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Abstract
The Agreed Measures for the Conservation of Antarctic Fauna and Flora (AMCAFF), passed in 1964, was an early major achievement of the Antarctic Treaty parties. These measures, the first within the Treaty regime to control human actions, were intended to conserve Antarctic fauna and flora by protecting certain species and areas and proscribing certain human activities and actions. This article is about the scientific impetus for nature conservation in the Antarctic and the diplomatic negotiations carried out in response. It argues that the Agreed Measures came about because the conservation challenge posed by scientists to the new Treaty parties allowed for an opportunistic and advantageous embellishment and expansion of the young Treaty regime. This article considers the challenge set down by biological scientists working within the newly created Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research, led especially by the Australian scientist Robert Carrick. It goes on to unpack the minimally drawn and conceived conservation and environmental aspects of the Treaty, to appreciate the diplomatic challenge of negotiating conservation measures. It then gives an account of AMCAFF’s negotiation. This article contributes to the developing historiography of the Treaty era by drawing attention to the ways in which the Treaty was enacted, argued and talked about after 1959.
Notes
1 Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Chile, France, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, United Kingdom, USA and USSR.
2 Benest, letter to Hankey, January 27, 1960.
3 As one crude example of the lack of interest in the Treaty era, David Day’s recent comprehensive history devotes 28 pages to the years 1961–2012 (51 years), while the preceding 15 years between 1945 and 1960 get 110 pages: Day, Antarctica: a biography. Others have begun important and critical work on the period. Adrian Howkins has written on climate change and politics in the Treaty era in “Melting Empires? Climate change and politics in Antarctica since the International Geophysical Year.” Lize-Marié van der Watt has shifted from Britain and the United States to South Africa: “Return to Gondwanaland: South Africa, Antarctica, minerals and apartheid”. See also contributions to Haward and Griffiths, eds., Australia and the Antarctic Treaty System which cover many aspects of Australia’s participation in the Antarctic Treaty System.
4 Examples of these regulations can be found in Bush, ed. Antarctica and International Law.
5 Roberts, The European Antarctic, 32–34.
6 See instruments of appointment to positions in the Australian Antarctic Territory in the mid-1950s in Department of External Affairs files held in the National Archives of Australia, A1838, 1495/3/2/2 Part 1-2.
7 There is a wealth of literature, particularly on the United States, which approaches the sources of nature conservation and environmentalism. A still standard work on the rise of conservation and ecological thinking is Donald Worster’s Nature’s Economy. An important work on ornithology in the United States is Mark V Barrow’s A Passion for Birds. As for people, communities and their local resources, a particularly fine example in this historiography is Richard Judd’s work on New England Common Lands, Common People.
8 The Antarctic experience can be instructively compared with the experiences of scientists in imperial settings, though there remain, of course, important differences. For a recent collection on scientists in the British Empire, see Bennett and Hodge, eds., Science and Empire. Richard Grove’s classic work Green Imperialism was also centrally about the emergence of conservation and environmentalism in imperial settings. See also Gregory Barton’s Empire Forestry and the Origins of Environmentalism.
9 International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics, Antarctic Symposium, 19.
10 Carrick’s position as the initiator of SCAR’s conservation effort has been identified and briefly discussed in Riddle and Goldsworthy, “Environmental Science and the Environmental Ethos of ANARE,” 565–6. See also Hemmings and Jabour, “Already a Special Case?,” 127.
11 He had already dealt with the topic in a broad way at the March 1959 SCAR meeting in Canberra (SCAR Bulletin, no. 3, September 1959).
12 Robin, letter to Carrick, April 8, 1960; Robin, letter to R. Carrick, May 17, 1960.
13 Dunnet, “Robert Carrick 1911–88.”
14 Robin, The Flight of the Emu, 153–4 and 161–3.
15 Ibid., 203.
16 Robin, “Nature Conservation as a National Concern.”
17 Carrick, “Conservation of nature in the Antarctic,” 299.
18 Ibid., 300.
19 Ibid., 301.
20 Ibid., 302.
21 Ibid., 299.
22 Ibid., 299–300 and 303.
23 British Section, International Council for Bird Preservation, letter to UK Foreign Secretary, July 18, 1960.
24 See Kroll, America’s Ocean Wilderness, chap. 2.
25 Ibid.
26 Robin, letter to Carrick, April 5, 1960.
27 Carrick, letter to Robin, May 4, 1960.
28 Carrick, letter to Robin, May 4, 1960.
29 SCAR Bulletin, no. 8, May 1961. On the revision process see Robin, letter to Carrick, May 17, 1960.
30 Roberts, Paper “Conservation of Living Resources in the Antarctic.”
31 SCAR Bulletin, no. 8, May 1961, 532.
32 United States, Department of State, “Tentative Proposals.”
33 British Embassy Washington. Telegram 580 to Foreign Office, London, March 12, 1958.
34 See enclosure to Muirhead, letter to Hankey, June 20, 1958.
35 Howkins, “Science, Environment, and Sovereignty,” 257.
36 United States, Department of State, Aide-Memoire, March 24, 1958; Hankey, letter to Oslo, April 22, 1958.
37 Beck, “Preparatory meetings for the Antarctic Treaty 1958–59.”
38 A copy of this Treaty draft can be found in The National Archives of the UK, FO 371/131916.
39 See, for example, Muirhead, letter to Hankey, June 26, 1959.
40 See, for example, Wilcox, Memorandum to Daniels, December 16, 1958.
41 Conference on Antarctica, Verbatim Record, October 22, 1959 and Working Paper COMII/SR/4.
42 Conference on Antarctica, Working Paper COMII/SR/5.
43 Conference on Antarctica, Working Paper COMII/P11.
44 It is unsurprising that Chile should have pursued this question, given the importance of fisheries to their national economy, and its pursuit in the 1950s of better conservation practices for world fisheries: see Finley, All the Fish in the Sea.
45 Conference on Antarctica, Working Paper COMII/SR/6.
46 Conference on Antarctica, Verbatim Record, October 27, 1959.
47 Conference on Antarctica, Working Paper COMII/SR/7.
48 For more on Roberts see Dodds, “The great game in Antarctica” and H.G.R. King and Ann Savours, eds., Polar Pundit.
49 Roberts, Paper “Conservation of Living Resources in the Antarctic.”
50 Ibid.
51 McInnes, Minute, September 20, 1960.
52 Recommendation I–VIII, in “Report of First Consultative Meeting, Canberra,” 1961.
53 Roberts, Personal Journal, July 11, 1961.
54 As discussed, Carrick seemed to have some difficult professional relationships, Robin, The Flight of the Emu, 432, no. 46.
55 The Treaty states that the first meeting of parties would take place in Canberra within two months of the Treaty coming into force: Australia, Argentina and Chile were the last ratifications; Australia strategically so, so it could control the date of the meeting; Argentina and Chile got bogged down in their domestic politics.
56 Hemmings and Jabour, “Already a Special Case?,” 128–9.
57 Roberts, Personal Journal, July 25, 1962.
58 Roberts, letter to Robin, July 28, 1962.
59 Second Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, Working Paper P3 “Draft Convention on the Conservation of Wild Life in the Antarctic,” July 17, 1962.
60 Mills, Memorandum to Smith, April 30, 1963.
61 USSR, “Notes on the draft Convention for the Conservation of Wild Life of the Antarctic.”
62 Piddington, Memorandum to Wellington, June 10, 1963.
63 Though apparently not enough of a bombshell for the New Zealand delegate to report. Press, Memorandum to Wellington, September 11, 1963.
64 Roberts, Minute, November 8, 1963; Carr, letter to Parsons, November 26, 1963.
65 Press, Memorandum to Wellington, November 15, 1963.
66 US Embassy Wellington, Note Verbale.
67 United States, Department of State, Airgram A60 to Brussels, October 28, 1963.
68 Cumes, Memorandum to Canberra, April 9, 1964; Roberts, letter to Law, May 14, 1964.
69 USSR, “Notes on the draft Convention for the Conservation of Wild Life of the Antarctic.”
70 Cumes, Memorandum to Canberra, February 12, 1964; United States Embassy Brussels, Airgram A794 to Washington, February 18, 1964.
71 Roberts, letter to Law, May 14, 1964.
72 UK Foreign Office, Working Paper, February 28, 1964.
73 United States, Department of State, Airgram A60 to Brussels, October 28, 1963.
74 Cumes, Memorandum to Canberra, April 9, 1964.
75 See two recent works: Howkins, “Melting Empires?” and Howkins, “The Science of Decolonization.”