Antarctic Treaty Consultative Parties’ engagement in wilderness protection at home and in Antarctica

Abstract

The Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty has stipulated the protection of Antarctica’s wilderness values since it came into force in 1998. A review of 2800 documents from the website of the Secretariat of the Antarctic Treaty indicates that the consideration of wilderness is a very small component in the discussions and decisions of the 29 Antarctic Treaty Consultative Parties between 1998 and 2014. Fourteen Parties have never or very rarely spoken or written about wilderness, yet at least three of them have wilderness legislations for their domestic territories. The existence or absence of domestic wilderness policies or wilderness areas in a Party’s home country cannot explain the degree of its engagement on the issue of Antarctica’s wilderness values. Instead, Parties’ engagement on the issue of Antarctica’s wilderness values can be seen as a subset of the larger pattern of their engagement within the Antarctic Treaty System in general and on Antarctic environmental matters in particular. For Parties that have engaged little on the issue, we postulate that wilderness is unlikely to be a priority. For Parties that have engaged on the issue, we postulate that they envision Antarctic wilderness within a strongly anthropocentric utilitarian framework, similar to that adopted domestically within the European Union, and in contrast with the more existential framework adopted domestically by the USA. We argue that an anthropocentric utilitarian framework, together with de facto zoning of the Antarctic Treaty area into infrastructure and protected zones and Every Man’s Land, cannot provide effective protection to Antarctica’s wilderness.