Representing Planetary Nature: The Promise and Challenges of Rights of Antarctica

In this talk, I first offer a quick overview of a forthcoming book entitled “From Sovereignty to Guardianship: Governing Antarctica, Governing the World”. In it, I propose that Antarctica should not only be seen as a laboratory for the natural sciences, but also for territorial governance, providing inspiration in places where both the regime of Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources of individual states and the international regime of Common Heritage of Mankind have proven insufficient and inadequate. At the same time, I show that Antarctic governance can be made less state-centric and less anthropocentric by incorporating the political representation of nature in decision-making processes that affect the continent. To successfully protect Antarctica, I claim moreover that action must be taken beyond it: governing Antarctica requires governing the world, and vice versa. Given the twin crises of climate change and biodiversity loss that we face and the growing challenges to international law and cooperation, environmental governance around the world can—and should—benefit from the creative and often unexpectedly fruitful Antarctic political imagination.

After this general overview, I focus on the question of the political representation of Antarctica. In line with a global movement advocating for the rights of nature and of the movement Rights of Antarctica, I examine the claim that Antarctica as one thriving community of life should be considered as the subject of political and legal representation. I present some defences for the rights of natural entities in domestic constituencies and point to important differences between them and the Antarctic case. I discuss the political, legal, and institutional challenges of considering Antarctica as a political and legal subject. Among them: how to challenge the monopoly of states as decision-makers, how to pick nature’s representatives, and how to modify existing institutions and create new ones to make this representation possible. The promise of moving in this direction, I argue, is to overcome state-centrism and anthropocentrism in international law, building a precedent for the representation of other natural entities and places beyond Antarctica.