Cape Town is nestled on a small peninsula that pokes out into the chilly vastness of the Southern Ocean. This city of nearly 5 million people is wrapped like a glittering hug around the stony buttresses that hold up the towering Table Mountain. For scientists, researchers and intrepid adventurers in Africa, Cape Town is one of the last points of human civilization before the vastness of Antarctica and its surrounding sea.
At the foot of Table Mountain is a gabled brick cottage that would look more at home in England’s green countryside. It is the house of renowned environmental lawyer Cormac Cullinan. Here in this bucolic setting, surrounded by huge forest trees, Cullinan and his partners are helping spearhead a growing global movement to grant legal rights to nature, an effort that has so far been remarkably successful, but which is about to butt heads with some of the most influential and powerful political players in the world.
“The Antarctic is facing very significant threats, and urgent action is required,” noted Cullinan as he sat in his garden below Table Mountain, where he spoke with New Lines. “What this new initiative is doing is putting in place an entirely new way of seeing Antarctica, seeing it not as a place but as a community of life.”
There’s a battle brewing in the southern ocean as a decades-old treaty between 58 countries that governs how Antarctica is used and how it is protected seems to be approaching its sell-by date. This vast continent, which has no fixed population and no government, is in the crosshairs of powerful interests that aim to mine for rare earth metals on land and drill for oil in its surrounding ocean. As global powers eye the chance to exploit the natural resources of Earth’s last terrestrial wilderness, and as global climate change is putting the Antarctic ice shelf at risk of collapse, a new Rights of Nature movement is making the case that Antarctica — its flora, fauna, ocean and ice shelves — should have legal standing on the world’s stage.
Covering 10% of Earth’s surface, Antarctica and the Southern Ocean play a critical role in supporting life on our planet. Moderating the global climate by acting as a natural refrigerator or cooling system, Antarctica’s ice shelves and glaciers reflect sunlight that would otherwise warm the dark land and waters, further accelerating anthropogenic global heating and, according to scientists, drastically increasing the already alarming rise in sea levels.
On a recent visit to the continent, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres made clear that more protection for Antarctica is desperately needed at this critical time. “We live in an interconnected world. Fossil fuel pollution is heating our planet, unleashing climate anarchy in Antarctica. The Southern Ocean has taken the majority of the heat from global warming. That means ice is melting into the ocean at record rates.”
Most experts agree that more protection for Antarctica is urgent. Scientists from the Australian Antarctic Program have noted with alarm that if Antarctica were to lose its ice to a warming climate “it would contribute approximately 58 meters [190 feet] in sea level rise” globally.
To put the extreme nature of this rise in context, a 2020 article in the journal Nature outlined the possible impact of what it called at the time a “worst-case warming scenario” — a global sea-level rise of only 1 meter (39 inches) by 2100. The authors projected that when the rise happens, “48% of the world’s land area, 52% of the global population and 46% of global assets” will be at risk of flooding.
With the world blowing past its internationally agreed-upon targets to limit climate change-causing emissions and with 2024 now recognized as the hottest year on record, scientists like Tim Naish from the Antarctic Research Centre at New Zealand’s Victoria University of Wellington are raising the alarm that the world can expect sea-level rise from the melting of Antarctica’s ice sheets to be catastrophic for our way of life. “We are getting close to tipping points, which once crossed will lead to irreversible changes with unstoppable consequences for future generations,” he said.
Cullinan, who is the director of South Africa’s Wild Law Institute, is globally recognized for his groundbreaking work over the last two decades advocating, often successfully, for legal systems to recognize the legal rights of what he calls “other-than-human beings,” and to impose duties on people, companies and governments as a means to force them to respect and uphold those rights. As part of his efforts, he helped draft the 2010 Universal Declaration of Rights of Mother Earth, published by the International Rights of Nature Tribunal, which states that the Earth and its natural systems have a “right to exist” free of things like pollution and disruptive human processes like mining or oil and gas drilling.
The Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature includes not only attorneys like Cullinan but also scientists, politicians, students and many others from nearly a hundred countries. The alliance has stacked up some big legal victories over the past 10 years. A 2023 study by Harvard University noted that rights of nature laws “have been enacted in Ecuador, Bolivia, New Zealand, Uganda, Panama, Spain, and US and Canadian localities, among others.”
Sitting under the lush green canopy in his backyard on a sunny spring afternoon recently, Cullinan explained how redefining natural entities like glaciers, forests, rivers and wildlife as legal subjects rather than objects means they can have enforceable legal rights, such as the right to exist and the right to fulfill their functions in an ecosystem. This, he explained, would enable courts to protect the natural systems that support life on Earth by upholding these rights when humans seek to violate them, and allow people to sue governments and corporations that endanger their future. He pointed out that courts recognize artificial entities, like corporations, as legal subjects and protect their rights (as in the United States with the Citizens United ruling that protected political donations from corporations and unions as an aspect of their free speech). “Why shouldn’t courts do the same for Nature?” Cullinan asked.
In 2022, the first European win for the Rights of Nature movement followed a massive public push for legal protection of Spain’s highly polluted Mar Menor lagoon. The largest estuary in Europe, Mar Menor had been badly degraded by decades of abuse and neglect. By granting the lagoon “legal personhood,” the new Spanish law, called Mar Menor Law, granted this natural wetland system legal rights, which include the right to be “protected, conserved and restored.”
The new law mandated a Representative Committee, composed of individuals from Spain’s national, regional and municipal governments, the scientific community, and environmental and civil society organizations. Each stakeholder group designates its own representatives to the committee, ensuring a broad range of expertise on issues like environmental protection, farming, tourism and urban development. This inclusive group is supposed to represent the lagoon’s interests and uphold its newly recognized legal rights, safeguarding its well-being by uniting policymakers, scientists and grassroots advocates.
But Spain isn’t the only country with powerful laws that grant rights to nature. In the U.S., a broadly popular law, the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, puts federal protection of the birds over citizens’ own property rights. Karen Bradshaw, a Professor of Law at Arizona State University, noted that rights of nature laws in the U.S. tend to be very popular with the public, despite challenges put forward by the new Trump administration. It is this growing wave of public popularity that Cullinan and his collaborators plan to ride, not for a single species or a lagoon, but for an entire continent and its surrounding ocean.
At the October 2024 meeting of the U.N.’s Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, held in Cali, Colombia, the new Antarctic Rights Initiative held several events to raise awareness of a groundbreaking legal effort to protect Antarctica and the Southern Ocean.
Driven partly by Cullinan’s Wild Law Institute, which acts as its secretariat, the initiative’s Antarctic Rights Working Group is launching a global alliance to transform how humans relate to Antarctica and its surrounding ocean. “If we want to protect our cities, our economies and our global trade,” said the working group’s spokesperson Roberta Bosu, “then we must protect Antarctica at all costs.”
It is not just about the economy either, explained Bosu in a recent interview with New Lines. Antarctica is also home to a host of incredible and rare animal species, from the critically endangered Antarctic blue whale, the largest animal to ever live on Earth, to the toothy leopard seal, which can dive 4,000 feet below the waves in search of its next meal. These and the multitude of other creatures that live in Antarctica have never enjoyed any real legal standing, except through the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS).
The ATS was signed into law in 1959 and now includes 58 countries, including the U.S., United Kingdom, South Africa, Australia and Russia. On paper, the treaty provides strong protections for the continent, including a ban on mineral or oil and gas extraction until at least 2048, environmental reviews for any research activities and some protections for both ocean and terrestrial life.
But what appears to be working on paper is far from working in practice, according to Alan Hemmings, an adjunct professor at the Gateway Antarctica Centre for Antarctic Studies and Research at the University of Canterbury, who has worked closely with the ATS in the past. The treaty system, he told New Lines, “hasn’t been able to do anything of much substance now for 15 years, and absolutely nothing substantive since the invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation in 2022.” This paralysis, he said, is driven by antipathy between the West and two of the other major political players in Antarctica: China and Russia.
He explained that, due to the ongoing rivalry between the great-power signatories to the treaty, who must agree unanimously on any changes to its terms, “no environmental initiative looks like it has good prospects within the Antarctic Treaty System right now, and possibly for many years to come.”
Cullinan also explained that it isn’t just geopolitical rivalries that stymie action to protect Antarctica and her surrounding ocean, but that the ATS “was designed to regulate human activities within the treaty area — which includes the whole of the area south of 60 degrees latitude. Nobody conceived of a time that it would be necessary to regulate activities outside that area in order to protect Antarctica.” But that’s exactly what’s happened, he said, “because obviously Antarctica is being affected very strongly by climate change, and the activities that caused that change are occurring outside the treaty area.”
Tony Press, the former director of the Australian Antarctic Division and onetime chair of the ATS’ Committee for Environmental Protection — a post he held for four years — calls himself “a geopolitical realist.” He and many other scientists feel that throwing out the ATS in its entirety in favor of a new legal approach would be a grave mistake. “My view on the idea that the ATS should be renegotiated due to current difficulties in reaching consensus is that it is wrong-headed. It would be fatal. Current great powers and others, like mining and oil companies, would love the opportunity to abandon much of the conservation and peace provisions of the ATS.”
Press believes that renegotiating the treaty, rather than working within it, would actually be worse for the continent. “Instead, as a way to further protect Antarctica, it would be a complete failure before conception” because countries may use it as an opportunity to weaken the limited environmental protections already in place — and start drilling, mining and possibly even fighting over its natural resources.
He argues that in 1980, when the nations who were then part of the ATS signed into law the treaty’s most important environmental protection, the Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, the world was less polarized around environmental issues. “Conservation is the purpose of the convention,” he explained, and because of the current rivalries among large international players, “if you tried to negotiate that convention now, it just wouldn’t happen.”
Press and other scientists working within the ATS do not rule out the idea that there could be a place for the Rights of Nature movement within the current treaty system — through, for instance, the ATS committee he used to chair. “There’s room to discuss these issues, their relevance and their importance for future actions in the Antarctic.” The Committee for Environmental Protection meets annually, and under its purview are climate change and its impacts on Antarctica. The ATS website explains that the committee is responsible for “the conservation of Antarctic flora and fauna, environmental monitoring, marine pollution, protected species, waste from past activities,” and more.
ATS headquarters did not respond to numerous requests for comment on this article.
The new Antarctica Declaration aims to get people everywhere to see Antarctica as a unique community of life, one that everyone on Earth has a responsibility to protect. The rights it supports include the freedom to remain wild and avoid human “disruption, contamination, or control,” as well as the rights to dignity, self-expression and self-determination.
The real question is how the new declaration’s lofty goals can be translated into real-world change that would protect Antarctica and its wildlife while perhaps, by extension, preventing the catastrophic flooding of Earth’s coastal regions.
Cullinan, who came to the legal field during the fight against apartheid in South Africa, sees that struggle as illustrative of how real change can come, not only for the legal effort to protect Antarctica, but for the global Rights of Nature movement. He pointed out that the apartheid system was not dismantled by the entrenched whites-only government of South Africa or its 1992 referendum to end minority rule. Rather, apartheid ended because societal pressure “built up and created an entirely new negotiating process.” This process, driven directly through strong public pressure at home and abroad, created “a new constitution and changed the rules of the game.”
Cullinan believes that, as public support for the Antarctic Rights Initiative grows, it also has the potential to “flow around the obstacles” posed by the current deadlocks within the ATS. He sees a growing understanding of climate change, along with the disasters already unfolding because of it, steadily bringing the initiative into the mainstream and garnering vital public support.
“I’m a great believer,” he said with a beaming smile, “that if the pressure builds up enough, a bit like a river, a way will be found. The river might cut a new path, but a way will be found. So I really believe that the impact of natural disasters like increasing hurricanes, etc. are building the pressure within the system and eventually people are going to say, ‘You know what? This system is not working — we’ve got to try something completely different.’”
For Hemmings, another important question remains: “Who will speak up for Antarctic rights?” If a representative body is established beyond what he calls “the sort of merely performative minimalist management system” that the ATS has become, it would need a different basis and structure. “Ideally,” he said, “it would draw from diverse international communities,” not only current ATS member states.
As was established for the Mar Menor lagoon, he believes that a new governing system for Antarctica should include scientists, environmentalists and legal scholars as well as existing Antarctic signatory nations and other involved international organizations. He also thinks it should include other states currently outside the Antarctic system as well as Indigenous peoples and global civil society organizations.
Representation is also addressed in the new declaration. It notes that, since Antarctica does not have any indigenous people of its own, the institutions charged with implementing the declaration should not be controlled by international oil companies or self-serving nations but should include “people with the necessary understanding, personal qualities, expertise and commitment to the best interests of Antarctica.”
Cullinan agrees. He pointed out that, “because humans have evolved within, and continue to be sustained by the living community we call Earth, protecting Antarctica also protects people and increases the prospects of our species flourishing in the long term.”
It is this profound change in the way the public sees and understands nature and humanity’s role within it that Cullinan and his colleagues at the Antarctic Rights Initiative are banking on. “The hope is that, starting with Antarctica, a place distant yet globally significant, it will make it easier for people to grasp the importance of this change.” Legal recognition could also allow representatives of Antarctica to sue to stop human activities harming it, like oil and gas drilling and burning, which accelerates the melting of the ice. “If it were recognized as a legal person,” explained Cullinan, “it could also be represented in courts in litigation to stop activities that drive climate change.”
The Antarctic Rights Working Group is not blind to the challenges that changing the status quo will entail. “It’s a paradigm shift,” Cullinan explained. “Vested interests, whether conservative elements or those eyeing future exploitation, might oppose the initiative.” He noted, however, that “the urgency of protecting Antarctica for the benefit of humanity should ultimately prevail.”
Travel and accommodation for the journalist was provided by AllianceEarth.org, a nonprofit foundation committed to science education.
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