Going deep –profits or progress?

Jules Verne’s Captain Nemo is being quoted a lot these days in articles advocating mining the ocean floor.

For those who don’t know the story, Captain Nemo first appeared nearly 150 years ago in Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. “In the depths of the ocean,” Nemo proclaimed, “there are mines of zinc, iron, silver and gold that would be quite easy to exploit.”

In 1870, such a declaration was the stuff of fiction and wild fantasy. But not today. At a time when the world’s attention is so focused on the health (or lack thereof) of our oceans, enthusiastic pioneers are looking to the depths of the sea as an accessible place to secure mineral resources for our ever-growing appetite for stuff.

Verne’s story in a modern context — where to begin?

The first question we ask ourselves should be, “why do this?”. One argument is we are no longer bound by technological constraints so why not consider deep sea mining activities? Some people argue that there are specific ‘green economy’ elements like tellurium that are found in unusually high concentrations deep in the sea, in quantities that are more plentiful than on land.

Tellurium can be used to increase the efficiency of the next generation solar panels. There have been arguments that gold and copper are increasingly scarce on land and we therefore need to extract them from the deep sea. Some also argue that deep sea mining produces fewer volumes of waste rock and could thus be an approach that replaces land-based mining leading to reduced environmental impact. These arguments should not merely be dismissed since we have no first hand evidence as of yet. That said, the profit motive remains at the heart of commercial pursuit and this tends to cloud any balanced discussion that needs to take place. We know from decades of evidence that profit is not always optimally aligned with real societal needs or environmental limits, yet we still fail to undertake the conversations needed to ensure beneficial outcomes for people and planet.

The idea of deep seabed mining sounds exciting. Like sending a human to the Moon or Mars, it pushes the boundaries of our ingenuity and innovation and lies at the core of the human drive to reach for the unknown. And we do live in a current (and hopefully changing) reality where consumption demands ever more metals and minerals to keep our production lines going, even as our awareness of environmental degradation increases.

Perhaps it would be more beneficial to argue that the new ‘unknown’ we should strive for as a 21st Century parallel to landing someone on the Moon, is one related to a transition from our unsustainable consumption patterns. Could we evolve a society that doesn’t need to keep pursuing the next source of raw material? Our great new frontier could be the elusive concept of ‘sustainability’, in which the metals we have already mined become more than enough to provide for a future society. We could all benefit from channelling the pioneering spirit into something that is really progressive!