| Summary: | This introduction situates this book within the fields of Antarctic, environmental, and international history. It poses the central question of the book: How did Antarctica transform from a cold, abiotic, and sterile wilderness into a fragile environment and ecosystem demanding international protection and management? It outlines how both parties to the Antarctic Treaty and scientists have sought order, stability, power, and authority in geopolitical, institutional, conceptual, and epistemic realms. It argues for reading international treaties as complex texts that articulate and shape human-environment relationships. It further argues for an approach to international environmental history that balances understanding the material reality of the physical environment with a range of imaginative and conceptual understandings of it. The chapter provides a concise guide to the development of Antarctic geopolitics after 1945, as well as a gloss of the Antarctic Treaty.
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