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The continent for science is also a continent for the humanities.
Despite having no indigenous human population, Antarctica has been
imagined in powerful, innovative, and sometimes disturbing ways
that reflect politics and culture much further north. Antarctica
has become an important source of data for natural scientists
working to understand global climate change. As this book shows,
the tools of literary studies, history, archaeology, and more, can
likewise produce important insights into the nature of the modern
world and humanity more broadly.
The continent for science is also a continent for the humanities.
Despite having no indigenous human population, Antarctica has been
imagined in powerful, innovative, and sometimes disturbing ways
that reflect politics and culture much further north. Antarctica
has become an important source of data for natural scientists
working to understand global climate change. As this book shows,
the tools of literary studies, history, archaeology, and more, can
likewise produce important insights into the nature of the modern
world and humanity more broadly.
Perpetually covered in ice and snow, the mountainous Antarctic
Peninsula stretches southwardd towards the South Pole where it
merges with the largest and coldest mass of ice anywhere on the
planet. Yet far from being an otherworldly "Pole Apart," the region
has the most contested political history of any part of the
Antarctic Continent. Since the start of the twentieth century,
Argentina, Britain, and Chile have made overlapping sovereignty
claims, while the United States and Russia have reserved rights to
the entire continent. The environment has been at the heart of
these disputes over sovereignty, placing the Antarctic Peninsula at
a fascinating intersection between diplomatic history and
environmental history. In Frozen Empires, Adrian Howkins argues
that there has been a fundamental continuity in the ways in which
imperial powers have used the environment to support their
political claims in the Antarctic Peninsula region. British
officials argued that the production of useful scientific knowledge
about the Antarctic helped to justify British ownership. Argentina
and Chile made the case that the Antarctic Peninsula belonged to
them as a result of geographical proximity, geological continuity,
and a general sense of connection. Despite various challenges and
claims, however, there has never been a genuine decolonization of
the Antarctic Peninsula region. Instead, imperial assertions that
respective entities were conducting science "for the good of
humanity" were reformulated through the terms of the 1959 Antarctic
Treaty, and Antarctica's "frozen empires" remain in place to this
day. In arguing for imperial continuity in the region, Howkins
counters the official historical narrative of Antarctica, which
rests on a dichotomy between "bad" sovereignty claims and "good"
scientific research. Frozen Empires instead suggests that science,
politics, and the environment have been inextricably connected
throughout the history of the Antarctic Peninsula region-and remain
so-and shows how political prestige in the guise of conducting
"science for the good of humanity" continues to influence
international climate negotiations.
The idea of a national park was an American invention of historic
consequences marking the beginning of a worldwide movement,"" the
U.S. National Park Service asserts in its 2006 Management Policies.
National Parks beyond the Nation brings together the work of
fifteen scholars and writers to reveal the tremendous diversity of
the global national park experience - an experience sometimes
influencing, sometimes influenced by, and sometimes with no
reference whatever to the United States. Writer and historian
Wallace Stegner once called national parks ""America's best idea.""
The contributors to this volume use that exceptionalist claim as a
starting point for thinking about an international history of
national parks. They explore the historical interactions and
influences - intellectual, political, and material - within and
between national park systems in Canada, New Zealand, South Africa,
Indonesia, Antarctica, Brazil, and other countries. What is the
role of science in the history of these preserves? Of politics?
What purposes do they serve: Conservation? Education? Reverence
toward nature? Tourist pleasure? People have thought differently
about national parks at different times and in different places;
and neat physical boundaries have been disrupted by wandering
animals, human movements, the spread of disease, and climate
change. Viewing parks around the world, at various scales and
across national frontiers, these essays offer a panoptic view of
the common and contrasting cultural and environmental features of
national parks worldwide. If national parks are, as Stegner said,
""absolutely American,"" they are no less part of the world at
large. National Parks beyond the Nation tells us as much about the
multifarious and changing ideas of nature and culture as about the
framing of those ideas in geographic, temporal, and national terms.
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