The world’s oceans harbor a cultural heritage of sunken ships, remains of those lost in the transatlantic slave trade and Indigenous islanders’ spiritual ties to the sea that must be protected, NGOs and native peoples say.
They are pushing at a meeting in Jamaica of the International Seabed Authority (ISA) — an organization established under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea — for such protection to be enshrined in a mining code that is being negotiated to govern the exploitation of sea beds in international waters.
“Our ancestors traveled the oceans for thousands of years, passing on information from generation to generation,” said Hinano Murphy of the Tetiaroa Society, a Polynesian conservation group. “We are the children of the people of the ocean,” Murphy told AFP, insisting this heritage must be treated as something sacred. Scientists and defenders of the oceans have long insisted that future industrial-level mining will threaten marine ecosystems.
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