Exploring Polar Hydrocommons : A speculative counter-cartography of the poles

Summary

This paper draws inspiration from the post-humanist feminist phenomenology of Neimanis in exploring how the polar areas can be made and maintained as planetary hydrocommons. What characterises the polar areas is ice. There, two thirds of Earth’s freshwater is held, 90% in Antarctica and 10% in Greenland. This ice plays a profound role in global hydrological cycles, not least pertaining to human wellbeing. As such it is a coveted resource pegged for extraction in the race for the poles. At the same time, as part of the global hydrological cycle this ice is a planetary commons. This paper will employ the concepts of geo-power and the hydrocommons to explore how the icy nonhuman forcefulness of the poles infiltrates the way we can make sense of the poles. Through exploring counter-cartographic and sympoietic mappings of the Antarctic in particular, the paper illustrates how icy geopower intersects with aesthetics through the ways in which the polar ice is materially sensed and made sense of. This sense making is meant to counter the economic compulsion of extracting polar water or the appropriation of icy polar areas as wilderness for conservation. The terrain to be cultivated through the counter-cartographic presences are the commons sustaining already the ‘uncontained overflowing force’ of the multitude (Hard and Negri, 2017). These are commons instituting a scheme of open, shared use and democratic governance which can construct free human conviviality beyond the archaic and destructive pair of the private and the public. The paper claims that sensory mappings of differentiating icy geo-power can make for the polar areas as hydrocommons. The aim is thereby to mobilise politics and aesthetics of future tourism development for a planetary hydrocommons informing our culture and strategies for liveability on and of the Earth.