In their quest for ecosystems to exploit that have not already been destroyed, industry has turned to the dark depths of the ocean. Lumps of metal precipitates that are purer than what has been mined on land have been known for over a century, but the cost of getting the metal has always been greater than its worth. Now that government is willing to pay the expense, which is still more than the metal’s worth, companies are making plans to mine the depths of the sea.

Sunlight reaches only a fraction of the distance to the bottom of the ocean, and at one time it was assumed that no ecosystem can exist without the sun's energy, but there are other energy sources in the depths, so there are other entire ecosystems, usually with unique inhabitants. Ocean mining will destroy those ecosystems, possibly forever, just as they're being discovered.

Trawlers have dragged the ocean floor and when oceanographers looked decades later to see how the benthic ecosystem bounced back, they saw that it hadn’t. It was a dead zone and the trawler tracks were still visible, often looking like gigantic claw marks.

It seems stupid to spend so many tax dollars to destroy entire ecosystems and every living creature in them for metals that are still worth less than it costs to get them. The comment will always be, "But we need that material! People come first." Aside from the morality of causing that much death, whether you attribute those unique life forms to evolution or God, there is another source of those same metals: junkyards and landfills. Without the right to repair, a lot of valuable commodities are thrown away and more are needed for replacement devices. The trashed devices are a source of already-refined metals—and with a right to repair, what you buy will last longer, so less metal and other materials will be needed for replacements.

On this episode of Eco-Logic, we discuss what deep sea mining will do to the oxygen of Earth, half of which is supplied by the world's ocean—even some produced without sunlight, a new discovery that further indicates why we need more research before even thinking of deep-sea mining.

Our guests this week are David Helvarg, founder of the ocean-protection organization Blue Frontier, author of a book by the same name and Arlo Hemphill, Greenpeace's Project Lead for Ocean Sanctuaries and Stop Deep Sea Mining and an editor of Greenpeace's report “Deep Deception”.

We open the show with news: workers and elected officials opposing stoppage of fully-permitted offshore wind energy, and a natural means of improving water retention in dry ares.

We lucked out once again— the song “Deep Sea Mining!? Leave My Down Below Alone!” could have been written by Seas at Risk for this show.

Tune in on radio or internet to get more details.

And
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