South Pole Episode 17: What if Antarctica had legal personhood?

This episode explores an ambitious initiative to grant Antarctica legal rights as a distinct entity within international law. A representative from Antarctic Rights discusses how the movement aims to secure a unique legal status for Antarctica, allowing it to be represented in global policy spaces. Topics include the philosophical framework of Earth jurisprudence, the shortcomings of the current Antarctic Treaty, and how a rights-based approach could reshape global environmental law. This conversation also dives into proposed protections and explores the challenges of determining what’s truly in Antarctica’s best interest.

Episode Guest: Cormac Cullinan

Learn more about Cormac Cullinan here

Learn more about Antarctic Rights here

Get involved with Antarctic Rights here

Learn more about Wild Law here

Episode Transcript  and more information on the Pine Forest Media Website

Follow Pine Forest Media on Instagram @pineforestmedia

Hosted, produced, written, and edited by Clark Marchese 

Cover art and PFM logo by Laurel Wong. 

Theme music by Nela Ruiz

Transcript

[00:00:09.290] - Clark

Hello, and welcome to another episode of South Pole, the podcast that explores Everything Antarctica. I am your host, Clark Marchese, and today we are talking about the rights of nature, the rights of Antarctica, and how we're going to defend them. All right, everyone. Welcome back to the show. Thank you for being here today. We have a very special guest today who is dedicated to protecting the future of Antarctica. Now, a lot of the people we talk to on the show are as well. But this guest is someone who is working to literally revolutionize the entire international legal framework to hold space for the rights of nature. But he is not alone. Before we speak to him, I should tell you about an organization called Antartic Rights. Spoiler alert, our guest today is speaking on behalf of them and is going to talk to us about the work that they are doing. Now, Antartic Rights is both an organization and a movement. It is a group of people with varying backgrounds, some legal experts, some scientists, some who have spent their lives in environmental advocacy, and they are working together to seek legal recognition for Antarctica within the international legal system as an entity with its own rights.

[00:01:34.550] - Clark

This would also involve a body of representatives to advocate for Antarctica's best interest in international policy meetings. Now, it's a really interesting conversation we have, and In it, we discuss whether or not something like this has ever been done before. We talk about who they are seeking recognition from. We have an interesting discussion about how to actually go about determining what is in the best interest of nature and also who should decide. Once those questions are all answered, how do we enforce them? Now, it's quite new territory, but it's very interesting, and I think leading somewhere special and also somewhere we need to go. To tell us all about this, who are we speaking to? Today, we have with us Cormac Cullinan, who is an author and an environmental attorney. He is the director of Cullinan Associates, which is an environmental law firm based in Cape Town, South Africa, which listeners of the show will remember, happens to be one of the big five gateway cities to Antarctica. Cullinan is also the founder and director of the Wild Law Institute, which advocates for the legal recognition of the rights of all nature as a basis for building ecologically sustainable and just societies.

[00:02:38.540] - Clark

He is also the author of a book by the same title, Wild Law. I very much enjoyed getting to speak with Cormac about his career Defending the Rights of the Environment and His Endeavors with Antartic Rights. Without further ado, let's get started. All right, we are recording. Well, first of all, welcome to the show. The first question I have is if you could just introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your work.

[00:03:14.240] - Cormac Cullinan

Thank you, Clark, and thank you for inviting me to join this podcast. I work as an environmental lawyer and a director of South Africa's oldest specialist, Environmental Law Firm. But I've also been involved for more than 20 years in the rights of nature movement. I wrote a book called Wild Law, which set out some of the theory of the rights of nature, and then was one of the founders of the Global Alliance for Rights of Nature. So yes, in essence, I guess I'm partially practicing attorney and partially an activist for rights of nature.

[00:03:44.860] - Clark

All right, thank you for being here. Now, let's just jump right in and unpack that. The rights of nature. What are the rights of nature?

[00:03:52.790] - Cormac Cullinan

I became an environmental lawyer because I thought the way humans are behaving is causing a deterioration in our habitat, this planet, and that law is one of the most powerful ways of changing human behavior. So I thought that we could fix the problem with better environmental laws. And for a long time, I focused on that. And then I began to realize that some of the problems couldn't be solved with simply better drafting of laws, and there were deeper underlying problems. And one of the things that I realized was at the heart of it is this idea that we humans are somehow separate and superior to nature instead of recognizing reality that we are one life form among many and we are embedded this community of life. That mechanistic worldview is hardwired into our legal systems. Everything that is not a human being or a corporation or a state is defined by law as an object or as property. To give you an analogy, when we define people as property, we call them slaves. If you've got a slave owner with legal rights and a slave who's an object property with no rights, it's very easy to see that the system is designed for the slave owner to exploit the slave.

[00:04:58.840] - Cormac Cullinan

We've adopted that same approach in relation to nature. All of nature is defined as object, which is by definition incapable of having rights. It's simply, in the eyes of the law, resources for people to use. That means that there's a real imbalance because we humans claim to have rights, human rights, by virtue of the fact that we exist. Even if your government doesn't recognize them, we say, just because you exist as a human, you have those rights, they're inherent rights. But humans are just one leaf on the tree of life. The idea that this leaf could have rights, whereas the whole tree doesn't have the right to exist is absurd. The only way we can really protect human rights is by recognizing the rights of other beings to exist and to continue playing their ecological roles. Once I saw that, I realized that we have to change the purpose of our legal systems. Instead of a legal system which is colonial in nature in the sense that it justifies the exploitation of others, of other beings, our legal systems need to align with laws of nature and help us to be good citizens, if you like, within this community of life.

[00:06:06.670] - Cormac Cullinan

I wrote about that theory of law. I called it Earth jurisprudence. Jurisprudence, just meaning philosophy of law. Then the laws which implemented, I called wild laws. But it's really just about recognizing that if we humans want to flourish on this planet, we need to recognize that we're born into a pre-existing system of order and we need to align our laws with that.

[00:06:27.660] - Clark

Okay, that's really fascinating. I'm wondering, when you say we need to re-imagine our legal systems, our legal framework, would you say that we need to start from scratch, as it were, to fold in this idea to our legal systems? Or are there any examples of laws or frameworks already out there that do uphold this concept of Earth jurisprudence that we can perhaps look to as an example or build off from?

[00:06:50.170] - Cormac Cullinan

Yes, sure. Probably the most notable example is the Constitution that was adopted by Ecuador in 2008. What the Constitution makes quite clear is that it's designed to provide a framework for Ecuadorian society to live well in harmony with nature. They say in order to live well in harmony with nature, you need to recognize that other beings are subject objects, not objects, and that they have the rights to exist and play their roles. That might be another species. It might be a river or a mountain, because in a dry country like South Africa, where I come from, we can say in the Constitution, you have the right to life, but it's meaningless unless you have water. If you want to have water, you have to protect the river, the mountain, the clouds, the whole hydrological cycle. It's perhaps most easily seen as one of the ways in which we can help people live well in harmony with nature.

[00:07:47.710] - Clark

Okay, I think that's quite a strong foundation for the rest of this conversation, because what we're going to be doing is to apply this philosophy to Antarctica. Now, you're affiliated with an organization called Antartic Rights. Can you tell us a little a bit about that organization and how and why you got involved?

[00:08:04.350] - Cormac Cullinan

Sure. A couple of years ago, somebody put the question to me, Could you apply the Rights of Nature approach to help protect Antarctica? I think the question originally came from Carola Riqueta, who's a ship's captain and now a member of the European Parliament, and she was working at the time for an NGO in Tasmania. She heard of Rights of Nature and wanted a difficult help. When I The question was put to me. I thought, Well, of course you can. But then I started thinking about it, and I was quite shocked, actually, how little I knew about Antarctica and how important it is. My role now is I'm part of a working group, Antarctica Rights Working Group that you mentioned. And by organization, the Wide Law Institute functions as a Secretariat of that working group. And we're in the process of pulling together organizations into an Antarctica Alliance, which will take this initiative further. But I think that Well, Antarctica represents an extraordinary opportunity for teaching people the importance of the approach because Antarctica is not only ecologically unique, it's also unique in terms of governance because it's not owned by anybody. So countries came and stuck in their flags and claimed bits of it, but those claims were never finalized.

[00:09:18.880] - Cormac Cullinan

The Antartic Treaty system was set up. There's a group of countries which effectively make decisions about Antarctica. But what you can see very clearly is that because there are no people who are indigenous to Antarctica, Antarctica. Antarctica doesn't have a parliament or a government to advance its best interests. It's run by, if you like this, a couple of countries arguing from their own best interests. So Antarctica is not recognized as a subject. It's essentially just a place or a territory under international law. And I immediately saw that if you could change that, if people could begin to see Antarctica not as a place, but as a community of beings, of a huge being itself, and particularly because this is an extraordinarily important area for the planet.

[00:10:06.020] - Clark

Yes, listeners of the show will be well aware after however many episodes have come out at this point, the importance of Antarctica, both to climate systems and I guess human civilization. But when I asked you about an example of a framework that upholds this Earth jurisprudence, you mentioned the Ecuadorian Constitution, which is explicitly a national context governing the people who live within the borders of that nation state. Antarctica, as As you mentioned, no one really lives there. That, alongside with the fact that it is governed by this treaty, begs for an international approach, I suppose. On that front, I guess I have two questions. We still have yet to cover the Antarctica Treaty explicitly on the show. It will have its own episode, but it does get mentioned a lot. I know the Antartic Treaty does have some environmental protocols, which I guess, are meant to be upheld. But I read on the website for the Antartic Rights Organization that the treaties, environmental protocols, are not, in fact, strong enough. In what ways is the initiative of the Antartic Rights Movement designed to fill the gaps in the treaty or to create a framework that is necessary to protect what is not already protected?

[00:11:08.940] - Cormac Cullinan

Sure. Part of this whole initiative is to get people to see Antarctica and by extension, nature differently. In other words, we're saying this is not just a place. Antarctica needs to be seen as a being in a community of beings. As such, it should have a voice in human decision making that affect it. In other human decision making should make decisions about Antarctica on the basis of what's in the best interests of Antarctica. That happens to also be in our interest because as you know, if the Antarctica ice melts, we don't only lose a unique ecosystem, which is essential for the for the planet stability in the circulation of the ocean currents, but coastal cities disappear as sea levels rise, etc. What we're pitching for is for Antarctica to be recognized as having a unique legal status similar to that of a state so that it can be represented in international affairs so that it can have agency. Because at the moment, it doesn't have a government, it doesn't have a seat to the United Nations, and surely it should. It can't send a delegation to climate change meetings and argue that climate change is having an adverse effect on it, and it can't be represented in courts around the world, and we want to change that.

[00:12:21.500] - Clark

Okay, I'm understanding. You want to give Antarctica a voice in international spaces, and you want it to represent it and its interests advocated for. Just for listeners who might not think the United Nations, for example, is made up of nation states, how could a nonstate entity have a voice? But in fact, actually, lots of non-governmental voices are very present and very vocal at international UN type meetings, be it Treaty negotiations, conferences, etc. These are sometimes corporate interests, sometimes they are interest groups or advocacy networks, and sometimes they're scientists, right? Now, we have the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, which is a UN organization of Scientists who put forth their research to be considered at climate discussions, for example. There's also now a treaty being negotiated on at the UN about plastics, and there's a Scientist Coalition for an effective plastics treaty. Pine Forest Media actually has an episode all about this treaty on Plastic Podcast that anyone can go listen to if they're interested in learning more about how science is informing those policy negotiations. But I'm just throwing this out there to say that no geographic territory outside of the Nation States has a voice yet in these spaces.

[00:13:27.560] - Clark

There is a precedent for entities beyond strictly national governments to take up space in these places. Now, let's get into the nitty-gritty of your draft proposal, which I read and is divided into three parts. We'll take them one by one. The first is, as you mentioned, to recognize Antarctica as a legal entity. My first question is, who is this audience and who are we asking to make this recognition?

[00:13:52.700] - Cormac Cullinan

I suppose ultimately, we would like all the countries of the world or the United Nations to recognize Antarctica Antarctica as having the status. But I think the first step is to get the public and civil society on board and for them to appreciate and take on this new approach to Antarctica, to see Antarctica as indigenous peoples throughout the world see other beings, that we need to maintain respectful relationships with other beings if we are going to thrive in this community of life. I think the next step would then be to start working with countries and to seek support from countries who are most at risk if Antarctica essentially deteriorates and melts, such as low-lying states, et cetera. But it's also important, for example, to realize that many states are not at all involved in the protection of Antarctica. There's only a small group of states that are part of the Antarctica Treaty system. For example, only South Africa of all the African states is involved. Most of these countries perhaps didn't see Antarctica as really very important to them. But I think that It has changed in the era of climate change because we can now see that Antarctica is important to everybody on the planet.

[00:15:07.950] - Cormac Cullinan

That means I think that everybody should be involved in it. Perhaps just to digress briefly to answer what you asked before about the existing treaty system. The existing treaty system, we think, can't really protect Antarctica. Look, the original Antarctica Treaty System was a brilliant achievement. It was negotiated and signed at the height of the Cold War, and it prevented Antarctica being mined, and it reserved it for peaceful purposes in science. So I'm not here to, as it were, diss the Antarctica Treaty System. But the factor is that it can't protect Antarctica for a number of reasons. First of all, it only applies to the treaty area, which is defined. But now we have a situation with the main threat to Antarctica, climate change is coming from outside of the treaty area. So the treaty system can't address that. Secondly, there's only a small number of countries participating, as I I've mentioned, and each of them are arguing on the basis of their national interests. So when they meet, they're thinking about what's best for our country. And there's nobody advancing the best interests of Antarctica, which we think is crucial. And perhaps, most importantly, the existing system is entirely stuck.

[00:16:16.830] - Cormac Cullinan

There's an impasse. That is in part because decision making has to be by consensus. For example, both Russia and the Ukraine are members, so you can imagine how hard it is to get consensus. But there are also countries like Russia, who have for a long time been conducting seismic surveys to explore for oil and gas under Antarctica. One can't help thinking that the only reason for that is that at some future date, they want to be able to exploit that. Of course, there's So cruel fishing and many other pressures on Antarctica, where countries are acting in ways which they perceive to be in their own national interests, but definitely not in the interests of Antarctica.

[00:16:55.130] - Clark

Okay. I think those examples really just show how the existing treaty is designed for countries to for their own interests in Antarctica rather than for the interests of Antarctica itself, right? And there's an overlap sometimes with the climate change being an example, but nevertheless, they are very different approaches.

[00:17:11.490] - Cormac Cullinan

We think that just at the moment where we realize that Antarctica is absolutely crucial to the health of the planet and the future of humanity as well as other species, we have a governance system which really isn't fit for purpose. It's very unlikely that change can come from within the system. What we're doing is to set up a very powerful new idea and a magnet for change. If I can use an analogy, after the Second World War, when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted, it was actually a non-binding document, and it didn't change any of the laws in the world immediately. But it set up such a powerful idea of norm of acceptable human behavior that ultimately legal systems all over the world changed in response to that. That's what we're hoping is that this will set off a process of change which will completely alter not only the existing treaty system, but also how countries around the world relate to Antarctica, and as I mentioned, how Antarctica features in international negotiations.

[00:18:17.980] - Clark

I really like that idea that this could serve as a cascading effect, and the countries around the world could adopt it and apply it to their own nonhuman geographic entities in their own countries, and would just be a precedent, right? I'm wondering, though, would this, in fact, be the first precedent of something like this? Because I know, at least in the United States, businesses, for example, have rights, protected rights, as though they were human beings. But are there any examples that we have of natural elements having rights like this, or would this, in fact, be the first?

[00:18:47.370] - Cormac Cullinan

There are examples of aspects of nature having rights, but so far, it's only been at the national level, in other words, within a country. For example, I mentioned Ecuador, also in New Zealand, the Fonga Nui River and a National Park have both been recognized as legal entities with rights. In Colombia, the Constitutional Court has recognized the Atrata River and others as rights. In Europe, Laguna Marmol was recognized last year as a legal subject with rights. So you do have these examples in an increasing number of countries around the world, but not really at the international level. In other words, this would be the first time we would be saying that within international law, international law must develop to accommodate the idea that the subjects of international law are not just states and international organizations, but also these natural beings, if I could call them, such as Antarctica. It is currently unprecedented at the international law level.

[00:19:47.850] - Clark

Okay, then it seems like Antarctica might just be the perfect candidate to be the first one because everyone and no one has claimed it, I guess, if that makes sense. The second objective in the draft proposal, once this recognition is established, is to actually set up a body to represent the interests of Antarctica in these spaces. Can you tell me first a bit about how you imagine the logistics of that will go, and also if you can speak to how this body would go about determining what, in fact, are the best interests of Antarctica?

[00:20:16.540] - Cormac Cullinan

We have a draft declaration of the rights of Antarctica, which is on the website, and you can look at it. The idea is that once we are recruiting organizations to be founder members of this Antarctica Alliance, and once we've launched that, hopefully either later this year or early next year, those members will engage in discussions to refine that declaration and come up with a final vision that can be adopted. But that is just, if you like, a statement of what we see as the rights of Antarctica, for example, to be represented in international affairs, to exist, to play its ecological role, et cetera. But the question then becomes implementation. And we started working on a separate document about how one could make make this real and how Antarctica could actually be represented. Then we decided that we would hold that back until we got the Antarctica Alliance and then the members of that alliance would discuss it. But in broad terms, the issue is that we probably going to need something like a parliament for Antarctica. But obviously, there aren't human constituencies, so you can't have members of parliament in the ordinary sense, but you might have people who represent either a particular ecosystem within Antarctica or perhaps a particular aspect, like ice, or seals, or krill, or whatever.

[00:21:35.300] - Cormac Cullinan

But the real fundamental question is, how do we hear what's in the best interests of Antarctica, and who are the right people to do that? I think this is really exciting. We'll have to be innovative, and we'll have to experiment, and we'll get better at it over time. But I would say the people who are going to determine that need to be people who know a lot about Antarctica, who understand it, not just people who are intellectually interested in Antarctica are knowledgeable, but also people who have, if I can call it, a heart connection with Antarctica. In other words, people who love Antarctica, because if you think of other instances where one is representing a being who can't speak, let's say a baby. The people you want to represent the baby's best interests are the parents who love it because they're most attentive to it, they've got its best interests at heart, and they're most likely to articulate accurately what its best interests are. Essentially, there's also There's a really exciting research being done, for example, on using artificial intelligence to try and interpret what whales are saying. We're getting more and more able to hear, if you like, nature.

[00:22:43.750] - Cormac Cullinan

I think all of that is going to feed into this. Over time, we will get better at determining what's in the best interests of Antarctica and the beings that live in Antarctica, the seals, the whales, et cetera.

[00:22:56.370] - Clark

What do you want, whales? I got you. But I guess if you have a lot of knowledge about a topic like this, experts would be in the best position to make decisions like this.

[00:23:04.830] - Cormac Cullinan

It's probable, I think, that we can never, as human beings, be in a position to say, Absolutely, this is the best in the interests of an Antarctica and define it in a absolute sense. But what I do think is that if we use our science and we use our hearts as well as our minds, when we are faced with two options, option A or option B, we probably are able to say, option B is more in the best interests of Antarctica than option A. That's all you need, really, in international decision making, to be able to have that discernment. But I think that the process of trying to work out how one listens to nature and articulates the best interests of an aspect of nature in human decision making is a really fascinating endeavor. It's just exactly the things humans need to be looking and innovating about in this period, not only for Antarctica, but for our relationships with this magnificent planet as a whole?

[00:24:08.960] - Clark

Well, I would love to be the person in charge of speaking for the whales, but alas, I would be horrendously underqualified. But I think this gets to a really philosophical question at heart, right? What are the best interests of a natural entity? Because you could say the best interest for Antarctica are that which sustains climate systems that best suit humans, perhaps. You could also say that it's what's best for the penguins. What I'm getting at is when the climate changes, the climate changes. It's not as though the world implodes, the world will just continue, and then whatever species are best fit to the new conditions will thrive. The world has changed and frozen and melted several times over, and it just keeps turning around the sun. But in any case, I like what you said about the people speaking for it should be the ones who have that heart connection. I think I've spoken to a number of those kinds of people on this podcast, and I hope to continue speaking to more. But yeah, I'll be interested to see how this all unfolds. Then I guess once this body is hopefully put together, the third objective in the draft declaration is to implement stronger protections for the continent.

[00:25:07.280] - Clark

In terms of specific policies, that might be a question for these scientists. But in terms of the framework for upholding them, once we have these policies and these decisions made about what is in the best interests of Antarctica, would we be relying on existing mechanisms of enforcement or would we need to create more?

[00:25:24.870] - Cormac Cullinan

That's an extremely good question. At one level, when it's talking ecologically, I guess that Antarctica is already self-governing and nature is self-enforcing. But by that, I mean is that it's far too wild a place for humans to think that they can actually govern it. What happens in Antarctica is a determined by natural processes. But the question you ask is really important in relation to human conduct, because Antarctica wouldn't be a state in the normal sense. It wouldn't have a navy and a defense force, etc. We We do have to rely on human institutions to regulate human behavior within Antarctica. To a large extent, states are currently responsible for the behavior of their citizens when they enter Antarctica. But I think that this is something where the existing Antarctica Treaty system might well continue to play a very important role in enforcing the rules, if you like, enforcing how humans must behave in relation to Antarctica. I think that there may also be new enforcement to mechanisms developed over time. But I think that the real thing is the mind shift and the paradigm shift. Quite frankly, I think that the scientists who are already engaged in Antarctica research would find it very stimulating to work together at particularly in working out what's best for Antarctica, how best to listen to Antarctica, if I can put it that way.

[00:26:50.390] - Cormac Cullinan

A bit like the IPCC mentioned in relation to climate change, where everybody's putting their data together around common objectives. Some of the people within the Atlantic Treaty system have been a little bit suspicious, thinking that we're attacking the system. That's not our objective. Our objective is to improve the system. But others within the Atlantic Treaty system are incredibly excited because they spent their life working on protecting Antarctica together. They've produced the scientific evidence, for example, which proves that you should have a marine protected area in a particular place, and then they just get blocked and nothing happens. It happens year after year. They have this appreciation of the extreme urgency of addressing this situation, and at the same time institutional inertia. Many of them are really excited about this idea because it has the potential to break the logjam. I think that's absolutely essential because I don't think you can solve these problems within the thinking or the mindset that created them.

[00:27:49.410] - Clark

Now that we have an understanding of what the objectives of this organization are, I want to ask you, where are we in the process of working towards them? What step are we on now? What's the next step? What challenges are you currently facing? How are we doing?

[00:28:02.670] - Cormac Cullinan

Yes, that's really important because we started with the idea that there was this group of us, many people involved in Antarctica, ranging from scientists to philosophers to people interested in photography and art and culture around Antarctica and then rights of nature, people like myself. We thought that we would work together as a very international group, people from around the world. We'd come up with a declaration and adopt it. That would be our manifesto, and we would go forward. We realized We realized that this is a really big project. It's something that, if successful, is going to really change the international legal order and hopefully also have an effect for countries. It's going to take time. It's a long-term project. It's a game-changing project project, and we needed a stronger vehicle to carry this forward into the future. We decided to first build an Antartic Alliance, we're calling it. At the moment, we are recruiting organizations, and individuals can also join, but we really want to have a solid basis organizations from around the world that will commit to collaborating to make this happen. We're in that phase. Once we've got that Antartic Alliance together towards the end of this year or early next year, we would launch it, and then the founder members would engage in the process of finalizing the declaration.

[00:29:20.130] - Cormac Cullinan

Then once we have got the declaration finalized, we would adopt the declaration, ideally sometime around about November, December, 2025, when the climate change COP is happening in Brazil. Then once we've got that, that's our manifesto. Then we would be engaging the discussions that I've mentioned already about how do you make this, how do you implement this. But while all of this is going on, we really want to be building public support for this because it really will only happen if enough people around the world, individuals and organizations, say that we need to have this and we're going to push our governments to recognize it and adopt message.

[00:30:00.560] - Clark

Yeah. I hope the awareness that comes about through this campaign throughout the general public also accelerates the process because I think we have a little bit of a general problem of people not exactly being aware of how important Antarctica is to the future or perhaps the negative consequences of failing to protect it. But I think once people are aware, there's going to be more urgency than ever. But on the topic of broad-based public buy-in, let me ask you a couple of questions. The first is, where can people learn more about this initiative, and then what can the average person do to support it?

[00:30:34.380] - Cormac Cullinan

Thank you. That's really important. We'd like all listeners to go to the website, a beautiful website, antarcticrights. Org. If you go to the website, there's a Join Us button, you can join either as an individual or as an organization. That will really keep you linked into the process. Obviously, particularly with organizations, we want people... We'll start a process where everybody could comment on the draft and make these submissions and play a part in shaping that.

[00:31:04.680] - Clark

All right. After this phone call, I will go straight to the website and I'll hit that Join Us button, and I'll put a link in the episode description so anyone listening to the podcast can also do that. I guess this is the part where I ask you, I mean, I'm sure we could go on talking about this for a long time, but is there anything that we didn't touch on today that we would be kicking ourselves if we didn't mention before we finish out this conversation?

[00:31:24.300] - Cormac Cullinan

I would just say that I'm a person that has been involved in environmental issues and environmental lawyer. Law for most of my life. I was completely amazed when I started looking at this to discover how little I knew about Antarctica, partially because I think the Antartic Treaty system meetings are held in private and they press on to land in, et cetera. And so there's this air of secrecy. But I was just staggered to discover first how huge it is. I mean, the landmass is bigger than the United States and Mexico together. Then if you add the Southern Ocean, as I mentioned, it's 10% of the surface of the planet, and it drives the ocean circulation. It's incredibly ecologically important as your listeners all know. It's very hard to overstate the importance of it. I was slightly shocked by how this hadn't really been on my radar before. But it's been a very exciting initiative. All I can say to people is that I think if you get involved in this and you also see yourself as somebody who can go out and change people around you, make them aware of Antarctica, what can be done, that But you could come in at the ground floor of a really exciting movement that I believe is going to be historical.

[00:32:36.470] - Cormac Cullinan

It's going to change the international order, and it's going to do something really good for this amazing community of life we call Earth.

[00:32:45.650] - Clark

All right. Well, with that, this is the part where I say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show today. Thank you so much for sharing this initiative with us. Also, thank you so much for your work in this space and your entire career, I guess, that you're dedicated to advocating for the environment.

[00:32:59.770] - Cormac Cullinan

Thank you very much, Clark. It's been a privilege to be on this show, and I really hope that lots of your listeners will throw their weight behind this initiative.

[00:33:24.780] - Clark

All right. A major thank you to Cormac Cullinan. Just a quick mention that anyone interested in learning Hearing more about the Antarctica rights or getting involved even can find out how to do that in the episode description. All right. Thanks for listening. Even listening to South Pole, you can find more information about this week's guests links to their work in the episode description. Cover art for the show was done by Laura Wong, and the music you're listening to was done by Nila Ruiz. I am your host, Clark Marchese, and this episode was produced and engineered by me. So if you found it interesting, send it to someone you know. South Pole is part of a larger network of sciencey podcasts called Pineforest Media. We've got one on plastic, one on drinking water, and a couple of new ones coming up soon. You can find more information about us in the episode description as well or on our website at pineforestplas. Com. We're also on Instagram and TikTok at Pineforest Media. If you love the show and you want to support science communication like this, a five-star rating across platforms or a review on Apple podcast is one of the best things you can do to help us reach more people and for the entire network to grow.

[00:34:43.950] - Clark

All right, thank you so much to all of you who have made it this far, and we'll talk soon.