Jasmine Monroe, a young Inupiaq and Yupik woman living in the village of Elim on Alaska’s Bering Strait, learned via a government website that industrial seabed mining leases were being considered for the ocean that provides beluga, walrus, seals, and whales to her community. A 30-day public comment period was launched by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. No one made a prior call. No one came to visit. The clock began to run when the comment period opened. “It just feels like the system is set up for failure for us,” she replied. It’s difficult to disagree.
Under the proposed plan, deep-sea mining exploration would be permitted on more than 113 million acres of waters off Alaska, an area larger than California. It is a part of a larger trend in American Samoa, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands, where comparable information requests have been submitted, leases have been floated, and communities have received little to no notice. Resource colonialism is the term used by indigenous leaders in the Pacific territories to characterize the strategy. Here, that term is really working. It’s not a rhetorical device. It outlines a system where extraction is carried out, profits are distributed to distant shareholders and the federal treasury, and the communities that bear the ecological and cultural costs receive no compensation. not employment. Not royalties. not a place at the decision-making table.
This arrangement’s legal mechanics are important to comprehend because they are not coincidental. The federal government is entitled to the profits from seabed leases in the U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone under the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act. Although they are not perfect, states do have some revenue-sharing arrangements for offshore oil and gas. There is nothing in territories. The Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, and American Samoa do not automatically claim corporate taxes or royalties from mining in their neighboring waters. Washington receives the funds. The unstable deep-sea ecosystems that took millennia to form, the disturbed fisheries, and the sediment plumes remain local.
The Trump administration’s portrayal of all of this as an economic recovery for rural and isolated Americans is particularly ironic. The communities most impacted by these proposals—Pacific island territories and coastal Alaska villages—voted in large numbers for a candidate who pledged to fight for places and workers left behind. Instead, what they’re getting is strikingly similar to what they already had: an extractive proposal designed to benefit corporate balance sheets in cities none of these residents will ever visit, skilled rotating crews on specialized ships, and automated offshore operations. Similar to offshore oil, deep-sea mining requires a lot of capital and is purposefully made to use as little local labor as possible. The current proposals lack the economic multiplier effect that communities require, such as supply chains, processing, and steady long-term employment. It might never come to pass.
The total lack of fiscal leverage is what makes the situation in the U.S. territories particularly dire. With their narrowly concentrated economies—tourism, fishing, and military spending—the Northern Mariana Islands, Guam, and American Samoa have little power to determine their own tax rates or reallocate federal funds to regional priorities. Unlike states, territories have no legal claim to offshore revenues, so any royalties from mining operations near their coastlines go straight to the U.S. Treasury. They take on the risk. They are not entitled to the prize. This arrangement might simply be the result of bureaucratic inertia—laws that were created for different situations but were never updated to take this one into consideration. However, that justification does not lessen its impact on those who live with it.
The risks to the environment are not hypothetical. Researchers investigating deep-sea mining operations have discovered that sediment plumes from extraction travel hundreds of miles, decreasing the amount of food available to deep-ocean species and upsetting habitats that might take thousands of years to recover. The proposed Alaskan lease areas include areas close to the Aleutians that are already off-limits to bottom trawling due to ecological sensitivity, including habitat for species that support regional food security and nurseries for commercially significant fish. The current regulatory process is moving too quickly to adequately address the questions raised by opening those same areas to seabed mining, which operates at far greater disturbance scales than trawling.
As this develops, it seems as though the dialogue taking place in Washington is very different from that taking place in Elim, Saipan, or Pago Pago. The federal government is discussing national competitiveness and vital mineral supply chains. The individuals whose oceans are being discussed are discussing their diets and identities. The two discussions must take place in the same space. They’re not even in the same building at the moment.
