The Specter of Deep-Sea Mining

BY EILEEN CRIST

 APRIL 12, 2024
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Investigation into manganese nodule mining on the seabed in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone. Photo: ROV-Team/GEOMAR. CC BY 4.0

With no public debate and scant publicity, deep-sea mining has gotten quietly underway in recent years. Exploratory mining contracts have been granted for over 1 million square kilometers of seabed in international waters, while the International Seabed Authority—the official UN body regulating ocean “resources”—deliberates how to cloak the enterprise in sustainababble attire. (Apparently, exploratory mining does not require regulations to proceed.) The deep-sea mining industry has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into constructing the gigantic machinery and technological assemblages to scour the depths. They saw no reason to delay and ascertain if the world is on board in the first place with their looting the seabed. With characteristic corporate insolence, they have manufactured the war machinery that will carry it out.

What is targeted: the polymetallic nodules of the ocean floor, materials of hydrothermal vents, and minerals and metals of seamounts and continental shelves. Before glazing over these apocryphal places of the deep blue, please be apprised that they are all old-growth habitats of rich and largely unknown life.

What does the deep-sea mining industry, and the nation states sponsoring its rampage, want to purloin from these ancient habitats? Cobalt, copper, gold, silver, manganese, nickel, rare earths, and more, all the ingredients required for the high tech industry, the military-industrial complex, and the “green economy.” The latter (you guessed it) is getting all the publicity, with the “new gold rush” being parlayed as necessary for saving humanity from climate change.

This recent development in the extractivist machine should not be underestimated, nor if we can help it be allowed to manifest as the fait accompli that its perpetrators are angling for. The fact that even a news outlet as incisive as The Guardian entertained the official framing of ocean mining as a “lesser evil” than climate catastrophe is baffling and heartbreaking. For sure, it is an indicator of how far down the slippery slope of muddled reasoning society is sliding. Given the international political track record to date, and how far along climate breakdown we already are, can anyone believe that deep-sea mining is going to save the world from climate change, or, for that matter, even contribute a little to saving the world from climate change?

This latest chapter of the war perpetrated against Earth is particularly despicable for a number of reasons. One, it masquerades as green. Two, it is being launched precisely at the historical moment that all violent operations against the planet need to be halted, phased out, and healed. Three, with shameless prerogative it’s already underway. Four, it’s being shoved into our faces as “inevitable.” Five, it is targeted against the last place on Earth that remains relatively free of despoliation. Six, it is an attack against a biodiverse biome smugly christened “the common heritage of humankind.” (Our oceans, according to the CEO of The Metals Company.) On all six counts, and for the extinctions, destruction, suffering, and pollution it heralds, the masterminds of deep-sea mining only deserve contempt. Indeed, I’m going to bypass decorum and say to the corporate-cum-political goons gearing up for more nature desecration: Your window dressing is repugnant and your actions worse.

The deep sea is Earth’s largest biome. There are beings who live there—obviously but apparently in need of stating. There are millions of undiscovered species in the ocean depths, splendors awaiting to be witnessed, knowledge to be revealed, and beauty to astound—in the very place where life likely originated. The polymetallic nodules, hydrothermal vents, seamounts, and continental shelves targeted for mining are deep-time habitats that took millions of years to create, accrue, and become. They harbor endemic species of all sizes, shapes, and constitutions, and they are destinations for cosmopolitan animal travelers. They invite us to transcend the warped thinking that they contain “resources” for appropriation. These habitats, like all Earth’s places, ask us to awaken to the realization that the last chance we have to turn around the catastrophic polycrisis of the “Anthropocene” is to recognize the majesty of the living planet, the only place humanity will ever belong with, and end civilization’s war against it.

The ecological criminals disguised as green-economy knights sell deep-sea mining with thinly veiled blackmail. Here’s what they say: If we want a green economy and the end of poverty, we either mine the land or we mine the seas. Better to mine the seas, they say, since nobody lives there (they don’t say that—they imply it), if we want to save the world from climate breakdown. Nothing in this extortionist logic is true. It is not better to mine the ocean: It is not better to add another chapter to Earth’s ruination, nor add more ocean destruction on top of industrial fishing, plastic pollution, and acidification. It is not better to vandalize ancient habitats that will cause extinctions. And does anyone believe that mining the seabed will be piously accompanied with the end of mining the land? Finally, regarding the disingenuous pretext: Deep-sea mining will not stop rapid climate change, nor even put a dent into climate-change havoc. Simply stated, mining the seabed is a new mega-weapon in the human supremacist regime that is destroying Earth.

The solutions to our perilous predicament are clear, if only the familiar tug of anthropocentric avaricious madness could be superseded. They are, in no particular order: Recycle like our hair’s on fire because our hair’s on fire. Conserve materials and energy by ending the incessant production of new lines and models of products, fast fashion, and rapid obsolescence; make stuff that’s durable, fixable, recyclable, shareable. Protect the natural world generously, for its own sake and because our lives and sanity depend upon it. Protect the global ocean, for starters by making the high seas a strictly protected area from all extractivism, including industrial fishing. Protect seas, land, freshwaters, as well as species and their abundances ambitiously. Earth, expansively protected and restored, will save us from climate change. Let’s act to enable the creativity and splendor of earthly life to resume and flourish. Earth’s sacred being is all around us and runs in our veins. Leaving the depths of the seas undisturbed, to continue being and becoming what they are, we might take up meditative practices (available in the spiritual traditions of all human cultures) to discover the hidden riches of our own depths.

Further on solutions: Downscale global trade, reduce commodity production, abolish luxuries, slash the workweek, grow urban and rural gardens. Embrace mostly plant-based eating so we can shrink the global livestock population that is devastating the planet, while improving human health and reducing animal suffering. Also, decelerate and reverse human population growth. How? By keeping girls in schools, abolishing child marriage, giving women and men accessible and affordable family planning services, and tutoring young people, comprehensively, about sexuality. Encourage humanity to embrace adoption: Adopt babies, adopt children, adopt animals who are already here and need loving homes. We must also come to terms with the coming massive movements of displaced people—from environmental degradation, freshwater shortages, climate breakdown, and war and conflict—so we may become receptive: Borders will not stop refugees, nor should they. Lastly, we must cease sprawling the industrial infrastructures that are chewing up nature and vandalizing the face of the planet.

Does all this sound like an extremely tall order? An extremely tall order is what it will take to stop the runaway mass extinction and climate breakdown train. Deep-sea mining will only add another freight car.

The establishment ignores the above imperatives, becoming instead increasingly invested in replacing the fossil-energy fueled ecocidal economy with a solar-wind-nuclear-hydro fueled ecocidal economy. The powers-that-be are drowsily awakening to the hurdles of catastrophic climate change—to the ways the latter threatens to throw a monkey wrench into civilization’s ongoing war on nature. Here’s what’s on their wishlist: If we could only address the problem of climate change with more mining—not really, but let’s pretend—humanity might saunter merrily toward The Economist’s wistful vision of “10 billion reasonably rich people” inhabiting a colonized and killed planet to make it so. Such an aspiration is extremely unlikely to manifest and lethal folly to pursue. Yet whether plausible or implausible, to wish for human wealth built upon Earth’s desolation only proves the alias “Homo sapiens” to be a giant’s robe hanging loose upon a dwarfish thief.[1]

Note

[1] Shakespeare’s Macbeth Act 5 scene 2.

This first appeared on Earth Tongues.

Eileen Crist is the author Abundant Earth: Toward an Ecological Civilization.

Ranchers, Livestock, and Wolves: Why We Should Coexist

BY ERIK MOLVAR

 APRIL 12, 2024
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Mexican wolf. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Coexistence is the right policy for humanity and nature in the western United States. In a civilized society, we do not kill others, vandalize homes, or otherwise infringe unnecessarily upon the liberty of others. The same set of values should apply to our treatment of wolves, a species that does not require human management, harassment, or interference.

Domestic livestock are an ecological catastrophe in the West, destroying wildlife habitats, damaging native ecosystems, and contributing to climate disruption by both emitting methane directly and decimating soil and ecosystem carbon reserves. Cattle and sheep are the main cause of riparian habitat degradation and adverse impacts to trout streams in much of the West, and overgrazing by livestock is the principal cause of cheatgrass expansion. Cattle and sheep grazing has so reduced natural forage that native wildlife populations are a mere shadow of their natural populations: Elk populations are one-tenth of their original extent, bison populations perhaps one percent their original size, sage grouse populations less than one percent of their original numbers. These ecological problems are so widespread that even Westerners see cow-burnt and sheep-desertified landscapes as the norm in the West. Despite this, I do not recommend lethal control of domestic livestock (at least those legally authorized to be there), even on public lands.

There are certainly problem ranchers. There are ranchers who set fire to public lands to increase forage for their cattle. There are ranchers who trespass their livestock on lands closed to livestock. There are ranchers who trespass their livestock by putting them out before the permitted livestock grazing season begins, or after the grazing season ends, accidentally-on-purpose. There is one rancher who has left his cattle out on public lands that were closed to protect endangered desert tortoises for thirty years, without paying a penny in grazing fees. There have even ranchers who have staged armed insurrections, engaged in acts of domestic terrorism, allied themselves with extremist militias to take over public lands or station snipers to threaten law enforcement officers with death. That doesn’t mean that all ranchers do these things, or that they are necessary for ranching. The public has a right to demand better.

Livestock spread their deadly diseases to native wildlife. There are ranchers who herd their sheep into known occupied bighorn sheep habitats, in full knowledge that their domestic sheep are carriers of Mycoplasma ovinpeumoniae and Mannheimia haemolycta, two deadly livestock pathogens that can wipe out entire populations of bighorn sheep. There are cattle ranchers whose herds are infected with Mycoplasma bovis, and whose herds have infected pronghorn antelope and contributed to the great die-off of pronghorn in parts of western Wyoming where the wild herds were already stressed by severe winter conditions.

There are ranchers who want to kill native wildlife, of all kinds, even demanding wildlife-killing as a “tool in the toolbox.” There are ranchers who want to kill wolves, and who shoot them, trap them, call in Wildlife Services to aerial gun them. They commonly kill wolves and then waste the meat, rendering them guilty of surplus-killing. Some will kill them just for the perverse joy of killing, and flout the law in places where wolves are protected, bragging about “shoot, shovel, and shut up.”

Ranchers commonly kill prairie dogs with all kinds of toxic concoctions, including lacing food with lethal compounds and sprinkling it at the doorstep of prairie dog towns. Some of them participate in coyote-killing contests, competing for who can kill the most, the biggest, even sometimes the youngest. Ranchers commonly advocate for the roundup, removal, and incarceration of wild horses by the use of inhumane helicopter roundups. They even seek to eliminate elk who dare to forage on their native habitats, competing for grass with their precious cows.

And it is these selfsame ranchers—typically those engaging in the most egregious crimes against nature—who criticize wolves for “surplus-killing” (which is a rare, rather than common, event).

Ranchers who willingly coexist with the natural world are the exception, not the rule. They do exist, but often are bullied into silence by their environmentally-hostile industry leaders.  Yet despite the clear and obvious antienvironmental and anti-wildlife tendencies of many ranchers, I do not advocate targeting their cattle or sheep for lethal control.

We should not kill off livestock, because that would violate state and federal laws, but more importantly because that would be dangerous and destabilizing behavior that would violate the social contract the allows a civil society to avoid internal bloodbaths.

For all the same reasons, ranchers should not be allowed to kill wolves.

Inside Yellowstone National Park, killing of wolves is expressly prohibited, and this is the landscape where wolves and humans coexist with the fewest problems, and where social tolerance for wolves by people (including ranchers) is greater than anywhere else.

But of course, Yellowstone has no livestock to cause conflicts with native wildlife, so perhaps that’s not the perfect example.

In California, state law prohibits the killing of wolves, not just by ranchers, trophy hunters, and trappers, but also by federal agencies and state wildlife managers. It is illegal to kill wolves even when they take the occasional cow or sheep. There are compensation funds available to ranchers to make them whole in the unlikely event of wolf-caused livestock loss. Of tens of millions of livestock in California, there have been only a handful confirmed to be killed by wolves. It’s early days in the California wolf recovery, of course, but the same infinitesimally small percentage of wolf-caused livestock losses has been shown in Montana and Idaho, where wolves and livestock have lived side by side for almost 30 years.

Conversely, the killing and abuse of wolves is completely unregulated across most of Wyoming where the state classifies wolves as a “predatory animal.” And while the State of Wyoming’s attorneys have argued in federal court that the killing of large carnivores is necessary to achieve a level of social tolerance, when a Wyoming resident recently engaged in the heinous act of running over a juvenile wolf with a snowmobile, duct-taping its mouth shut, hauling it into a local bar to brag about his exploits, and then took the wolf out back and killed it, a shocked world saw what kind of “social tolerance” results from allowing wolf-killing.

While the more extreme elements of the livestock industry insist that killing wolves in response to livestock is necessary, the biological reality is that doing so is a pointless act of revenge that does little to protect livestock or prevent future losses.

Instead, all of us, including the wolf-haters, should be legally required to coexist with wolves, in a non-lethal way. Just as wolf supporters are already legally constrained to coexist non-lethally with commercial livestock, even on public lands. By cultivating a mutually tolerant relationship with nature, instead of treating nature as an adversary to be conquered, destroyed, or displaced, we can lead happier and more abundant lives in a West restored to its original richness in wildlife.

Erik Molvar is a wildlife biologist and is the Laramie, Wyoming-based Executive Director of Western Watersheds Project, a nonprofit group dedicated to protecting and restoring watersheds and wildlife on western public lands.

Billionaires are Bad for the Economy, Taxing Them is Good for It

BY OMAR OCAMPO

 APRIL 12, 2024
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Photo by Lea Kobal

A new, disturbing milestone has been confirmed in the latest Forbes World Billionaires List. The U.S. billionaire class is now larger and richer than ever, with 813 ten-figure oligarchs together holding $5.7 trillion.

This is a $1.2 trillion increase from the year before — and a gargantuan $2.7 trillion increase since March 2020.

The staggering upsurge shows how our economy primarily benefits the wealthy, rather than the ordinary working people who produce their wealth. Even worse, those extremely wealthy individuals often use these assets to undermine our democracy.

Billionaires have enormous power to influence the political process. They spent $1.2 billion in the 2020 general election andmore than $880 million in the 2022 midterms. Even when their preferred candidates aren’t in office, our institutions are still more likely to respond to their policy preferences than the average voter’s, especially when it comes to taxes.

The vast majority of Americans, including 63 percent of Republicans, support higher taxes on the wealthy. Yet our representatives consistently fail to deliver. A quintessential example was Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for corporations and the rich — the most unpopular legislation signed into law in the past 25 years.

Though backers promised the tax cuts would benefit all Americans, a recent report by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities revealed that the primary beneficiaries were the top 1 percent.

The good news? Those cuts are set to expire after next year. So we’ll have an opportunity for a new tax reform — one that raises more money for the services we rely on while protecting our democracy from extreme wealth concentration.

President Joe Biden’s Billionaire Minimum Income Tax (BMIT) is one promising proposal. By raising the top tax rate and taxing unrealized capital gains, the BMIT seeks to repair a system where billionaires pay a lower average tax rate than working people. It would raise $50 billion a year over the next decade, making our tax system a bit more equitable.

Senator Ron Wyden’s (D-OR) similarly named Billionaire Income Tax (BIT) is more straightforward. It would target asset gains that can easily be tracked by the public, like a billionaire’s stock holdings in a publicly traded company.

Another idea? A well-designed progressive tax on billionaire wealth.

A modest 5 percent tax on all wealth above $1 billion would raise more than $244 billion this year alone. And that’s likely an underestimate, since some billionaires keep their wealth concealed from Forbes. Wealth-X, a private research firm, identified 955 billionaires in their  Census last year, 142 more than what Forbes just registered.

A wealth tax wouldn’t hurt investment and innovation — most innovation in the U.S. is driven by people worth less than $50 million. But for billionaires, it would function “as a constraint on their rate of wealth accumulation,” according to Patriotic Millionaires, a group of wealthy people who support higher taxes on the rich.

Of course, a wealth tax alone isn’t enough to ensure the safety of our democracy. We also need campaign finance reform to limit political spending. And stronger labor unions could prevent extreme concentrations of wealth from occurring in the first place. Unions not only increase the collective power of workers, they also close wage gaps between workers and CEOs.

Finally, we need better tax enforcement. The Inflation Reduction Act gave the IRS more resources to track down wealthy tax dodgers, and now the agency is projecting an unexpected windfall in tax revenue over the next decade.

That’s a great first step towards strengthening our democracy and democratizing our economy. Now let’s take the next step and fix the tax code itself.

Omar Ocampo is a researcher for the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies.