F R O M   T H E   C R O W E ’ S   N E S T

We Need a Moratorium



Referring to the race to extract mineral resources on the globe’s deep ocean floor, on March 14, 2015 British Prime Minister David Cameron said “With our technology, skills, scientific and environmental expertise at the forefront, this demonstrates that the UK is open for business as we compete in the global race.”

It’s not exactly “their” technology. The UK is in partnership with a subsidiary of US aerospace giant Lockheed Martin. Lockheed developed the US technology for Remote Command of Robots in Space. That technology will operate the UK’s machines on the ocean floor to excavate gold and other rare minerals. Cameron’s “environmental expertise” is evidenced by the widespread damage to the ocean floor, coastal wetlands and the toxic contamination of sea life from British Petroleum’s 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The largest in oil industry history and not BP’s only such disaster.

It is a global race. Russia is already mining in the Atlantic. China and Japan and India have put in their bids. The UK has signed a contract to mine 58,000 square kilometers of ocean bottom off the west coast of the US. Cameron is all but visibly and desperately drooling over the $40 billion they expect to extract. Just as in every other gold rush past and current, care, common sense and regard for all other rights are cast to the wind.

Extraction industries, oil drilling, coal strip mining, animal feedlots, industrial agriculture, have taken their toll on the land and air. Now a frenzied move to do the same on the last resource frontier about which we know so little. How quickly will robotic excavators run amok, out of sight and mind, finish off our most renewable resource? J. William Fulbright said, “Science has radically changed the conditions of human life on earth. It has expanded our knowledge and our power but not our capacity to use them with wisdom.”

It is in the context of this global focus of exploiting ocean resources and the reordering of ocean commons access rights that National Ocean Policy should be, but is not, discussed in New England. The relative “efficiency” of wild fisheries has come up at RPB meetings. When considered in the tradeoff efficiency equations of economists, how can groundfish, or lobster, compete with multi-billion dollar players?

Gold rush!? We all need a moratorium.