Conclusion
Though distant from human populations, the Southern Ocean has nevertheless been a site of considerable human activity, the products
of which - both material and intellectual - have affected many societies, cultures and environments.
If the numbers of people visiting and inhabiting the ocean have been manifestly fewer than other oceans, they have made up for it with a commercial purpose that has devastated species and had profound ecological impacts. Exploitation of natural resources is only the most obvious of the continuities through the ocean’s history. Another continuity revolves around the senses of proximity and distance, in both material-spatial and temporal senses. While certain countries and communities that face the Southern Ocean have considered it local, the ocean has so often hosted visitors from distant places. The ocean has witnessed the perils and distances that we (the ‘we’ of modern consumer society) will allow, indeed expect, workers to endure to provide some new consumable. The products of the ocean have also very often been distanced from their source: the seal furs do not seem to have been marketed as coming from the ocean; margarines made of whale oil were not marketed as ‘Antarctic’ and whales were very often abstracted from their particular environments when considered by companies or diplomatic meetings; the ocean did not feature in the advertising or packaging for the Soviet krill paste that might have led to excessive harvesting; and the modern catch of Patagonian and Antarctic toothfish is relabelled and marketed as ‘Chilean sea bass’. In contrast, the international community of earth scientists has, over recent decades, demonstrated the profound connections between the Southern Ocean and other parts of the Earth system. Histories and futures are also fluid in their proximity and distance. In recent environmental campaigns, the ocean has been portrayed as the ‘last’ ocean, relatively untouched compared to all others, a selective sense of history to be sure; the promise of the ocean has sometimes relied of strategic forgetting of the past. And the ocean’s future under a changed climate seems closer than ever.The opposition to this great, continuous exploitation has been one of the more recent changes. Since the decline of whaling beginning in the 1960s, the Southern Ocean has been increasingly contested in a variety of forums, international and diplomatic, governmental and nongovernmental, scientific and environmental. And through this contest, the ocean has been subject to constant attention and surveillance. At the heart of the contest is the question of the right way to approach the ocean. Should the ocean be emptied of its fishing vessels and preserved, or should exploitation continue?
Many elements of the stories told here are known; some are poorly known and demand continued research; and some may never be known because of the lack of reliable evidence. As is often the case with histories involving commercial enterprises, details associated with the making of money from natural resources can be scant or obscured - while some of the whaling ventures have left archives, few records survive of the sealing ventures and modern fishing companies seem hardly likely to open their records, if they have any at all. We must also remember to look at the ocean itself. In the past twenty years or so, the Southern Ocean has been found to be home to surprising biodiversity. And, of course, a future affected by major climate change - warming temperatures, ocean acidification, ocean freshening through the ice sheet mass loss and stormier weather - will certainly affect how we understand the past.