In The Greening of Antarctica Alessandro Antonello investigates the development of an international regime of environmental protection and management between the signing of the Antarctic Treaty in 1959 and the signing of the Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources in 1980. In those two decades, the Antarctic Treaty parties and an international community of scientists reimagined what many considered a cold, sterile, and abiotic wilderness as a fragile and extensive regional ecosystem. Antonello investigates this change by analyzing the negotiations and developments surrounding four environmental agreements: the Agreed Measures for the Conservation of Antarctic Fauna and Flora in 1964; the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Seals in 1972; a voluntary restraint resolution on Antarctic mining in 1977; and the Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources in 1980. Though distant from world populations, Antarctica has long been a site of inter-state contest for geopolitical power and standing. This book reveals how a range of contests, geopolitical, epistemic and imaginative, created the environmental protection regime of the Antarctic Treaty System, and discusses the tension between states' individual searches for power and the collective desire for stability in the region. In this international and diplomatic context, the actors were not only trying to keep relations between themselves orderly, but they were also using treaties to order the human relationship with the environment. Drawing on a wide range of international archives, many newly-opened, The Greening of Antarctica offers the first detailed narrative of a crucial period in Antarctic history and reveals the contours of global environmental thought and diplomacy in the transformative Age of Ecology.

About the Author
Alessandro Antonello is McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, the University of Melbourne.

Reviews
A welcome intervention in both environmental history and Antarctic humanities. Informed and infused by theoretical work on assemblage theory and regime development, it offers the reader a spirited and humane investigation into how Antarctica became a space of, and for, environmental governance.... There is plenty of attention given to the human dramas and more than human forces and perturbation that encourage and/or frustrate attempts to garner support for particular kinds of intervention. * Klaus Dodds, English Historical Review *
...The Greening of Antarctica is a deeply informative, thoughtful, and well-written history, which challenges readers' conceptions on how they think of Antarctica. * Daniella McCahey, Metascience *



Book Information
ISBN 9780190907174
Author Alessandro Antonello
Format Hardback
Page Count 264
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 499g
Dimensions(mm) 157mm * 239mm * 28mm