How quickly we forget the ties between mapping and exploitation. The British Empire didn't map the world to preserve it, nor will these maps be used to protect the seafloor. This is about demarcation ahead of future development and resource extraction. Sure, some interesting areas will be saved, but thanks to these more accurate maps such areas can now be defined as narrowly as possible.
Nah. We aren't creating rutters to navigate tough waters for enforcing colonialism. Sometimes the past doesn't predict the future with much confidence.
> Since the ISA's inception in 1994, the Authority has approved over two dozen ocean floor mining exploration contracts in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans, with the majority of contracts for exploration in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone between Hawaii and Mexico, where polymetallic nodules contain copper, cobalt and other minerals used to power electric batteries. To date, the Authority has not authorized any commercial mining contracts as it deliberates over regulations amid global calls for a moratorium on deep sea mining.
+1 on partners. Riffing on that: my priors entering are "oh I've been reading an article in the Economist, every 2 months, for 2 years about how scaling green energy requires deep sea bed mining, and it's incredibly non-invasive because they just sit in coalesced lumps down there"
From that perspective, comparing it to subjugating human populations seems like a non-sequitur, though one I respect.
Fair point. Colonial empires have some emotional baggage that I completely glossed over...
The good news is that the impact of sea bed mining on the human population of the deep ocean appears negligible! The bad news is that the environmental impact is still quite uncertain, and the lack of resident humans could make advocacy more challenging.
From the Wikipedia article I linked about the ISA:
> The ISA is funded by UNCLOS members and mining contractors and led by Secretary-General Michael Lodge, a British barrister who oversees a 47-member administrative body and has come under criticism for close ties to the mining industry and support for deep sea robotic exploration to develop renewable energy.
Also, I feel compelled to respond to to the comment that it's "incredibly non-invasive," as I'm not sure that's how it actually works out. In theory, we can simply pluck the nodules from the seabed. In practice this requires sending a multi-ton robot vacuum cleaner down to suck up and sift through the top layer of the seafloor, pump the chunks back to the surface for processing, and spit the silt back overboard. Here's a video of how we currently mine shallow-water deposits by hand. (Deep sea nodules are a bit different, they sit on the surface, so less disruption to the seabed is required. Less isn't none though, and surface is where life concentrates.)
We're going to be using these maps to expand deep sea mining that will certainly result in the poisoning of innocent people in remote regions of the world whn their food sources become contaminated from whatever we dredge up.
It's colonialism and exploitation of a different kind.
I'm not expecting you to single handedly put a stop to it or anything but it's not unreasonable to expect that you can recognize and acknowledge it instead of pretending it doesn't exist and saying that those sort of things only happened a long time ago.
Then use caissons and hyperbaric chambers; Mine the old fashioned way. You could make a floating island to service the system; They can be quite cheap https://ventivefloathouse.com/
Without getting into whether or not this technology that you're bringing up out of no where is the panacea to all the problems with seabed mining that we're talking about, what sort of mechanisms do you propose we use to ensure that the people who mine will use these safer technologies?
Maps exist to define ownership. Everything else is tertiary to that. Lewis and Clarke weren't "blazing a trail" for the pioneers. They were measuring the land that the US government had just purchased.
Sure. But the USGS doesn't publish precise up to date topological maps of every square inch of the United States for the purpose of guiding backpackers with compasses. They do it to divide up political boundaries, delimit resource rights, and guide commercial activity. This goes for just about any other large scale mapping effort (on earth).
But for steel, gold, silver, salt, gems, fuel, fertilizers, uranium, lithium, semiconductors, stone, cement, bricks, plastics, aluminum, glass, and chalk for schools, what did exploitation of land mineral resources ever give to us?
If you mean, "I didn't get the joke because I'm not familiar with the cultural reference", fair enough. If you mean, "it's Monty python, therefore not funny", you must be fun at parties. Now go away before I taunt you a second time.
FWIW, that land allocation came through a lot of blood allocation. Of course, wars are fought very differently these days but I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss the "transitionary period"
We fought many wars over lands that no one occupied. In fact, we've fought many wars over maritime territories before too. Wars are far from exclusively fought via inhabiting force and invading force. How do you think those boundaries were developed in the first place? People don't grow out of the ground and we all originated from Africa. In fact, not even the whole of Africa!
Did we really do so well on land? We are already looking at overtaxing our planet's carrying capability. 21st century will be pretty rough as the developing countries' lifestyle will catch up and they won't accept the richer countries telling them to be more sustainable unless the latter become so as well. Unfortunately, our level of consumption and environmental destruction is already unsustainable.
I am not asking you if human progress is speeding along and accelerating. That's an obvious yes.
I am asking you: are we speeding into a brick wall? If so, can we steer the car? Who steers the car? Does ANYONE steer the car? Or do market forces just decide where we go.
How do we ant colony our way out of this bitch before we all die?
Nobody has steered humanity's car so far, and it's gone well.
I'll give you my favorite answer. You probably won't like it.
For reasons I don't claim to know, humanity always expect the world to end. It's in all the religions. Christians has expected the Last Judgment any day now for 2000 years.
In this century we don't express that urge in religious term. It manifests in worries that pollution or overpopulation or nuclear war will bring the end of times. I've seen enough of these predictions over the last 50 years to stop worrying too much about the new ones that keep popping up.
Of course non of this proves we won't speed into one of these brick walls. None of us knows the future, and that's certainly a possible one.
It worked so far because our desire to grow never before threatened to exceed the carrying capacity of the whole planet. Growth is not stopped by people, but by environmental boundaries. So far the cost of failure was never the near-extinction of humanity. When civilizations exceed the carrying capacity of their environment, the results aren't pretty.
Civilizational collapse is real. It has happened many times to flourishing cultures and might happen again. Most cultures never recover*. The difference is that previously there was always another culture that was not pulled into the abyss as well and could pick up the leftovers.
As I indicated above, this seems to be an unsustainable state of affairs and an example of the mentality of kicking the can down the road. Let's hope we can continue living longer and better lives.
- "The mission of the U.S. Extended Continental Shelf (ECS) Project is to establish the full extent of the U.S. continental shelf, consistent with international law. "
- "Data collected for the project include bathymetric, subbottom, gravity, magnetic, seismic , and geologic sample data from the U.S. coastal waters to the deep ocean. U.S. ECS project data are in the public domain."
> The US government actually has an ongoing push right now to claim parts of the Arctic Ocean as territorial waters.
No, it doesn't. (Beyond that part of the Arctic Ocean already generally recognized as US territorial waters.)
“Continental shelf” is not “territorial waters”, it is a whole different legal category. The project to identify the extent of what qualifies under international law as continental shelf beyond the 200nm presumed limit is not about extending territorial waters.
The correct term for the legal category which they are trying to determine the extent of is “continental shelf”, hence the name of the project (under international law this is legal category is determined by the greater of 200nm or the natural extent of the physical continental shelf.)
If I'm understanding the history correctly, the British Empire eventually actively fought to end the slave trade because they realized there was something even more profitable than colonialism and extraction: trade.
Chasing profits didn't cause slavery to end, it was the abolitionists who were standing up for human rights. Historically massive social change doesn't come from the top down like you are describing. It would be akin to saying LBJ was a civil rights hero for his legislation. Sure, he signed it, but the civil rights movement of 60s is why it was possible in the first place. Hardly can one deserve credit for playing a forced hand.
The Statue of Liberty is just sitting there too - it would be far more valuable recycling all that copper and putting it to use. Could there perhaps be another reason we haven't melted it down yet?
"Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
It's remarkable how people forget how we all got here.
> same math could probably be done for sustainable stewardship of our oceans, just with more steps
Could it? We can measure the cash flow the Statue of Liberty produces relative to its commodity value. A pristine deep sea certainly has value. But it's difficult to argue that every square inch of it is more valuable than the commodities on and below it. Particularly when you start trading off extraction there against terrestrial mining.
But if you rephrase it as "Are those resources more valuable just sitting at the bottom of a deep sea instead of mixing them into our bodies and environment?" my reaction is now: Yes
But then, also: "And what if the (human) environment is damaged / contaminated less by deep undersea extraction vs land-based mines"?
and also:
"What if an abundance of these materials enables vastly cheaper energy storage batteries, making solar / wind energy overnight storage practical, reducing our reliance on cheap fossil fuel energy generation"?
To be clear, I'm not sure if either of those hypotheticals are true, but I have a feeling, as with many things in life is "It's complicated".
Being good stewards of our resources with careful management / regulation is the answer, rather than unfettered exploitation or outright bans.
Those bottom are brittle ecosystem that thrive in silence and total darkness.
It would be nice to document and observe first, rather than barging in to get the riches as fast as possible once again.
( riche in that point being « nodules » it’s a fun resource ! )
