Reporter on the high seas

Plastic, damage from fishing, global warming are not the only attacks on the ocean. States and private companies seek to exploit mineral resources, even if it means degrading the ecosystem. In the open sea, therefore, an economic war is being played out about which little is said. Lucas Menget returns from a mission aboard the Frigate, the Nivöse.

“It’s a real front line.” The great reporter Lucas Menget, familiar with conflict zones, does not use this war semantics lightly. Returning from a mission aboard the French frigate, Le Nivôse, a warship, military hunting and surveillance vessel, whose home port is Pointe des Galets on Reunion Island and which patrols the the Indian Ocean to monitor French maritime areas, the journalist discovered an essential mission in a tense geopolitical and environmental context.

As Lucas Menget writes in the annual review Latitude Seapublished in Ecuador, “the notebook is the witness of humanity in the ocean”. The reporter’s notebook and that of the captain who notes all the details for posterity. And future missions. The funds known to be scraped by fishermen who use illegal practices are today in the sights of economic interests.

In Kingston, Jamaica, where the International Seabed Authority – the maritime entity of the United Nations – is based, the debates focus on the mining of the seabed. On the one hand, scientists and ecologists, on the other, powerful mining groups with unlimited means, which push States to extract from the seabed the rare metals essential for the manufacture of batteries: cobalt, copper, nickel. A financial eldorado and economic opportunity.

We know nothing about this ecosystem

Scientists are just beginning to study it. As Camille Etienne points out, “the surface of the moon has been mapped more than the bottom of the ocean”. And if these depths have always raised the imagination of literature and the most ambitious projects of explorers, there is no scientific foundation on the subject. No one can predict what such drilling might generate.

This subject is however touched on in the news, and the reports from the field are difficult to edit. Except to cover the Kingston debates and get closer to oceanographers. A few reporters are trying to raise awareness, but as Lucas Menget points out, our relationship with the ocean is still too romantic. The image of sunsets, of a living and roaring nature, of surfing on the waves.

And yet, global warming, the nibbled beaches of the Atlantic coast, everything reveals to us the absolute state of emergency. And we must put an end to the received idea that it can absorb everything by its immensity. The ecosystem is deteriorating and species are disappearing, it is a biodiversity in danger.

Lucas Menget’s contributions can be found in the album of Reporters Without Borders Sea and in the annual review of Equateurs, Latitude Sea, which has just been published.