Am Samoa says NO to deep-sea mining. Trump admin might do it anyway

Pago Pago, AMERICAN SAMOA — In early August, more than two dozen local residents gathered in Lee auditorium to learn about a proposal to allow deep-sea mining across more than 18 million acres of surrounding waters in the Pacific Ocean.

President Donald Trump had issued an executive order to jump-start the nascent deep-sea mining industry three months earlier. Within weeks, the U.S. Department of the Interior began asking for public input on leasing the seabed surrounding American Samoa, and the territorial government organized a series of meetings to help educate the public on what to expect.

During the meeting, Oliver Gunasekara, co-founder and chief executive officer of a mining company called Impossible Metals, appeared on Zoom from San Jose, California, to give a presentation about how his company’s proposal to mine the seafloor about 130 miles offshore would benefit the American Samoan community. 

“We have committed to provide 1 percent of our profits from the American Samoa EEZ to the community of American Samoa,” said Gunasekara, using the acronym for Exclusive Economic Zone, which refers to the waters surrounding American Samoa up to 200 miles from shore. Gunasekara said his company expects to generate up to $1 billion of annual revenue from mining; 1 percent would translate into $10 million for American Samoa per year. 

About half an hour later, a local woman stood and commented on Gunasekara’s proposal. “I think it’s an insult that it’s 1 percent,” she said. “This is our ocean.”  

“Many millions of dollars a year is not an insubstantial amount of money,” Gunasekara replied. “There’s no legal requirement for us to do this. This is something that we have voluntarily done. To my knowledge, no other mining company has.”

To Sabrina Suluai-Mahuka, who leads American Samoa’s climate resilience office and helped organize the meeting, Gunasekara’s response did not go over well. Neither did references by other industry officials to how it is preferable to mine “remote” parts of the Pacific than on land. 

“Our waters are not isolated,” Suluai-Mahuka told Grist. “We live here.”

But after discussing and researching the proposal, every major political leader in American Samoa came to agree: Their answer is no. “There is strong opposition to any exploration or extraction of minerals from the ocean floor in waters near American Samoa,” wrote Representative Amata Coleman Radewagen, American Samoa’s only U.S. congressional representative, in her official comments to the Interior Department. She described how Samoan culture, known as fa’a samoa, includes the story of a mother and a daughter who transformed into a turtle and a shark and swam to Tutuila. 

“This is where the people stand, and I stand with the people — to preserve the shark and the turtle and fa’a samoa,” she said. 

Yet whether or where the mining happens may not be up to the local American Samoans. Unlike the independent country of Samoa, just a day’s sail away, American Samoa is a U.S. territory, subject to the whims of the American flag. Radewagen has a seat in the House of Representatives, but she is not allowed to vote except in committee, and U.S. territories have no voice at all in the U.S. Senate. 

Residents of American Samoa, like residents of other U.S. territories, had no choice in whether Trump or Kamala Harris became president. Under international law, Indigenous peoples have the right to consent to projects on their lands, and in previous disputes with the federal government, American Samoa has pointed out that when it was established, the U.S. promised to respect the rights of its people. But while the Department of the Interior has elicited American Samoansʻ opinions on seabed mining, the agency’s current process could allow mining to proceed over the community’s objections.

Angelo Villagomez, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress specializing in Indigenous-led conservation, is among more than 2,000 current and former residents of U.S. territories who signed a petition opposing the mining proposal. He said the situation in American Samoa reflects a broader assault on public lands and waters by the Trump administration, and highlights the political disparity facing residents of U.S. territories.

“No place is safe under this administration,” Villagomez said. “They’re not just trying to drill for oil in the Gulf of Mexico and off the East Coast — they’re going to the farthest reaches of the American empire to look to extract natural resources,” he said, adding: “We should only be doing these things if the people who have to live with the outcomes are supportive of it.”

(Grist is an independent, nonprofit media organization founded in 1999 that covers climate change solutions and a just future.)