Scrubbing the World Clean

A few days ago, when dearest and I had the tv on, not really watching it, but on in the background, I heard the middle and end of a story on mining the undersea ridges of the Pacific for precious minerals like gold and copper.  Apparently, the easily obtained supplies of these minerals are running out in dry land sources and manufacturers are looking for other areas to mine.

The plan is to send robotic scrubbers to the seafloor and scrub up rocks containing these precious metal ores, which would then be sent to the surface where they would be processed into the much needed metals.  Presumably the detritus from this operation would then be disposed on dry land.

Mining companies have engineers and scientists who assure the world that this process and be completed without appreciable harm to the environment (but with very appreciable financial gain to themselves).

I am not sure I believe this, but I am certainly sure I am against mining the undersea ridges for precious metals.

There is more that we do not know about life on the seafloor than there is that we do know.  We know that there are sulphur-based tubeworms living around the openings to the deep-sea sulphur jets, but we do not significantly more about these creatures than simply that they exist.

No-one can say for certain whether the proposed mining with have an appreciable impact on the environment, simply because we do not know enough about the environment to make that statement.  We do not know what role the gold and copper in and around the earth at the sites of sulphur jets plays.  We do not know what role the sulphur-based tubeworms play in the complicated, interconnected web of life on Earth.  We cannot know what harm scrubbing the "dirt" from the seafloor would do.

As humans, we are smart enough to know when we do not know the answers.  We should be smart enough to not do something until we can know even a fraction of the effect it will have.  We need to do what we can to prevent this pillaging and plundering that of the seafloor.  And if this means we need to slow the rate of progress so that we do not need to replace our electronics as quickly, that is what we need to do.  If we need to stem our desire for shiny things to decorate our ears, fingers, and necklines, that is what we need to do.  If we need to discover more cost-effective ways to reclaim the precious metals from our spent electronics, that is the avenue we need to discover first, before we scrub clean the seafloor.

We do not know the effects our need for things will have on the world.  Until we do, we should be smart enough to reign ourselves in.