Seabed Mining, Health Mining, and Health/Enviro Unity

An unnecessary division between the environmental movement on the one hand, and the health activism movement on the other, limits the effectiveness of both.

The health activism movement comprises the health freedom community, the MAHA movement, the activists striving to break the grip of Big Pharma, Big Ag, Big Food and Big Medicine over healthcare, and to all who have for so long upheld natural and holistic medicine as an alternative to reigning industrial and reductionistic paradigms.

Under the leadership of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., this movement was instrumental in getting Donald Trump elected, though Kennedy is having a significant influence on healthcare policy. However, in other areas the Trump administration is implementing policies, especially environmental policies, that contradict the MAHA mission.

To fulfill the promise of making America healthy again, people in the movement are going to have to mobilize on environmental issues too. We will never be healthy on a sick planet.

Can your liver be healthy if the rest of your body is deteriorating? Not for long. That is why the slogan “Make America Healthy Again” limits the movement’s success. It cannot be just about America (although, as the sickest nation on earth, that’s a good starting point). As with the body, so with the world. If one organ sickens, all eventually sicken. The health of America’s people cannot be separated from the health of all the world’s people, nor from the health of society as a whole, nor from the health of the rest of life on earth.

This in fact is the real meaning of holistic health. Holistic health starts by considering the whole body as a complex living system, including its own cells and its internal microbiome; then it extends further to include what one might call its exobiome: the life outside the body, human and otherwise: social life, civic life, biology, and ecology.

The Trump administration’s announced recently that it would expedite commercial mining of the deep ocean floor. An NOAA statement described polymetallic nodules just sitting on the ocean floor “waiting to be scooped up.”

Well, that’s not an accurate description of seabed mining. To fully appreciate its destructive potential, one must understand the ocean as a complex interconnected system, a living being with its own physiology. The sea floor isn’t a dead expanse of rocks and sand. It is fully alive, a dense web of life, and a crucial organ of the whole ocean.

The seabed mud is alive with microbes and crawling, swimming, and burrowing organisms. They are the foundation of biochemical flows that regulate phosphorus, nitrogen, carbon, and sulfur in the ocean. Phosphorus recycling in particular is one of the most important functions of the living seabed, because the entire ocean ecosystem depends on phosphorus. Without it, the ocean will slowly starve.

When mining companies “scoop up” the polymetallic nodules with heavy equipment, they not only destroy these ecosystems directly, but also stir up enormous sediment plumes. These can drift for miles, suffocating marine life, blocking filter-feeding organisms and deoxygenating water by feeding bacterial decomposition of the sediments. Furthermore, many seabed muds are full of oxygen-hungry chemicals like hydrogen sulfide and ammonia. As soon as they are stirred up, they bind with free oxygen in the water and make it unavailable for fish and other animals. Whereas left undisturbed, the nodules actually produce oxygen, dubbed “dark oxygen” because it is not created by photosynthetic organisms but by electrochemical (and maybe biochemical) processes in the nodules themselves. This phenomenon was discovered in the Pacific Clarion-Clipperton Zone—a prime target for seabed mining.

Seabed polymetallic nodules are curious objects. They form over millions of years, starting with a “seed” – an object from above like a shell fragment or a shark’s tooth. Then metals precipitated from the seawater or from sediment pore water accrue onto the seed, building up layer after layer of iron, manganese, cobalt, nickel, copper, and rare earths. They are like black pearls growing in the abyss.

Like a tree though, which is a living layer encasing the heartwood, the nodules are not just dead matter. They are alive. The bacteria covering their surface help to precipitate metals out of the seawater in the first place. Other organisms anchor themselves to the nodules, which are often the only hard objects in the deeps. They are habitat for fish larva, sponges, sea anemones, and other creatures. Not only are the nodules in some sense alive, they are part of a web of life. I spoke with a scientist today who is knowledgeable about the matter, who told me that they found a species of octopus that lays its eggs only on these nodules, and then hangs around the nodule guarding the eggs.

Who knows what other functions these living beings serve? Who knows their role in ocean physiology, balancing trace minerals, cycling nutrients, anchoring a whole ecosystem?

Because seabed minerals are distributed over vast areas, mining means vast destruction of this crucial organ of the ocean. There is no direct analog to the human body, but we might look at it as sort of a skin. What would happen if someone gouged out huge swaths of your skin?

Once the ocean floor is disturbed, it does not quickly heal. Scars from a test mining operation conducted in 1979 are still visible today, along with serious ecological impacts. And of course, the nodules take millions of years to regrow. A clear-cut old growth forest takes a thousand years to regenerate, if it ever regenerates at all. The ocean floor takes millions.

Ok, that’s too bad for the ocean, but will anything bad happen to us? Should we sacrifice access to abundant, necessary minerals for the sake of the octopuses, the fathead sculpin, and the faceless cusk-eel?

Setting aside for now the assumption that seabed minerals are ‘necessary’ (for what?), which depends on a certain vision of human progress, the question of whether ecosystem destruction will harm human beings already comes from a serious misunderstanding of the relationship between human beings and the rest of life. It is only from a premise of separation that one can even ask such a question. One who understands that we are part of life and life is part of us knows that to harm life is inevitably to harm ourselves.

Let me tell you what I think will happen if we continue down the path of ocean destruction, adding seabed mining to plastic pollution, coastal development, agricultural runoff, toxic and radioactive chemical pollution, mangrove swamp draining, overfishing, and so on. No, humanity won’t perish, but what will happen is nearly as sad. The ocean will collapse and become inhospitable to most of its higher life forms, including human beings. Analogously to the forests of eastern North America, which are now unfriendly to humans as they are riddled with poison ivy and ticks, the result of two or three centuries of repeated clearcutting, apex predator extermination, and so on, the ocean will collapse into simpler ecosystems rife with jellyfish, toxic algae, and harmful chemicals. Today we take it for granted that we can enter the ocean to bathe or surf, just as, when I was a child, we took for granted laying out in a grassy meadow to watch the clouds or sitting under a tree in the woods. Neither I nor any of my friends ever got a tick, and poison ivy was a rate sight. I don’t know the direct causal chains that led to the explosion of these noxious species, but that it will happen through one means or another is predictable from the basic principle of interconnection, the inseparability of human and nature, self and the world. When we other nature, nature others us.

It is not so simple as, “If the rainforest dies, we will die,” or “If the ocean dies, we will die,” or “If the faceless cusk-eel goes extinct, then so will we.” Few believe such warnings anymore after forty years of global warming alarmism. Beside, something crucial, something sacred even, is at stake beyond our own survival.

Techno-optimists like Julian Simon, Bjorn Lundborg, Indur Goklani, and Matt Ridley argue somewhat convincingly that technology decouples human prosperity, not to mention survival, from ecological health. Technology, they believe, will replace ecosystem services. This substitutionist optimism points us toward a future which I call the ‘concrete world,’ in which GDP (“prosperity”) continues to rise even as earth has become one gigantic strip mine / waste dump / parking lot, where machines maintain a breathable atmosphere, where precision fermentation factories, animal cell culturing factories, and robotified hydroponics farms produce our food, while we are entertained by VR simulations of all the life we have destroyed. Who needs real birdsong when we have high-fidelity recordings or AI simulations of it at the touch of a button?

Are we OK with an ocean without whales, turtles, dolphins, tuna, octopuses, sharks, seals, and the rest of its fecund life, so long as we humans can survive and “prosper”?

History has born out the arguments of the substitutionists. By conventional measures, we are more prosperous now than ever before, despite worldwide ecosystem collapse. We may have ten percent of the whales we had in 1500, less than half the fish biomass, half the mangroves, about half the rain forests, and so on, but we have many times the GDP. The Tasmanian wolf, the red gazelle, and the passenger pigeon may be extinct, we may be losing thousands of insect species every year, but at least now we have beard glitter kits, avocado-shaped pool floats, pet perfume, and glow-in-the-dark toilet paper to make up for it. We can no longer drink from our brooks and streams, as humans have from time immemorial, but have all kinds of new water filtration and structuring technologies. We’re doing just fine. Or so the logic goes.

In fact, the depletion of the world and life outside us corresponds to a depletion of the life within and among us also, a hollowing of humanity’s civic and psychic core. Rampant addiction, depression, chronic illness, suicide, domestic violence, and all manner of civil and individual ailments may not admit to an obvious, direct causal link to ecocide, but at the very least all arise from the same field: the story of separation that alienates us from nature, from each other, from our own bodies, and the wounded parts of our psyches. The mindset and systems that generate ecocide also generate our own illnesses.

The close link between human and environmental health puts a limit on what the MAHA movement can accomplish if it does not embrace both. MAHA is oriented strongly toward holistic medicine. Because holistic medicine recognizes the link between individual, social, and environmental health, it resists compartmentalization. Demineralized soil, pesticide residues in food, contaminated groundwater, electromagnetic pollution, and heavy metals in fish and other foods are environmental and health issues. These are more than incidental connections; they illustrate a general principle that most MAHA activists understand intuitively. I know a lot of the leading voices in he MAHA movement, and I can tell you that every single one of them is also a proponent of (or sympathetic to) organic and regenerative agriculture, forest and wetlands conservation, marine preserves, whale conservation, sea turtle conservation, and honoring and protecting the indigenous stewards of earth’s wild places. This overlap extends all the way to the movement’s champion, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who, though best known as a vaccine safety advocate, spent most of his career as an environmental organizer and attorney who litigated extensively on behalf of indigenous people in North and South America.

By repudiating Kennedy and siding with the establishment on issues of medical freedom, censorship, Covid policies, and so on, the environmental movement has split itself in two. I was on the scene as Kennedy’s advisor and speechwriter during his presidential campaign—the big environmental NGOs and leading activists wanted nothing to do with us. Sometimes they would privately express sympathy for our cause, but “I cannot be associated with him publicly.”

That is ironic, because as far as I know, no Cabinet-level official in history has had stronger pro-environment views than Kennedy. At a recent conference in Charlotte, NC, Kennedy wowed a gathering that included top environmental NGO officials and scientists with his understanding and sympathy for some of their key concerns. Unfortunately, Kennedy heads Health and Human Services, not the EPA, the Department of the Interior, the Bureau of Land Management, or the USDA. Yet he has power to influence policies around glyphosate and other pesticides, microplastics, toxic chemicals in food and water, and many other issues that straddle the boundary between health and environment.

Just as I urge health activists to mobilize on behalf of the environment, I would also urge environmentalists to take a close hard look at their antipathy, or at least ambivalence, about the health freedom movement. There is little difference between mining, petroleum, logging, and chemical industries on the one hand, and pharmaceutical, medical, and food companies on the other. They all influence government, science, academia, and media in similar ways. If anything, Big Pharma is even more masterful and more corrupt than the extractive industries. On a deeper level, extractive industries and conventional allopathic medicine and pharmacology share a worldview with extractive industries, seeing progress as a matter of the increasing domination of nature. In a way they are all extractive. One mines the earth; the other mines the vitality of the human being; each converts some form of health into money.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. did not suddenly lose his mind when he expanded his work from cleaning up heavy metal pollution in the Hudson River to cleaning it up in the human body. Modernity visits equivalent damage upon earth and sea, body and mind. The healing of all of them go together as well.