By Tracy Sorensen
"Words can hardly describe how beautiful it is — so pure, so majestic, it's almost humbling", says Greenpeace campaigner Kaye Dyson of the vast, pristine, ice-laden continent at the bottom of the planet. "Seeing it for myself emphasised to me even more the importance of saving it. Antarctica is a symbol of hope. If we can't protect the world's last great wilderness continent, what hope have we got of saving the world?"
In Madrid on June 23, a historic opportunity to preserve this unique ecosystem and continue an unprecedented period of international cooperation was missed when the United States blocked an agreement which could have introduced an indefinite mining ban.
On the final day of discussions of the 39 Antarctic Treaty Nations, the US delegation announced that it could not agree to the crucial article of the agreement on minerals activities, which would have given each signatory country a veto over mining. Twenty-six of these nations, including the US, have voting rights.
Even more alarming is the US proposal that any country have the right to withdraw from the environmental protocol on two years' notice.
The US forced the other 25 voting members of the Antarctic treaty to allow any one nation to walk out after 50 years and start mining. While this was unacceptable to the other nations, they agreed to the clause in order to accommodate the US and keep it within the bounds of the Antarctic Treaty.
"But for the US, an agreement would have been made that would have saved an entire continent — this is a sad day, indeed, for the future of Antarctica", Dyson told Green Left.
"It's obvious that the Bush administration has no intention of contributing to environmental protection — in fact, the two phrases should not be used in the same sentence. The US wants to maintain, at all costs, its rights to mine even at the expense of the ongoing viability of the Antarctic Treaty."
International dealings over the Antarctic, while not free of politicking, have, since the late 1950s, been surrounded by an atmosphere of relative good will. The Antarctic Treaty was signed on December 1, 1959, in Washington by representatives of Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Britain, Chile, France, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, the Soviet Union and the United States.
According to an article by Micheal Kennedy in Simply Living, the treaty served to "freeze" the various land claims. The parties to the treaty were divided into "claimant" and "non-claimant" states. The claimant states include New Zealand, France, Chile, Argentina, Britain, Norway and Australia. One sector is unclaimed, and there are three overlapping claims.
Australia maintains the largest claim, covering about 42% of the land area.
The treaty was also notable, writes Kennedy, for the first international agreement which established a demilitarised zone, and ensured that the continent could not be used for nuclear explosions or the disposal of nuclear waste.
"So for 25 years the hopes and aspirations ... that Antarctica would remain essentially the preserve of science, became a reality. Those political land claims remained in abeyance, and the great southern continent was one of the world's only and truly zones of peace."
It is the spirit of this treaty the US is set to destroy.
After the US walked away from the June Madrid talks, World Wildlife Fund spokesperson Margaret Moore commented that it was "bad enough that the US Energy department interests are driving US international policy"; now, it was "dictating Antarctic Treaty policy".
Even the Melbourne Age condemned the US position. Its June 25 editorial concluded: "Washington has ... long been a reluctant participant in multinational negotiations whose outcome it cannot dictate. It would be tragic if the Antarctic agreement was lost because of US determination to put its own perceived commercial interests before the welfare of future generations."
Michael Kennedy outlined the glittering prizes thought to be languishing under the snow and ice: chromium, coal, cobalt, copper, gold, gravel, iron, magnesium, manganese, marble, molybdenum, nickel, platinum, quartz, silver, tin, titanium and uranium.
But it is the conviction that Antarctica harbours vast supplies of oil that most excites the developers. Wrote Kennedy: "A representative of Gulf Oil in 1979 said the oil 'potential' of the most prospective areas in the Ross and Weddell seas was in the range of 50 billion barrels, but could be much more. The rich Australian oil fields in the Bass Strait by contrast have an estimated yield of only three billion barrels."
How quickly can the earth's oil-guzzling economy get through 50 billion barrels? Whether it's decades, or whether it's hundreds of years, environmentalists argue that, when put beside the enormity
of what future generations would lose, mining would be a painfully short-sighted, short-term solution to the world's energy crisis.
The undisturbed beauty of the continent has made poets of naturalists. International explorer and conservationist Jacques-Yves Cousteau, for example, described his experience of the place like this:
"Here, water is everywhere, heavy clouds camouflage glaciers, fog penetrates the lungs as tasteless inhalation and turns into snow in a minute ... humidity enters the bones forever, but dissipates like a joke with a ray of sun ... massive glaciers split and collapse in an uproar, raising mountains of smooth water ... streams of dark fluid mud sing under the snow and undermine our steps, black rocks emerge from their sheets of ice, mist roams around icebergs, and blurs camera lenses and eyeglasses. I can hardly survive without sun, but this continent of ice fascinates and bedazzles me."
Antarctica is regarded by meteorologists as the "heat sink" of the earth and a major controlling influence on world weather patterns.
"And then there's the wildlife", says Kaye Dyson. "You can sit and watch penguins for hours and hours. Eight species of penguins live in Antarctica, including the sub-Antarctic islands. They don't live anywhere else."
All the great whales can be found in the waters surrounding Antarctica: blue, fin, humpback, sei, minke, southern right, sperm and killer whale. Most of these species are now considered threatened.
"Mining, as we've seen all over the world, has grave environmental impacts", says Dyson. "If they drill on the continental shelf, there is the risk of oilwell blow-out or a tanker spill. This is a risk particularly in a place where ice conditions change from day to day. The conditions are very harsh, harsher than the Arctic.
"The continent is covered by a layer of ice about 1.6 kilometres thick. The technology to drill through it hasn't been invented yet; but anyone can see there'd be problems trying to do it."
Greenpeace has launched a campaign against the latest moves by the US over Antarctica, and continues its campaign to have the continent declared a world park in perpetuity.