- 1 I would like to thank Stefan Helmreich for feedback on earlier drafts and the anonymous reviewers w (...)
- 2 To offer only two examples that illustrate the ambiguity of the term: from the perspective of the I (...)
1«A battery in a rock». So goes the slogan of Nautilus Minerals, one of the companies currently most active in the deep-sea mining (DSM) sector. Today, the extraction of minerals from the seabed is increasingly seen as the new frontier in the push to transition to a «low-carbon economy» that requires larger quantities of metals. The mainstream narrative behind what is broadly termed “just transition” is that technology will save the world2. As Donna Haraway argues this apocalyptic mood is characterized by a «cosmic faith in restorative technology» (Haraway 2020: 16). In the search for solutions to mitigate climate change, the demands of capitalist societies go unchallenged; on the contrary, even more resources are being invested in the quest for advanced technologies, with a view to maintaining the existing system under a greener guise. As some scholars have proposed, «just transition could provide another platform for corporate “tournaments of virtue” where companies compete to profile their “good deeds”» (Bainton et al. 2021: 627). Not surprisingly, DSM is touted by national governments and corporations as more environmentally and socially sustainable than “land-based” extraction.
2Notably, the arguments offered by both the scientific community (geologists, oceanographers, engineers, etc.) and the lay community, whether in support of or in opposition to the emergent DSM sector, are invariably based on the need for an ecological turn and on the key role that technology and scientific data will play in achieving this. To provide but one example, the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition has called «on governments to stand with the science and support a moratorium on deep-sea mining» (my italics)3. International policymakers navigating the green (or rather the blue) turn are co-constructing, along with scientists and the mainstream media, an imaginary of an “endangered ocean”, which serves on the one hand as a scientific laboratory in which to produce knowledge for combating climate change, and on the other as a reservoir from which to extract value, such as minerals and genomes. In parallel, a process of “re-enchantment” of the ocean, viewed as a catalyst for responding to the challenges of the Anthropocene, is underway4. In this regard, the European Commission has made significant efforts to support the Blue Economy:
The Blue Economy emerging and innovative sectors include marine renewable energy (i.e. Ocean energy, floating solar energy and offshore hydrogen generation), Blue bioeconomy and biotechnology, Marine minerals, Desalination, Maritime defense, security and surveillance, Research and Education and Infrastructure and maritime works (submarine cables, robotics). These sectors offer significant potential for economic growth, sustainability transition, as well as employment creation. […] With the European Green Deal well underway, and the insight of the Sustainable Blue Economy communication, the need to ensure that economic growth and employment go hand in hand with protecting and restoring nature and fighting climate change is imperative5.
3Globally, the just transition discourse is increasingly intertwined with discourse concerning the ocean, and more specifically its deep-sea region – the water column whose seabed is below 200m in depth and that accounts for 80% of the planet’s oceans –, which has acquired key and somewhat controversial status within international politics, becoming a crucial geopolitical issue (Hannigan 2016). The deep sea was already known to host large quantities of minerals as far back as the 1870s but attempts to quantify these resources only got underway in the 1960s, when deep-sea mining began to attract serious interest on the part of national governments, partly thanks to impact of the popular science book Mineral Resources of the Sea (Mero 1965). However, while the technologies of that early period enabled the first offshore deep-water oil drilling, deep-sea mining was not yet a viable reality. Today however, the time seems to be ripe. Although we are still traversing a largely exploratory phase, the rush for “green” minerals and increasing international regulation of the field suggest that the next step is approaching. The potential ecological and political impact and the specificity of this economic sector attract interdisciplinary interest from oceanographers, geologists, and engineers but also from jurists, geographers, and of course anthropologists. Questions of sovereignty, benefit distribution, environmental impact and stewardship – all common to the anthropological study of mining – assume new valence in this novel context. It becomes anthropologically salient to ask what are the political, epistemological, ecological, and economic consequences of a mining future that promises to be bound up with autonomous machines and increasingly sophisticated technologies; how does engagement with mining change when extraction takes place in the deep sea; and how does it shape our relationship with the ocean.
- 6 My earlier ethnographic research on Kanak people working in the nickel extraction sector in New Cal (...)
4With the intention of initiating a new line of reflection, in this article I draw together insights from both the anthropological extractive literature and recent oceanic studies, within a contemporary framing of the sea as a generative and transformative material agent with the capacity to challenge or resist the rational and linear logic typical of the (hard) sciences and economics that tries to explain and control the agency of non-humans and the unpredictability of the sea by physical laws and calculation. While my interest in DSM is in continuity with my research background6, it was the totalizing experience of “being at sea” on multiple sailings during 2021, as part of the project Ermenautica. Saperi in rotta, that pointed me to an exciting new perspective on DSM studies. During these sea expeditions, I asked myself: what would it entail to do ethnography ‘on board’ DSM vessels? How does the materiality of the sea influence mining operations?
5Thus, in this article I go virtually ‘on board’ DSM, as a first theoretical step towards designing innovative research on this emergent sector. Deep-sea mining, if approached ethnographically in this way, could offer more immediate potential than land-based mining in terms of illustrating the fundamental importance of integrating both the ecological and geological contexts – understood as actor and actant – into anthropological analyses of resource extraction. A novel perspective of this kind would also enable us to deconstruct the “terra-centric” approach that we habitually bring to bear on DSM. Furthermore, at the epistemological and methodological levels, ethnographic immersion in an economic sector that is shaped by the sea will draw out the interspecific relationships that are often obscured by uniquely political and ideological readings.
- 7 Anthropological literature on mining and corporations is extensive. I refer for convenience to the (...)
6Recently, Rajanikant Pandey in Ethnographies of mining in the late industrialism (2015) and Jerry Jacka in The anthropology of mining: the social and environmental impacts of resource extraction in the mineral age (2018) summarized what were the most significant milestones and the paradigm shifts in the anthropology of mining that led to the current state of the art. Both built their argument on the basis of two previous articles that appeared in the Annual Review of Anthropology; Mining: anthropological perspective by Ricardo Godoy (1995) and Resource wars: the anthropology of mining by Christopher Ballard and Glenn Banks (2003)7. According to Pandey, Banks and Ballard's article bridges an early phase he calls industrialism, in which anthropologists were interested in the relationships of dependence and exploitation, politics, and the impact of the capitalist market on rural economies, and a second phase called late industrialism, in which an important shift takes place. Since the early years of the new millennium mining communities are no longer those formed by small groups of miners and their families, but also include resource owners who claim rights to profits and emerge as stakeholders alongside states and corporations. The presence of other actors such as NGOs, legal agencies, lawyers, and international media, has produced a multi-sited and multi-vocal arena of unprecedented scale, thus requiring an analysis that goes beyond the contribution of economic anthropology alone, contrary to Godoy's argument. While early mining research focused on macroeconomic characteristics, questioning resource ownership and management and the role of the state, since the 1990s the emphasis has shifted to the environmental practices of mining companies with a particular focus on the question of sustainability.
7Jerry Jacka offers a further argument to explain the reasons for this shift. His article begins with a powerful acknowledgment: «[w]hile we may be living in the Anthropocene, there is certainly no doubt that we are also living in the mineral age» (Jacka 2018: 62). If we think about it, our daily (digital) life, including our most “green” oriented life, depends on mineral extraction. What makes mining new and “necessary” today in respect to the past – according to the author – is precisely that it has become a political and economic imperative for developing countries. Not surprisingly, some critical environmental authors coming from the highly mineralized contexts of Latin America prefer to term this phenomenon “extractive imperative”, “extractivism” or “neo-extractivism” rather than simply extraction, to emphasize the dominant logic of growth and acceleration that drives late capitalism (Arsel et al. 2016; Jalbert et al. 2017). The Latin American perspective has been progressively adopted by critical leftist circles to reinterpret large-scale mining, oil, and agribusiness investments in other territories of the world. This term has now become an analytical concept for understanding and explaining heterogeneous phenomena of capital and value extraction. In Zibechi's words, extractivism is a «total social actor» that generates social conflict and causes division (Zibechi 2016). In particular, Sandro Mezzadra and Stefano Rota argue that: «[d]espite the firm awareness of the problems of translation and translatability in creating such a connection, it is necessary to identify the way through which the notion of extraction provides a means to map and unite struggles that unfold in seemingly distant and unrelated contexts (e.g. data mining, gold farming, and cryptocurrencies)»8. Consequently, the academic literature on extractive processes becomes increasingly politically engaged in the task of uncovering and denouncing asymmetrical relations of power and exploitation.
8Feeling the necessity to defend the specificity of the field of anthropology of resource extraction (D’Angelo, Pijers 2021), as well as the cultural, social and historical complexity of each different ‘minescape’, I adopt here the conventional approach by which we indicate the extraction of non-renewable resources. Although I agree with the need to denounce the new forms of capital extraction, I do not consider “extractivism” paradigm a useful analytical tool to approach mining. «What do we humanities scholars talk about – or take as given, leave unspoken – when we talk about extractivism? And just why are we talking about extractivism now?» – the literary and cultural scholars Imre Szeman and Jennifer Wenzel provocatively ask (2021: 506). In line with them, I believe «[t]here is a danger that extractivism may become the adjective and epithet du jour» (ivi: 510).
9An adjective that fails to capture the complex architecture of the DSM consisting of a combination of science, technology, laws, market, an assemblage of humans and non-humans operating in an extreme and ungovernable material environment that in turn sets apart and shapes them. Focusing only on the manifest ideology of conquest, capital extraction and ocean governance that characterizes DSM studies, we run the risk of obscuring what the anthropologists Hirsh and O’hanlon call the «second landscape», which is not what we initially see, but that «which is produced through local practice and which we come to recognize and understand through fieldwork and through ethnographic description and interpretation» (1995: 2). Hence, the importance of the multi-species encounter with the materiality of the sea. Compared to land-based mining, ethnographically approaching DSM requires new ways of thinking: what I called an ocean-based perspective. As provocatively expressed by Melodie Jue: «thinking with the ocean involves asking: how would ways of speaking about (x) change if you were to displace or transport it to a different environmental context, like the ocean?» (Jue 2020: 6).
10DSM is a very recent field of anthropological research but it represents an interesting and stimulating sector precisely because it challenges the rectangular state-corporation-community-“social corner” (Filer, Gabriel 2018) model that anthropologists conventionally bring to bear on land-based mining. If we think for example the mineral extraction in the sea areas beyond national jurisdiction some questions arise: Which is the “mine-affected community” in DSM? Which is the state concerned? Where is the corporation located physically? Is it represented by the scientific community that inhabits the mining vessels? Or do the scientists rather fall under the category of “community"? What role is played by the non-human agents that inhabit the deep-sea? These are just some of the issues that prompt us to realize that we are dealing with a «discombobulated actor-network» (Filer et al. 2021) that renders conducting an ethnography of DSM particularly challenging.
11Various authors have already questioned the political and ecological consequences of DSM (Zalik 2018; Childs 2020; Le Meur et al. 2018; Bainton et al. 2021; Tilot et al. 2021), but only very few have taken an ethnographic approach (Childs 2019; Filer, Gabriel 2018). Especially interesting is the work of the geographer John Childs who showed (in his multi-site research conducted at Nautilus Minerals' headquarters in Brisbane and its national office in Papua New Guinea, as well as with manufacturers of underwater vehicles in the UK) that it is precisely the materiality of the sea that is exploited by the corporation to legitimize the Solwara 1 DSM project (Papa New Guinea) as sustainable (Childs 2019). Nautilus managers’ emphasis on the wildness and disorder of the seascape, given in particular by the presence of active volcanoes near the mining site, as well as on the “placelessness” and remoteness of the deep ocean implies that the impact of human resource extraction is negligible and attempts to transfer responsibility to “nature”. In the geographer’s terms, nature’s everyday actions afford the company a sort of license to operate allowing it at the same time «to bypass its social commitments and countering concern over its potential impact» (Childs 2019: 6). Not only does operating offshore involve technologically advanced extraction techniques, but the extraction process takes place mainly in horizontal space below the ocean’s surface. According to Childs, «the geopolitics of DSM is not marked by verticality so much as the three dimensions of volume and the fourth dimension of time» (Childs 2020: 202). Offering a critical geopolitical reading of DSM, this geographer has analyzed the shifting timeframes of the resource-making process, taking into account on the one hand the fluidity, voluminosity, and dynamism of sea and seabed, and on the other hand the long-term geological processes playing out on the ocean floor (the three types of mineral deposit are associated with different temporal and spatial patterns); in other words, the geophysical and scientific principles that explain how minerals become resources (Ibidem). Child’s work is thus particularly interesting because he approaches DSM with the emphasis on the materiality of the sea as an uncontrollable element. «Water provides – he has argued – both the medium through which the ore is lifted and the source of the power through which the system operates» (ivi: 9). From his perspective, the core concern to «make resources “be”» underpins the combination of different materialities (water, plumes, technological equipment, etc.) as well as social, non-human, and geological forces.
12Especially worthy of note is also Hannah Appel’s ethnographical work on board a floating production, storage, and offloading vessel (FPSO) at an offshore oil platform in Equatorial Guinea. Appel examined the everyday infrastructural practices that enable offshore oil extraction, comparing them with those of the onshore extractive industry. In her compelling ethnographic account, she described the sensation of being in an «immersive, hermetic environment» where the «performance of safety» is practiced; and that is home to a «rainbow coalition of 115 workers from twenty different nations», some highly skilled (Appel 2015: 263). Emphasizing the materiality of «mobile, flexible and licit» modular offshore architectures, she also presented the internal hierarchies and social inequalities within the FPSO community and offered an account of the enormous financial and logistical investment underpinning the enterprise (ivi: 265).
- 9 For more literature on “materiality” in mining studies: Ferry 2021; LeCain 2015.
13However, thinking with an ocean-based perspective doesn’t mean simply considering the material environment where extraction takes place. Recent neo-materialist approaches can be helpful in this regard9. The historian Timothy J. LeCain proposes to understand humans and their cultures as the products of their material environment, not its masters.
[The] immaterialism is not so much a denial of materiality per se, but a far too narrow definition of materiality, a definition that refuses to recognize how the things we work and live with help to create who we are – our niche, if you will. Yet it is precisely this recognition of the power of things to make us human that I think offers the chance of realizing a more just, rewarding, and sustainable world for all. Ironically, perhaps what we need today is a non-anthropocentric Anthropocene (LeCain 2021: 5).
14Far from any material determinism, my argument here is to adopt a perspective that looks at the DSM’s compounds as a product of the materiality of the sea. In other words, we can reverse our “terra-centric” perspective by thinking that the human intelligence and creativity, required to make the DSM feasible, is a product of the specific material condition and the ecosystem of the mining environment. It is in this sense that the sea, we will see in the next paragraphs, emerges as an agent capable of influencing and permeating the economic, political, and scientific flows and expectations that have structured and made possible the exploration and exploitation of the ocean floor. The unpredictability of the environment where DSM operates, refocuses our attention also on the materiality of things (robots, minerals, etc.) and how their interrelate one another. Just to make a banal example, if global position system (GPS) is a common mobility method on land, it is not effective in deep-sea mining environment due to the rapid decay of electromagnetic signals. Being at sea constantly calls into question the “interdependence” of the Anthropos with the specific environment, prompting us to think about its limits in the Anthropocene and in this relentless movement toward progress.
15A surface mining support vessel (also termed mother station) lowers a collection vehicle onto the deep seabed between 4000 and 6000m underwater. The deep-sea mining vehicle (DSMV) is programmed to remove the bed’s hard substrate10. It collects polymetallic nodules and sends them to the surface via an ascending pipeline. The nodules are cleared of sediment on the support vessel and then conveyed back down to the seabed via another tube. This is an ideal and apparently simple nodule mining operation, viewed to date as the most viable method of deep-sea mining. Polymetallic nodules are potato-sized lumps of accumulated metallic ore (including cobalt, copper, nickel, and manganese among other minerals). These nodules take millions of years to form via the precipitation of minerals around a nucleus and can attain very high densities (up to 50 kg per square meter), covering the sea floor in some places. The greatest concentrations of them are found in the Clarion Clipperton Zone in the equatorial north of the Pacific Ocean (Jones et al. 2020). As reported by Thomas Peacock, Director of the Environmental Dynamics Laboratory in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, polymetallic nodules in the Pacific Ocean contain more Mn, Ni, Mo and Co than the entire global terrestrial reserve base of these metals11. Other deep-sea mineral types that are currently thought to be of potential commercial interest include polymetallic crusts and seafloor massive sulfide deposits (SMSs). Like polymetallic nodules, polymetallic crusts, which are rich in cobalt, are formed via a slow precipitation process. They can be up to 25cm thick, cover tens to thousands of square kilometres and they are most prevalent in the Prime Crust Zone of the central western Pacific Ocean. SMSs have a high sulfide content, but are also rich in copper, gold, zinc, lead, barium, and silver. In contrast to nodules, they tend to be present in relatively dynamic environments, such as near hydrothermal vents, and to accumulate on smaller areas of seafloor. Hydrothermal vents are found at depths of 1,000-4,000 m underwater and are characterized by temperatures of up to 400°C and high acidity (pH 2-3), yet they support large and densely populated communities of rare organisms (ivi). Given the uniqueness, high density, and endemicity of this fauna, sulfide mining potentially poses the greater environmental risks – although all three types deep-sea mining have specific impacts – due to the release of toxic heavy metals from sulfide oxides into the sea.
16In January 2018, the European Parliament adopted a resolution urging small states to stop sponsoring deep-sea mining in international waters and to support a moratorium, which was promptly welcomed in Oceania by Fiji’s Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama, who at the 50th Pacific Island Forum (PIF), held in Tuvalu (2019), called on leaders to support a 10-year halt (2020-2030) to allow scientific research programs in the ocean to be completed. Juridically, recent changes in the legal structure of oceanic sea space have fueled a “politically correct” battle to extend rights over the sea. For a few decades now, coastal nations have been allowed to apply to a commission of twenty-one experts in geology, geophysics, or hydrography (Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, CLCS, 1997) for permission to extend the outer boundary of their “continental shelf” beyond 200 nautical miles (but no further than 350 miles). In other words, to extend their Economic Exclusive Zone (EEZ), whose natural resources they hold sovereign rights over – and may directly exploit (Art. 47, United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, UNCLOS).
- 12 In contrast, the “deep waters”, the water column beyond the EEZ, are subject to an open access regi (...)
- 13 The ISA also has the arduous task of striking a balance between the exploitation of mineral resourc (...)
- 14 https://isa.org.jm/exploration-contracts, accessed 15/06/2022.
17However, it is the so-called “Area” – the water column beyond the limits of national jurisdictions – that is the most contested space. In Part XI of the UNCLOS, the Area and its mineral resources are defined as «common heritage of mankind» (Art. 136)12, as such to be administered by an independent body, the International Seabed Authority (ISA), established by the convention to act on behalf of mankind and for its benefit (Art. 140). The role of the ISA is to balance the principle of equality among states with the need to safeguard particular interests including those of: industrialized States that are interested in actively exploiting resources and claim the right to do so based on the principle of the “freedom of high seas”; consumer states who need an increasing supply of metals at low prices; producer states who extract the same metals but on land and whose activity could give rise to negative repercussions; and developing states who, albeit lacking in technological and financial capital, wish to share in the benefits13. Following the Implementation Agreement brought forth by UNCLOS (1994), in order to apply for an exploration license, private companies must be sponsored by a signatory state. So far, ISA has signed 22 contracts of 15 years' duration, each for exploration in the Pacific Ocean, including 19 in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ) alone14.
18Protecting a common good such as the deep-sea seabed which does not fall under national jurisdiction, through the legal recognition of a supranational entity (made up of states with considerable interests) that regulates the area through the notion of common heritage of mankind, paradoxically offers the possibility for states to contend for significant portions of the ocean in a “politically correct” manner (as happens with EEZs).
19DSM elicits far more resistance from civil society than does land-based mining because it clashes on the one hand with a romantic view of the sea as a preserved and essentially non-human place, and on the other with perceptions of deep-sea waters as an “elsewhere” that is “alien” to cite anthropologist Stefan Helmreich (2009b). In the social sciences the Ocean has been a “victim” of the “terrestrial bias” and of an ontological gaze that has rendered it “flat”, without volume or material dimensions; in the popular “terra-centric” narrative the sea still remains a surface to be crossed that is lacking in volume (Steinberg, Peters 2015). While over the past decade we have witnessed an epiphany of scientific awareness and editorial interest surrounding the vegetable world, right now the ocean is center-stage, under the political, scientific, and social spotlight. The endangered inhabitants of the ocean, including corals – the world's largest living structure – emerge as both as signs and catalysts of the forthcoming ecological catastrophe. As the human-environment geographer Jessica Lehman argues: «we might even say that a different world ocean has been called into being; a world ocean characterised by flows and becomings, uncertainty and volatility, disequilibria and change» (Lehman 2016: 115). Even more so, the deep sea has historically been defined as a great void, idealized as outside the society, as «the last great wilderness» (Ramirez-Llodra et al. 2011) out of the reach of capitalists who saw the ocean as an empty surface (Steinberg 2001).
20Oceanography has only recently begun to explore the connections between climate change and the deep sea, given that the latter was «traditionally considered to be relatively isolated from the atmosphere and thus mostly sensitive to climate disturbance at the centennial to millennial scale of ocean thermohaline circulation» (Le Bris, Levin 2020: 161). Scholars now agree that the deep sea can absorb a large proportion of the excess heat generated by greenhouse gases and carbon dioxide, which in turn causes the acidification, deoxygenation, and warming of the sea water. According to oceanographers Andrew Thurber and Amanda Netburn (2020), the public requires to be educated about the interconnection between the sea’s surface and its deep waters. They note empirical findings that people would be willing to pay more to protect fisheries (especially when impacted by oil platforms) than to protect deep-sea waters.
21In this scenario marked by an endangered deep sea, marine biologists, in parallel with national governments, corporations, geologists, and engineers, are working to facilitate DSM as a viable industry. At the heart of their research lies a fundamental question: Can we do a better job in the ocean than we do on land?15 Cindy Van Dover, professor of biological oceanography, claims that unlike land-based mining «one of the exciting things about deep-sea mining is that we don't know things and so it's a chance to find out»16. Similarly, the oceanographer duo cited earlier have pointed out that: «We often think of the deep sea as a place of the unknown, but in many ways it could be viewed instead as an epicentre of knowledge generation» (Thurber, Netburn 2020: 148).
22Albeit mainly with different goals, scholars in the human sciences are also increasingly beginning to perceive the deep sea «as a cogenerative, transitional realm thrumming with material agency and life» (Reid 2020: 31) and a cultural and multi-species ecology, reflecting «an important shift from a long-term concern with mobility across transoceanic surfaces to theorising oceanic submersion, thus rendering vast oceanic space into ontological place» (Deloughrey 2017: 32). The deep sea is thus socially and culturally constructed via local imaginaries and ontologies and by technology, in a generative and performative encounter with the sea.
23Unlike terrestrial mining, DSM operates in the shifting and extreme conditions that characterize the ocean environment and soft ground. For this reason it should be considered also as a maritime sector. Going on board DSM cannot be detached from everything that going to sea has signified for millennia. For the historian Markus Rediker (1989) the ship is the most important machine to the raise of capitalism but at the same time, the sea is a laboratory for the rediscovery of new forms of resistance. If on one hand life at sea is extremely authoritarian and hierarchical, on the other at sea you don’t really have a really civic society but temporary working communities. Ultimately, the sea remains an ungovernable space and this characteristic is what has challenged human intelligence and creativity. The stormy waters tested early navigators and continue to do so in our contemporary era. A spirit of endurance, practical experience, and intuition have charted the course to survival but, above all, have fueled a constant process of knowledge-gathering and technological innovation, leading to the development of a systematic and theoretically framed body of situational and environmentally-based knowledge. The art of navigation is based on experiential and sensory awareness of the environment, the detection of even minute atmospheric variations, and the ability to read the sky and stars, as well as to anticipate changes in the sea. Hence, sailors have functioned as scientists, or at least as drivers of constant scientific progress in light of the incessant demands and stimuli that issue from the sea. It is no coincidence that nautical science has come to intersect with the fields of physics, geometry, and engineering science. Technological innovations, ranging from automated navigation to the design of hulls, sail fabric, and other sophisticated materials, should not be overlooked, given that they reflect the incessant discoveries of sailors or sea workers, who often remain on the fringe of scientific discourse and yet who have helped to make possible the automated navigation of today.
- 17 To know more on automated mining see Calvao 2019; Paredes, Fleming-Muñoz 2021.
24My argument here is that DMS presents some areas of friction that is worth value to bring out. If on one hand its off-shore operators (sailors, scientists, engineers, etc.) work together for this great machine to extract value from the ocean, causing enormous ecological consequences, their constant encounter/clash with the materiality of the sea makes them intimately connected to it; bodily being-at-sea, for example, presupposes a corporal engagement that complicates analyses of the alienation of labor in automation industrial processes17. We could wonder how does our relationship with the materiality of mineral resources change once workers' bodies have been removed from the extraction site and the visual component has been compromised. A narrative that is widely shared among social scientists is that, for example, of researcher Susan Reid:
On a flood-lit seafloor, machines maneuver back and forth on caterpillar tracks as they cut, scrape, and crash the seabed into a big pile of mineralized material. In this disembodied, industrialized ocean a few small specks of matter are visible but no fish or plumes of disturbed material. The machines are alone (Reid 2020: 33, my italics).
- 18 It is particularly interest what tells a pilot for the robot submarines that monitor subsea drillin (...)
25Yet, if we adopt a fresh perspective and assume that the sea has its own performative specificity, we realize that human corporality has not been subtracted from this scene. Neither has the visual dimension been excluded; rather, it is now mediated by technology18. Other components of sensory experience have even been amplified. Being at sea means being there with one’s body, incorporating the materiality of the environment. Lehman (2016, 2018) and Helmreich (2009b), analyzing oceanographers’ and biologists’ respective use of physical sensors and robots to explore the deep sea, have shown that the materiality of the sea produces new sensory relations between humans and non-humans (robots, fish, organisms, etc.). According to Helmreich, technologies can enable the union of self and sea, which is one of the most privileged ways to enjoy nature (2009a). Contrary to the general view that underwater extraction alienates and abstracts corporality, we may assume that human sensory expansion also takes place onboard DSM vessels. Thus, while this mining sector is moving towards automation, it also requires highly qualified human resources with the capacity to adapt to the mining vessel setting.
26Another dimension that allows us to reflect on the agentivity of the sea is temporality, or rather the interweaving of multiple temporalities. It is quite obvious that the linear temporality of DSM, which is conducted 24/7 and follows the logic of profit accumulation, seriously affects the long or “deep time” (Irvine 2020) that characterizes not only minerals but the entire marine habitat. This is why it is impossible to predict environmental damage in the long term. But here again, if we view the sea as a performing agent, we can further complexify the intertwining of temporalities. While on the one hand scientists have attempted to regulate and control time with a view to maximizing profits, being at sea requires a specific temporality that goes beyond the human dimension and that to some extent resists linear capitalist logic (a progression of profit accumulation). Salt water and atmospheric conditions inevitably influence the temporality of extraction operations, from the design of robots and studies of the materials they are made of, to the maintenance of machinery. The failure of a technological device at sea can cause serious delays in production, even more so than on land. The site’s distance from centers of control and intervention presupposes the availability of specialized crew to support the vessels. Thus, the sea demands specific professional capabilities. What might appear on the surface to be a depersonalizing process is reverting towards a humanizing specialization in practices that are highly innovative and technological in nature.
27The oceanic current with its salt water literally wets and corrodes this well-established mechanism of conquest, forcing it to come to terms with an unstable fluidity that slows down and partly defuses an irrepressible process of acceleration. In the shift from the land to the ocean, certain cosmological assumptions underpinning the language of development, which is strongly terrestrial, go missing. It is precisely this gap that we need to fill by reconstituting our relations with a new context that we cannot fully grasp until we are physically immersed in it. The materiality of the sea continues to bend innovation to its own needs, and – importantly – technological innovation in turn enhances the art of seafaring. I see this hybridization, which blurs the boundaries between art and science, as offering an interesting perspective from which to finally embark on DSM vessels.
28If oceanographers have been constituting the ocean as a field-laboratory and a field of knowledge production since the 19th century, anthropologists have only recently approached the sea as a fieldwork. However, while the formers try to make the ocean a rational, calculable and domesticated space, the latter emphasize the figure of the ship as something emblematic between passage and blockage, mobility and immobility, flow and stuckness (Markkula 2022). It is worth reporting here Markkula’s description of the ship as «a self-contained social world».
“It is the crew that makes the ship”, was a saying I often heard onboard during my fieldwork on different ships. Ships are social worlds, accidental communities of strangers who live and work in close proximity for extended periods of time, and whose collaborative work makes the ship work, and thus, by extension, makes shipping and the global economy work too. Furthermore, the ship is a social world that moves, that connects other places, while the people who live and work inside of it have multiple connections to the outside world as well. It also is a vector of all sorts of political and social processes, of trade, colonialism, imperialism, individual trajectories, and relationships between people and places far from each other. Yet, ships are also concrete objects, each with an individual material existence. They are both strangely enclosed, isolated, self-sufficient and self-contained floating pieces of machinery and space, at the same time as each ship forms part of a global infrastructure of mobility made up of other physical structures, like ports, nautical highways and canals. With all of these qualities and contradictions in mind, it is perhaps no wonder that the ship has been such a productive figure for social theory (Markkula 2022: 194).
29In DSM research the problematic nature of life on board remains under-explored (in contrast with the growing anthropological studies on biological expeditions at sea). It would be of value to ethnographically explore how these ‘minescape’, which tend to be seen as industrialized and disembodied, are re-signified. Some key questions arise with respect to identifying the work culture and crew of DSM vessels. Who are the people who inhabit and shape the vessels? Is it a masculinity space? How are they influenced by the sea? What are their aspirations, perceptions, challenges, and fears? What are the differences between the nautical engineers and the sailors on board? May we view the latter as sailors in the established understanding of the term? Should we view them all as sea workers indiscriminately? What are their different conceptualizations of the ocean? Answering these questions is by no means easy, yet «being at sea» and participating in a mining operation can direct our theorizing about what it means in general to work at sea, while offering new insights. As Helmreich argues:
the field is a relational term, not a fixed functional kind. […] “be-ing there" is a way to learn how everyday technical improvisation and social negotiation inflect the making of knowledge claims meant to carry beyond their contexts of initial creation (Helmreich 2022: 151).
30To paraphrase Thomas Eriksen (2001), the DSM vessels is a “small place” that opens up “large issues”. Compared to conventional fieldwork, ‘seawork’ imposes total immersion without those escape routes that are sometimes needed to absorb the ethnographic material itself. On a boat, cultural intimacy – understood as those affective and intercultural encounters – is intensified at the expense of personal intimacy, which on the contrary is severely curtailed. A further question arises in relation to the encounter between the researcher's time and the time of “others” (Fabian 2014). The boat is an essential epistemological and methodological tool that functions as a “relational accelerator”, thereby overriding terrestrial concepts of ethnographic time. For all these reasons, I strongly believe that ethnography on board vessels is necessary not only to inform new lines of reflection on DSM that over-political readings tend to obscure, but also to facilitate the imagining of new ethnographic spaces and methods.
31However, an ocean-based perspective means to multi-situate the space of investigation to understand how the materiality of the sea even penetrates the offices of the mining company's headquarters, as well as the simulation trainings centres and technology labs, or even the annual Deep-sea mining summit. An ethnographic encounter with DSM emphasizes the concrete potentials borne by the reciprocal permeability and “amphibiousness” (Pauwelussen 2017) that characterizes relations between the human, the sea, and economic and ecological needs.
32This article is focused on what the shift between land-based and sea-based mining entails in the extractive assemblage, but also on what new insights open up for the anthropologist doing ethnographic research aboard DSM vessels. One of the goals is precisely to deconstruct the terracentric approach with which we analyze DSM as if it were an extension of land-based capitalism over the sea. The focus is not so much on deep-sea mining tout court but on how such ethnographical approach can explore and reveal a specific relational and multi-sensorial space in which the sea is an agent actor that bends, performs, and affects DSM, from technology to juridical regulation. The ocean-based perspective, which arises from being at sea and thinking of the sea as a performative actor, is the starting point, rather than the goal, from which to observe the DSM operators (sailors, scientists, engineers, etc.).
33Resistances that do not take place on land occur at sea. While processes of acceleration offer us the opportunity to turn once more to the sea and its unexplored spaces, at the same time the sea opposes forms of unconditional exploitation with all their “materiality”, curbing the imaginative impulses that have allowed us to extend our gaze beyond the land mass. Automation, which makes it feasible to penetrate the abyss and appears to have no need for the direct engagement of human bodies, must nevertheless strike a compromise with the surrounding marine environment in order to be implemented. This triggers a reverse process that assigns the human dimension with a key role in managing the unpredictability of the seas and oceans.
34I am aware that the approach I propose may be critiqued as romanticized or depoliticized. At the same time, a reading that only emphasizes the capitalist “extractivism” (to use a term in vogue) logic behind this mining activity risks dematerializing the connection between the surface and the underwater ‘minescape’ and flattening the reflection to one dimension: the immense power of the Anthropos. On the contrary, a perspective that acknowledges the agentivity of the sea emphasize the limits of human beings and our necessary interdependence vis-à-via the environment, with non-humans and technology. As Helmerich affirmed:
I think Peters and Steinberg’s provocative and productive more-than analytics can help us track – but that also requires us, as we ask about oceans “within”, “beyond”, and “imagined”, to ask for whom and with what political implication these within, beyond and imagined become important (Helmreich 2019: 311).
35I argue that anthropology, among the social sciences, is best placed to reformulate this essential theoretical background within specific cultural contexts and practices. Ethnographically approaching DSM by boarding its vessels will allow researchers to concretely immerse themselves in the challenges, problems, resistance, and solutions posed by the oceanic milieu, revisit accelerationist claims, and apply theorizations of the agentivity of the sea that would otherwise remain uncontextualised abstractions. The ocean-based perspective outlined here could be thus a privileged starting point to observe the multiplicity of issues DSM unveils. Such an approach could also give new insights on the comparison between land-based and sea-based extraction along with traditional and automated mining, exploring for example the concept of automation in both contexts to understand in what terms the specificity of the environment affects the “present absence” of working bodies and how it shapes the human-machine relationship.
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