Cook Islanders confront US-funded vessel over seabed mining threat

COOK Islands activists in kayaks confronted a United States-funded exploration vessel as it returned to port in Rarotonga on Wednesday, holding a banner that read “Don’t Mine the Moana.”

Media reports from Rarotonga said the four activists targeted the Nautilus, a research ship that had spent the past three weeks surveying the sea floor for valuable mineral deposits.

 Critics fear the expedition is a fast-tracking of deep-sea mining in the Cook Islands and across the Pacific. The protest comes amid growing Pacific opposition to seabed mining, a controversial and largely untested industry that threatens fragile marine ecosystems and Indigenous sovereignty

The vessel’s expedition, conducted in partnership with the Cook Islands government and funded by the United States’ National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Ocean Exploration Cooperation Institute, is being criticised as the latest example of powerful nations pushing extractive industries in the Pacific under the guise of scientific exploration.

“Right now, global superpowers like the U.S are vying for control of deep-sea minerals throughout the Pacific, in an attempt to assert their military might,” Louisa Castledine, Cook Islands activist and spokesperson for the Ocean Ancestors collective, says.

“Seabed mining will lead to the destruction of our home environments and put our Indigenous rights, cultural ways of living, and wellbeing at risk.”