ABSTRACT
Hydrothermal vents form at points on the ocean floor where the earth’s plates are moving apart. Mineral-rich soups of manganese, copper, iron, nickel, cobalt, gold, and silver gush out through the cracks and precipitate as sheets, mounds, or chimneys of great heights. Vents are also home to unique ecosystems, much sought now by biotech and pharmaceutical industries. Discovered too late for detailed attention in the 1982 UNCLOS, vents throw into relief the extractive imaginary established by that treaty, the ocean’s constitutional text. They particularly call into question UNCLOS’s neat classifications between land and water, life and matter, and mobility and immobility. Ongoing law-making over a new mining code, and a new agreement on “biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction,” could exacerbate the problem. Instead of simply enacting fixes, new law-making processes must respond to the call for critical ontologies and epistemologies of the ocean. They must confront the law of the sea’s historic legacies of extraction, immiseration, and destruction, while also taking seriously the world (re)making impetus that had guided—albeit imperfectly and incompletely—the inauguration of UNCLOS negotiations half a century ago.
