‘After over half a millennium for the lessons of the exploitation of the Americas to sink in, could we convince folks to chart a different course this time?’
This past week I published an essay I started crafting nearly a year ago about the importance of protecting the deep seas from human exploitation. It took a long time to bubble up to the surface and get published, but it’s now up on the Dark Mountain Project’s website. I started writing it while in Germany last year for two conferences, a polycrisis workshop and a conference on ‘Myth, Ritual and Practice for the Age of Ecological Catastrophe.‘ At the latter, I met the co-director of Dark Mountain who noted their new book on oceans lacked a piece on deep sea mining, and she invited me to add my voice. My piece, unfortunately, turned out too advocacy-oriented for the book, but it did make it onto their website. The exploration also led me to grapple with the topic for my journal article on the polycrisis, so certainly worth the journey, even if it was a long one! Below are the first few paragraphs and then a link to continue reading at Dark Mountain’s site.
Imagine if five hundred years ago, capitalists and aristocrats had campaigned not to explore and colonise the New World. Perhaps after meeting a kidnapped Native American and connecting with him as a fellow human being, or after seeing the unique flora and fauna on a continent previously unknown to them, they decided that they were wealthy enough, and should leave that land alone to thrive as it had since Creation.
It would have been a hard hill to hold of course, considering all they were giving up: the lands for building and growing, and all the treasures for the taking, including precious metals, exotic crops and strategic resources, like white pine for ship masts, which would have helped expand their economic influence and military might.
The enlightened capitalists might have argued: those lands are not uninhabited. They’re filled with Native peoples and countless species we’ve never encountered. Who knows how our entry will disrupt the ecosystems and the life flourishing there, and what future benefits gentle exploration, instead of extensive exploitation, might offer.
Tragically, history did not play out this way. But what if this happened again today, and we found another vast unexplored region of the world. After over half a millennium for the lessons of the exploitation of the Americas to sink in, could we convince folks to chart a different course this time?
That’s exactly the story that’s unfolding with the deep sea today.
The incalculable value of the deep ocean
In 2022, while giving a talk about how forests sustain the very conditions that allow forests to thrive, theoretical physicist Anastassia Makarieva changed my understanding of life’s ability to regenerate. Having studied the declining state of the world for over 20 years, I asked her about Earth’s resilience in the face of accelerating onslaughts from humans. Surprisingly she didn’t talk about tropical forests but rather the deep sea.
She noted that the ocean depths are where life first evolved and that if humans destroy life on land – whether through runaway climate change or nuclear winter – it is in the deep oceans where new life will develop and give birth to a new stable Earth system. Of course she meant over millions of years, but the fact that this unfathomable source of resilience can serve as Gaia’s appendix (a home to beneficial life ready to recolonise a disrupted biome) helped me realize that maybe humanity wasn’t as dire a threat to life as I had feared.
Then I started reading about the state of the deep sea….
Keep reading for more about the depths of damage of the deep seas and strategies on how to depend them at the Dark Mountain Project.
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