French Polynesia objects to an American seabed mining plan made without its input

The government of French Polynesia plans to challenge an American startup’s proposal to explore the waters just beyond its maritime borders for seabed mining.

“We were approached, but we were not consulted,” Moetai Brotherson, the territory’s president, told Grist. “We are not remaining passive while industrial activities are proposed immediately next to ecosystems that French Polynesia has chosen to protect.”

As Grist reported last week, a Bay Area investor wants the Trump administration’s approval to explore seabed mining in international waters entirely surrounded by the maritime borders of the Cook Islands, Kiribati, and French Polynesia. The company, American Deep Sea Minerals, has a permit application pending before U.S. regulators and hopes to extract minerals essential to the production of batteries and military technologies. It is one of at least a dozen applications under consideration as President Trump races to make the United States a leader in critical mineral mining.

Negotiators from dozens of countries are meeting this month in Jamaica at the headquarters of the International Seabed Authority, where they are debating the minutiae of a regulatory framework that’s been in progress for more than a decade. Last year, the Trump administration invited companies to apply for permits to mine the high seas directly through the U.S. rather than wait for the adoption of those rules. That has prompted global outrage from countries who say it flouts international law.

“The deep seabed belongs to no single country and no corporation; it belongs to all of us,” Letitia Carvalho, the secretary-general of the regulatory body, said in Jamaica last week. “If we lose sight of this, we risk repeating on the ocean floor the same injustices and destruction we still strive to remedy on land.”

French Polynesia doesn’t have a seat at the authority because it remains a French territory whose Indigenous people haven’t been granted political self-determination. And until re…