Yes to Life no to Mining

Lynas, Rare Earths and the War Machine Inside the recent militarised extrtactivism webinar co-hosted by YLNM and AidWatch

Photo: Protest against Lynas-United States deal for military supplies of rare earths on July 6. Credit: Malaysian Protest 4 Palestine

Lynas Rare Earths likes to present itself as a green technology company, as a clean supplier of the minerals the world needs for the energy transition. Sit with the evidence for an hour, as everyone who joined our recent webinar did, and that story falls apart.

What emerges instead is a company kept alive for close to two decades by Japanese state money, subsidised by the Pentagon and the Australian Government, dumping radioactive waste on a Malaysian coastal community, and now sitting inside the supply chain that arms Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

The Lynas Rare Earths: Militarised Extractivism in Action webinar was co-hosted by AidWatch and Yes to Life No to Mining (YLNM). It’s the first in a webinar series which builds on a YLNM position paper published at the end of last year, Militarism is Extraction: From Mines to Missiles which builds on.

AidWatch Chair, Liz Downes opened the webinar and set out why Lynas matters and how deep the Pentagon money runs, before handing over to Shigeru Tanaka, Executive Director, Pacific Asia Resource Center (PARC, Japan), Farwina Faroque, Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS), Malaysia, and AidWatch’s Lee Tan, who has been organising against Lynas since 2011.

Here’s what they told us.

What Lynas actually is

Liz Downes, AidWatch Chair, opened by laying out exactly what Lynas is: an Australian-owned company that mines rare earths at Mount Weld in Western Australia and, since 2012–13, processes them at the Lynas Advanced Materials Plant (LAMP) in Kuantan, Malaysia. A long-promised processing plant at Kalgoorlie remains unreliable at best due to its limited water supply. Lynas moved the hazardous separation stage of production offshore quite deliberately: Australia’s environmental standards were expensive and inconvenient, Malaysia’s were not.

The company took advantage of lower costs and more permissive waste rules to do in Kuantan what it did not want to do at home. The result is millions of tonnes of hazardous waste, including a radioactive stream from the water-leach purification process.

Lynas has spent years pushing Malaysia to accept a permanent radioactive waste dump on flood and fire-prone coastal peatland, a proposal that falls well below international standards for managing low-level radioactive waste. And it matters well beyond Malaysia’s borders, because LAMP is currently the only commercial-scale producer of separated rare earth oxides outside China.

The Pentagon pipeline

Liz then walked us through how a single fact – that Lynas is currently the only ‘game’ outside China, is exactly why the US Department of War (formerly Defense) has poured so much money into the company under both the Biden and Trump administrations. Funding for a heavy rare earth separation plant in Texas has gone nowhere, but the money hasn’t disappeared: it has flowed instead into extracting heavy and light rare earths through the Malaysian plant, backed by a four-year supply agreement guaranteeing the Pentagon a framework for rare earth oxides. In March this year alone, Lynas picked up another US$96 million.

The US still imports more than 70% of its rare earths from China, but it is racing to change that as it prepares for confrontation with China rather than cooperation. Lynas is now the world’s biggest rare earth miner and the only commercial-scale processor outside China, which makes its output “critical” to Washington’s plans. This is not for green technology, but for the expanding military capabilities, producing more deadly weapons for profit, and furnishing war and genocide around the world.

Until 2025, Lynas mostly produced light rare earths like neodymium and praseodymium – elements it could plausibly describe as feeding green technology. Pentagon money is now pushing it to separate dysprosium, terbium and samarium too — elements essential for the durable magnets in high-precision weapons, with yet more to come for production of high-powered lasers, night vision, fighter jet engines, missile guidance, nuclear reactor control systems, radiation shielding and nuclear submarines.

Australia has also funded Lynas through trade agreements – part of its bid to be Washington’s key ally in militarising the Pacific – and Japan’s investment runs deeper still.

Liz traced the same supply chain forward to its disastrous end point: local environmental damage in Kuantan, regional militarisation of the Pacific through military exercises like RIMPAC and a wave of “defence critical minerals” projects, and the involuntary enlistment of countries like Malaysia, in a supply chain feeding the military-industrial complex – including, as Liz laid out with sobering figures, the weapons pipeline into Gaza.

Two decades of Japanese rescue

Shigeru Tanaka, Executive Director with the Pacific Asia Resource Center in Japan, walked us through a history that reframes Lynas as far more than an Australian company operating in Malaysia.

Lynas announced its plan in 2007 and nearly went bankrupt within a year, as the global financial crisis dried up capital and interest rates climbed. By 2009 the company had around $7 million in the bank against monthly overheads in the millions, Lynas was genuinely on the edge of collapse. A Chinese state-owned company offered to buy a 51.6% stake for $252 million plus a further $252 million loan, effectively $500 million in total. The Australian government blocked the deal outright, unwilling to see a Chinese-controlled monopoly on rare earths.

Japan stepped in instead, but not out of goodwill. In September 2010, a collision between a Chinese fishing vessel and Japanese coast guard boats near the tiny island of Senkaku, a contested territory escalated into a diplomatic crisis, and China responded by halting rare earth exports to Japan. With China holding a monopoly on these elements, the shock sent Japan into overdrive to secure an alternative. The state-owned Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation (JOGMEC, since renamed the Japan Organization for Metal Security) and trading house Sojitz co-invested $250 million for 30% of LAMP’s output. This is half of what China had originally offered, but enough to keep Lynas alive.

Japan came back again in 2013–14, when the rare earth price bubble collapsed as a result of the WTO ruling which stopped China from placing a quota and restricts its rare earth export. WhenLynas’s stock and investment base started falling away, a ten-year extension on loan repayments and reduced interest rates were quickly granted. It came back a third time in 2018–19, blocking a hostile takeover that would actually have suited Japanese lenders financially, apparently preferring to keep Lynas under its thumb rather than cash out. And in 2023, as Lynas moved into heavy rare earth elements, JOGMEC and Sojitz added a further $200 million.

Three rescues, one pattern. As Shigeru put it, Japan isn’t only importing the materials — it is exporting the harm, and allowing Malaysia to absorb it, all under the rhetoric of “mineral security” and anti-China positioning.

 

From Kuantan to Gaza

Farwina Faroque, secretary general of BDS Malaysia, drew the line from the soils of Kuantan to the rubble of Gaza.

BDS was founded in July 2005 by 170 Palestinian civil society organisations, calling for an end to military occupation and colonisation, full equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel, and the right of return under UN Resolution 194.

Boycotts work. Intel halted construction of a US$25 billion plant in Israel in 2024 under sustained pressure, and Puma finally dropped its sponsorship of the Israeli Football Association. In Malaysia, direct action has blocked shipments too, including a container belonging to Israeli shipping giant ZIM at the Thai border in 2024, and just this past month, a Maersk container linked to weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems.

Lynas sits inside this picture as a critical part of the US war machine. The Pentagon’s funding – including the Texas contracts, the 2022 US$120 million agreement, and the US$96 million framework locked in this March – exists to guarantee rare earth oxides for weapons production.

Following Lynas’s mineral supply chain to the end, means following it toward Gaza: the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute puts US military aid to Israel and regional operations at US$22.7 billion in the year after October 2023 alone, including more than 50,000 tonnes of weapons shipped, and half a billion dollars annually for missile defence and F-35 jets,(aircraft that depend heavily on rare earth magnets). US officials have received more than 500 internal reports documenting these weapons being used to commit atrocities in Gaza, and taken no action to stop the flow. Journalists and human rights organisations, including Al Jazeera, have repeatedly found serial numbers and manufacturing stamps from US-made munitions in the rubble of schools, hospitals and designated safe zones in Gaza.

BDS Malaysia has built an unprecedented coalition around this, joining with Malaysian Protest for Palestine, Greenpeace Malaysia and Sahabat Alam Malaysia to bring petitions and street protest directly to parliament, to name and shame the politicians and corporate enablers who put foreign defence contracts ahead of human lives.

It has worked: the campaign forced a parliamentary select committee review, and rattled Lynas into issuing a sanitised statement claiming the US$96 million contract was merely “research and development” for permanent magnet production. Farwina wasn’t buying it. Everyone knows where those magnets end up: fighter jets and guided missiles. The contradiction cuts deep in a country whose government publicly champions Palestinian rights while its rare earths flow to the Pentagon.

The ground truth in Kuantan

Lee Tan has been part of the Stop Lynas campaign for more than 20 years, and her section of the webinar made the human and ecological cost impossible to look away from.

Rare earths are the “spices and vitamins” of modern industry: only tiny amounts are needed in almost every piece of electronics we touch, from smartphone touchscreens to laptops. Lynas has marketed itself in Malaysia as exactly that: a green raw-materials supplier. But separating these elements requires highly concentrated acids at temperatures around 600 degrees, and it generates enormous volumes of radioactive and hazardous wastes. This is precisely why almost all rare earth processing happens in the Global South, where regulation is weakest and resistance hardest, rather than in wealthy countries that can actually afford to manage the waste safely. Lynas, for its trouble, enjoyed twelve years of tax-free status in Malaysia as a “pioneer” in green technology.

The Kuantan site was once a pristine tropical peat and mangrove forest before Lynas cleared it in 2011. Waste retention ponds now sit where a peat forest used to be, and the company’s proposed “permanent” radioactive waste facility sits on a flood-prone peat swamp next to it. This is an engineering and hydrogeological absurdity, given that the thorium and uranium in Lynas’s waste stream have half-lives of roughly 14 billion and 4 billion years respectively. This waste is, in any meaningful sense, permanently hazardous.

Malaysia’s 2018 change of government briefly opened a path to end this. A review found that Lynas’s original operating licence required it to remove its radioactive waste from Malaysia unless a genuinely safe storage site could be found. A wet, low-lying peat swamp plainly isn’t one. Enforcing that clause could have shut Lynas down. Instead, incoming Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, a long-time ally of Japan, and the same figure behind an earlier radioactive contamination case involving Mitsubishi’s Asian Rare Earth plant, travelled to Japan and personally overturned his own environment minister’s ruling. Under Japanese pressure, the plant kept running.

The double standard doesn’t stop there.

In Western Australia, community objection and a state regulatory requirement (secured partly through AidWatch submissions backed by expert Professor Gavin Mudd and Lee Tan) forced Lynas to remove radioactive waste from its Kalgoorlie site within 24 months, taking it back to Mount Weld mine under stricter Australian radioactive waste management requirements.

Malaysia has no equivalent requirement, and its safety threshold is dramatically weaker: the International Atomic Energy Agency’s benchmark for thorium and uranium is 1 becquerel per gram, but Malaysia has adopted a threshold 100 times more permissive, meaning Lynas’s radioactive waste often isn’t even classified as radioactive under Malaysian law.

Photographs shown during the webinar documented waste stored under nothing more than garbage-bag-grade plastic, repeatedly flooded, while posters and glossy picture books were distributed trying to convince local residents that it was safe to keep swimming downstream at the estuary. Soil sampling by Professor Yoshihiko Wada, a Japanese researcher found dramatic increases in toxic elements and heavy metals in sediment samples nearby including a two fold increase in thorium at the estuary. Local fishermen in this traditionally significant fishing and shellfish area strongly object, Lee said, but face real political pressure to stay quiet.

What comes next

The Q&A drew the threads together. 

Malaysia’s parliamentary select committee inquiry which was reopened this year with new evidence about the Pentagon deal, largely thanks to work led by Greenpeace Malaysia, Sahabat Alam Malaysia and Malaysian Protest for Palestine, has yet to report back, a month after a special hearing. There’s real legal and political leverage here: Malaysia’s foreign policy is explicitly pro-Palestinian, and Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim has publicly positioned himself as a defender of Palestinian rights while his country’s rare earths help supply the Pentagon.

Shigeru pointed to the Rarotonga and Bangkok Treaties, which establish nuclear-free zones across the Pacific and Southeast Asia and to which both Australia and Malaysia are signatories. These are  treaties that a properly classified nuclear waste dump would plainly violate, if only the waste were honestly called what it is.

He also flagged a structural obstacle that campaigners can’t ignore: Malaysia, Australia and Japan are all parties to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), whose investor-state dispute mechanisms (SDS) could let Lynas sue Malaysia for lost profits even if the government moved to shut the plant down. Stopping Lynas, in other words, means confronting these investment treaties too.

Speakers closed by underlining the value of exactly the kind of cross-border organising this webinar represents:

• • BDS Malaysia’s own networks, for instance, learned about Israeli navy participation in RIMPAC exercises and about vessels to target for blockade through contacts as far away as Hawaii. 
  • Lee is now working on a briefing paper to help connect the Stop Lynas campaign with peace movements, Palestinian rights groups and organisations like Friends of the Earth Australia. 
  • Liz closed the session by placing Lynas inside AidWatch’s wider work: joining the dots between Australia’s critical minerals policy, the money pouring into mining expansion across Aboriginal lands, Australia’s deepening role in Pacific militarisation through AUKUS and a growing web of regional defence agreements, and the way aid dollars increasingly underwrite infrastructure that feeds the same military-industrial complex. Liz also flagged an upcoming look at the minerals race behind AI and defence technology.

Rare earths aren’t rare, and this story isn’t over. If it feels like a lot to take in, that’s because it is, but as one of our speakers put it, you don’t need to be a scientist or a lawyer to do something.

Get informed, share what you’ve learned, and get active in whatever way is open to you, including:

– Follow website and social media updates from the various organisations that speakers are connected with (links in email above);

– Join up to AidWatch’s mailing list for updates or join as a member (see links below);

– Sign up to receive Yes to Life No to Mining’s newsletter that shares stories of how people around the world are resisting mining and forging alternative futures!

Watch this space for the recording, the position paper behind this series, and further webinars in our militarised extractivism series.

The post Lynas, Rare Earths and the War Machine appeared first on Yes to Life No to Mining.

ARGENTINA: Gatherings for Life and the Future 29th Seed Festival of Misiones Province Explore BePe's campaigns here

On Pachamama Day, organizations from Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay gathered in Aristóbulo del Valle, Misiones, one day after the 29th Provincial Seed Fair, to strengthen the political, organizational, and educational capacities of leaders and organizations in the Triple Frontier region committed to defending seeds as the heritage of the people.

The event was attended by more than 800 people from organizations in the three border countries.

YLNM member BePe participated in this political coordination meeting as an organization that is part of the MAELA Network, the Latin American and Caribbean Agroecology Movement. In addition to the indispensable exchange of experiences and contextual analyses, the meeting affirmed that agroecological practices and those of the social and solidarity economy are real alternatives for breaking free from the system of death generated by colonial, patriarchal, and extractivist capitalism. In this context, it is worth noting that the territories of Catamarca constitute “sacrifice zones” for big capital: we have endured nearly thirty years of mining exploitation disguised as a “productive and progress-generating” activity. The experience of participating in the process of creating alternatives constitutes a vital response to challenge the prevailing notions of progress, development, and authentic wealth for the people.

True wealth does not lie in money or in the financial system, which was invented as a fetish to distort the reality of life itself. True wealth lies in the alliance of peoples who have formed communities rooted in their territories, the true producers of life and the future. This alliance possesses the power and ancestral memory to bring us back to the reality of life: a marvelous emergence that springs from the relationships between the Cosmos, the Earth, and the human and non-human beings born of it.

Only by recognizing our origin can we build a future, one that is more than merely “sustainable,” but a future worth living. On this path, the gathering was also a timely opportunity to develop a plan for tri-national collaboration among seed-saving organizations and others dedicated to advancing agroecology and creating community-based, territorially rooted spaces.

We continue to walk in these footsteps, inherited from ancestral struggles. Furthermore, at BePe, we are committed to standing alongside the organizations from Catamarca and Santiago del Estero so that they may be part of the preparations for Brazil’s National Agroecology Meeting, to be held in Foz do Iguaçu in June 2027.

BePe: https://www.bepe.org.ar/conozcanos/

Other references:

https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=1515365267285488&id=100064360885231&rdid=lPNohWB43KIArtfM#

https://www.lavozdemisiones.com/provinciales/feria-de-semillas-tierra-corpus-y-yerba-viejas-luchas-reaparecen-en-misiones/

The post Argentina – Gatherings For Life and the Future appeared first on Yes to Life No to Mining.

Warriors Defending Our Mother Nature: The Ocean Is Our Home The Alliance of Solwara Warriors and the Fight Against Deep Sea Mining

 

 

Bismarck & Solomon Seas, Papua New Guinea

Women and men from Duke of York Islands and New Ireland Province at the Shark Calling Festival in the west coast of New Ireland Province. Credit: The Healthy Oceans Network and Piku Biodiversity Network Inc.

An emblematic case by the Alliance of Solwara Warriors with the support of the West Coast Development Foundation and the Deep Sea Mining Campaign

Along the Bismarck and Solomon Seas of Papua New Guinea, coastal communities have spent more than fifteen years standing between their ocean and the machines that would tear it open. They are Duke of York Islanders and West Coast Namatanai villagers, Milne Bay fisherfolk and Karkar Islanders, Manus seafarers and Nissan clanspeople. They are nited across six provinces, dozens of languages and a thousand kilometres of coastline as the Alliance of Solwara Warriors (ASW) – in Tok Pisin: Yumi Lukautim Solwara — we look after the sea

Their fight began against Solwara 1 deep sea mining project in the Bismarck Sea. This project is the world’s first commercial deep sea mine given an operating licence, until today the project has not started operating.

This is not only a case about resistance. It is a case about what the Solwara Warriors are saying YES to: a living ocean that is mother, garden, highway, law-giver and ancestor all at once. YES to a world of Locally Managed Marine Areas, coral farms, fisheries cooperatives and cultural revival that they are building in its place, on their own terms.

The Ocean Is Our Mother:
Life in the Bismarck and Solomon Seas "The ocean is not a resource. It is our ancestor, our provider, our home."

– Jonathan Mesulam, Alliance of Solwara Warriors Coordinator, New Ireland Province

For the coastal peoples of the Bismarck and Solomon Seas, the ocean is not scenery and it is not a commodity. It is family.

“The sea carries our ancestors’ voices and connects us to other clans across islands,” says Edderlink Sarwau of the Alliance of Solwara Warriors (ASW) Karkar, in Madang Province.

In Milne Bay Province, communities put it just as plainly: for a Milne Bayan, the sea is called mother, because it provides everything needed for life. While gardens on land supply yams and taro, it is the sea that supplies the protein, the trade, and the very sense of who people are.

That relationship is woven into economy and identity alike. The Kula ring — the centuries-old exchange of shell valuables that binds islands from the Trobriands to Woodlark — is carried across deep-sea trade routes that run over seamounts and trenches communities consider sacred.

Clan and family names carry the ocean inside them:

“My dad’s name is Michael Melebe. Melebe refers to shark. Lebe in the Madak language means shark. This is how sacred and special our culture is,” one ASW member explains. The root of the Shark Calling Culture that ASW works to protect.

Livelihoods flow directly from this bond.

Families fish reef fish, parrotfish, mullet and mackerel for daily protein; women and men dive by hand for trochus, beche-de-mer, clams and mud crabs to sell for school fees, church contributions and household goods; bamboo fish traps are set to catch only what a family needs, sized so the small fish swim free through the gaps.

“We fish with wisdom,” Milne Bay ASW members explain. “We take only what the family needs. Use hand lines, not dynamite or chemical fishing that kills little fish for the future.”

Elders read the ocean like a text, including frigate birds diving that signal baitfish running, clouds that warn of storms, moons that tell which nights the fish are spawning and should be left alone.

"The ocean is Earth's life force — regulating climate, sustaining biodiversity, and nourishing communities."

— Edderlink Sarwau, ASW Karkar, Madang Province

Climate change is already unsettling this inheritance. “The old signs are less reliable,” ASW members report; mangroves that once buffered villages from storm surge now struggle against rising seas and stronger cyclones, gardens are lost to inland flooding, and coral that should be vivid with colour is bleaching white. Into this already-stressed ocean, the mining industry now proposes to bring machines to the seafloor itself.

Two boys preparing their fishing nets with the ocean behind them in Mioko, Duke of York Islands in the Bismarck Sea of Papua New Guinean. Credit: Nat Lowrey, Deep Sea Mining Campaign

Solwara 1 Deep Sea Mining project:
A World-First Experiment the Sea Never Consented To

In 2011, the Canadian company Nautilus Minerals secured a mining lease from the Papua New Guinea government for Solwara 1, a project that would have become the world’s first commercial deep sea mine — tearing into hydrothermal vent fields roughly 1,500 to 1,600 metres beneath the Bismarck Sea, some 25 kilometres offshore, to extract copper and gold.

“The Solwara 1 site sits at a very crucial location where the impact of this project will affect coastal communities along the Bismarck Sea,” an Alliance of Solwara Warriors (ASW) member notes. “For people along the Duke of York Islands and West Coast Namatanai communities, this project threatens our daily survival.”

No comparable project had ever been attempted anywhere on Earth.

“The life in the oceans has taken millions of years,” Jonathan Mesulam, Alliance of Solwara Warriors Coordinator and Founder and Director of the West Coast Development Foundation, has said, “to be what it is today” — and “no one knows what the environmental impact will be.”

Communities who had fished, dived and navigated these waters for generations were never meaningfully asked.

“The information and knowledge of seabed mining is very limited,” an ASW member explains. “Locals have been convinced of the monetary benefits the project will bring, without really understanding the potential negative impact.”

Consultations, where they happened at all, arrived as technical documents in languages people did not speak, decisions communities were told about rather than asked into.

“Our people felt decisions were made elsewhere, not in our villages,” as ASW Karkar members put it.

This is the pattern the global Yes to Life No to Mining network calls the colonial extractive development model: a resource frontier opened without the free, prior and informed consent of the people who will carry its risks, dressed in the language of jobs and progress.

In Papua New Guinea, ASW is explicit about who now stands in the way of the people’s right to say no.

“The challenge has shifted from local communities and landowners making the critical decision, to political leadership,” the Alliance of Solwara Warriors (ASW) notes. “Political leaders are our main enemy.”

"Developed nations have banned seabed mining… experts and scientists have stated that the unknowns are too great."

— Governor Gary Juffa, Oro Province

Above all, ASW has refused to let the risk be reduced to economics.

“If we allow seabed mining, then we may just call for the end of humanity,” Jonathan Mesulam has warned, describing an ecosystem, and a food chain, too complex and too poorly understood to gamble with. “The sea has no boundaries,” he adds: whatever is unleashed on the Bismarck Sea floor will not stay there.

Ancestors of the Deep:
The Sacred Law of Kastom

Mioko in the Duke of York Islands in the Bismarck Sea of Papua New Guinea. The Solwara 1 deep sea mining project sits 25km from Duke of York Islands. Credit: Nat Lowrey, Deep Sea Mining Campaign.

Long before any environmental impact statement, the peoples of the Bismarck and Solomon Seas had their own law governing the deep, ‘kastom’. Kastom is carried orally through elders, chiefs and clan leaders, and enforced not by regulators but by consequence.

Across Milne Bay Province alone, community members shared names, stories and spiritual figures tied to specific seamounts, trenches and channels, each one a boundary on what may be taken and how.

East of Kiriwina in the Trobriand Islands lies Tewala, a reef wall dropping into deep water called bwaibwai, home to a powerful masalai. Only men with clean hearts may dive there; anyone who boasts or takes too much risks being taken by the current, never to return. Ancestral law ‘gumagabu’ reserves the fish of the deepest channels for chiefs and feast days alone; ordinary people fish the shallows.

Along the Kula route to Dobu and Woodlark, spirits are said to ride the currents over the seamounts, and to sink the canoes of anyone who fights, spills blood (or mines and extracts) along the way.

On Goodenough Island, elders describe a giant sea serpent asleep in the trench toward Fergusson Island, its back forming the seamount chain and its stillness holding back earthquakes; to cut its skin with dynamite or a drill is to shake the island and wash away the gardens.

In the channel to Wagifa, a masalai woman is said to sing; when fishing turns greedy or the sea is polluted, her song changes and the fish stop coming.

South of Dobu, the seamounts called Bwebweso are the resting houses of Kula spirits, crossed only in silence, therefore no fishing, no anchoring, no industry.

Around Panaeati and Brooker Islands, unseen beings called tokwai are said to farm tuna and trevally on the deep seamounts; people may eat what strays to the reef, but:

“we must eat the fruits, not the tree — mining is cutting the tree down.”

In the waters off Sudest, a mother spirit is said to birth all the fish and send them to feed the people; damage her home, and “the whole food chain collapses.”

"It's not just rocks and water. It's ancestors' house, spirits' garden, bones of the sea. If you break it, you can't fix it again."

— Composite of Milne Bay chiefs, elders and mothers, as told to ASW

Further north on Karkar Island, ASW Madang members describe the same principle in their own terms: masalai, guardian spirits, protect specific reefs and currents, and the message across every telling is the same, to approach the deep with humility, not greed.

Certain reefs are set aside as resting places for ancestors; entry requires protocol, prayer, or the permission of an elder, and breaking that protocol is believed to bring sickness or misfortune.

Communities read the health of their sea the way scientists read instruments: coral colour and growth, seabirds feeding close to shore, water clarity, whether tuna return to Panaeati in season, whether sharks are still seen at the Tewala drop-off.

“These natural signs guide us more than scientific instruments,”ASW Karkar notes.

It is this law, not a regulator’s checklist, that communities invoke when asked whether Free, Prior and Informed Consent has ever truly been given.

“In Milne Bay, the same rule applies — not just for mining but for marriage, for land. If you don’t follow it, it’s not worth it,” one member explains.

In Karkar, Free Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) is defined with equal clarity:

“Free: no bribery or pressure. Prior: consultation before decisions are made. Informed: information given in our language, with time to discuss among clans.”

By that standard, the community’s own standard is that consent for seabed mining in Papua New Guinea has never been met.

The Warriors of The Alliance of Solwara Warriors

Community alarm over seabed mining in Papua New Guinea reaches back to 2009, when the state issued Nautilus Minerals its first environmental permit, and hardened in 2012, when more than 25,000 signatures were carried to Northern Governor Garry Juffa and the Mining Minister.

In those early years, resistance was scattered. A few individual voices and a handful of civil society groups such as the Bismarck Ramu Group, and politicians including Governor Juffa and Dr Allan Marat, with the Catholic and Lutheran churches played a critical early role.

In 2016, those voices coalesced formally into the Alliance of Solwara Warriors (ASW), a coalition built specifically to “speak one voice, in one language,” maintaining a single, grassroots-driven position: Ban Seabed Mining.

Today ASW brings together coastal communities, community-based organisations, NGOs, churches and concerned individuals across the Bismarck and Solomon Seas, coordinated by seven regional focal points:

No. Name Organisation Province 1 John Momori Caritas Kavieng Diocese New Ireland 2 Jenny Jack Duke of York AE1 Development East New Britain 3 Lawrence Smith Balel Conservation Autonomous Region of Bougainville 4 Pais Alik Caritas Papitalai Manus 5 Edderlink Sarwau ASW Karkar Madang 6 James Tomiyavau Caritas Alotau Milne Bay 7 Jonathan Mesulam West Coast Development Foundation New Ireland

Jonathan Mesulam, Coordinator of the  Alliance of Solwara Warriors and Founder and Director, West Coast Development Foundation speaking on NBC Current Affairs in Papua New Guinea. Credit: West Coast Development Foundation

Jonathan Mesulam (pictured above) has coordinated the Alliance’s response for over a decade as founder of the West Coast Development Foundation, campaigning against deep sea mining, illegal logging and climate impacts across New Ireland Province since 2011, and facing threats for it. Hey says: “We never losing hope.”

Women lead throughout the network: from Jenny Jack’s work with Duke of York communities to the mothers, aunties and clan mothers who, as Milne Bay members describe it, “spoke” alongside chiefs and youth when the decision came to stand against mining.

The Catholic and Lutheran churches, through diocesan Caritas offices in Kavieng, Alotau and Papitalai, provide organisational backbone and moral authority across provinces.

Knowledge passes down deliberately, through elders and clan leaders to parents, uncles and aunties, and finally to children and youth who: “learn by doing.” ASW’s own name for itself in Tok Pisin says it plainly: Yumi Lukautim Solwara — we look after the sea.

Fifteen Years of Resistance

Alliance of Solwara Warriors at their 2nd Strategic Meeting held in Namatanai, New Ireland Province, October 2023. Credit: West Coast Development Foundation.

ASW’s campaign has combined community mobilisation, education, lobbying, church solidarity, and sustained legal action. This has led to winning real victories, while the threat of deep sea mining itself has refused to stay defeated.

YEAR MILESTONE 2009 PNG’s environmental regulator issues Nautilus Minerals its first permit for Solwara 1. 2011 Nautilus is granted Mining Lease ML-154 — the world’s first deep sea mining lease. 2012 Civil society delivers a 25,000+ signature petition to Governor Garry Juffa and the Mining Minister. 2016 The Alliance of Solwara Warriors is formally established, uniting scattered opposition into one grassroots voice. 2017 Coastal communities file court action against the Mineral Resources Authority; the Pacific Council of Churches condemns seabed mining; the first Namatanai forum is held; Jonathan Mesulam and three others file the landmark Deep Sea Mining – Freedom of Information (DSM-FOI) case. 2019 Nautilus Minerals collapses into bankruptcy after sustained community resistance and investor withdrawal; PNG’s Prime Minister announces a ten-year moratorium on seabed mining. It is a hard-won victory — and, ASW insists, only a pause. 2022–23 After the DSM-FOI case is dismissed at the National Court, PNG’s Supreme Court quashes that decision and sets a precedent ruling on Section 51 — the constitutional right to freedom of information — before ordering the case back to trial. ASW attends the International Seabed Authority in Jamaica and holds a third public forum plus 20 Days of Human Rights Activism across Namatanai and Kavieng. 2023 Despite the moratorium, PNG’s Mining Minister confirms the project’s backers — now trading as Deep Sea Mining Finance Ltd — intend to return, even as coastal communities reaffirm their opposition. 2024 ASW and partners launch the Wokisok Association and Kono Enpun Cooperative Society — community-owned economic alternatives; the National Court orders regulators to disclose all Solwara 1 documents to Mesulam and fellow plaintiffs; communities respond publicly when the survey vessel MV Coco resumes testing and sampling in their waters. 2025 The fight for political leadership continues: an acting provincial governor voices support for seabed mining even as the Prime Minister restates PNG’s opposition abroad; Governor Garry Juffa, Allan Bird and civil society renew their objections; ASW convenes its own provincial stakeholder consultation on seabed mining in New Ireland. 2026 The Alliance of Solwara Warriors continue to educate and mobilise within their local communites in their ongoing resistance against deep sea mining in the protection of their lives, livelihoods, cultural practuces and their living ocean.

 

The through-line across fifteen years is consistent: every time the project appears defeated, it resurfaces under a new name or a new backer, and every time, the Alliance of Solwara Warriors is still there — in the courts, in the villages, and at the national, regional and international tables.

Saying Yes to Life:
Building the Post-Extractive Ocean

The Alliance of Solwara’s (ASW) fight has never been only about refusal.

“Our main focus remains on protecting the ocean,” the Alliance states, “whilst promoting sustainable ocean management”

This is a living, practical answer to the question of what a post-extractive Papua New Guinea and Pacific looks like.

That answer is already taking shape in Locally Managed Marine Areas designed and governed by the communities who depend on them; in coral farming and marine research programs that rebuild reef health from the bottom up; and in fisheries projects and new community enterprises like the the Wokisok Association and Kono Enpun Cooperative Society among them. Such local cultural and economic initiatives keep income in the hands of the people who hold the knowledge, not offshore investors.

In May 2025, the West Coast Development Foundation ran a two-day fisheries training program for the community, passing skills forward exactly the way kastom knowledge always has: hand to hand, generation to generation.

Culture is treated as infrastructure, not decoration. ASW organises annual World Ocean Day celebrations and actively promotes cultural practices tied to the sea — above all the Shark Calling Culture that gives the Alliance’s own name its meaning. Reviving these practices is itself a form of resistance: proof that a living relationship with the ocean, carried in language, ritual and totem, is precisely what an industrial seabed mine would sever for good.

"The ocean is our everything, and destroying the oceans means destroying our everything."

— Pais Alick, ASW Manus

ASW is candid about what has made this model work, and offers it freely to others facing the same fight.

“One very important lesson,” the Alliance reflects, “is simply to tell the truth about any development project — people knowing the truth and accepting the facts will resist projects that will not benefit them. You do not need to force people to support the fight.”

And no community needs to face it alone:

“When I started talking about seabed mining, I thought I was the only one in the village,” one member recalls.

Awareness-raising and networking revealed how many others already stood against it.

That is how the Alliance itself was built, and it is why ASW has appreciated regional and global solidarity — with the Deep Sea Mining Campaign, with Yes to Life No to Mining, and with allies in Fiji, Tonga, Vanuatu, Hawaii, Cook Islands, Aotearoa/New Zealand and tacross the Pacific, all pushing together for a Pacific-wide ban.

 

"The Ocean is the source of our livelihoods — we depend on it greatly."

— Lawrence Smith, Balel Conservation, Bougainville

A Message To The Grandchildren

from Molot village, Duke of York Islands in the Biasmarck Sea, Papua New Guinea. Credit: Dr Helen Rosenbaum, Deep Sea Mining Campaign.

Nowhere is the meaning of “Yes to Life” clearer than in the words ASW’s own members chose when asked what they wanted their grandchildren to know about this moment. In the voice of an elder and ASW member from Milne Bay Province:

“My grandchildren, if you are reading this, it means the sea is still alive. It means the reef still has colour, the fish still run, and the spirits still rest in peace in the sea.”

“I am telling you this because big companies came asking to dig up the deep sea floor. They talked about jobs. They talked about money. But we saw the water grow hot, the coral turn white, and the big fish stop coming like they used to. So I, with your other grandparents, made a choice. We stood up and said no. We heard the sea cry. We stood by the law of our ancestors — the chiefs spoke, the Kula leaders spoke, the mothers spoke, the youth spoke.”

“Free, Prior and Informed Consent means: sit properly, talk straight, agree together in truth — and we did not agree to break the seafloor. We carried the pain, so you would not carry the burden. We ate little, so you could eat well later.”

“If you stand on the bow of a canoe and look down and see the colour of the reef — that is our gift to you. Do not let anyone fool you with the word “development.” Real development is when children can still catch fish with their own hands.”

Because of your grandparents’ decision — we live.”

— An Alliance of Solwara Warrior Elder, Milne Bay Province

Yes to Life No to Mining

Fifteen years on, the Solwara Warriors have already won things no court order can undo: a bankrupt mining company, a moratorium no government asked for on its own, a constitutional precedent on the public’s right to know, and a generation of youth who, in ASW’s own words, “see the sea as their identity and pride.”

Traditional knowledge, the Alliance is clear, “is not dying — it’s fighting under heavy pressure,” and it is winning ground: in Locally Managed Marine Areas, in coral farms, in cooperatives, in a fisheries training course, in a shark-calling song still sung on the water.

The threat has not gone away with political leaders who continue to court the very project communities have refused for a decade and a half. But so has the Alliance.

As a global network of communities defending the right to say no, and building the right to say yes, we stand with the Alliance of Solwara Warriors, with the people of the Bismarck and Solomon Seas, and with every coastal community choosing life and culture over short-term money.

“My grandparents fought in their time, so the sea lives.”

— A Milne Bay Elder

For this, we say Yes to Life, No to Mining!

Special Thanks:
Jonathan Mesulam, Coordinator, Alliance of Solwara Warriors (ASW) and Co-founder and Director of the West Coast Development Foundation (WCDF) who interviewed Alliance of Solwara Members across the Bismarck and Solomon Seas and collated the timeline of ‘Fifteen Years of Resistance’.

Editor:
Nat Lowrey, Deep Sea Mining Campaign (DSMC)

ASW, WCDF and DSMC are members of Yes to Life No to Mining

 

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NIGERIA: Forests, Critical Minerals, and the Crisis of Human Security NSAC 2026 See original article from HOMEF here

On 14 July 2026, Abuja hosted the Third Nigeria Socio-Ecological Alternatives Convergence (NSAC), convened by HOMEF and partner organisations under the theme: Deforestation, Mining and the Crisis of Human Security in Nigeria.

The gathering pulled in traditional rulers, frontline communities, academics, labour groups, youth and women’s organisations. The message from HOMEF’s Executive Director, Nnimmo Bassey, in his welcome address cut straight to the point: “We cannot restore forests while chainsaws are still roaring. We cannot heal rivers while mining waste continues to poison them.” With Nigeria losing up to 300,000 hectares of forest annually and already stripped of over 90% of its original forest cover, there was certainly cause for alarm in the room.

What brought that alarm to bear, however, was the question Professor Omolade Adunbi posed in his keynote: who benefits from the global push for critical minerals…and at whose cost? Nigeria sits atop lithium, nickel, copper, tantalite, and rare earth deposits that the world’s green energy industry desperately wants, yet beneath those maps are farms, rivers, sacred lands, and people. The demand from every attendee in the room was clear: that communities must have the power to say no before a single licence is issued, that primary forests and watersheds must be declared No-Go Zones, and that restoration cannot remain a post-damage promise.

As Professor Adunbi put it, critical minerals may be the new oil, but they do not have to become the new curse we must bear.

Read more here: https://homef.org/2026/07/22/forests-critical-minerals-and-the-crisis-of-human-security/

 

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