The people of the Marianas are once again being asked to participate in a familiar process: review the documents, attend the meetings, submit comments, and trust that our voices will shape decisions that will profoundly affect our ocean, our lands, and our future.
This time, however, the stakes are not isolated. They are cumulative, layered, and accelerating.
Within weeks, two major federal actions have converged over our islands. The U.S. military has opened public comment on its Mariana Islands Training and Testing Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement, outlining continued and evolving military activities across our surrounding seas. At the same time, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management has expanded its area of consideration for deep-sea mining around the CNMI to roughly 69 million acres, nearly doubling what was initially proposed.
Individually, each of these actions demands scrutiny. Together, they reveal something far more concerning: a systemic redefinition of the Marianas as a multi-use federal zone for defense and extraction, rather than a living homeland with rights, relationships, and responsibilities.
The Navy’s supplemental review makes clear that military activity in our region is not only continuing, but evolving in scale, complexity, and intensity. Training and testing include sonar operations, live-fire exercises, underwater detonations, and the deployment of advanced systems across vast ocean areas that extend well beyond the immediate range complex.
We are told these activities are necessary. We are told they are carefully analyzed. We are told they are consistent with decades of operations.
But what is missing from this narrative is not technical analysis. It is relational accountability.
The same waters identified for intensified military use overlap with ecosystems of global significance, including areas connected to the Marianas Trench Marine National Monument. They are migration corridors, cultural seascapes, and ancestral highways of knowledge. They are not empty training grounds.
At the same time, BOEM’s expansion of deep-sea mining consideration raises a parallel concern. After engaging with our leaders and communities under the premise of partnership and consultation, the federal government has moved to significantly enlarge the potential footprint of extractive activity—adding tens of millions of acres to what was already an unprecedented proposal.
To be clear, “Area Identification” is not yet leasing. But it is the decisive narrowing of options. It is the stage at which futures begin to harden into policy trajectories.
And here lies the contradiction.
We are asked to believe in consultation, yet decisions expand.
We are invited into dialogue, yet outcomes escalate.
We are told our voices matter, yet the geography of impact continues to grow.
This is not partnership. It is procedural inclusion without structural influence.
The Marianas today occupy one of the most strategically contested and environmentally significant ocean regions on Earth. We sit at the intersection of geopolitical competition, critical mineral demand, and climate vulnerability. That reality places us in a unique position but also a precarious one.
Because what is unfolding is not simply military planning or resource assessment. It is a cumulative governance challenge.
How do you evaluate sonar impacts without considering mining noise?
How do you assess habitat disruption without accounting for overlapping industrial footprints?
How do you speak of mitigation when the baseline itself is being transformed?
Federal processes remain siloed. The ocean is not.
This is why the current moment demands more than participation in comment periods. It demands a reassertion of regional authority, Indigenous knowledge systems, and place-based governance frameworks that treat the ocean not as a resource frontier, but as a living archive.
We, the people of the Marianas, are not passive stakeholders in these waters. We are their stewards, their navigators, their inheritors.
And we must be clear: stewardship is not compatible with fragmented decision-making imposed from afar.
If there is to be any legitimacy in the processes now underway, then consultation must evolve into co-governance. Data must be shared, not extracted. Regional institutions, including our colleges and local agencies, must be entrusted as custodians of research and knowledge not merely consulted as recipients of it.
This is the foundation of what I have called a Marianas Blue Frontier Initiative an alternative pathway that prioritizes conservation, ocean science, cultural knowledge, and sustainable economic development over extractive and militarized expansion.
The question before us is not whether development will occur.
It is whether it will occur with us, or around us.
Because if current trajectories continue unchecked, the Marianas risk becoming a case study in cumulative impact without cumulative consent.
We have been here before, in different forms, across different eras.
This time, we must respond differently.
Not as isolated voices in separate comment processes, but as a unified region asserting a clear principle:
Nothing relating, regarding, negotiating, discussions about our ocean without us.
Gregorie Michael Towai (Eipéráng) is a cultural advocate and independent researcher from the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands currently residing in Oregon. He writes on Pacific governance, ocean policy, and diaspora political participation.
Editor’s note: The views and opinions expressed in this op-ed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of NMI News Service or its staff. All assertions are the sole responsibility of the writer.
To submit an op-ed for consideration, email your piece to brad.ruszala@nminewsservice.com
