We are of the Ocean

The title is quoted from President Moetai Brotherson.

“It's not sustainable underwater,” my instructor said, adjusting the strap on my tank "to not pace yourself and to breathe too fast.”

This was my third dive in Tahiti. I’d been here for a while under a Columbia fellowship, working with the Department of European and Pacific Affairs of French Polynesia. 'Diving deep' into international environmental law and economic development practices for SIDS countries, I was determining how to pause deep sea mining, at least till the best technology was developed and an impartial comprehensive impact assessment had been undertaken.

My work was in no way a mere theoretical or academic exploration of the topic. Tahiti and many other Pacific small islands sit above the world’s most contested seabed, the Clarion –Clipperton Zone, containing cobalt, nickel, and manganese nodules. Over the past few years, energy security, mineral supply chain, and strategic affairs experts had informed governments that these minerals were the next solution, critical for manufacturing EV batteries and renewable infrastructure. Opportunistic companies had begun to circle in like sharks.

From the dive boat, however, the crisis felt far away. The island of Tahiti rose behind us: jagged ridge lines cutting through clouds, with rainforest spilling down toward the coast. The water was clear enough to see thirty feet down, deep enough to feel how quickly you could disappear.

"First rule," my instructor said. “Don’t descend without equalizing. Go too fast, and the pressure crushes you.”

Flipping backward off the boat, descending beneath the water's surface, I tried to implement the instructions. The deeper I went, the quieter everything became. I'd entered the world of coral shelves, sand channels, and underwater caves, a place that didn’t announce itself. Everything seemed so still, and yet nothing was passive. It didn't matter if I’d come prepared with the UN Law of the Sea; if I wanted to be underwater, I was going to have to follow the ocean's own laws.

-----------------------

On one of my dives, I had a rare encounter. Amidst the vast blue expanse, our group watched a whale calf curve into view: slowly, curious, and playful. It's mother, massive and still, kept a watchful eye on us. We wouldn't have noticed her until the guide showed us where to look. But once we saw her, we understood; we were being watched.

“Stay calm,” my instructor said. “Don’t follow. Just let her be.”

The calf turned toward us and for a second, I met its eye. I thought about what was beneath us: mineral nodules millions of years old, ecosystems no one had fully mapped, life we haven’t even named yet.

Later, back on the boat, I sat with a towel around my shoulders, still half-drenched.

“You okay?” my instructor asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “I can't help but think about what happens if we mine the seabed before we even understand it?”

He looked out toward the water. “The ocean’s been quiet for a long time. People forget that doesn’t mean it’s empty.”

-------------------

In the afternoons after our dives, I’d walk up the hill to my hostel. I roomed with students, locals, and volunteers. We often cooked and ate together; someone brought fresh fish or bananas from their family’s land. There were no locks on doors as there was no need for them. Time moved differently there. Not in hours or meetings, but in meals and tides.

After my dive, my usual lunch would be a noni fruit I'd grabbed from a tree on the path. No one stopped me, and I knew there wasn’t a price. Such was the subliminal reciprocity in French Polynesia, built on sustainability and restraint; take what you need, leave what you don't and you'll always have enough for tomorrow. This is why people in Polynesia didn’t try to dominate the land or the sea. They adjusted to it. It wasn’t a Silicon Valley utopia, and yet it worked.

---------------------------

One evening, I was invited to a formal dinner with President Moetai Brotherson. He didn’t reject mining outright, but he returned, again and again, to the precautionary principle: ask questions before taking irreversible steps. That we shouldn't assume the ocean's silence means consent. His arms were inked with whales, stingrays, and sharks not for aesthetics but as lineage. Responsibility.

The deeper I got into the research, the clearer it became: deep sea mining wasn’t just a debate over resources. It was a debate over time and patience. Can this “sustainability” protect ecosystems, especially when it's just shifting the burden from land to sea?

----------------------

“Second Rule,” my instructor told me during another dive, “you never hold your breath.”

You don’t cling to control underwater. You move with what’s there. You adapt. The deeper you go, the more you have to surrender.

If we accept limits just to survive forty minutes underwater, why do we resist them when it comes to extraction?

Late one afternoon, I was sitting outside the hostel, drying off near the clothesline. The woman who ran the place walked by with a basket of laundry, a hibiscus behind her left ear, and seashells around her neck.

“You’ve gone quiet lately,” she said. “Work stuff?”

“Kind of. I came here thinking law could fix things: systems, industries. Now I’m not so sure the systems were ever built to be fair.”

She nodded like she’d heard some version of this before. “People come here and start realizing things all the time. Our life had rules before the French came with their books.”

The earliest laws weren’t contracts or codes. They were customs, practiced ways of living, built around restraint and relationship. Much like the laws Indigenous communities had long before colonizers arrived.

I came to Tahiti with tools to regulate a future. I left with something harder to categorize: the sense that some futures should be slowed. Or left alone entirely.

Maybe the most radical kind of governance isn’t innovation. It's a pause.

Maybe my role as a lawyer isn’t to license the future. It’s to protect the ideas that make one possible.

We are not masters of the ocean. We are of it.