Groups Sue to Halt Seabed-Mining lease
A coalition of environmentalists and community advocates sued the federal government Tuesday in an effort to halt the first-ever commercial sale of deep sea mining leases in American waters.
The Marine Minerals Administration, which oversees offshore mineral mining, last month announced plans to sell mining leases for 31 million acres of seabed in the Pacific Ocean off American Samoa, in U.S. territorial waters.
The lawsuit challenges a finding by the National Marine Fisheries Service that mining “is not likely to adversely affect” species protected by the Endangered Species Act. That finding greenlit the sale.
Parts of the ocean floor are blanketed by fist-sized nodules that contain valuable minerals including nickel, cobalt, manganese and copper, which are essential to the manufacture of advanced technologies that the United States considers critical for both economic competitiveness and military security.
President Donald Trump has made seabed mining a priority of his administration.
The plaintiffs, Fa’asao Amerika Samoa, a group that advocates for protecting American Samoan culture and natural resources, and Conservation Council for Hawai’i, both represented by the national environmental law group Earthjustice, argued that the government’s determination was “arbitrary and unlawful,” and included no analysis of the effects that mineral exploration, testing, surveying or eventual mining of the leased seabed could have on endangered species, including blue whales and sea turtles.
The suit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Hawaii.
Had the National Marine Fisheries Service considered the effects of eventual mining, the agency would have had to do a full biological opinion with analysis of the potential effects of mining, said Chris Eaton, a senior attorney at Earthjustice. That analysis, Eaton said, would also have considered measures to offset the effects of mining on wildlife and the environment.
The U.S. government is “rushing ahead with this without actually paying attention to any of the effects,” Eaton said. The plaintiffs asked the court to vacate the finding by the fisheries service, saying it violated aspects of the Endangered Species Act.
The National Marine Fisheries Service, which is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, declined to comment on the filing Tuesday. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, whose department oversees NOAA and who is also a defendant in the lawsuit, did not respond to a request for comment.
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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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