By Angelo VillagomezThe Trump administration argues that opening America’s seafloor to deep-sea mining is essential for strengthening our economy and securing our energy future. From a Pacific Islander perspective, this rush to extract metals from the ocean — especially near the Mariana Trench and American Samoa — ignores hard-earned lessons and risks repeating past mistakes.
In many Pacific cultures, including my own Chamorro heritage, we navigate our world by “walking backwards into the future.” Pacific voyagers do this as they navigate across vast ocean spaces by reading the stars and waves. Hundreds or even thousands of miles from land, by looking behind the canoe to assess the direction and speed of the wake, they can determine where they’ve been, and this helps them know where they are going. Misreading a current could send a canoe hundreds of miles off course, which can be devastating when trying to find a low atoll that may be only a few miles across. Ignoring the lessons of history can likewise lead us astray.
In our Indigenous worldview, the past is before us because it is visible and full of knowledge — knowledge learned in our lifetimes and also passed down from our ancestors. The future, unseen and unpredictable, is behind us. Navigating the world involves keeping our eyes on the past while walking backward into the unknown future. This way of thinking and experiencing leads Pacific Islanders to be very skeptical of the administration’s plans to mine the seafloor.
History is clear: Time and again, when the United States has tested technologies or extracted resources on Indigenous lands, our communities have paid the price while others benefit. From uranium mining on Tribal lands that left generations to deal with environmental contamination, severe health effects and cultural disruption, to nuclear weapons testing in Johnston Atoll, Marshall Islands, Kiribati and French Polynesia that rained nuclear fallout on nearby populated islands — the pattern is unmistakable. As my colleague Steven Mana‘oakamai Johnson at Cornell University wrote in his comment to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, “Deep-sea mining represents the latest in a long history of the Pacific being treated as a testing ground for extractive industries and experimental technologies.”
Deep-sea mining is not a proven technology. Scientists warn that disturbing fragile ecosystems miles below the surface could cause irreversible harm to biodiversity and disrupt ocean processes that regulate our climate. Once damaged, these ecosystems may never recover — certainly not in our lifetimes. We can look in front of us to places such as the Peru Basin and Blake Plateau, mined more than half a century ago, which still have not recovered. And while others benefit, communities like mine are left with the carnage. There are no pathways for the local islands to benefit economically from the leasing of these resources.
This is going to be a defining ocean conservation fight for the next decade, and we are woefully unprepared and underfunded. The Pacific area under consideration for destruction is 25 times larger than the largest marine sanctuary designated under President Joe Biden. Our communities received no notice that this was happening and have been provided only 60 days to comment before this moves forward. The environmental damage— and the cultural loss — could be catastrophic.
Walking backward into the future means moving intentionally with caution, guided by the wisdom of experience. The Trump proposals for deep-sea mining fail that test. Deep-sea mining in American Samoa and the Marianas Islands must stop until a commitment can be made to inclusive, community-led decision-making, where people in our island communities can share the benefits, not just the risks, of these proposals.
The administration’s push for deep-sea mining in the U.S. Pacific territories asks us to charge blindly into an uncertain future, ignoring the wake of history. In the Pacific, we know the best way to act is with great care, guided by what we can see and what we have learned. Walking backward into the future means honoring the wisdom of our ancestors and the lived experiences of our communities.
Angelo Villagomez is an ocean conservation expert who was raised on an island near the Mariana Trench. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.Section: OpinionTags: op-ed
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