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đź“… Join the next one.This Open Dialogue was hosted on December 1st, 2025 – Antarctica Day: 66th Anniversary of the Antarctic Treaty. Watch the recording here. Revisit the chat here.
“The universe is not a collection of objects. It is a communion of subjects.”
— Thomas Berry, quoted by Cormac Cullinan
This was the fourth conversation in a series about pre-emptive peace, focusing on Antarctica as a critical site where new forms of planetary governance may emerge. Held on Antarctica Day – the anniversary of the 1959 Treaty signing – the dialogue marked a historic moment: the global launch of the Antarctica Alliance, a coalition advancing legal personhood for the continent. But what unfolded was far more than a celebration. The conversation surfaced a profound tension at the heart of our ecological moment: the recognition that the conservation war may already be lost, and that we must now think in terms of regeneration, stabilisation, and 500-year cathedral projects.
The group included Indy Johar of Dark Matter Labs; Andrew Kelly, former CEO of the Antarctic Science Foundation, joining from Australia; Cormac Cullinan, the environmental lawyer from Cape Town who helped found the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature; Linda Sheehan of Environment Now; and James Barnes, who co-founded the Antarctica and Southern Ocean Coalition in 1978. (You can read more about ASOC here and see their new book on Antactica as a model of global peace). Barry Knight facilitated, with Tamzin Ractliffe hosting for the Impact Trust.
Andrew Kelly opened with a sobering assessment. The Antarctic Treaty, signed 66 years ago, remains “one of the high point achievements of humanity” – reserving Antarctica for peace and science in the shadow of the Cold War. But the system that once worked is now paralysed. The Treaty operates by consensus, and consensus has become the language of inaction.
“The Antarctic Treaty System has been contained by consensus and largely has not done anything for 10 to 20 years. Everyone says, well, it’s working as it should because it’s based on consensus. And this is the language of no action. This is the language of nothing happening.” — Andrew Kelly
Meanwhile, Antarctica itself – humanity’s household fridge, as Kelly calls it – is on the blink. The core problem is awareness. Unlike the ozone hole forty years ago, which galvanized global action once people understood the stakes, Antarctica remains a remote abstraction for most of the world’s population.
“There’s a great reason why no action is currently being taken. It’s because nobody really knows about this in a substantive way. Once general awareness took place, agency and then action came to the fore, and it became everybody’s problem. And so, we acted.”— Andrew Kelly
James Barnes, who has spent 47 years in Antarctic advocacy, offered crucial perspective. His coalition stopped mining, created the world’s only ecosystem-as-the-whole fisheries regime, and established the Ross Sea Marine Protected Area. But he was clear-eyed about the nature of the current crisis:
“Antarctica’s problems today are not coming from what’s happening in Antarctica. They’re occurring because of what’s going on planetary-scale, mainly climate change. If climate change didn’t exist, Antarctica would be doing pretty darn good, actually. But with climate change, it’s ruining everything.” — James Barnes
Cormac Cullinan had been up since before dawn. At five o’clock that morning, he stood on the quayside of a fishing harbour in Cape Town, surrounded by Extinction Rebellion activists dressed in blue to represent Antarctica, dancers in white embodying the winds, and the traditional blowing of kudu horns. It was the South African launch of a global movement that had begun hours earlier in New Zealand and would continue around the world throughout the day.
“We’ve launched the Antarctica Alliance, a global alliance of organisations and individuals who are working on what we call the Antarctica Rights Initiative—essentially the idea that Antarctica should be recognised at international law as a subject with rights, something like a state, and that it should be entitled to be represented in international negotiations.” — Cormac Cullinan
The significance runs deep. Because Antarctica has no indigenous human population, a voice for Antarctica would be, in a sense, a voice for nature itself. But Cullinan was careful to emphasise that this is far more than a legal campaign. The performances, the art, the music – these were deliberate signals that what’s being proposed is a fundamental cultural change.
He described a social sculpture that morning, led by a gifted artist who asked participants to close their eyes, cradle something in their hands as if it were a baby bird, then release it. Ribbons of paper streamed out in the wind, making the invisible visible.
“He asked us to imagine it as an extended organ of perception, so that our fingers were flowing out in the wind and enabling us, metaphorically, to feel the wind more accurately. And he talked about how we need to work on ourselves to enhance our ability to perceive—if we are to hear Antarctica.” — Cormac Cullinan
The shift from object to subject changes everything. As soon as we see Antarctica not as territory to be owned but as an entity with agency, we move from the language of management to the language of relationship. And this reframes the entire governance question:
“Antarctica is wild. It knows how to look after itself. What we’ve got to manage is how humans relate to Antarctica. We’ve got to manage human behaviour, not Antarctica.” — Cormac Cullinan
In the chat, Cullinan clarified the deeper purpose: “What we are trying to do is analogous to the introduction of human rights – does not immediately change governance systems or laws but by changing understandings and rights, eventually permeates governance.” And later: “Perhaps the main reason for speaking of rights of Antarctica is to create corresponding human duties to respect them. Antarctica doesn’t really care if we think it has rights. What really matters is if people think that they have legal duties.”
Indy Johar shifted the conversation to harder ground. Where the Alliance launch offered hope, Johar offered an unflinching assessment of where we actually stand.
“The thing that I’m holding is this: standing still no longer works. If the status quo no longer works, and our legal governance systems are locked into the preservation of the status quo, we hit three degrees, and in that three degrees we pretty much have blown the Antarctic in tipping point terms…” — Indy Johar
His stark conclusion:
“I don’t think there’s anything left to conserve on the table. We can’t conserve the current position. All of our mindsets are about the preservation of the present when the present is already gone, because the underlying CO2 that’s been released and is likely to be released means the present can’t be preserved.” — Indy Johar
This throws us into unfamiliar governance territory. If conservation is no longer possible, what remains? Regeneration. Stabilisation. And this brings up what Johar called “dreaded words” – geo-engineering, active intervention in planetary systems. His reframing was telling: “geo-gardening,” he suggested, to soften the implications. But the question remains stark: will these technologies be done to us by asymmetric powers, or will we as a planetary democratic civilisation find another way? How does one look at the technologies without being subsumed by the ‘mastery’ mindset of the human world?
Johar connected ecological collapse to violence. Biophysical volatility—extreme weather, resource scarcity, supply chain disruptions – will drive inequality and breakdown of social contracts, which will drive conflict. Barry Knight confirmed the trajectory: violent conflict has increased 65% since 2021, with no signs of slowing.
But from this bleak assessment emerged something unexpected: Antarctica as an apex point for planetary governance.
“I think the future of planetary governance will either be discovered in Antarctica -because of all the conditions that Andrew laid out—or it will mark the tombstone for present-based civilisation and its inability to do that. So, I think it’s an apex point of actually planetary governance being discovered, and that’s why, for me, it’s so critical.” — Indy Johar
Andrew Kelly introduced a concept that would reverberate through the rest of the conversation: cathedral thinking. Anyone who has spent time in Antarctica, he observed, is eventually brought into contact with deep time – glaciers moving at 200 meters per year, ice cores containing bubbles of atmosphere from 800,000 years ago, a continent that has existed for millions of years and will still be here when we are long gone.
“When we talk about what is good for Antarctica, we need to see it beyond our minuscule lives of 70, 80, 90, 100 years. How do we as this group have what I term a ‘cathedral type mindset’ where we’re going to lay down foundation stones that we won’t see the end of? Building pathways for others who will put the final stones in place in 50 and 100 and 200 years.” — Andrew Kelly
This raised a structural challenge. We live, Kelly observed, in a dopamine economy – infinite scroll, PR narratives instead of redesigned systems, subjectivity re-engineered so that people experience themselves as bundles of cravings rather than agents with projects.
“Long-range issues can’t compete with infinite scroll. What’s really important here tonight—we are a group of agents within this collective with a project, or a series of projects, and that is pretty counter-cultural out on the main street.” — Andrew Kelly
Michael Hrebeniak reinforced this in the chat: “Our established global educational systems across the whole pyramid are entirely disengaged from this way of emergent, entangled planetary thinking. They exist to reproduce the existing ruinous practices of morbid capitalism and its zombie substrate. It’s now imperative to seed agile, parallel and proliferating institutions as a condition of urgency.”
A philosophical tension surfaced between morality and what Johar called enlightened self-interest. His argument was provocative: morality is rooted in separation. You need moral frameworks when you recognise yourself as separate from others, because you need a way of dealing with externalities. But entanglement changes everything.
“Entanglement means you no longer work with a moral perspective. You work with the recognition of your entanglement, which doesn’t require morality. It’s not that I’m being moral by doing something which averts a crisis to my own existence. It’s just enlightened self-interest.” — Indy Johar
This has implications for which political economy we build. Do we construct an economy around the preservation of Antarctica (a moral claim), or around the preservation of civilisation itself (enlightened self-interest)? The ability to hold both, Johar suggested, is essential.
Joe Redston raised Gandhi’s refusal to contribute to the UN Declaration of Human Rights without an accompanying declaration of responsibilities. Rights without corresponding duties, Gandhi argued, wouldn’t work in the long run. Cormac’s response in the chat was clarifying: “Perhaps the main reason for speaking of rights of Antarctica is to create corresponding human duties to respect them”.
Linda Sheehan connected legal rights to moral standing, citing Antarctic researcher Alan Hemmings, who has argued that “the philosophical, ecological, moral and ethical imperatives for Rights of Nature (RON) in the Antarctic are clear”. She suggested if we couldn’t recognise the independent moral standing of ecosystems and species and our relationship to them, we won’t be fully moral people.
Andrew Kelly amplified this in the chat with a fuller quote from Hemmings who is Adjunct Professor at Gateway Antarctica Centre for Antarctic Studies and Research, University of Canterbury: “The Antarctic Treaty System at the moment, and I’m afraid for years to come, cannot even progress conventional instrumental environmentalism. It’s not been able, for example, to adopt marine protected areas since 2016 and has difficulty agreeing on anything apart from a very low-level environmental maintenance agenda. So realistically, no environmental initiative looks like it has good prospects within the Antarctic Treaty System right now. So that is why we need this initiative, because there are very real threats to the region that need to be urgently addressed.”
In the chat, Amaya Steensma offered a different framing: “Intra-becoming means respecting also different ways we believe is the best way of being in this world. Ethics and morality are artificial, and human-made. The beauty is in stepping away from these words – that is where the intra-becoming and interdependent co-existence lives.”
Linda Sheehan posed a question that seemed to crystallise something essential: the word “governance” comes from steering, controlling the ship. But what if we’re not actually steering? What if the concept itself embeds assumptions of control that no longer apply?
“This idea of governance, which came from the idea of steering, controlling the ship—how do we roll back from that and realise our co-dependency, that we’re not actually steering the ship? How do we rethink this concept in a way that’s more inclusive and realistic?” — Linda Sheehan
Johar responded:
“Maybe we’re in a world beyond governance, because governance is rooted in the theory of control, and we are now in participation. And that’s fundamentally more interesting and fundamentally different to the last industrial theory of control and separation.” — Indy Johar
This reframing—from governance to participation—connects to the emergence methodology that Andrew Kelly had emphasised at the start. Top-down design solutions rarely work. Instead: “We’re using emergence to bring people and ideas, and we’re cobbling it together as we go. It’s more jazz than classical music.”
After the main dialogue ended, a smaller group remained to discuss next steps. It was here that the most direct assessment emerged.
“If I’m brutally honest, I feel like we’re trying to fight a conservation war, and that war is already lost. That is gone—the data, everything’s gone around that. If we’d won it, we would have won it in 2001 onwards, and we didn’t. We’re now path-dependent, linked to a different future, and updating ourselves and our postures to that feels quite important.” — Indy Johar
Andrew Kelly captured what makes this conversation different from almost anything else happening in the Antarctic space:
“Nobody is talking in the way that we are in this group about a 500- or 1000-year trajectory, and nobody sees the ground moving beneath their feet. Some of the posts I’ve seen on social media today are so lame. It’s like, ‘We get to go to Antarctica to do research. It’s an amazing place, and then we get to come back.’ Nobody is talking in the way that we are.” — Andrew Kelly
He spoke of grief -the kind that sits at the pit of the stomach. Not magical thinking, not denial, but the slow recognition that we are all complicit in something vast and irreversible. The challenge now is to act anyway.
“Acting in 2025—just acting is almost an act of resistance. When you do act and say we are acting and we’re moving, as we’ve done tonight and over this year, people assume it’s happening. There are so many times when people just talk and talk and talk and nothing ever happens.” — Andrew Kelly
Several threads came together in the final discussion. The group committed to further work – not to design a solution, but to think through what a work program might look like. Indy suggested a framing: “Planetary Antarctica Inquiry.”
The question Johar posed was stark: How do we design a planetary cathedral project? How do we finance it in the metabolism of 500 years, rather than the metabolism of a TikTok video?
This is not conservation in any traditional sense. It is something closer to what Johar has called “civilisation optionality” -the work of expanding the range of viable futures available to life itself. Antarctica, in this framing, is not just a place to be protected. It is a site where planetary governance might be invented, or where its impossibility will be demonstrated.
As Will Wade wrote in the chat: “So much food for thought and excellent contributions here. I’ve written and deleted several messages because someone else pre-empts them with far more eloquence. Thank you for hosting this -keen to stay in touch with how we might experiment with, model, and mobilise towards radically different and planetary-oriented governance.”
Mike Freedman raised the awareness challenge: using the classic AIDA funnel (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action), the conversation is operating at the bottom while the top remains empty. Cape Town, he noted, could be positioned as the home of three oceans—Atlantic, Indian, and Southern – bringing Antarctica closer to people’s lived experience. –
The Antarctica Alliance will reconvene for the signing of its Declaration on Antarctica Day 2026 in Cape Town. Between now and then, the task is to build the political economy – the desire and demand- for a different kind of conversation about our planetary future.
What emerged from this dialogue was recognition that Antarctica is more than a continent – it is a mirror reflecting our capacity for planetary stewardship, international cooperation, and species-wide consciousness. The Antarctic crisis reveals the bankruptcy of approaches based on extractive thinking, nationalist competition, and short-term optimisation. But it also points toward possibilities: rights-based governance, middle-power coalitions, relational consciousness, and deep-time perspectives that prioritise human flourishing over electoral cycles.
Antarctica may be the world’s most remote continent, but it is also our shared planetary commons—and perhaps our last best site for developing the consciousness and institutions needed to navigate the age of consequences.
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This synthesis is based on the Open Dialogue held on December 1st, 2025 Convened by Impact Trust and facilitated by Barry Knight. The chat history is available here.