Reframing the Antarctic as polar planetary commons : moving beyond rights of nature

Summary

This conceptual paper seeks to unravel the processes of assigning rights to nature (RoN) in the polar context through recognising how current efforts of assigning these are steeped in property relations and express an inherent anthropocentrism. The paper critically synthesises ideas from across the disciplines of environmental law, geography and cultural theory to understand how the process of assigning rights to nature takes place–or effectively how rights of nature makes for Antarctic geographies today and into the future. The Antarctic is currently promoted, depicted and popularly imagined as a pristine wilderness. As such, it represents the final frontier of techno industrial capitalism on the planet. In this context, the wilderness qualities of the region need to be confronted as places of our making. This calls for a radical realignment of the assignation of rights to nature, whereby any diminutive apprehensions of nature or objective measures of wilderness need to be countered. Any assignation of rights needs to be informed by how values and representations are continually relationally constituted and have a planetary dimension. This reframing implies that places do not possess some inherent or authentic value, or rights. The way they are valued is made here and now, there and then, in the moments we make sense of and relate to place. In this frame of ongoing valuing, this paper explores how RoN takes place in the polar regions, revealing the Antarctic as a planetary hydrocommons. Underpinned by notions of geopower and sympoietic earth jurisprudence these planetary hydrocommons are illustrated through ice and the question posed is how our ongoing relation configuration to place can feature in Antarctic policy and governance.