expensive. In other words, they feel they can’t pass the cost on to the consumer. And it doesn’t make sense, because child labor is used in the Congo for the extraction of cobalt and other strategic minerals to then come to the South Pacific and damage our ocean environment. Isn’t that much more sensible to improve the mining conditions in the Congo? That’s just common sense.

Rachel Reeves: Well, I think to your point, this connects to another question we had about who’s responsible if something happens? Dr. Levin was talking about the timescales that we’re using to sort of imagine and understand this issue. So you know, you have governments switch out, you have companies’ contracts come to an end, but then after that, who would be responsible? If you know, something did happen? I think that’s a big question.

Imogen Ingram: So I had this explained to me at a deep-sea mining meeting in 2009 in Belfast. So a mining company will create a shell company in your little country with a capital of about $1,000. Then they will mine under the sea where you can’t see it. Then after about five or six years, they’ve eked out what they want and they will leave. Then you’ll say, wait a minute, the government of the day will say wait, what about this environmental degradation that has happened in the meantime? And he said, they will just say, so sue me, you know, because they’ve got this $1,000 shell company in your jurisdiction, you can’t see them in another jurisdiction. So it’s very cold-blooded, I would say. And we should have learned from the experience of 300 years of extraction, that mining companies do not have the benefit of other people at hand. They’re very concerned about profit.

Rachel Reeves: I’m just changing tack here really quickly, we have a question that’s come in that I think just would invite you, Dr. Levin, to expand on what you were starting to say previously. The question is, science seems to consider the effects of scooping up nodules permanent and so what does that mean for seabed life?

Lisa Levin: Well, you know, sort of the simplest view of it is that studies in the Clarion-Clipperton zone suggest that 50% of the species rely on the nodules as a point of attachment. That’s where they live. We still don’t know if they’re deriving any nutrition from the microbes associated with those nodules or whatever. But, you know, if you remove the habitat for 50% of the species you are going to endanger life. You know, how we interpret that, so permanent, you know, have we eradicated 50% of the species there permanently? I don’t think anybody would allow you to do that on land. If they, you know, if you put it in that way. That’s not to say there won’t be some unscooped up nodules where maybe some of the species will definitely live but you know, we are talking about mining huge areas and species are turning out to have very narrow distributions in the deep sea, even though it’s all connected, some species only live in a very in a relatively small area. So we still don’t have the science to understand what the distributions are and how species are connected. If you remove species in one place, where would the new colonists or recruits come from and so on. So we’re missing that.

Rachel Reeves: Thanks so much. And Gary, who I see on the screen had another question, which might be a question for you, Alanna. Do the Cook Islands intend to abide by the standards passed by the International Seabed Authority?

Alanna Matamaru Smith: Yeah. So to my knowledge, our Seabed Minerals authority have always said the ISA standards will be a minimum, which the Cook Islands would abide by. If anything, the Cook Islands would look to go beyond that standard.

Rachel Reeves: Cool, thanks.

Imogen Ingram: One area, when I questioned Mike Hodge at one of the conferences was, you know, what are the standards you are talking about? I have asked for them and they have never come up with anything. And he said, well, whatever goes on within your EEZ, your exclusive economic zone, that’s up to your government, the ISA doesn’t have any jurisdiction over that. We are more concerned with what happens on the high seas. But I agree with Rachel, that’s a very minimal standard that will be there and other chemicals and waste conventions, they say that you should rely on best available technology and best available environmental practice. So we haven’t seen any idea of what principles might rule defining these things in the ISA.

Rachel Reeves: Sure, go ahead, Dr. Levin.

Lisa Levin: Sure. I mean, this is a very timely topic, because you know, today, the International Seabed Authority is meeting and discussing environmental standards and guidelines. The exact ones which would apply to Cook Islands because the Law of the Sea requires that any country that has signed and ratified the Law of the Sea is bound to the regulations developed by the ISA. If it wants to mine in its own waters, it has to use those ISA regulations as a minimum standard, just as Alanna said. But they don’t have those standards, and guidelines and thresholds yet, that’s all under development right now. This is one of the reasons that it is so important that good scientists engage and people who can understand what those standards, guidelines and thresholds really need to be are involved in this decision making at the ISA. Because it will affect a lot of countries’ minimum requirements, you know, for should they choose to mine in their own waters. And it’s a really hard problem. Today, I think today or yesterday, they released the names of people now on intersessional committees to develop thresholds for mining and I assume these thresholds will be contaminant thresholds. They’ll be sediment, pollutant suspended sediment thresholds and so on. And the challenge of knowing how to set those thresholds, how many species and which species need to be able to tolerate what level in the deep sea when those ecosystems are barely understood? You know, how they work is really, really a hard problem.

Rachel Reeves: Yeah, thanks. And, yeah go ahead, Imogen.

Imogen Ingram: One of the things we have not mentioned is if you had a plume from deep-sea mining in one country, there’s very little idea of how the currents move. Apparently at different levels, they move in different directions. So the debris from one country’s mining might very well cross to the jurisdiction of a different country which didn’t want the deep-sea mining. So we could see there’s a deep sea pocket bordered by Kiribati, Cook Islands and French Polynesia. Both French Polynesia and Kiribati do not want deep-sea mining to go ahead. But the Cook Islands appears to be adamant. Well, at least the government is. The population is pretty well split. So how do you prevent that deep-sea mining plume from affecting ecosystems of other countries who are not in favor of it?

Rachel Reeves: Sure, it’s such a complex question. Go ahead, Alanna.

Alanna Matamaru Smith: I’ve been reading everyone’s comments and, you know, the standard and guidelines, they would have to be specific to site location. Each region is different. And, you know, what technologies the mining companies used to extract these minerals would also change thresholds, I suppose, or the activities that are occurring within that area and the impacts. So there are so many questions, and you couldn’t just rely on one part of the region of the world to make decisions on your particular areas such as the Cook Islands.

Rachel Reeves: Sure, it’s so complex, right? Questions and sort of geopolitical questions and environmental questions and social questions to consider. There was a sort of a comment from a reader which I think we can parlay into a question, but it’s about sort of the examples throughout history of well intentioned mistakes. There were many times that we felt that we were doing the right thing or the thing that made logical sense. You know, of course, we’ve got these market forces at play in this case, but, you know, there are so many examples of times that we discovered years later that our actions had far reaching and unintended consequences. This person is talking about the Dust Bowl in the United States in the middle of the 20th century. So the intention was to produce food for soldiers really quickly. The unintended consequence of destroying a lot of topsoil to grow a lot really fast was a dust storm that affected people very deeply for many years. So I think the question that we can tease out of this comment is, you know, how do we ensure that this isn’t another well-intentioned mistake? And, you know, I know we’ve been sort of speaking to that throughout this conversation, but any thoughts on that comment?

Lisa Levin: I was just going to say, this is what the moratorium is about. To give time to think this though. To engage more of the stakeholders, hear more voices for the different kinds of people who would be affected either now or in the future. And to gather the science, but not just the science because deep- sea mining is such a complex issue that involves economic and social issues, and equity and environmental justice issues and intergenerational issues. So to bring all of this together and to have the right voices there and the right people making decisions. I mean right now the people making decisions are the delegates that sit in the International Seabed Authority for the international ocean, which is 60% of the ocean. But many, many countries are also making their own decisions and I know they’re carefully watching what happens at the ISA as well. Sorry Alanna, go ahead.

Alanna Matamaru Smith: Thanks, just adding on from Dr. Levin. I just totally see this as a panicked response to wanting to mine. And the reasons for wanting to mine are totally for burning a quick buck, basically. So the reasons to get into this industry are not for the right purposes right now. Hence, the reason for a moratorium is to put this time aside to really make sure we’re getting some clear data, independent research done to make the best decision possible around whether we can do this in a safe manner and for good reasons.

Rachel Reeves: Yeah, thank you for that. Go ahead, Imogen.

Imogen Ingram: So there’s a question in the chat about concerns about seabed mining authorities licensing panel for exploration and exploitation. I don’t believe that our government is listening to the voices of dissent. We get shut down when we go to village meetings and ask questions. We don’t even make the statement yet we asked the question, and it’s kind of fobbed off and rushed to one side. That’s why I mentioned the fake prior informed consent earlier, because we are not being told the full story. And it’s very important that people are told. Right now, it seems odd that, for instance, we have activists who spoke against nuclear bombing and ocean pollution in the South Pacific. And then recently, they came out against the Fukushima wastewater release, which is good, because it’s another form of ocean pollution. But the same people, for some reason cannot see that deep-sea mining will have a similar effect of polluting the ocean. So then, you wonder whether there are not governmental issues like corruption coming into it. We had a visit a couple of years ago from the U.N. team, who were looking at implementation of the Convention Against Corruption, which the Cook Islands had signed up for. And I spoke informally with one of the people and said, I’m very concerned about the likelihood of corruption to deep-sea mining, because it happens in other extractive industries. And that you end up instead of having a sovereign wealth fund, which we had under the 2009 legislation, which got repealed and replaced in 2019, we’re going to end up with maybe five or six very wealthy people in the Cook Islands, and everyone else just continues on the same as usual. So it’s very wide ranging the impact that could happen. Right now our standard of living as it’s really not too bad by world standards. And if we redirected some of the expenditure, I think it would be preferable to try and to go out and find, you know, Eldorado, through deep-sea mining, we pointed out that if you increased the fishing licenses per kilo, you would probably get a lot of money in more quickly, and with less danger or damage to the environment, then embarking on this silly escapade of deep-sea mining.

Rachel Reeves: So unfortunately, we only have a couple more minutes, but I think I just wanted to pose the question to all of you, where can people go for more information? Like if someone is watching this and thinking, wow, I didn’t know about any of this? Are there resources that we should be directing them to?

Lisa Levin: I’m gonna put something in the chat. Is that okay?

Rachel Reeves: Yeah, that’s great.

Lisa Levin: I think the Minerals Group website will be very helpful.

Imogen Ingram: To the media, The Economist and The Atlantic Monthly, you know, we’re very grateful that the media has made sensible investigations available.

Alanna Matamaru Smith: And those that are into scientific papers, just further echoing those papers that have been done by independent researchers, and that have not been funded by mining companies, and also articles for more grassroot purposes. Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, they publish amazing stuff, easy to understand, another great avenue for information.

Lisa Levin: We also just prepared a mini course for the South Pacific islands a couple of years ago during the pandemic, and it’s on the DOSI’s YouTube channel with a whole series of short, 20-minute, easy-to-understand lectures, presentations about the deep sea, why it matters, what the threats of seabed mining are and what the key management issues are.

Rachel Reeves: Great, we love simple and easy to understand, because this is you know, as we’ve been talking throughout this conversation about, it’s just, it’s complex. There’s a lot going on here. So I just want to say again, thank you so much to each of you for joining us. Thank you, too, Zuade and the team at Truthdig for hosting this event. And then to everyone who’s watching just for joining us in the work of being engaged, digging for the truth. So, thank you so much.