Dear Editor, Saturday’s full-page article, “What (on Earth) Under Sea are Polymetallic Nodules”.

Looks like an article, looks like news, looks educational. Anyone who wonders just how honest, or dishonest this industry might be can take a hint, in this writer’s view by the ever so tiny type in the upper right-hand corner, “Paid Content”. A kinder word for “Advertisement”. It’s a sales job, plain and simple. Are we buying? Time will tell.

Is this our undersea Nauru where that island was stripped bare of the “vital” phosphorus that the world “just had to have” to feed the millions with that fertiliser? Nauru is now largely a moonscape and the millions are still eating. Nauru could still be a vibrant island nurturing its indigenous population. Somebody sold them a fairy-tale and they bought it. If the politicians on Nauru had said, “Let’s wait a generation or two while we think about this”, their descendants would still have a treasured homeland.

Here is how National Geographic described the decimation, “A worked-out phosphate field is a dismal, ghastly tract of land … its cavernous depths littered with broken coral, abandoned tram tracks, discarded phosphate baskets, and rusted American kerosene tins.”

Back off big money, find someone else’s environment to plunder.

(Name and address supplied)