The Gigaton Ice Theatre: Performing Ecoactivism in Antarctica

Abstract

Drawing on the author’s own experiences as a journalist, this chapter provides an overview for understanding Antarctic ecoactivist protests in the late 1980s and early 1990s—a time when environmental groups lobbied to have the continent declared a World Park—as a political performance for low-latitude audiences. It focuses primarily on Greenpeace’s actual Antarctic engagements: building World Park Base, protesting at McMurdo and completing larger survey tours of Antarctic bases. It identifies actions, symbols and media strategies shaping Antarctic environmental history and providing the history with coherence. It further examines what happens when political systems are challenged, exploring Greenpeace’s environmental activism in the 1980s in terms of an acute dichotomy in which human beings shame each other for failing to respect and champion nature, or die with nature as we fail to monitor, regulate and shift human exploitation of the Earth.

The Ross Sea, Antarctica, February 1988

Maggi McCaw: I joined Greenpeace because of the whale issue. I went to Antarctica as an able-bodied seaman with Greenpeace because Antarctica is not theirs. They cannot have it.

Me: What do you mean, “theirs”?

Maggi: I mean the people who sit around thinking about exploiting Antarctica as yet another mining site. Those people. Go mine your own countries. Fuck you. The Antarctic belongs to us all. And we want to keep it pristine and free. A World Park. World Park Antarctica.

—Conversation between the author and a Greenpeace activist