#50: Cook Islands Part 2 - Concerned Islanders Imogen Ingram and Kelvin Passfield

Te Ipukarea Society has been one of the most consistent civil society voices in the Cook Islands’ deep sea mining conversation since long before it became international news. In this episode, Eric speaks with two of its members: Imogen Ingram, an accountant-turned-environmental advocate with decades of experience in UN chemical and waste conventions, and Kelvin Passfield, an Australian-born ecologist who has called the Cook Islands home since 1988. Together they offer a ground-level account of what the DSM process looks like from inside one of the world’s most watched jurisdictions — a country that is 99.99% ocean, whose EEZ sits directly over some of the most actively explored nodule fields in the Pacific, and whose government has already passed exploitation regulations while the ISA is still working on its own.

What makes this conversation particularly useful for anyone tracking the Cook Islands situation is the level of institutional detail both guests bring. Imogen walks through the consent process as she has experienced it firsthand — the community meetings with no recordings, the DSMA staff who cannot answer questions about investor-state dispute mechanisms, and what she describes as a pattern of regulatory capture that mirrors what civil society has raised at the ISA level. Kelvin picks up the legislative thread, explaining the quiet but significant shift from “public interest” to “national interest” in the Cook Islands’ seabed mining legislation, the consolidation happening among the three active exploration license holders, and why the precautionary approach is the only intellectually honest position when the science on deep sea ecosystem impacts is still this incomplete. Both guests are clear that they support a moratorium rather than an outright ban — and both explain precisely why that distinction matters legally and strategically.

Follow Te Ipukarea Society:

🔗 Website: tiscookislands.org🔗 Facebook: Te Ipukarea Society - TIS

Chapters:

* 00:00:00 – Introduction: Imogen & Kelvin on the Cook Islands

* 00:02:22 – Geography: 15 Islands, 99.99% Ocean

* 00:06:57 – From Accountant to Environmental Warrior

* 00:11:08 – When DSM Became Real: 2007–2012

* 00:22:47 – What Do Cook Islanders Actually Think?

* 00:40:51 – Consultation Theater: Appearance vs. Reality

* 00:52:40 – Regulatory Capture: The Fox in the Henhouse

* 00:56:51 – The Trade-Off Question: Minerals for Climate?

* 01:21:40 – Rahui: Traditional Ocean Stewardship

* 01:46:05 – Closing: “Just Don’t Do It”

Resources:

* Deep Sea Conservation Coalition — deepseaconservation.org

* IUCN — iucn.org

* Marae Moana Act 2017 — govt.co.ck/marae-moana

* UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples — un.org/development/desa/indigenouspeoples/declaration-on-the-rights-of-indigenous-peoples.html

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