Greening the Poles: Science, the Environment, and the Creation of the Modern Arctic and Antarctic (GRETPOL) is a historical study of how humans perceptions of the polar regions have changed during the years 1945-1992. During the late 1940s the term 'environmental protection' was commonplace in American military thinking, referring to the need to protect fragile soldiers from the harsh Arctic environment. Yet by the early 1970s the idea of the 'fragile Arctic' had become widespread, with assumptions that delicate Arctic environments needed protection from tourists, hunters, and builders of infrastructure (particularly related to the oil industry). By the early 1990s the Antarctic had also undergone a shift from being a potentially attractive site for mining to a heavily regulated environment with strict regulations on the presence of non-Antarctic animals -- including humans. Why did these shifts take place? Part of the answer comes from natural scientific research in the biological and geophysical sciences, but social and political factors were equally important. Indigenous organizations and individuals asserted rights to determine what kind of activities took place on traditional homelands, challenging ideas of 'development' as an uncontroversially good thing. Public opinion began to mount against the hunting of polar animals, particularly polar bears. And banning mining in Antarctica -- but not creating a World Park -- allowed the member states of the Antarctic Treaty System to maintain their authority and in some causes (such as Australia) to shore up domestic political support.
The golden thread that runs through GRETPOL is that the kinds of actions deemed appropriate in polar spaces always reflect the anxieties and ambitions of particular historical contexts. That understanding in turn demands research across state boundaries, with the aim of transcending national versions of stories that are by their nature often international, such as the 1973 Agreement on the Conservation of Polar Bears or the 1980 Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Living Marine Resources. By exploring how polar environments were defined and managed during the Cold War -- a period when interest in both polar regions was arguably at an all-time high -- our hope is to challenge ideas that environmental management flows primarily from natural scientific findings alone. Choices to regulate certain activities (like hunting or mining) or to regard particular actors (such as Indigenous groups) as relevant participants in decision-making processes were fundamentally political and social. At the mid-point of the project, the research team has already begun to develop new understandings of how and why particular agreements became possible at particular historical moments, bringing in diverse factors ranging from national economic structures through to military-strategic imperatives and changing public perceptions of risk and development. There is nothing inevitable or irreversible about such agreements. Like all events that make sense in particular historical moments, changing values and priorities in the future may well lead to different conceptions of what kinds of activities are warranted in the polar regions, and indeed in other environments.
GRETPOL succeeded in investigating how, when, and most importantly why the concept of the polar regions as fragile environments emerged during the second half of the twentieth century. The central hypothesis was confirmed, that this conception did not emerge simultaneously across time and space due to different social, political, and economic rather than environmental factors. A stronger version of the thesis is now argued -- that the fragility identified in the environments reflected the fragility of existing consensuses on who ought to control resources and territory, from claims to Indigenous rights to calls for global economic justice to include Antarctica. Moreover, a view of the polar regions as harsh and challenging environments for individual human visitors could coexist with a view of the environments (including even their human communities) as vulnerable and threatened.
