The Greening of Antarctica: Assembling an International Environment by Alessandro Antonello (review)

A perennial challenge in the writing of polar history involves the need to push back against popular perceptions of circumpolar regions as unchanging spaces, largely (if not wholly) empty of human habitation and peripheral to the concerns of all but a few remote communities. And the scholars burdened most by this challenge are those who research the Antarctic, which—unlike the various sectors of the Arctic—lacks any indigenous population or any direct physical or socio-political ties with the nation-states of more temperate zones. Indeed, not until the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did the continent even enter the bounds of human awareness. To combat the prevailing sense of Antarctica as marginal and timeless—in other words, to make it a truly historical subject—has never been an easy task.

Difficult or not, this is one of the several goals that Alessandro Antonello sets for himself in The Greening of Antarctica. This clearly written and cogently argued monograph effectively blends environmental studies and diplomatic history to show how treaty-making and scientific agenda-setting between 1959 and 1980 transformed Antarctica "from a cold, abiotic, and sterile wilderness [and] a lifeless and inert stage for geopolitical competition" into "a fragile environment and ecosystem demanding international protection and management" (p. 4). Nothing about this process, especially its outcome, was preordained: although Antarctica's near-inviolability is generally taken for granted today, thanks to the treaty system that safeguards it so closely, it did not come into being automatically, and the continent could just as easily—arguably, more easily—have met an entirely different fate. Antonello takes pains to show the decades of debate and negotiation it took to secure the continent's status as a protected ecosystem, free of claims to sovereignty. To alter, then stabilize, "the idea of what Antarctica is," as Antonello puts it, required the complex interplay of "ever-increasing knowledge of the Antarctic, a larger place for scientific voices, profound changes in concepts of the global environment, changes in international political economy, and the continuing reality of national self-interest" (pp. 3–4).

The Greening of Antarctica is logically organized into five chapters, preceded by an introduction and followed by a short epilogue. In addition to describing Antonello's approaches to his topic, the introduction provides a useful thumbnail sketch of Antarctic history, leading up to and including 1959, when the Antarctic Treaty was brought into being by its twelve original signatories (Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Chile, France, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the USSR). The introduction also explains why Antonello has chosen to focus on the period between 1959 and 1980: although much of the scholarly consensus identifies 1991—when the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty opened for signature—as the pivotal moment in the history of Antarctic conservation, Antonello wishes to draw attention to earlier moments that are, in his view, not just equally decisive, but foundational. The "seeds" of today's "comprehensive environmental protection and management regime," he argues, "can be found in the 1960s and 1970s" (p. 17).

With one exception, each of the book's core chapters examines a key protocol or agreement, illustrating along the way how diplomats and politicians from over a dozen countries, scientists from numerous disciplines, commercial interests from all over the world, environmental NGOs, and the general public all exercised various degrees of influence over the eventual "greening" of Antarctica—sometimes in support of that goal, sometimes in opposition to it. Chapter One traces the emergence of SCAR, the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research, and the way it claimed a role for itself in shaping the continent's fate, alongside (and often in conflict with) the official delegations that negotiated and refined the 1959 Antarctic Treaty. Several of SCAR's biologists, particularly Robert Carrick of Australia, campaigned against the utilitarian impulses that threatened to dominate Antarctic policymaking and brought conservation...