Aqua/geopolitical conjuncture and disjuncture: invasion, resources, and mining the deep dark sea

ABSTRACT

In this article, I address the omission of the ocean or the aqua in geo-political scholarship and public debate. My argument is motivated by the public descriptions of Putin’s invasion and war in Ukraine and the lack of attention to the oceanic geopolitics of deep sea mining. Descriptions of Putin’s attack reproduce old terrestrial arguments about the role of geography in figuring national identity and destiny. On the contrary, I posit that the war in Ukraine is focused on capturing control of the oceanic circulation of resources. Deep sea mining is framed as a green response to defossilization of energy and the economy, and centres on mining minerals on the sea floor for the ‘EV revolution’. I argue that these two events or crises can be understood through a conjunctural framework. However, this involves reworking cultural studies’ usual understanding of conjunctural analysis. Following the work of Ben Highmore and others, this means deepening the geopolitical, historical and material scales involved in the disjunctures that hold together simultaneously yet separately the invasion of Ukraine and the legal framing of mining the deep seas through the UN Convention of the Law of the Seas (UNCLOS) and the International Seabed Authority (ISA). Such an analysis involves narrating the clashing of what Timothy Clarke calls the derangement of temporal scales of the Anthropocene if we are to figure ‘what happening now’.

KEYWORDS:

• Ukraine
• deep sea mining
• geopolitics
• terrestrial and oceanic
• scales
• UN Convention of the Law of the Seas

It’s spring 2022 in the southern hemisphere, and in Australia La Niña keeps pounding the Eastern states. The forecast is of an unprecedented third consecutive La Niña event before the end of the year. Massive floods have displaced thousands, damaged hundreds of farms, and rendered supermarket vegetable aisles bare: the cost of an iceberg lettuce reached AUD$10. On the other side of the southern hemisphere, La Niña is causing deep droughts, extreme heat and threatening the soy monoculture in Argentina upon which much of the world relies. Around the world, it’s either floods or drought along with extreme heat and fires. In Pakistan, more than 30 million have been affected by floods. And everywhere it seems, the price of fuel is soaring.¹

We think we know the reason for the latter even as we forget the real cost of carbon-based fuel. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has put a chokehold on the circulation of resources – oil, grain, fertilizer. Beyond the endless media images of petrol pumps, we know that fuel fuels more than cars.

The public descriptions of Putin’s landgrabs are drenched in a centuries-long tradition of terrestrial geopolitical thinking. They have revived and strengthened a view of the world as geo – the land under the feet of soldiers and tanks, the land of ancestors and the guarantor of futures. Terrestrial-centred thinking and imaginaries are not the sole preserve of geopolitics. Humans are in the main landlubbers. But a fixation on land in geopolitics has been and remains dangerous. As it twists our very sense of the earth, and disregards that 70 percent is ocean, it obscures much needed attention to the aqua. This matters deeply on several scales: land-based fossil fuels are recreating the oceanic and terrestrial environment. When we speak of climate change, we tend to ignore that what is happening in the oceans is crucial to the very being of the more-than-human. Ocean-warming affects whole species of fish and marine mammals. Just as farmers feel global warming in their fields and in their bones, so do fishers whose traditional prey are moving south or north depending on the hemisphere, desperate to get away from the overly warm waters. The ocean collects the largest amount of solar heat, which then re-enters the Earth system causing melting glaciers, rising water, ‘Heat energy in the ocean can warm the planet for decades after it was absorbed’ (Lindsey and Dahlman 2020). The temporality of change is beyond us: even if the impossible were to happen that the world stopped burning fossil fuels, our past will appear in the future.

Out of sight, currently there is a race of ocean-grabbing to mine the bottom of the sea. Couched in concern for the environment, companies are eager to exploit the mineral resources for the defossilization of the economy which will rely on batteries, and the minerals and metals they require – copper, cobalt, nickel, and manganese. The deep ocean has these in abundance, much more than the whole of the terrestrial earth.

Conjunctures, disjunctures, derangements of scale

In this article, I attempt to understand how these events do and do not fit together. Examining two geopolitics, two splintered conjunctures or disjunctures, going on at the same time, I hope to extend understanding of the ‘derangement of scales’ (Clarke 2012) that we (a more-than-human ‘we’) are living with. I make no causal argument that Putin’s landgrabs precipitated the oceanic ones. What is needed is a much more difficult and delicate form of analysis – one that can highlight the interaction among different forms of tensions: political, historical, legal, geographical, and oceanic.

Like many in cultural studies, conjunctural analysis has been my preferred mode to think about what’s going on. As we know:

A conjuncture is a description of a social formation as fractured and conflictual, along multiple axes, planes, and scales, constantly in search of temporary balance or structural stabilities through a variety of practice and processes of struggle and negotiation … Yet a conjuncture has to be constructed, narrated, fabricated. (Grossberg 2010, pp. 40–41)

This is a considerable challenge: to understand, bring together, force apart, trace and narrate what is going on across and in so many different realms. John Clarke specifies the ‘multiple temporalities’ that conjunctural description attempts to capture; that the conjuncture is a ‘moment of condensation: an accumulation of tendencies, forces, antagonisms and contradictions’ (Clarke 2010, p. 341). To Clarke’s multiple and accumulated temporalities, Ben Highmore highlights that ‘the time of a tree … is not the time of a piece of coal, which is the result of archaic photosynthesis’ (2021, p. 33).

The problematic that I seek to address is massive but can be described fairly simply: ‘how do we articulate and analyse the condition of living across multiple rates of change?’ (Highmore 2021, 42). This focus is acutely sensitive to times and slippage of events – their constellations and disjunctions. The political stakes of this analysis reveal forcefully the imbrication of the mundane and the worldly, of the everyday practices of people and the machinations of governments and corporation. For instance, Highmore’s analysis of Thatcher’s miners’ strike brings the ideological and the geological together, interacting mutually:

The social geology of different forms of energy (the flexible rerouting of global oil and gas supplies, for instance, compared with the defined routes of coal supplies) connect to different class politics (pipeline sabotage and community demonstrations versus large-scale labour disputes). (2021, pp. 34–35)

To flag where I am going: First, I turn to the genealogy of geopolitical thinking, which continues to inform many popular descriptions of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Dating from the nineteenth century, this form of geopolitics melded statecraft with the leading tenet that land and geography were the uniting forces of national identity. Second, I frame Putin’s central tactic in the invasion and war in Ukraine as an attempt to strangle the oceanic circulation of resources – oil, grain, and nitrogen-based fertilizer, which depends on natural gas. By blocking the export of these resources, Russia aims to undermine Western sanctions by threatening the availability of energy in the West and of food security in the Global south. Third, I turn to the ocean and in particular to the UN Convention of the Law of the Seas. UNCLOS emerged from the geopolitics of post WWII and in the midst of the Cold War. In 1994 the International Seabed Authority (ISA) was created by UNCLOS to manage marine resources and deep-sea mining in the space beyond national jurisdictions in the name of ‘the Common Heritage of Mankind’ (Taylor 2014) The realities of mining unseen, mostly unknown entities propel us into a new aqua/geopolitics that coalesce in the present disjuncture of the Anthropocene.

As is clear, my argument treads a necessarily twisted path. As Highmore (2021) puts it, the ‘untamed coincidence of materials’ often don’t quite fit together, are not on the same plane, in the same place, and do not coalesce into some seamless picture. And, as I will argue along with John Childs (2020), we need a four-dimensional description, one that takes seriously the different temporalities and timelines, the legal and historical ordering, and the unknown materialities, physicality and histories of the geo and the aqua. All these elements and more constitute a clashing ‘derangement of scales’ (Clarke 2012).

Mining the ocean and bombing Ukraine are two very different events. How to think them together is mind boggling. But, as Timothy Clarke argues in the case of climate change, we may need to confront the excruciating exigency of ‘having to think “everything at once”’. This brings with it ‘the overall force of an implosion of scales, implicating seemingly trivial or small actions with enormous stakes while intellectual boundaries and lines of demarcation fold in upon each other’ (Clarke 2012, p. 152). As an example, he tersely offers the ‘situation in which it is not irrational to connect a patio heater in London immediately with the slow inundation of Tuvalu in the Pacific’ (2012, p. 154).

This is as instance of ‘derangements of scale’ (Clarke 2012), where cartographic scale no longer holds the world together, and ‘telling the time’ outside of usual linear temporal frames reveals the twisted interplay of the environment, politics and everyday life. In John Clarke’s terms, we need to consider ‘the profound tensions emerging between the apparent urgency of planetary time in the face of ecological disaster and the foot-draggingly slow time of “business as usual” in the dominant political and economic regimes’ (Clarke 2019, p. 137). As I flagged above, the long temporality of fossil fuels – their materiality and their effects – belittles the time of human action. For instance, in 2017 the then Treasurer, Scott Morrison, now former Prime Minister of Australia, brought a lump of Australian coal into Question Time of the Australian Parliament to mock his opponents, the Labor Party and their plans for renewable resources of energy. South Australia had suffered a state-wide electricity black-out in the summer of 2016 because while it has been at the forefront of wind and solar energy, it didn’t have batteries big enough to store the excess power for moments of high usage. In 2017 Elon Musk built what was the world’s largest lithium-ion battery in the world in a remote part of the state. Notwithstanding this development the then Prime Minister thought it was a great joke to lovingly handle the lump of coal telling his opposition not to be scared of it. The joke was on him. Australian black coal is between 299 and 145 million years old; Morrison lasted two government lifecycles and his views towards fossil fuels and climate change may lock out his party from power for another political generation – or two.²

Citing Reinhart Koselleck, Andreas Folkers writes that different tempo-material strata are defined by the ‘simultaneity of the unsimultaneous’. One of the urgent tasks that preoccupies me (and many others) is how to figure (out) radically dissimilar deranged scales in an understanding of what is going on now. As I flagged, this proposes a different order of politics and cultural analysis.

In no particular order, here are some of the things going on now that illustrate the different temporalities and effects of two geopolitical conjunctures occurring simultaneously: Russia’s war in Ukraine and deep-sea mining.

Life on the ocean floor moves at a glacial pace. Sediment accumulates at a rate of 1 millimeter every millennium. With such a slow rate of growth, areas disturbed by deep-sea mining would be unlikely to recover on a reasonable timescale. (Gallagher 2019)

Now and in the future, heavy metals will be in our groundwater and soil. We’re [Ukraine] an agricultural country, and when it’s not an active war, I don’t know how we’re going to rebuild anything because it’s going to be polluted. (Evgenia Zasiadko cited in McCarthy 2022)

Beneath the human and socioeconomic catastrophe is an evolving array of environmental disasters that will afflict Ukraine’s ecosystems for generations to come. (Stakhiv 2022)

The local chief of President Putin’s ruling party, Mikhail Shuvalov, promised islanders in the far-eastern Sakhalin island 5 kg of flounder, pollock and salmon in exchange for sending their men to war. [They] are not ethnic Slavs. President Putin has drawn disproportionately on non-Slavic groups to fight in Ukraine. (Tucker 2022)

The [nodule] we have just put on display formed around the tooth of a megalodon, a species of giant shark that became extinct more than 3 m years ago. That shows how long a nodule takes to grow on the seabed – about a centimetre every million years. … [Mining] will also produce sediment plumes which will disrupt ecological function and behavioural ecology of deep-ocean species, smothering fundamental ecological processes over vast areas … Populations could take centuries to recover. (McKie 2021)

Terrestrial geopolitics

To step back, I start by considering the discipline of geopolitics in its changing forms. Many, if not most, of the descriptions of the Russian invasion of Ukraine are framed within a classic tale of the impact of geography on national identity – geography as destiny. A former Australian diplomat, David Livingstone notes that ‘Politics sometimes defies geography, but rarely for long’ (Livingstone 2022). In the Wall Street Journal, David Knight Legg, an adviser to investment and political-risk firms, writes:

Much of the current analysis of Russia’s war on Ukraine accepts at face value Moscow’s stated premises for the invasion. Vladimir Putin claimed from the beginning that his special military action was a determined attempt to reunite the old Russo-Ukrainian territorial and ethnic communities under his rule. (2022)

What is called the ‘realist’ or ‘classical’ school of geopolitics, a view now most often repeated in journalism, would frame Putin’s bombing of the Ukraine as central to his vision of the unification of the Rus and their ancient vast territory. In another instance, an Indian journalist, Arun Anand, in an article entitled ‘The Russia-Ukraine War is a Revenge of Geography’ cites James H. Billington, an advisor to Ronald Reagan on Soviet Russia: ‘geography and not history has dominated Russian thinking’. In Billington’s argument, the materiality of the land was central: ‘Harsh seasonal cycles, a few, distant rivers, and sparse patterns of rainfall and soil fertility controlled the lives of the ordinary peasant’ (cited in Anand, 2022). Anand’s title explicitly refers to an article by Robert D. Kaplan in Foreign Policy entitled ‘The Revenge of Geography’ (2009). Kaplan is a highly prolific writer on international affairs but not greatly respected by some geographers and geopolitics scholars who often refer to him as a travel writer (Dalby 2020). In this piece, Kaplan writes that ‘the central question in foreign affairs: Who can do what to whom? And of all the unsavoury truths in which realism is rooted, the bluntest, most uncomfortable, and most deterministic of all is geography’ (Kaplan 2009, pp. 99–100).

Kaplan claims that ‘geography is the father of modern geopolitics’ According to Werner Cahnman (and several others) it was the German geographer Karl Haushofer who defined geopolitics in 1928. Cahnman argues that it was ‘Friedrich Ratzel’s grandfathership’ in 1903 who helped elevate ‘Geopolitics, to the dignity of a pivotal science of statecraft’ (1943, p. 55). It was Ratzel who formulated the concept of Lebensraum, which would become racialized and central to Socialist Nationalism’s and Hitler’s actions. According to Woodruff Smith ‘Lebensraum became a catchword of conservative politics in the 1920s as it was used to attack the Versailles Treaty for stealing living-space from the German Volk’ (1980, p. 55). The father-figure for Kaplan is Sir Halford J. Mackinder who wrote ‘The Geographical Pivot of History’. Kaplan resumes Mackinder’s work as ‘the archetype of the geographical discipline’ where ‘Man and not nature initiates, but nature in large measure controls’ (2004). Kaplan extrapolates that as ‘the ultimate land-based empire, with few natural barriers against invasion, Russia would know forevermore what it was like to be brutally conquered. As a result, it would become perennially obsessed with expanding and holding territory’ (2009, p. 99).

Charles Clover³ follows through on Mackinder’s central tenet, which was his vision of ‘Heartland’. Eurasia, or Heartland, was the ‘geographical pivot’. Mackinder, writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, was convinced that the geographical weight of Russia when combined of both its European and Asian parts would control power in the world. Of course, it was to be Germany that became that Heartland in the two World Wars. But as Clover writes in his book Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia’s New Nationalism (2022), Mackinder’s idea was taken up by a Russian hardliner Alexander Dugin⁴ in his book, The Foundations of Geopolitics (1997), which made Mackinder’s claim into the mantra of the right-wing: ‘The Eurasian Empire will be constructed on the fundamental principle of the common enemy: the rejection of Atlanticism, the strategic control of the U.S.A., and the refusal to allow liberal values to dominate us’ (cited in Clover 2022). Clover argues that Dugin built on Mackinder’s belief in geographical determinism: ‘the all but impregnable … land fortress, the “Heartland” of Eurasia’ (Clover 2022).⁵

As a fan of Cold War thriller fiction, I can envision the cover of ‘Heartland – the novel’. As a girl, however I read serious Russian literature, such as the novels by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn about the Gulag. I was haunted by the terror seemingly happening so far away but close in time to the atrocities of the war my father fought and never spoke of, and those of WWI from which my grandfather, a conscripted Canadian atheist in the mud of the trenches, never recovered. But for a cultural studies scholar, the two-dimensional depiction of the Heartland as a monotonous endless vast land of steppes as the stage for Mackinder’s battle between man and nature, is limited. While it seems to highlight the enmeshment of human and land, it is an antagonist rendition that bifurcates the geo from the aqua and ignores the different natures of both.⁶ It also crucially ignores that natural resources are in and of the aqua/geo – animating matter that profoundly shapes history, the present and the future.

Central to my thinking it is important to emphasize that however massive the collective landmass of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine is, 71 percent of the planet is ocean. To quickly underline its importance through some statistics. It is estimated that 3.5 billion people rely on wild-caught fishing without taking into account that 25 percent of global catch goes into the production of fishmeal for aquaculture. Forty percent of the world’s population lives within 100 kilometres of the coast. Over 90 percent of all goods are shipped by ocean.

The ocean as a medium of transport is particularly important now. When Russia captured some of Ukraine’s ports on the Black Sea, they effectively cut off supply of nearly a fifth of the world’s nutrient exports. As consumers in the global North complain of the cost of vegetables, in the South famine beckons:

As a result [of the lack of fertilizer], despite having 60 percent of the world’s arable land, almost half the countries in Africa depend on imported wheat from Russia and Ukraine, with 14 African countries getting more than half their wheat from the two warring nations. (Elkin and Gebre 2022)

Russia’s chokehold on key ingredients for fertilizer will be more far reaching than even the present interruption of grain exports, as farmers already severely ration their use, reducing their crop yields in the next several years.

Combined, Russia and Belarus accounted for more than 40% of global exports of potash last year … Additionally, Russia accounted for about 22% of global exports of ammonia, 14% of the world’s urea exports and about 14% of monoammonium phosphate (MAP) – all key kinds of fertilizers. (Polansek and Mano 2022)

The industrialization of agriculture, which many would argue is central to feeding humanity, absolutely relies on chemical and mineral fertilizer. Others would argue that fertilizer-dependence is leading us into a barren future.

Geography, oceans and resources – control of the ocean and ports fundamentally constricts where and to whom resources can go. Feminist geopolitical scholar Vicky Squire asks, ‘If geopolitics is both a form of geography and politics, then what type of politics and what type of geography does this involve?’ (2015, p. 143). And it seems that it is a terrestrial geography even for critical geographers such as Stuart Elden for whom the materiality of the geo frames geopolitics as ‘a politics of the earth’ (Elden 2017, p. 299). While Elden’s remarks are directed at the geography of the Anthropocene, nonetheless ‘the earth’ seems to be without oceans. But one of planks in Putin’s war is dictated by the imperative of Russian access to Ukraine’s ports. Blockading Odesa would sever the Ukrainian economy from global markets (Stavridis 2022). invading Crimea in 2014, Russia has intruded into Ukraine’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), the body of ocean up to 200 miles from the country’s coast that is internationally recognized as its legal territory. Under UNCLOS, Ukraine has 132, 414 sq km of EEZ on the Black Sea compared to Russia’s 67,351. And Russia needs southern, year-long ice-free ports, although with the warming of the Arctic new shipping routes and ports will open in the north – and set off yet more geopolitical battles. In Elizabeth Dunn’s terms, this forges a ‘geopolitics based on the control of circulation rather than the control of territory’. That circulation is primarily still by ocean.

The route from Ukraine’s Black Sea ports is geographically complicated by some of the narrowest straits in the world. It is a map of unbelievable complication involving historic negotiated treaties with Turkey. Before the invasion, 93 percent of grain went via the Black Sea. Odesa and Mykolaiv are still under Ukrainian control, but Russia has planted mines in the nearby waters. In addition, no Western maritime insurance broker will cover cargo ships carrying Russian goods.

Drawing lines on the sea floor

Phillip Steinberg’s argues ‘the ocean is not and never has been a stable surface’ (2018, p. 223). This makes the tasks of drawing lines in it incredibly complicated. Steinberg continues:

in a world of ever more intensive and extensive ocean uses, it is imperative that we recall that everything flows … [as] human’s impacts on the ocean are reshaping future seascapes from the ‘blue revolution’ to the ongoing search for fossil fuels … (2018, p. 223)

Deep-sea mining is the latest articulation of the vaunted ‘blue economy’, whereby the ravages of the geo can be resolved by an oceanic ‘fix’. The conceit of the blue economy has been roundly critiqued (Silver et al. 2015, Voyer et al. 2018). Here I contain my discussion to the ways in which legal instruments brought into possibility the mining of the seas. As Anna Zalik and others argue, the UN Laws of the Sea and the International Seabed Authority formulate the space of the ocean as ‘an extractive frontier’ (Zalik 2018, p. 343). Surabhi Ranganathan makes the key point that the law has reified ‘an extractive imaginary of the ocean floor’ that now shapes the fate of the ocean (2019). This constrains any search for ‘solutions’ to problems of inequality and environmental harm that were to be central to the long conception of the law of the sea.

Conceived in the post WWII period and in to the Cold War, UNCLOS grappled with the radical de-colonization of former British, French, Belgian, Portuguese and American colonies at a time when some 75 new nations emerged. As I’ve argued elsewhere (Probyn 2022), the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) is one of the most radical if deeply uneven legal documents ever produced about the ocean. Phillip Allot’s view from 1992 (a couple of years before UNCLOS was in full force) was that UNCLOS contained ‘a half-formed new structural uniqueness, full of painful ambiguities and exciting possibilities’ (Allott 1992). It tried to envision the ocean as a global commons but became a conduit for enclosing the more-than-human marine environment. Carving the ocean into Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZS) left a checkerboard of large chunks of the ocean and its resources to former imperial powers who had held onto often tiny bits of land in the seas, notably France which possesses the largest EEZ in the world covering 11.7 million km² thanks to its territories in Polynesia and elsewhere. As Elizabeth DeLoughrey argues, UNLOS ushered in

the largest remapping of the planet since the Truman Proclamation which declared the length of a coastal ‘cannon-shot' (200 miles) as sovereign national territory. This created what Maltese Ambassador Arvind Pardo famously labeled a global ‘scramble for the seas' which was based on the expectation of new technologies for extracting strategic seabed minerals like manganese. (2022, p. 147)

In 1994, the International Seabed Authority (ISA) – a 168-member body based in Jamaica – was set up by the United Nations to ensure that the ‘Area’ (beyond the limits of national jurisdiction) and its resources are the ‘Common Heritage of Mankind’. As Prue Taylor explains,

the ISA must ensure the equitable sharing of financial and other benefits arising from activities in the Area, taking into particular account the needs and interests of developing states and others. Promotion of research, transfer of technology to developing states and protection of the marine environment’s ecological balance are all important functions of the ISA (Articles 143–145). (2014)

Since its establishment, the ISA has granted 29 exploration licences for contractors sponsored by national governments to explore mineral wealth at a number of deep-sea locations. But it has yet to formulate regulations to ensure that mining does indeed contribute to the common good of humanity. As Marta Conde et al argue, it is not even clear ‘what exactly the seabed is … [and] who stakeholders are’ (2022, p. 328).

This is in part because of how vast and complicated the oceanic realms are. As Elisabeth Mann Borgese, one of the forces behind the UN Conventions of the Law of the Sea – and one the foremost advocates for an equitable division of the marine resources – argued:

What we do know, however, is that the ocean is a medium different from the earth: so different, in fact, that it forces us to think differently. The medium itself, where everything flows and everything is interconnected forces us to ‘unfocus', to shed our old concepts and paradigms, to ‘refocus' on a new paradigm. (1998, pp. 5–6)

Photographs of the deep seabed depict this different medium and the wonderous creatures that mutually sustain the more-than-human – ‘polychaete worms, crustaceans, sponges, sea cucumbers, starfish, brittlestars, sea urchins and various deep-sea fish, as well as countless microbial species and tiny sediment-dwelling creatures’ (Heffernan 2019). NOAA reports that ‘Scientists estimate that 91 percent of ocean species have yet to be classified, and that more than eighty percent of our ocean is unmapped, unobserved, and unexplored’ (NOAA 2021).

Despite our ignorance, and in a derangement of scales, Electric Vehicles (EVs) are apparently going to save humanity – if elements can be mined from the deep sea in large enough amounts. A World Bank report predicted ‘nearly 500 percent more lithium, cobalt and graphite, alongside 100 percent more nickel and 7 percent more copper are needed to build renewable energy technologies’ (The World Bank 2020). Cobalt is another necessary element in constructing the lithium batteries that drive the EV revolution. It is hard to come by on earth – e.g. terrestrial parts of the planet, or it is heavily tainted by environmental and human abuse. The now defunct deep sea mining Canadian company, Nautilus – one of the first out of the door with its Solwara 1 Project in Papua New Guinea – baldly stated that, ‘socio-economic and socio-cultural issues that are normally associated with terrestrial mining projects are absent … as the majority of Project activities will occur at sea and not be located on occupied land’ (cited in Childs 2020, p. 204). As we will see, this is not quite the case – the seabed is not terra nullius even if no humans live there.

Some 3500–6500 m below the surface of the water, in the total dark of the abyssal plains the surface is apparently covered in what are sometimes described as ‘the potato fields of the deep sea’ (Setsa 2021). These ‘potatoes’ are Polymetallic Manganese Nodules (PMN), extremely rich in rare earth minerals, notably nickel, cobalt, copper and manganese, which reportedly can contain zinc, zirconium, lithium, platinum, titanium and other valuable elements, and contain more manganese, nickel, and cobalt than land-based reserves. But as Susan Reid argues in her intricate refiguring of the interconnected worlds of life in the abyssal, ‘The formation and material relations of nodules exceed their extractivist representations as inanimate, potato-shaped rocks and fungible units rich in mineral wealth’ (2022, p. 76). ‘Nodules are lifeways in progress in the deep time of abyssal worlds’ (Reid 2022, p. 78). In contrast, the CEO of DeepGreen, Gerard Barron, calls them ‘batteries in a rock’ (cited in Dyer 2021). After the demise of Nautilus, DeepGreen is the furthest ahead in the race to mine them. However, it isn’t as easy as ploughing up potatoes. The geophysciality is dauting – and makes extraction expensive:

The nodules would be sucked up in a seawater-sediment slurry by huge undersea machines from as deep as 6,000 metres, passed up to the surface in a giant riser, then separated from the sediment and seawater (which would be pumped back down to the bottom). (Dyer 2021)

Remember that the atmospheric pressure is immense. In another derangement of scales, NASA argues that ‘At the deepest point of the trench (and the deepest point on earth) the pressure is over 8 tons per square inch, or the equivalent of an average-sized woman holding up 48 jumbo jets’ (NASA. Nd).

The geo in the deep aqua really is like nothing on earth. As is oft repeated, ‘We know more about the surface of Mars and the moon than we do of the deep sea’ (Hemphill cited in Lu 2022). There is probably more human junk there than on Mars – and in both realms, there is a lot of it. As Reid recounts,

this deep realm experiences humans at intimate and planetary wide material scales. Slow old currents trace submarine cables, wrecks, and abandoned oil rigs, projecting their paths into waters above. Fossil fuel-related heat, carbon, and plastic wastes mix deep into the ocean’s heart; plastics knot cetacean bellies and settle in sediments. (2022, pp. 69–70)

This is a world of dimensions and scales that strain our imaginations. As mentioned earlier, John Childs reframes the seabed and its entities as four-dimensional. The idea of a ‘bed’ as flat surface so central to mining companies’ plans to send down huge machinery to roll along the floor scooping up nodules is contradicted by the aqua/geo materialities. Childs foregrounds the volumes – or the volumetrics – of the ocean:

[It] defies simple classification as a subsurface phenomenon: on the one hand, the seabed is a site of extraction that is a ‘surface of earth’ below a ‘surface of water’. Yet those ‘surfaces’ are defined amongst other things by their permeability and relationality: sea water moves through the seabed, meets magma from below and then continuously shifts forms between mineral-rich gas and solid deposits as it settles in the water column. (Childs 2020, p. 199)

Childs’ fascinating take on extraction in and from the deep seas highlights the need to think through its spatial and temporal dimensionality. Centrally, he points to how ‘these elements have distributed and shifted senses of agency which are themselves encountered and rendered political by human ordering, in both legal and governance terms’ (2020, p. 199) Childs concludes his argument by underlining that

understanding of the future geopolitics of DSM must be attentive to the ‘geo-’, and the ‘possibilities that matter affords to us’ (Richardson and Weszkalnys 2014, p. 15), whilst remaining always cognisant of the historic and contemporary socio-economic orderings that govern its practices. (Childs 2020, p. 207)

This returns us to the role of UNCLOS in ordering the world. Ranganathan takes us deep within its machinery through her analysis of how UNCLOS creates ‘an extractive imaginary’ (2019). In her argument about how deep sea vents (such as the one pictured in Figure 1) confound UNCLOS and our imagination, Ranganathan writes:

Depending on who is thinking about them, vents are clues to the beginning of life and to solutions to stave off the end of the world through bio and nano-technologies; resources to master the climatologically changing world anew, and homes to some of the worst threats (zoonotic diseases, methane pollution) that can follow in the wake. (2022, p. 41)

Figure 1. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Champagne_vent_white_smokers.jpg#/media/File:Champagne_vent_white_smokers.jpg.

Commenting critically on the how UNCLOS and ISA ‘facilitated the grab of the ocean floor’ (2019, p. 600), Ranganathan reminds us of the contradictory basis of the Law of the Sea:

In the discussions of the 1950s and 1960s, it was taken for granted that extracting seabed resources will be for the benefit of mankind. Redistribution was in fact regarded as only one possible mode by which to spread the benefit; other models assumed … the economic growth catalysed by these new resources was a benefit in itself. (2019, p. 597)

As I have flagged earlier, UNCLOS was forged during a period of deeply vacillating geopolitics. Post WWII, there may have been a quite genuine repulsion to the horrors of war. But equally the ‘victors’ drew up arbitrary geographical divisions, and the Cold War thrived. Former colonies declared independence with little wealth but newly endowed with EEZs and possible resources. From today’s perspective the idea that seabed resources beyond national EEZs should be shared for the ‘Common Heritage of Mankind’ seems extraordinary. But bizarrely it does chime to a certain extent with the arguments that the exploitation of the seabed for ‘green’ minerals and metals will allow for a brave new world of defossilized energy.

Much of the potential mineral wealth lies in the South Pacific in the EEZs of small poor island states. These nations can sponsor companies that want to explore for minerals and thus far Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Tonga, Cook Islands, Nauru and Kiribati have sponsored foreign companies.

Of course, they hope that deep-sea mining might boost faltering economies and offer opportunities for their citizens. Papua New Guinea was the first to put its feet in the water with Nautilus Minerals. Under the rules of ISA, all companies seeking to explore seabed resources have to operate with a subsidiary in the sponsoring country. Nautilus was so sure of its luck that it had already ordered the massive machinery and seemed to be ready to go with the deep-sea mining project Solwara 1. However, through poor management the company collapsed in 2019, leaving Papua New Guinea to cover $AUD157 million in debt. Had they proceeded with the mining PNG might have been liable for much more. One of the more bewildering aspects of ISA’s regulations is that the sponsoring nations may have to carry liability for the actions of a private company. In other words, the environmental damage caused to their territory if a company does something wrong. Now Nauru is taking the uncertain plunge into deep-sea mining. It has sponsored Nauru Ocean Resources, a subsidiary of the Metals Company – another Canadian firm – that emerged from the acquisition of DeepGreen and the Sustainable Opportunities Acquisition Corporation. According to ISA rules, once a country requests approval of the plans, the ISA has to finalize the regulations within two years (ISA 2021).

Bluntly put, the ISA hasn’t come up with regulations to govern the massive amount of issues raised by deep sea mining. It has until July 2023 to formulate them.

Figure 2. Chinese labourers in a Nauru phosphate mine, 1908. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chinese_labourers_phosphate_mine_Nauru.jpg.

Nauru is desperately poor.⁷ The island has already been bitten badly by resource mining (Figure 2). As the Canadian international affairs expert, Gwynne Dyer puts it:

You have to feel sorry for Nauru. It’s only the size of Manhattan up to 42nd Street, and 80% of that tiny territory was strip-mined for phosphates by colonial powers during the twentieth century. Almost half its population has type 2 diabetes (70% are obese), and it has no resources left worth mentioning. (Dyer 2021)

The Germans took it as a colony in the late nineteenth century and discovered phosphorous – essential along with nitrogen and potassium for fertilizer, which as we saw is in low supply now thanks to Russia’s blockage of nitrogen and the dwindling amounts of terrestrially-based phosphorous. We are at a time of ‘peak phosphorous’ (Cordell et al. 2009). The colonizers knew the value of the piles of guano – bird droppings that over the millennia had formed into exceptionally rich resources. Mining began in 1906. The Germans were joined by Britain, New Zealand and Australia in strip mining the island. When they finally achieved independence in 1968, for a short time Nauru became one of the richest nations per capita in the world. However, the resource was soon fully exploited. Because it is mined on the surface of the soil, mining rendered the island a wasteland. Unable to farm their land, Nauru became dependent on imported processed food, which in turn has left an obesogenic imprint (Pollock 2014). Given their lack of terrestrial resources, and poverty, it is little wonder Nauru has been enticed by the prospect of deep-sea mining. Yet as numerous critics point out (Heffernan 2019, Clark et al. 2020), the unknown consequences threaten to destroy their underwater environment just as their terrestrial lands have been rendered lifeless by mining.

As Pelenatita Kara states:

Deep-sea mining is a relic, left over from the extractive economic approaches of the ‘60s and ‘70s. It has no place in this modern age of a sustainable blue economy. As Pacific Islanders already know – and science is just starting to learn – the deep ocean is connected to shallower waters and the coral reefs and lagoons. What happens in the deep doesn’t stay in the deep. (cited in Morse 2021)

What is going on now?

Of course we are living in probably the first geologic age that has gone viral – the Anthropocene. The geo and the aqua are being felt and talked about differently than when the UNCLOS and ISA were being formulated. As Davor Vidas argues, UNCLOS depended on the relative stability of the late Holocene: ‘Reliance on coastal geography as an objective natural feature that is fixed and predictable is the cornerstone of today’s architecture of the law of the sea’ (2018, p. 237).

Vidas poses a key question:

Can a new insight of geology – that we are entering a different epoch, the Anthropocene, marked by increasing change and unpredictability of earth-systems conditions – provide inspiration for law to once again draw on geology but now with the objective of thinking about rules appropriate to a new epoch in our planet’s history? (2018, p. 236)

I would caution that the law is not the only or the best method with which to deal with a ‘series of connected and disconnected emergencies’ (Highmore 2021, p. 42).

In conclusion, I return to the disjunctures I have raised. The problematic remains: ‘how do we articulate multiple rates of change?’ (Highmore 2021, p. 42) Let me reiterate that the events of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the race to mine the deep sea do not hang together causally. I could say that the crisis of supply and circulation of resources may link the two or might be an added commercial push to find new sources of the needed resources for the current and coming phase of green energy. But this is not enough. They are not two discrete events, and as I am arguing there never are.

What I have attempted here is to forgo, as Highmore puts it, ‘the political rationality of conjunctures for the more unmanageable and oceanic frame of a disjuncture’ (2021, p. 29; Probyn, 2021). Through foregrounding the geo and the aqua we can analyse two wildly different conjunctures that are none the less happening at the same time. What is going on right now is, of course an enduring question of cultural studies. But what if we deepened and widened that ‘right now’ and exploded ‘the historical scale of cultural studies’? (Highmore 2021, p. 29).

Deranged scales unhinge received extractive imaginaries, cutting into them, ripping them open. To return to the random fragments of information I listed at the outset of this article, I have examined the simultaneous disjunctions articulated by different timelines of the geo. While they are part of the now, they are also very different in geological time. The nodule that grows at a centimetre every million years can be plucked by massive machines being built ready to exploit the sea bottom under Nauru. The bombing of Ukrainian land will take years to recover and that’s if they don’t explode a nuclear power plant. Forty-three years after the meltdown in Chernobyl there are 100 people left in the exclusion zone. Once they die no one else will inhabit the poisoned land. Heavy metals from Russian bombings will remain in the soil and, more worryingly in the groundwater, which leaches into the ocean. The intergenerational trauma of all the death will carry the pain of now into the future (Chuck 2022). Despite the ancient timeline of the minerals in the deep-sea, ‘after operating for 25 to 30 years – the anticipated limit for an ISA extraction licence – about 10,000 square kilometres of the seabed could be strip-mined’ (McKie 2021). Despite being founded in 1994, the ISA has until July 2023 to figure out some rules. Unless we come to grips with the true weight of geo and aquapolitics, and real value of the marine and terrestrial resources and do anyway with a mentality that views them as ‘free gifts’ (Clarke 2012, p. 153), we will only have a short-term future.

It is beyond the scope of any academic article to suggest how to avoid the extinction of marine or terrestrial life. While this can leave one bereft, it is also salutary – and perhaps a solace – to remember the only small things we can do. For me it is to be alert through research and writing to the intricacy of eco-systems in which we are a tiny blip in space and time. And to try to convey those interconnections and disjunctures we inhabit with so many more-than-human others. It is also to try to keep honing these skills and passing them on.

So here is a challenge to cultural studies and to myself: to use the breadth of analysis and objects of study, to bring the necessary attention of historical underpinnings to the more-than-human, to have the curiosity and courage to step away from cherished antagonistic debates, and to enter and embrace oceanic chaos. What does this mean politically, analytically, and pedagogically? At the level of analysis and teaching it entails an acute attention to how things hang together, or don’t. Unlike the theoretical explication of old, the page doesn’t stay still. This doesn’t exclude a Foucauldian preoccupation with the conditions of possibility, it just means that genealogy is more multi-scalar that we may have imagined. Nor does it mean ignoring the lessons of classic cultural studies’ conjunctural analyses such as Policing the Crisis (Hall et al. 1978). As John Clarke reviews its emergence and importance, and quoting Grossberg, it was as an exemplar of ‘overlapping commitments – to inter-disciplinarity, to what Larry Grossberg (2006) has called the “radical contextualism” of cultural studies as a practice, and to the importance of “conjunctural analysis” as a focus and form of intellectual work’ (2008, p. 123). Clarke is clear-sighted about the institutional limits of such work now: ‘its scale (and the basis of extensive collaborative work that it required) is intimidating or potentially off-putting. Who can, or wants to, work like that?’ (2008, p. 127). Nonetheless his conclusion remains crucial for cultural studies even in these straitened times: ‘how to recognize the multiplicity of currents that make up a conjuncture; how to treat their simultaneity and interconnectedness without collapsing their specificity as forces shaping the present and as possible routes to the future’ (2008, p. 129).

It may be that giving our students these directions and then letting them follow what is often bemoaned as a disinclination to read deeply and an inclination to wander widely may produce new modes of understanding conjuncture, the disjunctures and the derangement of scales with which we live.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the Australian Research Council Discovery Project [grant number DP140101537].

Notes

1 One of the constant challenges of conjunctural analysis is that everything is always moving. I edited this chapter in January 2023. The war in Ukraine continues on in the bleak winter in the northern hemisphere where images of petrol pumps have been replaced by those of freezing soldiers and citizens.

2 Morrison’s views on women and promotion of a culture of sexual violence in parliament was central to getting rid of him. The centre-right Coalition-Liberal had ridiculed climate change throughout their nine years in government and were defeated roundly in the 2022 election by a bunch of powerful women independents who are named ‘Teals’ for the colour that united their green politics with ‘small l liberal’ values.

3 Clover is the former Moscow bureau chief for the Financial Times, not the Charles Clover who wrote The End of the Line: How Overfishing Is Changing the World and What We Eat (2008).

4 On August 22, 2022 ‘Darya Dugina, 29, died after an explosion on a road outside Moscow, Russia's investigative committee said. It is thought her father, the Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin, who is known as "Putin's brain", may have been the intended target of the attack’ (Sands 2022).

5 To be sure, it is an understatement to say that not all geopoliticians are enamored by the centrality these arguments give to their discipline. In Nigel Clarke’s terms, it has ‘the unpleasant aftertaste of environmental determinism’ (2012, p. 48). Philippe Le Billon quotes Hitler’s chilling statement about Lebensraum: ‘land and territory for the sustenance of our people, and the colonization of our surplus population’ (2004). One can see why geographers such as the late Harm de Blij would say that ‘It is piquant to see Kaplan accord such gravitas to notions long consigned to the dustbin of geography and to follow him as he tries to accord current relevance to such old ideas’ (2013). He is joined by those who claim a counter-position, such as Klaus Dodds who argues that ‘Critical geopolitics was … envisaged as a critique of the taken-for-granted assumptions and approaches to the relationships between space and power in conventional or classical geopolitics and neighbouring international relations’ (Dodds 2016, p. 15).

6 As a feminist, I am of course conscious of the repeated tropes of ‘the father’, ‘the grandfather’ of geopolitics, just as I am infuriated by the heteronormative framing of the environment ‘for our grandchildren’. I am intrigued by the simultaneous and gendered passivity and power that geography assumes in much of these descriptions. Despite the muscularity of much of the literature on terrestrial geopolitics, there are important feminist interventions in studies of geopolitics (Dowler and Sharpe 2001, Hyndman 2001, 2010, Massaro and Williams 2013, Squire 2015). It would also be remiss not to acknowledge the important literature on ‘critical geopolitics’ initiated by Dodds et al. (2016). For important overviews see Koopman et al. (2021) and Dodds et al. (2016). And in cultural studies, Junka-Aikio and Cortes-Severino eds. (2017), and Szeman and Boyer (2017). My main reason for not engaging with this scholarship is that I am interested in how current descriptions of Putin’s presumed intentions reproduce older geopolitical thinking.

7 So desperate that under a despicable plan initiated by the then Australian Prime Minster, John Howard, they took in refugees trying to enter Australia by boat. The so-called Pacific Solution was put in place to avoid processing refugees on Australian territory.