T is for Treaty #AntarcticAlphabet

If the Treaty dies, the continent dies. When treaties are broken, people die. Treaties are agreements between those sovereign figments of our collective imagination, the nation-state. Itself an Enlightenment child, the ‘nation’ is our fundamental global organising principle. For the lucky majority, our nationality is the ground on which we … Continue reading

S is for sight: #antarcticalphabet

Sight, language, reference and memory are contingent, rely on our agreement to shared understandings. Does what I see differ from what you see? You may read that number-plate which is a blur to me, or I think this scarf is green when you insist it’s blue. Yet the interior experience … Continue reading

#AntarcticAlphabet: R is for rope

R is for rope. The rhythm of coils passed hand to hand, or turned upon the deck in line with the lay. Wrapped round and hung, ready to hand, on pins and cleats, belayed and standing-by for work. Rope is part of the trinity of sail and hull harnessing the … Continue reading

Q is for Question: a short love letter to the scientific method #antarcticalphabet

Query Island is a pimple in the ice at nearly 69° south, its existence a question till 1948. The Falkland Islands Dependencies Survey (predecessor to BAS) named it recognising the difficulty of distinguishing it from the mass of the Peninsula. That’s science for you: honouring the question. The ‘scientific method’ has … Continue reading

#penguinrights and habitat corpus: #antarcticalphabet

  Let us sound the battle-cry for #penguinrights. Suppose penguins took us humans to court for destroying their habitat? Suppose they won?  I am not talking only of animal rights, or even land rights, but earth rights. Penguin power is habitat corpus: the battle to protect an ecosystem – a place … Continue reading

#AntarcticAlphabet: O is for oil

Oil drips down the trypots and the rigs. It oozes in tarpits, welling up from the ground, the black gold of fantasy released by water under pressure, the raw hydraulics of fracking. The revolution relies on the stuff; prosperity and peace rise with carbon dioxide released into air and ocean. … Continue reading

N is for Navigation: #AntarcticAlphabet

Navigation:The process or activity of accurately ascertaining one’s position and planning and following a routeThe passage of ships (Oxford Dictionary)‘The demanding test of landfall’ (David Lewis, We The Navigators) Once upon a time, in the old days, those imagined times when everything was better – yet somehow much harder – … Continue reading

M is for migration and life on Mars: #AntarcticAlphabet

Penguin chicks lie among the pebbles. Still nearly complete, some of them, beaks agape and wings extended as if the raw spine might haul itself up and zombie-walk to the sea. Remnants are arranged into memento mori, reminiscent of Victorian child shrines kept by loving mothers.Scraps of bone and feather mark … Continue reading

L is for Language: #AntarcticAlphabet

There is no private, prior language. No baby talk nor word of god has meaning beyond our shared agreement. Today, it seems, our shared language has betrayed us, is fading to leave only the emoticon of a tear.  Real things exist whatever their names on our charts. You can be shipwrecked on Isla … Continue reading

#AntarcticAlphabet: K is for kelp

Kelp connects everything, from the Orkneys to the South Shetlands. Seafloor to surface, dark to light. Brown, red, ochre, rust within the grey/blue/white of the Antarctic seas. The simplicity of stipe and stem dancing inside the heart-breaking, never-ending complexity of the wave. And of course, almost mundane, the host of lives … Continue reading