“Manganese nodule collector.” The neologism alone has something ugly about it. Maybe something brutal too. In the more than ninety-minute documentary film “The Greed for the Sea” you can experience what happens when this collector is lowered into the deep sea to start mining manganese nodules that have grown over millions of years. This harvesting machine is used on the deep sea floor, which is so rich in raw materials and valuable materials, where numerous creatures that have not yet been explored by man live and where the last reservoirs of nature lie, which man has not yet taken possession of.
“Stone batteries,” says one of the scientists featured in Michael Stocks’ documentary, lie down there in the deep sea: manganese nodules consist of nickel, cobalt, copper and manganese. The industry, which is in a gold rush mood, is just waiting to be able to systematically mine and exploit it.
[„Die Gier nach Meer“, Arte, Dienstag, 20 Uhr 15]
But what happens to the life of the underwater world when the collector approaches? The film accompanies the voyage of the “Island Pride”, a research ship that begins on the west coast of the USA in San Diego, and which brings together an international group of scientists on board. It follows the industrial ship that has the prototype collectors on board. Soil samples are taken with equipment left on lines at a depth of more than four thousand meters, and individual specimens of the creatures that live down there in pitch darkness are brought to the surface of the ship.
Overexploitation in Cape Verde
A second place of documentary observation and description is the Cape Verde archipelago off West Africa. Here sand is hauled away from the sandy beaches, from morning to night, and the mostly poor, unemployed inhabitants of the small fishing villages, who do not know what to live on, help with this. Against their better knowledge, they dig up their own land and soil. This is used in construction in industrialized countries. It’s just another toxic cycle. Because with the disappearance of the sandy beach, flora and fauna disappear there. A number of beaches on Cape Verde consist of only gray scree that is boiling hot under the scorching sun and impassable.
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“The Greed for the Sea” is touching when it records the landing of giant sea turtles that were born here and now, twenty years later, are returning to their place of birth to lay their eggs here. But the sea turtles can no longer find a sandy beach, but instead move over the hot, inhospitable scree to return later to the sea. It took man only twenty years to completely destroy their living space, their birthplace.
But there is resistance: a small group of conservationists, including marine biologists such as Ana Veiga, and the nature conservation organization “lantuna”, founded in 2013, have made it their goal to draw the locals’ attention to the consequences of the lack of sand. “lantuna” tries to protect some of the sea turtle eggs in fenced sand enclosures. Here the French marine explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau, painted oversized on a wall, looks down on the island village that he once visited in 1948. It is his granddaughter Alexandra Cousteau, who lives on the French Atlantic coast, who repeatedly has a warning voice in the film.
Ultimately, “The Greed for the Sea” shows that people are literally digging up the water for themselves, that they systematically and irreversibly rob themselves of their own livelihoods in the long term just for the sake of short-term supposed progress. The effect of this documentary film, which is deliberately sober, rich in facts and contains rare images, is quite sobering, maybe even depressing. Because the progress of industrial exploitation seems unstoppable even in the unexplored, mystical deep sea. It will also cause irreversible damage here. The “manganese nodule collector” will take care of that. The engaging factual film by Michael Stocks draws attention to it. After all.
