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“If someone digs a well only when thirsty, or forges weapons only after the battle has begun, are these actions not too late?” – the Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Medicine, written more than two thousand years ago
We have never been good at the disaster that doesn’t happen.
It leaves nothing behind. No monument, no veterans, no anniversary, no line on a balance sheet. A war we avoid produces no victory to celebrate, so we celebrate the wars we win instead. A health system that keeps people being well also looks like a health system doing very little, at least on paper. The flood defence that holds is the one nobody thanks. Prevention’s success is indistinguishable from absence of need, and so prevention is starved of the thing response never lacks: a story, a budget, a reward.
This is not a failure of will. It is a structural feature of how we organise ourselves. Response is legible. It is fundable. It can be photographed, narrated, and praised. We can stand in the rubble and promise to rebuild. Prevention offers none of that. It asks us to spend now, visibly, against a catastrophe that, if we succeed, will never arrive to vindicate us. Our society, in the most literal sense, is built around winning wars rather than avoiding them, to damage ecosystems and then mobilise heroically around the wreckage. We have an entire economy of response and almost no economy of foresight.
Antarctica is where this habit stops being merely expensive and becomes terminal.
Because there is no response to a collapsed cryosphere. There is no rebuilding an ice sheet, no reconstruction effort, no recovery phase, no rubble to stand in and promise from. One of the participants in next week’s roundtable calls Antarctica humanity’s family refrigerator. It is on the blink. And we do not fix refrigerators after they fail. We replace them. This one cannot be replaced.
The numbers are not abstractions. A 4.5-metre sea-level rise is the Netherlands. It is Vietnam. It is the Agulhas current reshaping itself and India losing its monsoon. The Antarctic Circumpolar Current is the heart that drives the planet’s circulation, pulling cold water and nutrients through every ocean, holding up the food webs that feed billions. Call it lifeblood and you are not reaching for a metaphor. Strip it away and what remains is a hard, narrow survival, if it is survival at all.
For years we have argued about this morally. And the strange thing about where we now stand is that there is no longer anyone on the other side of the moral argument. No one is making the case for losing the ice. The argument has been won, and the ice is melting anyway, because winning a moral argument was never the same as building the political, financial, and institutional architecture that could act on it.
That is the real subject of this work. Not whether we should act, but why a civilisation that knows what is coming still cannot move, and what would have to change for it to move in time. The Antarctic Treaty System was designed for a Cold War it has outlived, built on a consensus that now functions as a veto, where “the system working as it should” has become the language of nothing happening. Conservation assumed a baseline that could be protected. That baseline is already gone. The question is no longer how to prevent disturbance. It is whether we can stabilise systems that are already destabilising, and whether we can build the forms of coordination capable of holding that work over the time it will take.
This is what we mean by pre-emptive peace. Not peace as the absence of conflict, arriving after the fact to clear up. Peace as the deliberate design of the architectures that acts before crisis forces our hand, while we still have the optionality to choose. It means treating the disaster that doesn’t happen as the most valuable thing we can produce, and learning, against every instinct and incentive we have built, to value it precisely because it never arrives.
The scientists tell us the next ten years will define the next ten thousand. That is the wager. We can design the political, regenerative, and financial architectures deliberately, now, in the narrow window where design is still possible. Or we can let them emerge reactively, under crisis conditions, when the only options left are bad ones.
We would rather do the first. Join us to think about how.
Thanks to the thinkers behind this article – Indy Johar, Andrew Kelly, Linda Sheehan, Gerry Salole, Joan Diamond, Barry Knight, Cormac Cullinan, Stephen Heintz and so many others who have joined and contributed to this evolving and expanding conversation.
Antarctica as a Laboratory for Governance before Crisis. Tuesday 9 June, 2.00–3.30 UK, on Zoom, open to all. Hosted as part of the 4th International Conference on Environmental Peacebuilding, University of Ottawa. With Andrew Kelly, Stephen Heintz, Indy Johar, and chaired by Linda Sheehan. Register here.