ONLINE CURRENTS VOL3 - Flipbook - Page 17
missile launch sites and the intensification of Cold War geopolitics, and conflict over strategic
stores of minerals such as uranium”.
The current Antarctic Treaty, signed in 1959, was spurred by the Cold War, where 12 initial
states, which included US and USSR, came together to agree upon a broad set of goals:
peaceful usage, freedom of scientific investigation and cooperation, territorial sovereignty,
and zero nuclear activity 31 . With only 14 articles, it was a remarkably short treaty, with inherent
fragilities which did not take long to show, especially from an environmental perspective.
Most obvious among these were sealing and whaling practices which were still rampant in
destroying native populations right up into the seventies, which gradually came under public
pressure. Brutal imagery from hunts, as well as the discovery of whale “songs” as
communication lines were inspiring the public to realize them as intelligent species 32 . Rex
Weyler, a former Greenpeace director who heard these recordings when they were first
released said “it was the first time any of us had heard those [whale song] recordings, and it
certainly was a huge factor in convincing us that the whales were an intelligent species here
on planet Earth”.33
The public outcry helped to energize the fruition of modernized legal protocols, notably, the
Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) in 1980 and
the Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Seals in 1978. The focus of mitigating
overfishing saw the regulation of Antarctic krill (Euphausia superba - the largest biomass in
the oceans), Patagonian toothfish (sold as premium Chilean sea bass) and sealing.
Sealing, which prized their blubber, leather and fur, had reduced populations to near
extinction but implementation of the protections delivered one of the most notable feats in
modern population recoveries. Now none of the 6 seal species, such as the crab eater or
leopard seals, are considered threatened by the International Union for Conservation of
Nature (IUCN). 34
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