My Remarks at the Society of Conservation Biodiversity Virtual Workshop: Deep Sea Mining Policy

I was invited to participate in a panel on deep sea mining organized by the Society for Conservation Biology.  I gave these short remarks and then participated in an hour long panel discussion.

Good afternoon, and thank you for the invitation to speak with you today. I want to thank SCB and especially David for organizing today’s workshop on deep sea mining.

My name is Angelo and I work for an organization in Washington, DC called the Center for American Progress.

I’m going to start my talk by saying something you don’t often hear at the start of a conference panel: I wish I didn’t need to be here today. I wish I didn’t have to think about deep sea mining. Two years ago, I was working closely with the American government, imagining what was possible in ocean conservation.

I served on the federal advisory board making recommendations on area based management to the government and was on a national academy of sciences panel studying how to make ocean science more equitable. The Biden administration was advancing a number of new national marine sanctuaries across the country, and existing protected areas that had languished as designated and unimplemented were transitioning into active management.

And then the American people elected Donald Trump to a second term. The advisory boards on which I served were dissolved on day one. And then, through a series of executive orders, the Trump administration began accelerating the sale of public natural resources to private corporations. All of our marine monuments – accounting for 26% of all US waters – have been opened, or are in various stages to be opened to industrial fishing, all oil and gas development in the Gulf of Mexico has been exempted from Endangered Species Act restrictions, and waters off California, Texas, and Florida are being leased to oil companies.

In two years the United States has gone from imagining what is possible, to questioning: how the hell is any of this even possible? A year ago there were zero proposals for deep sea mining from the United States. But today the Trump administration is undermining the International Seabed Authority and considering issuing mining permits on the high seas, violating the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples by leasing the seabed around Indigenous communities in the US Pacific territories, and helping American companies gain access to the seabed in various small island developing countries in the Pacific like the Cook Islands and Tonga.

So I’m on this panel today out of necessity – not choice. Twelve months ago I wouldn’t have even said I worked on deep sea mining. But when the Trump administration started exploring the potential for deep sea mining around American Samoa, I got involved through two coalitions, Right to Democracy and America the Beautiful for All.

Both coalitions have worked on the importance of uplifting the concerns of the US territories, so we organized an online petition that was just for citizens from the territories to sign. Our hope was that we’d create a way for the voices of the territories – who are majority brown, black, and Indigenous peoples – to be heard. With that first effort, we collected over 2,000 online signatures.

A few months later the process repeated itself for the waters in my home islands near the Mariana Trench. Our second petition collected over 5,000 signatures. We use the emails we collected to update our supporters in the territories and around the country. If you want to join our email list, you can sign our petition and check the box that says you want updates.

Before I begin, I want to flag something that may be useful context for this conversation. Yesterday, I published a column on the deep‑sea mining efforts in Alaska and the U.S. Pacific territories. If you want a deeper dive into the economic, equity, and governance issues I’ll touch on today, I encourage you to visit the CAP website and give it a read and a share. It lays out, in much more detail, why many Indigenous leaders have described the current push for deep‑sea mining as resource colonialism—and why the communities closest to these projects are likely to receive damage, but not dollars.

I was invited to speak today and asked to cover four topics: (1) Indigenous rights, (2) Equity and power, (3) Global South perspectives, and (4) benefit‑sharing in the global commons. Alright, when we talk about these four topics – we are really talking about governance. Not in the abstract, institutional sense, but in the most basic human sense: who has voice, who has veto, who lives with the consequences of decisions made far away, and how all of this is allowed to take place.

I want to begin with Indigenous rights, because this is where the ethical stakes are clearest. For many Indigenous communities, especially in island and coastal communities, the ocean is not a commodity. It is a relative. A teacher. It is a sustainer of culture, language, and identity. That relationship does not end at the shoreline, or at the edge of the continental shelf. It does not vanish as depth increases.

Yet modern ocean governance often treats the deep sea as if it exists outside of human relationships altogether. Just as an example, a few years ago I found myself trying to explain to an environmental reporter why finding pollution in the Mariana Trench was scary for the people living next door in the Mariana Islands and I struggled to articulate my thoughts because it was so obvious to me why this was a problem.

The framing of the deep sea void of people makes it easier to dismiss Indigenous consent as optional, or symbolic, or irrelevant. But free, prior, and informed consent cannot be just a procedural inconvenience—it is a recognition that Indigenous peoples are political actors with the right to say no.

When deep sea mining advances without that consent, particularly in U.S. territories and other colonized places, it reinforces a long‑standing pattern: Indigenous communities are expected to absorb risk for projects they did not design, do not control, and will not meaningfully benefit from.

Which brings me to equity and power. At a recent congressional oversight hearing, deep sea mining was presented as low risk, an environmental neutral technology that would use AI to avoid ocean life and only pluck the right nodules off the sea floor. The mining executive argued his proposals were governed by objective science and rational economics. But risk is never neutral. Power determines whose risk is acceptable, and whose is invisible.

Territories like the Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, and American Samoa do not have equal standing in U.S. political systems. They cannot vote for the president. Their representation in Congress is limited. And yet they are being positioned as sacrifice zones for activities that primarily benefit corporations and distant decision‑makers. This is not a failure of science. It is a failure of democracy.

Equity demands more than impact mitigation after decisions are made. It requires shared authority at the moment decisions are formed. Without that, the language of national interest or energy security becomes a justification for concentrating power and wealth upwards and exporting harm outwards. The same dynamics play out at the global scale.

Many countries in the Global South are being told that deep sea mining represents opportunity—that it is a way to participate in the blue economy, the green energy transition, to generate revenue, to compete in a resource‑hungry global economy. But we need to ask: opportunity on whose terms?

When nations facing climate vulnerability, debt pressure, and limited development pathways are encouraged to gamble on irreversible environmental damage, that is not a fair choice among equals. It is a narrow corridor shaped by inequality.

This is why so many Global South leaders and civil society groups are calling not for marginal reforms, but for caution, pause, and, in many cases, moratoria. In the Micronesia region, Palau, Marshall Islands, and Micronesia called for a global moratorium on deep sea mining in international waters, and they’ve each taken domestic action as well. And Diva spoke of the 40 countries calling for a global moratorium.

The leaders of these nations all know the lessons from the Twentieth Century phosphate mining on Nauru well: extractive booms rarely deliver lasting prosperity to those closest to the mine. They deliver volatility, dependency, and ecosystem destruction that cannot recover on political timelines.

And finally, David asked me to talk about benefit‑sharing in the global commons, but honestly this is not my strong point, and I hope that some members of the audience have a stronger grasp of these issues and bring that knowledge to the break out groups.

The idea that the deep seabed is the common heritage of humankind is a powerful one. But in practice, access to the deep sea is determined by capital, technology, and geopolitical influence.

My understanding is that benefit‑sharing arrangements remain largely hypothetical. Meanwhile, the environmental costs of mining—sediment plumes, biodiversity loss, disruption of carbon cycles—will be immediate and likely permanent.

True benefit‑sharing would require clear guarantees: not just redistribution of revenue, but protection of livelihoods, long‑term monitoring funded in perpetuity, meaningful decision‑making power for affected communities, and a recognition that some places may simply be too important, culturally and ecologically, to industrialize at all.

We don’t have so much a scientific problem with deep sea mining as we do a political one. If governments consistently listened to scientists, many of us probably wouldn’t have jobs. We need to understand that political problems need political solutions. Science won’t save us from Donald Trump.

I want to end where I began. I said at the start that I wish I didn’t have to be here today. And I meant that.

I don’t want to be in meetings about how to govern deep sea mining my people don’t want, any more than future generations should have to sit in meetings about how to repair ecosystems we knowingly destroyed. The fact that we are here—debating how to make extraction more equitable, how to manage harm more fairly—is itself evidence of political failure, not progress.

If Indigenous consent were respected, if science were allowed to guide policy, if democracy extended fully to territories and the global commons, this conversation would be unnecessary. We would be investing our intellectual energy in protection, not mitigation.

So the question is not just how to govern deep sea mining responsibly. The harder question is whether we are willing to draw a line—to accept when we are told no, to say that some places are not bargaining chips, that some risks are not acceptable, and some futures are worth defending even when powerful interests disagree.

Deep sea mining forces us to confront a simple truth: commercial resource extraction combined with political inequality produces predictable outcomes every single time. And unless we change who has power, who has voice, and who gets to say no, we will keep reproducing the same hierarchies—just at greater depth.

The deep ocean is not empty. And deep sea mining is not inevitable—unless, of course, we allow it to be.

Thank you for your time and attention, and I look forward to the panel discussion.