Abstract

The twin crises of climate change and biodiversity loss have shown humans our power to intervene and modify nature in ways that can end up threatening our own existence on earth. At the same time, and despite attempts to find technological fixes, they have shown us our limited knowledge and power to control the planet’s processes and systems. It is no accident that scientists who have theorized the need to remain within our “planetary boundaries” are advocating a new form of governance for the “planetary commons”; and that researchers mapping the world’s most valuable ecoregions are proposing the creation of a “Global Safety Net” of protected areas spanning across national jurisdictions.

In this book, I look to Antarctica as an inspiration for creating modes of territorial governance that respond more adequately to these environmental challenges. Despite its colonial origins, for over 60 years the Antarctic Treaty has ruled over the continent preserving peace, science and—since the signature of the Environmental Protocol in 1991—the protection of the environment. Neither under the national regime of Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources nor under the international regime ofCommon Heritage of Mankind, Antarctica has been jointly governed by a group of states with a focus on protection rather than exploitation of the nonhuman natural world. I argue that this regime of Joint Guardianship where business has not been conducted as usual and where states have shown restraint should serve as a blueprint for the governance of places beyond Antarctica, like ecoregions and arguably also the oceans and outer space. Having said this, I argue that what I call the “Antarctic political imagination” has not been wholly impervious to three biases that also inform international law more generally: methodological anthropocentrism, methodological extractivism, and methodological nationalism. I find in the Environmental Protocol some of the conceptual resources needed to move beyond them and suggest that, if reinterpreted along these lines, this could result in the first political system at the global level where not just humans, but also nonhumans are represented, and where the representatives are not just states, but also non-state actors. To conclude, I look at the “paradox of protection” that affects Antarctica as well as other Global Systemic Resources; namely, that to protect them it is not enough to act in them, but also beyond them. Unsurprisingly, the take-home message is that governing Antarctica requires to some extent governing the world … and vice versa.