KONO, Papua New Guinea — News of apparent renewed interest in deep-sea mining came as a shock to Jonathan Mesulam in late 2022. Looking out over the Bismarck Sea that separates his native island of New Ireland from Papua New Guinea’s mainland, the former teacher and U.N. aid worker-turned-activist fights back tears. It’s a dose of emotion typically absent from the measured interviews Mesulam often does with PNG media. The beach where he sits is just 30 kilometers (19 miles) from the spot where a foreign company has long hoped to harvest copper, gold, silver, and other valuable minerals from the seafloor. In his media appearances, Mesulam lays out the fears of communities along New Ireland’s west coast, including the one where he grew up, that seabed mining will damage the ecosystems and fisheries that underpin their subsistence and cultures. Mesulam first voiced his concerns about seabed mining to the communities in New Ireland when he was working as a high school teacher in the early 2010s. He has since gone on to found his own development NGO and serve as the spokesperson and coordinator for the Alliance of Solwara Warriors, a coalition of communities and faith-based organizations in PNG. (Solwara, stemming from “saltwater,” is a word for “sea” or “ocean” in Tok Pisin, an official language in PNG and a lingua franca in this country of more than 840 languages.) More than a decade of campaigning against the mining project, called Solwara 1, has helped stir the international debate…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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