For the last three decades, the United Nations’ agency called the International Seabed Authority, or ISA, has been working in relative obscurity on negotiating the regulations that will govern a field of enterprise that remains purely speculative: deep-sea mining, or the harvesting of metal rocks known as polymetallic nodules off the ocean floor. The beginning of commercial-scale seabed mining has, as the Australian international law scholar Douglas Guilfoyle puts it, “been 10 years away for 60 years.”

In April, the Trump administration announced its intention to open the permitting process to issue deep seabed mining licenses of its own — both in American waters and, troublingly for the ISA, the high seas. In May, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management began the process to lease parts o

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