Anthropocene Antarctica

Perspectives from the Humanities, Law and Social Sciences

Elizabeth Leane, Jeffrey McGee, Elizabeth Leane, Jeffrey McGee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781032089157
• eBook ISBN: 9780429770746
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

Anthropocene Antarctica offers new ways of thinking about the 'Continent for Science and Peace' in a time of planetary environmental change. In the Anthropocene, Antarctica has become central to the Earth's future. Ice cores taken from its interior reveal the deep environmental history of the planet and warming ocean currents are ominously destabilising the glaciers around its edges, presaging sea-level rise in decades and centuries to come. At the same time, proliferating research stations and tourist numbers challenge stereotypes of the continent as the 'last wilderness.' The Anthropocene brings Antarctica nearer in thought, entangled with our everyday actions. If the Anthropocene signals the end of the idea of Nature as separate from humans, then the Antarctic, long considered the material embodiment of this idea, faces a radical reframing.

Understanding the southern polar region in the twenty-first century requires contributions across the disciplinary spectrum. This collection paves the way for researchers in the Environmental Humanities, Law and Social Sciences to engage critically with the Antarctic, fostering a community of scholars who can act with natural scientists to address the globally significant environmental issues that face this vitally important part of the planet.

1 Anthropocene Antarctica

Approaches, issues and debates

Elizabeth Leane and Jeffrey McGee

The Antarctic is a region that traditionally occupied the remote reaches of the geographical imagination. In the Anthropocene, however, the ‘frozen continent’ has become central to the planet’s present and future. Even as ice cores taken from its interior reveal the deep environmental history of the planet, warming ocean currents are ominously destabilising the glaciers around its edges. The continent contains over ninety per cent of the world’s ice, with the potential to raise sea levels by nearly sixty metres, if it were all to melt. While such a wholesale melt of the Antarctic ice sheet is not imminent, estimates (based on a business-as-usual greenhouse gas emissions scenario) indicate the continent’s ice could contribute over a metre of sea-level rise by the end of this century and over fifteen metres by 2500 (DeConto & Pollard 2016). And warming global average temperature – along with associated effects, such as ocean acidification and species migration – are only some the hallmarks of the global-scale threats to the region’s environment arising from activities remote from the continent itself. Marine microplastics pollution, possibly originating from outside the region, has been found in Antarctic waters (Waller et al. 2017). The thinning of the ozone layer in the atmosphere above the continent, identified by Antarctic scientists in the 1980s, has begun to abate due to international action to reduce the use of ozone-depleting gases, but recovery of ozone concentration to 1980s levels is not expected until the second half of this century (World Meteorological Organization 2018, p. 3). For many decades framed as a ‘last wilderness’, Antarctica is now increasingly understood as an environment irrevocably altered by remote human action and one that will irrevocably change the course of human lives all over the globe.

Scientific research into the impact of these global environmental changes on the Antarctic region is therefore crucial and has become increasingly prominent outside the polar research community. The continent’s spectacular icescapes and charismatic wildlife frequently feature on the cover of leading scientific journals such as Nature and transfer readily into popular forums. Popular culture has certainly registered the important links between Antarctica and global environmental change, as evidenced by Hollywood films such as the disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow (2004) and the children’s animation Happy Feet Two (2011). Large calving icebergs that might formerly have been enjoyed as spectacular natural occurences are now treated as political events and presaged by news headlines around the world.

The Anthropocene, then, not only brings attention to Antarctica’s integral role in the global climate system; it also asks us to rethink our assumptions about a place ‘often depicted as paradigmatically non-human’ (Roberts, Howkins & van der Watt, 2016, p. 2). Labelled variously a ‘continent for science’, a ‘giant laboratory’ and a ‘last wilderness’, Antarctica in the popular imagination has until very recently been largely thought of as a pristine environment defined by its remoteness from human settlement. But the global biophysical impacts of the Anthropocene significantly challenge the notion of Antarctica as a remote place, cut off from the planet by the circumpolar current and extreme weather of the Southern Ocean. In the Anthropocene, Antarctica becomes nearer in thought, entangled with our everyday actions. If the Anthropocene signals (in geographer Jamie Lorimer’s words) ‘the end of the idea of Nature as a pure place untouched by human hands’ (2017, p. 121), then the Antarctic, previously understood as the material embodiment of this ideal, faces a radical reframing.

The concept of the Anthropocene also brings home the fact that humans never encountered a truly ‘pure’ Antarctica. When European explorers caught sight of its icy coasts in the early nineteenth century, the gasses in its ice were already recording the atmospheric changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution (British Antarctic Survey 2014). Antarctica and the subantarctic islands were the site of a massive sealing and whaling industry in the nineteenth century, with fur seals driven close to extinction. Explorers who stoically battled the Antarctic elements for national and scientific priorities were also interested, in some cases, in the potential for exploiting the continent’s mineral resources. ¹ In the same year the Antarctic Treaty entered into force (1961), the United States installed a nuclear reactor to power McMurdo Station, its largest research base. The Treaty designated Antarctica a ‘continent for science and peace’, but the decades that followed also saw krill, icefish and later toothfish become the subject of industrial fishing in the region, and whales being hunted by Japanese factory ships. And although the 1991 Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty (Madrid Protocol) introduced a series of measures to limit the environmental impact of activities in Antarctica, including the banning of non-native species (bar humans), the human ‘footprint’ on Antarctica is not trivial and cannot be blamed solely (or even mostly) on the burgeoning tourist industry. While over fifty thousand tourists visited the Antarctic region in the 2017–2018 summer season – some of them perhaps motivated by an Anthropocenic ‘last chance to see’ impulse – research suggests that scientific programmes have a greater environmental impact, ² with infrastructure and related disturbance ‘similar in size to the total ice-free area of Antarctica … [and] disproportionately concentrated in some of the most sensitive environments’ (Brooks et al. 2019, p. 185). ³ In 2017, there were seventy-six research stations on the continent (COMNAP 2019).

While these kinds of impacts are ‘local’ rather than global problems, in the sense that they are a result of human activity in the region, they nonetheless form part of a new understanding of Antarctica as an anthropogenic icescape, enmeshed with the human world in ways that require ongoing analysis, critique and reassessment. This creates a challenge for scholarship, as the disciplines designed to think critically about human culture and society have only recently begun to apply their conceptual frameworks to Antarctica. Before turning to this topic, however, it is necessary to tease out the multiple and contested uses of the term ‘Anthropocene’, particularly as they relate to the Antarctic region.

Antarctica in the Anthropo-scene

In this volume we understand ‘the Anthropocene’ to broadly indicate the period in which human activity of various kinds has become a key driving force of planetary environmental change. In the last two decades, the concept has gained considerable traction in scholarship across a wide range of disciplines. The exact scientific definition of the term, and indeed its acceptance as a geological unit, is far from settled, with the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) still in the process of preparing an official proposal to the appropriate subset of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (Zalasiewicz et al. 2017, p. 59). Although the scholarly community eagerly anticipates the results of this proposal submission, the concept has gained an interdisciplinary currency which seems unlikely to be diminished by any lack of scientific consensus. The idea of the Anthropocene has been so productive within a wide range of disciplines that it now constitutes its own subfield, with corresponding conferences and journals ⁴ – an ‘Anthropo-scene’, as geographer Jamie Lorimer (among others) has described this ‘event-space’, which now extends beyond academia to the media and other parts of the public sphere (2017, p. 118). As Lorimer writes in an overview of relevant scholarship, the term has ‘proliferated promiscuously in ways unforeseen by its creators’, and while future acceptance by geoscientists might give it a ‘scientific legitimacy’, this ‘matter[s] less than the pressing problems the Anthropocene names’ (p. 131).

Within the humanities, law and social science disciplines (henceforth HLSS), debates about the Anthropocene and the length of the period it describes are themselves productive, generating new insights. Criticisms of the term, often made alongside suggested alternative namings and framings, have centred on its homogenising power to disguise global inequities, presenting as it does ‘humanity’, rather than certain sectors of it, as the source of destructive planetary-wide environmental change. Also at issue is its apparent reinstatement of human ascendency, ‘conceptually hardening modern humanity’s perceived entitlements … enshrining humanity’s domination over the planet’ when exactly the opposite conceptual move is required (Crist 2007, p. 52). Related debates about the date of the Anthropocene’s beginning have political meaning, signalling a different root cause of the planet’s current trouble: a suggested starting date of the onset of the Industrial Revolution, for example, ties the concept to the emergence of capitalism, whereas another suggestion – the beginning of European settlement of the Americas – points towards Western colonial expansion (Lorimer 2017, p. 132). The AWG is currently proposing the mid-twentieth century as the most likely starting point of the Anthropocene, but the question remains to be decided (Zalasiewicz et al. 2017, p. 58). We have therefore imposed no restrictions here on how contributors to this volume understand the Anthropocene, leaving them to make their own implicit or explicit case for interpretation, and to embrace or question the term as they see fit.

Within the huge body of HLSS-based scholarship on the Anthropocene, the Antarctic region’s scientific relevance – as an ‘icy archive’ of greenhouse gas data, a global climate ‘canary’ and a source of massive sea-level rise – is taken as read. Much less explored are the distinct opportunities that the continent currently offers as a subject of social and cultural enquiry. The chapters in this volume bear out this claim, but here we offer a few broad ways in which Antarctica presents a useful and distinctive place – intellectually speaking – from which to address some of the challenges of the Anthropocene.

The growth of the Anthropocene as a subject of scholarly discussion has been accompanied by an increasing interdisciplinarity in academic exchange. Within the environmental humanities, critics such as Noel Castree have urged researchers to ‘get their hands dirty in the places [where] scientists operate’ and seek ‘institutional and epistemological forms of engagement that might alter important conversations occurring outside the humanities’ (2014, p. 244). The Antarctic scholarly community is unusually well placed to initiate and maintain these kinds of interdisciplinary engagements. With Antarctica long labelled the ‘continent for science’, researchers in the HLSS disciplines interested in the region have had to carve out a place for themselves within a science-dominated field – a situation that has generated opportunities as well as challenges. The key body representing Antarctic-based HLSS scholarship is the Standing Committee on Humanities and Social Sciences (SC-HASS) within the international Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR). ⁵ SC-HASS holds its own regular conferences and forms a significant part of SCAR’s large biennial Open Science Conferences (OSCs). These represent truly multi-disciplinary events, where researchers in fields ranging from astronomy to literary studies meet and take part. And given SCAR’s role in providing advice to the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meetings, and its connections with industry bodies such as the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators, the opportunity for transdisciplinary exchange at these meetings is also significant.

This is not to suggest that Antarctic research is a paragon of disciplinary collaboration and inclusion. Authority is still heavily weighted towards the natural sciences and it is not unusual in Antarctic forums for scientists to be positioned as experts on topics that are the traditional purview of the HLSS disciplines (although the opposite situation is extremely rare). For example, at a SCAR OSC held in mid-2018, a well-attended Q&A panel event focused on ‘Polar Change and the Future of Society’. Sponsored by the journal Nature, the panel comprised five scientists (with another chairing), the head of the UK’s Polar Regions Department and one of the journal’s senior editors. Given the large number of social scientists presenting at the conference, their absence from the panel drew some comment. ⁶ For genuine intellectual exchange, HLSS researchers need a seat at this kind of table, and as well as the freedom to challenge the idea of the natural sciences as the altruistic generator of all relevant knowledge on Antarctica. Nonetheless, the continual growth and integration of HLSS into the Antarctic research community suggests that, in the future, this will be a particularly active space for disciplinary conversations.

Another striking aspect of Antarctica in the context of a global environmental crisis is its status as an internationally governed space. The Antarctic Treaty, which puts the seven territorial claims on the continent into a form of indefinite hiatus – effectively on hold, but not abandoned – has now been in place for sixty years. Long the subject of literary fantasies about alternative societies that invert and rectify the injustices of the wider world, in the twenty-first century Antarctic governance continues to be seen in a utopian light, as presenting an example of international cooperation for the global ‘common good’ and environmental protection that might provide a model for future governance of other areas, especially outer space. Perhaps, this thinking goes, a reverse globalisation is possible, where humanity’s international governance of Antarctica, the erstwhile exception, sets the standard for the rest of human activities. Again, this harmonious image is in many ways naïve. Claimant states have never ceded their territories and, as Alan Hemmings argues in this volume, nationalist motives can influence seemingly noble scientific ventures. Criticisms directed at the Anthropocene as a homogenising concept that smooths over global inequities can equally be directed at the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS) itself. Nations such as Malaysia have protested at various points, particularly during the 1980s, about the perceived dominance of Antarctic governance by Western nations that are wealthy enough to sustain scientific programmes, instead calling for the region to come under UN governance. While some commentators celebrate the longevity and stability of the ATS, others (including Tim Stephens in this volume) point to the mounting pressures on the governance regime – such as increased access and a growing diversity of states involved in its governance – that the Treaty was not specifically designed to address (see also Hemmings 2017, p. 518). Despite these difficulties, however, Antarctica still functions not only as a ‘laboratory ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• 1. Anthropocene Antarctica: Approaches, issues and debates
• PART 1: Governance and geopolitics
• PART 2: Cultural texts and representations
• PART 3: Inhabitations and place
• PART 4: Conclusion
• Index