NATURE OF HUMAN OCEAN
Fact 1: The Antarctic
is not the Arctic, no matter how often toy
makers and television programming routinely confuses the geographical
distribution of polar bears and penguins. Penguins are to be found in
Antarctica.
Fact 2: The Antarctic is comprised of a large
polar continent surrounded by ocean. The Arctic is an ocean surrounded by
continents and islands.
Fact 3: The
Antarctic is colder, drier, windier and higher than the Arctic.
Fact 4: The
Antarctic does not have an indigenous human population.
Fact 5: The
Antarctic is remote and far removed from centers of population.
But why does the
Antarctic matter? And why should we take an interest in
this apparently distant, remote and unpopulated space? Does the Antarctic hold
vast and largely untapped resources? Will countries and other stakeholders ever
go to war over their ‘rights’ to territory and resources? It might sound mad
but the Antarctic is caught up in the politics of nationalism and national
pride. You only have to look at a map of the Antarctic and read the place
names.
These kinds of questions were routinely posed
in the 1940s and 1950s when it was unclear as to what kind of future faced the
Antarctic. At that stage there were seven countries (Argentina, Australia,
Chile, France, New Zealand, Norway and the UK) that believed that they enjoyed
sovereign rights in the Antarctic. Unfortunately for this particular G7, the
United States and the Soviet Union rejected those claims and reserved the right
to make their claim to the vast and poorly mapped polar continent.
As the Cold War gripped the Arctic region,
there was a strong likelihood that superpower competition might migrate
southwards. And it did. In the form of science and scientific endeavor rather than
military posturing and war gaming. Science, by the International Geophysical Year (1957-1959),
was the mechanism by which rivalries flourished. Fearing the worst 12 countries
agreed upon an Antarctic Treaty to help regulate behavior.
Over the next five decades, interest in the
Antarctic has grown steadily inspired by scientific, resource and strategic
drivers. Science remains the dominant activity and a growing number of nations
invest in national and multi-national programs designed to better understand
below and above the surface of the polar continent. Resource exploitation,
especially via fishing and controversially whaling, is pivotal in shaping the
management of the Southern Ocean. Strategically, despite efforts to ensure that
territorial claims do not become a subject of dispute, all the claimant states
including the UK behave as if they enjoy a sovereign presence in the Antarctic.
The manner in which the Antarctic is managed
is controversial. For non-governmental organizations, there remain complaints
that the dominant powers are not regulating sufficiently well fishing and a
growing tourism sector. Commercialization is blamed for corrupting the
scientific ethos of the Antarctic Treaty. Rising powers such as India and China
are now more visible on the ice and within the corridors of polar power. Their
presence routinely cited for unsettling established Antarctic powers such as
Australia, which maintains a vast claim to the Antarctic. India and China have understood the ‘rules of the game’ and
built research stations and undertaken scientific firsts such as establishing
bases in more remote places of the polar continent.
This tendency to emphasize the idea of
performance reminds us that the Antarctic has been a very gendered place. This
was a space, ever since the Edwardian era, for men to test themselves against
nature. Scott and his party may have died on their return from the South Pole
in 1912 but they did so heroically. Women were nowhere to be found. Or if they
were present then it was more likely to located on a map. The exploration and
scientific study of the Antarctic was largely a man’s world. This has now
changed but that gendered legacy remains. The Antarctic continues to attract
men eager to show off their equipment and study, exploit and play.
Should we worry about the Antarctic? One
enormous cultural shift has occurred in the manner in which we engage with this
region. In the nineteenth century, it was common to read stories about how the
polar realm inspired awe and fear. The ice was to be feared, and there has been
no shortage of explorers and novelists ready to sustain such an unsettling
vision of place. But now it is the ice that should be scared of us. Ice, snow,
and the cold are the new frontline of human anxiety pertaining to a changing
world.
Increasingly scientists and policy-makers
speak of the Antarctic as no longer remote in any sense. The Antarctic is
connected to planet Earth,
and contemporary research recognizes that so much of the world’s climate is
tied to the southern continent and surrounding Southern Ocean. And vice versa.
What remains to be understood is how rising temperatures, and the rise is not
uniform across the Antarctic, is having varied consequences for ice cap
stability and biodiversity.
What to do? The governance of the Antarctic is
so much more complicated than it once was in the 1950s. In the late 1950s, the
Antarctic Treaty stood largely untroubled by other kinds of international legal
entanglements. This is no longer the case. The Antarctic is ensnared in a
complex mix of legal regimes involving terrestrial and marine environments. The
Antarctic is no longer exceptional in that regard, and that troubles claimant
states and even non-claimants such as the United States.
The good news is that all the parties working
in the Antarctic accept that there should be no mineral exploitation. This ban is in place
for at least three decades. There is no evidence that mining is coming any time
soon. The Arctic is on the front line in that regard.
The bad news is two fold. Scientists worry
that the Antarctic ice sheet is being destabilized by ongoing climate
change. This will have consequences for the region and the wider
world. And political co-operation might be undermined if states and other
stakeholders continue to make money from Antarctic related activities. No one
agrees on the question “Who owns the Antarctic?” And that will remain the case
for this century.
Klaus Dodds is Professor of Geopolitics at Royal Holloway,
University of London. He is author of a number of books including Geopolitics: A
Very Short Introduction (2007) and The Antarctic:
A Very Short Introduction 2002
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