The Environmental History of the Antarctic

• Main Author: Grevsmühl, Sebastian
• Format: Book Part
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford University Press 2024
• Subjects: Antarctic; The Antarctic; Antarc*; Antarctica
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199389414.013.862

The environmental history of the polar regions, and in particular of Antarctica, is a rather recent area of inquiry that is in many ways still in its infancy. As a truly multidisciplinary research field, environmental history draws much inspiration from a large diversity of fields of historical and social research, including economic history, diplomatic history, cultural history, the history of explorations, and science and technology studies. Although overarching book-length studies on the environmental history of Antarctica are still rare, historical scholars have already conducted many in-depth case studies related mostly to three major interrelated research topics: Antarctic governance, natural resource exploitation, and tourism. These recent historical efforts, carried out mostly by a new generation of historians, have thus far allowed the proposal of several powerful counternarratives, challenging the frequent yet erroneous assertion that environmental protection and conservation were completely absent from Antarctic affairs before the 1970s. In so doing, environmental historians started offering a much more complex and nuanced account of what is frequently referred to as the “greening” of Antarctica, going well beyond “declensionist” narratives and conservation success stories that commonly pervade not only environmental histories but also public discourse. Indeed, all recent historical studies agree that there is nothing inevitable about the “greening” of Antarctica, nor are conservation and environmental protection its natural destiny. Science, politics, imperialism, capitalism, and imaginaries all have played their part in this important history, a history that remains still largely to be written.