- The U.S. government is moving fast to grant leases to corporations for deep sea mining in places like the territory of American Samoa: once issued, these are very difficult to rescind.
- Leaders there have weighed in against this lease on cultural and environmental grounds, but the federal agency in charge has merely acknowledged this dissent while continuing to move forward.
- “American Samoa is not a test case; it’s at risk of becoming the federal government’s blueprint” on deep-sea mining licensing, a new op-ed states.
- This article is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily of Mongabay.
At 7:45 a.m. one recent January day in American Samoa, a delegation from Greenpeace and Pacific Island partners sat in a small radio studio explaining why we had traveled thousands of miles across the Pacific.
We were invited by local leaders to the unincorporated U.S. territory — halfway between Hawai‘i and Australia — to listen, to learn, and to help elevate what people in American Samoa have been saying for years. Communities there are deeply concerned about deep-sea mining, and they want to be heard before decisions are made about the ocean that sustains them.
Hours later, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) stood before local officials in a meeting space up the street, walking them through the steps of a federal leasing process that was already moving forward, fast.
BOEM’s visit, even as the governor’s office convened space for community voices, felt less like consultation and more like choreography. The agency’s message was, in essence, we hear you, but we are moving forward.
BOEM received more than 76,000 public comments, most warning of environmental and cultural harm. It advanced anyway. Worse, BOEM expanded the potential lease area, nearly doubling its size, because it does not yet know enough about what is down there.
That should tell you everything you need to know: that this is not precaution, it is momentum. And momentum is how extraction happens, even when communities object.
A process designed to outrun consent
When participants looked closely at BOEM’s own handout describing its regulatory pathway, a sobering realization landed: that American Samoa is already halfway through the federal leasing process. That recognition sharpened the questions in the room. Will the public be consulted before a lease sale moves forward? And once a lease is issued, how do you ever get it back? Could the process be paused if communities were clearly opposed?
BOEM emphasized procedure, not consent. They made it seem as though reversing a lease later would be straightforward if objections emerged. In reality, the default is continuation unless the government takes affirmative action to stop it. Once a lease is granted, undoing it becomes extraordinarily difficult — a fact underscored by the U.S. government’s previous unsuccessful attempts to claw back leases issued for wind farms, where courts have largely sided with developers.
Meanwhile, the next day, back on the mainland, the House Committee on Natural Resources (HCNR) held a hearing on deep-sea mining. The contrast was stark.
Pacific Island delegates spoke not about procedure, but about permanence.
“To the Indigenous people of American Samoa, the ocean is not just the backbone of our local economy, it is sacred,” said Delegate Aumua Amata Radewagen. “As it stands, the people of American Samoa are opposed to deep-sea mining in and around the territory.”
“In places like the Marianas, American Samoa, Guam — we don’t get the luxury of being wrong,” added Kimberlyn King-Hinds, the delegate from the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, reminding Congress of what is at stake. “Any decision impacting our ocean is permanent.”
Guam Delegate James Moylan put it plainly: “The people of Guam [are] not asking for slow progress. They are asking not to be sacrificed.”
These were not abstract concerns. They were statements of survival.
Industry asked lawmakers to lock in the outcome
Gerard Barron, CEO of The Metals Company, praised the push to streamline permitting and called for “regulatory stability” across administrations — permits that are hard to reverse, even if the science changes or the public objects.
Not stronger safeguards. Not independent monitoring. Not meaningful consent, but speed, permanence, and protection from reversal.
See related: Deep-sea mining rules face delays despite urgent push
One witness, independent deep-sea ecologist Andrew Thaler, cut through the hype. “There is no urgency” to launch commercial deep-sea mining, he told Congress. “There is no domestic processing capacity,” meaning any nodules mined by the U.S. would have to be shipped abroad for processing. “There is no commercial deep-sea mining operation anywhere in the world,” he said.
The polymetallic nodules the companies are after form over millions of years, and scars from past exploratory mining for these have remained visible more than 50 years later. Most troubling of all, should mining begin, the only entities capable of monitoring impacts at depth may be the mining companies themselves — turning oversight into self-reporting by the companies that profit.
American Samoa is not alone. Less than a week after its visit to the territory, BOEM announced a new request to explore seabed mining off Alaska — one of the most intact and productive marine ecosystems in the country.
Different region of the Pacific Ocean, same playbook: Move fast, shrink review, treat public opposition as a box to check, and call it “national security.”
American Samoa is not a test case; it’s at risk of becoming the federal government’s blueprint.
Jackie Dragon is a senior oceans campaigner at Greenpeace USA.
Banner graphic by Emilie Languedoc/Mongabay.
See related coverage of deep sea mining:
Deep-sea mining interests raise alarms among Mariana Trench communities
Mongabay & CNN investigation reveals movements of China’s mining fleet:
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This story first appeared on Mongabay
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