By Gregorie Michael Towai
Independent Researcher, CNMI/Refaluwasch Cultural Advocate
THE recent Grist article, “What changed for deep-sea mining in 2025? Everything,” makes one thing unmistakably clear: deep-sea mining is not advancing because the science is settled or because communities consent — it is advancing because power has decided it will.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the statements made by Oliver Gunasekara, CEO of Impossible Metals, whose remarks in the Grist story — and echoed again in his NMI News Service interview — reveal a startling detachment from the lived realities of Indigenous and island communities in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands.
In Grist, Gunasekara dismisses calls from CNMI leaders, Guam officials, and community members for more time to respond to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s Request for Information. “I think 60 days should be sufficient,” he says. “You’re talking about writing a document, giving input.” He then goes further, framing opposition as a strategy by NGOs “to try and delay.”
This statement alone should alarm anyone who believes in meaningful public participation.
For CNMI residents, this is not “writing a document.” This is learning, often for the first time, that millions of acres of ocean surrounding our islands are being considered for industrial extraction. It is understanding unfamiliar technologies, deciphering federal regulatory language, translating implications for elders, fishers, families, and future generations, and doing so during the holidays, while juggling work, caregiving, and economic strain.
To wave this away as a paperwork exercise is not ignorance, it is dismissal.
Gunasekara’s posture reflects a broader industry mindset on display throughout the Grist article: that Pacific communities are obstacles to be managed, not nations and peoples with inherent authority over their ocean. His framing assumes that timelines convenient for investors and federal agencies should automatically be sufficient for communities that have been deliberately excluded from early decision-making.
This is not engagement. It is procedural theater.
Equally troubling in the Grist piece is Gunasekara’s assertion that Indigenous spiritual and cultural connections to the ocean have “died down” because Pacific communities are largely Christian. This claim is not only historically false — it is deeply offensive. Christianity did not erase Indigenous cosmologies; it was imposed alongside colonial governance, militarization, and land dispossession. Pacific peoples did not abandon their relationships to the ocean when churches arrived. Those relationships continue through fishing practices, navigation traditions, ancestral knowledge, and obligations to protect what sustains life.
To suggest otherwise is to recycle one of colonialism’s oldest justifications: that once Indigenous people adapt, convert, or modernize, their claims to land and sea somehow weaken.
The Grist article rightly highlights Indigenous opposition across Hawaiʻi, the Cook Islands, American Samoa, and the CNMI. Yet Gunasekara’s response to this opposition is not humility or caution — it is impatience. He invokes a “national emergency,” China’s control of minerals, and global demand as reasons why communities should simply keep up. But urgency has always been the language of extraction. It is how consent is bypassed and harm is reframed as necessity.
His promise of a voluntary 1% profit share does little to change this reality. There is no requirement for consent, no guaranteed revenue sharing, and no local control. Any federal royalties would flow to a Congress where territories have no vote. This is not partnership — it is extraction with public relations attached.
What the Grist story ultimately exposes, perhaps unintentionally, is that deep-sea mining is proceeding on the assumption that Pacific peoples will eventually tire, miss deadlines, or be overridden. Sixty days is deemed “enough” not because it is adequate, but because it is convenient.
But communities are not delaying justice. We are demanding it.
If Impossible Metals and its peers were serious about respect, they would not minimize community concerns, mischaracterize NGOs, or treat consultation as a hurdle to clear quickly. They would recognize that oceans are not empty spaces, that cultures do not disappear with conversion, and that meaningful engagement cannot be rushed to meet investor timelines.
The CNMI is not a box to check in a federal process.
Our ocean is not a delay tactic.
And 60 days will never be sufficient to decide the fate of something that has sustained us for millennia.
Until communities are treated not as commenters, but as decision-makers, the answer to deep-sea mining remains unchanged: NO!
