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
