Human Society Carries Trouble to the Bottom of the World

The cleanest place in the world has just been soiled; more than its few isolated residents should grieve.

The sinking of the Bahia Paraiso off Palmer Station in Antarctica, the subsequent spill of fuel oil that killed penguins, sea birds, krill--and the innocence of those icy shores--passed quickly across news pages this month: just another minor disaster, without human tragedy. Luckily all 316 souls on board were saved. But for the seventh continent, the last to be assimilated into the complex structure of human society, it was a milestone, inescapably symbolic.

The ship was a 435-foot Argentine freighter, a long-used Antarctic vessel with a double hull. It carried a crew of 234 plus tourists and cruise staff; 46 of the tourists were Americans, who had paid from $2,995 to $6,680 for what turned out to be an epic adventure. After a brief visit at the United States base, Palmer Station, near the Antarctic Peninsula, someone on watch chose, inexplicably, to leave the harbor across an area clearly marked (on all U.S. charts, at least): “Dangerous ledges and pinnacles.”

Pinnacles can be stunning even when you miss them: As you watch one on a depth sounder its trace rises like a rocket aimed at the hull, then plunges back down. But this time something rose up and smote the Bahia Paraiso, cutting a 30-foot gash through the hull.

Unfortunately the 700 metric tons of fuel oil on board (about 250,000 gallons) was not so easily handled. Much of it poured into the bay beside the station, centimeters deep on the water’s surface. The Palmer Station area is remarkably rich in wildlife; long after the human survivors were back home talking about their adventure, penguins, giant petrels, seals, blue-eyed shags, krill, fish, limpets and many other creatures were still paying the price. No one yet knows how many of these Antarctic natives died. The cleanup--led by a $250,000 U.S. effort--is only just beginning.

These local tragedies, however, are less significant to the outside world than the sinking’s symbolism. The wreck and the spill are yet another sign, this time in flashing neon, that Antarctica has become another now part of civilization, for better or worse.

It is a hard lesson. This continent isn’t even shown on many of the maps children study in school. Most people are only vaguely aware of what is there--ice, penguins, hardship. We like the mystery. Antarctica has been as enthralling as another planet: remote, austere, miraculously free from the tensions, weapons, and debris that trouble civilization elsewhere. However wonderful it was to have this piece of outer space sitting here in our back yard, that time is over.

Witness the signs, big and little:

-- During the past five years many nations that previously had little concern about this 5.4 million-square-mile chunk of ice and rock have suddenly become interested. Many have either debated Antarctica’s future in the United Nations or spent millions to establish bases and thus participate in the exclusive Antarctic Treaty System. Malaysia has led recent U.N. debates, while new entries in the treaty system include Brazil, China and India, which have all built and manned year-round antarctic bases. For years the 12 countries that originally signed the Antarctic Treaty in 1961 administered their lonely outposts without outside interference, but suddenly the voting, active treaty members number 20, and others knock at the door.

-- The 20 nations recently agreed on a convention; when ratified it will allow commercial prospecting and mining of Antarctica, ending a nearly 30-year span when the continent was reserved exclusively for scientific exploration.

-- Argentina and Chile have recently been working to consolidate their overlapping claims to slices of the continent by sponsoring colonists--families, including children, who live in Antarctica for up to two years. The treaty ignores claims, but the two nations appear to be getting ready for a more contentious future.

-- Commercial tourism is booming. Cruises to the Antarctic Peninsula area--which included the Bahia Paraiso--have gone from fewer than six a year to more than two dozen. Tourist visits to scientific bases, once pleasant interludes for the scientists, have become so frequent that they are intrusive; the U.S. National Science Foundation, which runs the most serious scientific program on the continent, recently had to restrict visitors to Palmer Station. Even the hostile reaches of the high ice plateaus have been conquered by commerce: Last year the first commercial tourist flights landed at the South Pole and this year six tourists paid $100,000 each for the privilege of skiing 740 miles from the Ronne Ice Shelf to the pole. They made it in mid-January, spent about five hours toasting their achievement and were flown home. So much has changed since Robert Falcon Scott stood there, cursed the place and walked north to die.

-- For the first time in three decades antarctic residents are having to grapple with overt political disagreement. Since the International Geophysical Year--1957-58--Antarctica has been a place where Cold War ideological tensions have been overcome by the good will of scientists and explorers: Chileans and Russians live cheerfully side by side on King George Island; U.S. and Soviet researchers drink toasts at each other’s bases; South Koreans and Chinese share weather information. But in 1986, when the activist organization Greenpeace built a year-round base on Ross Island near U.S. and New Zealand bases--and began attacking the environmental records of everyone else--friendliness hit a rock. This year French construction workers fought with Greenpeace activists who were protesting the construction of an airstrip near a penguin rookery. At McMurdo Station, U.S. administrators, irritated at Greenpeace for criticizing a program that has produced major breakthroughs in understanding global environmental problems, made rules that left Navy and civilian residents thinking they could be punished for any contact with the station’s Greenpeace neighbors. Antarctica is no longer just a chain of explorers’ encampments--it is a fledgling social system struggling to learn how to handle the dissent and conflict common to the more complex northern world.

Anyone who has seen the clean beauty of Antarctica and experienced the camaraderie that exists among its men and women, will find many of these changes sad. They came quietly, but now the wreck of the Bahia Paraiso has rung all alarms. The first major environmental disaster in Antarctica involved its first significant private enterprise, tourism. It involved one of the claimant nations. It will involve recriminations and involve us all. You can’t paint Antarctica off the map margins any more. We have taken it--and stained it with our carelessness.

On the way to Palmer Station a few years ago I read a few lines from “Eileann Chanaidh,” by poet Kathleen Raine. Now they are chilling to remember:

Because I see these mountains they are brought low,

Because I drink these waters they are bitter,

Because I tread these black rocks they are barren,

Because I have found these islands they are lost;

Upon seal and sea bird dreaming their innocent world

My shadow has fallen.

But even a pessimist must hope that out of disaster comes wisdom. The goal of Greenpeace is to make Antarctica a world park; accidents give that drive new steam. But a world park would not have prevented this catastrophe--it was, after all, a tourist venture that went awry; you don’t keep visitors out of a park. So perhaps this is not just a matter of demanding that another place be walled off. Penguin corpses washing up among pieces of black ice suggest instead that if no place on earth is safe from civilization, then all places should be cherished. As we weave Antarctica into our web, both the joy and sadness of that process remind us that sooner or later, we have to think of the whole world as a park and treat it with reverence--the difference between casting shadow and light.