Contemporary Order, Protection and Management

Norwegian whalers were known to remark that below forty degrees south latitude there was no law, and that below fifty degrees there was no God, so physically demanding was the ocean.^[871] While it remains as stormy as ever, the contemporary history of the Southern Ocean is one that is indeed characterised by rules and a concerted (and contested) search for international order across the whole ocean.

Concerted scientific work from the late 1950s increasingly demon­strated the extent of various fish stocks, most particularly of Antarctic krill (Euphausia superba), the main zooplankton of the marine ecosystem and fed hopes for new fisheries and renewed industry in the Southern Ocean. Though non-whale and non-seal fisheries had sometimes been invoked by scientists and explorers in the first half of the twentieth cen­tury, it was whaling that soaked up the capital, labour and imagination.

These investigations and trials occurred in several contexts which cre­ated frictions in need of resolution by both diplomats and scientists. In diplomatic terms, these new fisheries affected the balance of the Antarctic Treaty regime. The states investigating the fisheries (with the exception of West Germany at the time) were parties to the Antarctic Treaty, an agreement that had been signed by twelve states in 1959 in an effort to peacefully resolve disagreements arising from territorial claims on the continent - the Treaty ‘froze’ the territorial and sovereignty issues.^[874] The Treaty had, in part, responded to the rhetoric of scientific international­ism that had animated the massive research effort of the International Geophysical Year of 1957-58. Though the IGY program had concen­trated on the continent, the ocean was still caught up in some ways in that internationalist spirit and was enfolded into the scientific work that continued in IGY’s wake. While the Treaty specifically excluded the high seas and whales, its parties were increasingly worried about developments in the Southern Ocean. They worried about continuing their peaceful relations, they questioned who would win and lose in such developments and they increasingly wondered about environmental impacts.^[875]

The new potential fisheries also raised questions about the ordering of the Southern Ocean that were inescapably tied with the ordering of the world ocean at large. Developments in ideas of the ‘global commons’, the ‘common heritage of mankind’, the exploitability of the sea bed, the creation of exclusive economic zones, identification of the extended con­tinental shelf and the negotiations towards a new and comprehensive law of the sea through the United Nations after 1973 (UNCLOS), all weighed heavily on the range of diplomatic, scientific and civil society actors engaging with the Southern Ocean.^[876] The UNCLOS negotia­tions in particular cast into relief the limits of the international or global character of the Southern Ocean, for they pitted a collective of newly decolonised states, through the Non-Aligned Movement among others, against the much smaller group of wealthy, industrially developed states that dominated the ocean’s affairs.

From an environmental and scientific perspective, the spectre of the over-hunted whales hung over these discussions. The fate of the whales was invoked in mid-1975 when the still-young Greenpeace’s activities in the North Pacific confronting the Soviet whaling fleet were interpo­lated into Antarctic affairs by diplomats only weeks later to justify marine resource conservation.^[877] The other major environmental context was the increasing salience and dominance of the ‘ecosystem’ idea not only in resource management, but in the broader environmental cultures emerg­ing in global civil society. With krill seen as the most promising quarry, scientists drew attention to the fact that it is the keystone species of the Antarctic marine ecosystem, with which nearly all other animals have some very direct relationship; any over-exploitation of krill would affect other, non-exploited, species.^[878]

In light of these political, economic and intellectual pressures, two developments occurred broadly. First, scientists within the overarch­ing international architecture of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) began to create an international research framework to develop data and knowledge about the Antarctic marine ecosystem. They organised their endeavours under the title Biological Investigations of Marine Antarctic Systems and Stocks (BIOMASS). This program ran through the 1980s, generating not only new reams of data on many aspects of the ocean, but also a concerted international scientific rela­tionship to it.^[879]

The second development fed off these scientific movements, but had some independence too. The consultative parties of the Antarctic Treaty saw the problem of an absence of rules in the Southern Ocean, and began to negotiate a formal response from 1975. What was novel about their approach was that their negotiations fixed upon the ecosys­tem and ecological relationships between species as one of the central subjects of their agreement.

In the years since the Convention came into force in 1982, there have been several areas of work and contention. The interests of fishing com­panies in the Southern Ocean have not abated, and significant catches of Patagonian and Antarctic toothfish and krill have occurred through the period. Catch limits, gear regulations, ecosystem monitoring and pro­tection guidelines, seabird by-catch, illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing and piracy, and marine protected areas have all animated the diplomatic and scientific efforts of parties to CCAMLR. The parties and scientists have seemingly made CCAMLR a success, certainly avoiding the fate of the whales under the early IWC.^[881]

The CCAMLR structures arose out of the Antarctic Treaty regime, which had no provisions allowing discussions of whales, leaving such matters to the International Whaling Commission.

Despite the commercial moratorium, from 1987 the Japanese whal­ing fleet continued to hunt for ‘scientific purposes’ in the Southern Ocean under special permit provision of the ICRW. Most Western sci­entists, governments and publics have been incredulous of the scientific rationale, confronting the Japanese government in several ways. Several international environmental groups have protested on the ocean itself at the very site of whaling. Greenpeace chased down Japanese whal­ers in the Southern Ocean in the late 1980s, manifesting a particularly robust form of ‘bearing witness’ that, following the Quaker faith of sev­eral of its founders, was central to the organisation’s mode of activism.

In more recent times too, other international bodies have been enrolled into the story of Southern Ocean whaling. With continuing domestic pressure, the Australian government, supported by New Zealand, applied in 2010 to the International Court of Justice to rule on the legality of Japan’s ‘scientific whaling’.^[885] The majority of the court found that JARPA II could not be considered scientific under the convention. Much media coverage and public discussion of the judgement misinterpreted the spe­cific focus of the case on JARPA II and painted the judgement as banning all whaling. In their way, the majority of judges of the ICJ continued a trend of privileging scientific work in the Southern Ocean at the expense of other forms of human engagement, and, as a corollary, also judging what was good science.

While the small Japanese hunt for whales in the ocean continued to gather public and governmental attention, a larger group of actors has pursued with greater intensity the other economic resources of the Southern Ocean. Tourism has also grown over the past few decades as a valuable economic activity. In addition to the Antarctic ice sheet and the region’s unique wildlife, the rusting remnants of the whaling industry at South Georgia are a standard part of tourist ship itineraries. While tour­ists number only in the tens of thousands, the concentration of activities in the South Atlantic and Antarctic Peninsula regions brings increased chances of environmental damage, both on land and at sea. Under the watchful eye of CCAMLR, significant catches of krill and toothfish have been landed, sustaining a significant industry. Enmeshed in these eco­nomic efforts is a geopolitical push to continually refine and bolster the sense of order and power in the ocean. Furthermore, the contest between conservation and exploitation continues unabated, without clear win­ners - though the recent, October 2016 creation of a marine protected area in the Ross Sea suggests that a conservation-minded approach is currently ascendant, or at least diplomatically tolerable. While the victors trade the rhetoric of scientific truth and self-evident rightness of environ­mental protection, the contemporary historian is left to ask how long- and short-term changes and continuities have led to such outcomes, and how slowly built structures of ideas, practices and identities will shape the future.