“The universe is not a collection of objects. It is a communion of subjects.”
Cormac Cullinan
This was the third conversation in a series about pre-emptive peace, focusing on Antarctica as a critical site where new forms of planetary governance may emerge. Many were newcomers to the conversation, drawn by the growing awareness that Antarctica represents far more than the popular image of “penguins and ice.” The conversation including a sobering assessment of governance failure and an energising vision of what new forms of planetary cooperation might look like.
You can watch the recording on our YouTube channel now.
Andrew Kelly summarised the state of affairs and the urgency. Antarctica, he explained, functions as “humanity’s refrigerator,” regulating global climate through the massive circumpolar current that drives all ocean systems. The marked reduction in sea ice extent at both summer minimum and winter maximum is causing more heat to enter the ocean around Antarctica. This causes the surrounding waters to warm, carving out the undersides of ice shelves, and breach the grounding line between ice & continental shelf, destabilising the glaciers feeding the ice shelves. Concurrently, the warming waters are changing and slowing the “planetary pool pump” which regulates the worlds currents and global weather.
Kelly presented the real and staggering facts. If the Thwaites ice shelf collapses, global sea levels will rise 65 centimetres, threatening virtually every coastal city. Blue whales arriving for their summer feeding found increasingly depleted krill swarms in what some researchers are calling “the ocean reprogramming itself.” The 2024-25 krill fishing season had to be closed seven months early after boats caught the annual quota in record time.
Andrew also reported on the, once more disappointing, Antarctic Treaty meeting held in Milan in July. This annual gathering, meant to coordinate the peaceful governance of a continent twice the size of Australia, had produced nothing of substance. Tourism regulations from 2004 remain unimplemented. Emperor penguins, despite clear scientific evidence of their endangerment, still lack protection status. Marine Protected Areas, some proposed twenty years ago, remain stalled as Russia and China weaponise the consensus system to block conservation measures.
“The United States tabled one report,” Kelly noted, “when they normally table around thirty.” America’s retreat from Antarctic leadership coincided with China’s aggressive expansion. There are now five Chinese research stations, two new icebreakers, and plans for another base by 2027. Meanwhile, the meetings themselves violate their own transparency rules, admitting only two journalists over four years and shrinking public sessions to mere opening ceremonies. (NOTE. this might be shifting given recent notice from the US Congress Committee on Oversight and Government Reform that post-dates the meeting in Milan)
Kelly wanted to dispel any illusions about Antarctica’s current status:
Lest we be in any doubt, Antarctica is not a protected reserve. This is something most people do not appreciate. The continent lacks the comprehensive conservation protections many assume it has.
Indy Johar provided crucial background context to the notion of pre-emptive planetary peace. Having previously worked on the Himalayas as a major geographical hotspot where hydrological cycles could easily “run away into a catastrophic existential landscape of conflict” and three superpowers involved, he highlighted that there would be “no winning party at the other end” and “no pathway to win”. This created incentives for everyone to engage in pre-emptive peace as a means of stabilising locations with catastrophic planetary effects.
From this framework, Johar reframed the Antarctic discussion. Rather than seeing Antarctica as a distant concern for a few polar nations, he argued that roughly 7 billion people, everyone in coastal communities and cities, everyone affected by climate, everyone affecting by fishing, all have a material stake in Antarctic stability. This isn’t just about conservation; it’s about recognising Antarctica as critical planetary infrastructure whose failure would threaten civilisation itself.
The war machine doesn’t have a carbon budget. If we were to go to war in any meaningful way over Antarctica, we would be talking about the elimination of billions of people’s lives [and livelihoods]. This reality demands pre-emptive peace, a mechanism for addressing conflicts before they reach catastrophic thresholds.
Drawing parallels to how the River Danube became the birthplace of international water governance after regional wars, Johar suggested Antarctica could be where new forms of planetary governance emerge. But this would require transcending the nation-state system entirely, creating what he termed a “7 billion alliance” of those materially affected by Antarctic stability.
The challenge, Johar acknowledged, runs deeper than politics. Global inequality fractures our collective ability to perceive long-term existential risks.
“If you are hungry today, your horizon of existential risk is seven days. If you’re thirsty today, your horizon is about twenty-four hours.”
Building shared recognition of Antarctic threats requires addressing the systemic inequalities that trap billions in immediate survival mode.
Cormac Cullinan, the environmental lawyer from Cape Town who helped found the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature, brought three decades of hard-won wisdom to bear on the question. His analysis cut to philosophical bedrock: our legal systems, inherited from Enlightenment thinking, treat everything non-human as mere “objects” available for exploitation.
Much like when we define people as objects, we called them slaves, our legal systems have entrenched that relationship between humans and corporations and states on the one hand, and the rest of the planet on the other.
Citing the American thinker Thomas Berry, Cullinan offered a radically different vision:
“The universe is not a collection of objects. It is a communion of subjects.”
Antarctica, under this framework, deserves legal personhood giving it a voice in the human decision-making processes that affect its future.
The Antarctic Alliance Cullinan described plans to launch on December 1st, 2025, which is Antarctica Day, represents more than advocacy. It’s an attempt to build what he called a “global civil society movement” capable of transcending the failed nation-state approach to Antarctic governance. The goal: finalising an Antarctic Declaration by Antarctica Day 2026 that recognises Antarctica’s rights and establishes systems to advocate for its interests.
Growing up under South African apartheid, Cullinan sees parallels between that system of institutionalised separation and humanity’s relationship with the more-than-human world. “A small percentage of the community decides that they’re superior to the rest of the community, they set themselves apart, and they seek to exploit the rest of the community. That always ends badly.”
Linda Sheehan, representing one of the few philanthropists willing to fund in this emerging field, provided crucial perspective on systemic change. A lawyer herself, she noted how both philanthropy and law remain “stuck in Newtonian cause-and-effect science”, investing money and expecting predictable results in systems that are fundamentally complex and interconnected.
“We need to think more in terms of probabilities rather than linear cause and effect and invest in those probabilities.”
Her organisation Environment Now supports rights of nature work precisely because it brings different voices into decision-making processes. The upcoming IUCN Congress will consider Motion 055 on Recognition of the Rights of Antarctica, offering one pathway toward the systemic change the conversation demanded.
Sheehan also challenged the language of “governance” itself, arguing it “presumes control by a few rather than collaborative co-creation.” She proposed “entangled system building” as an alternative framework, viewing Antarctica not as a site of crisis but of “poly-opportunities”—multiple pathways toward more collaborative planetary management.
The discussion touched on everything from David Bohm’s dialogue groups to Ivan Illich’s analysis of how verbs morph into nouns in ways that enable control. Cormac Cullinan noted how even drafting documents raises language challenges—should Antarctica be “it,” “he,” “she,” or something entirely different? Robin Wall Kimmerer’s proposed pronouns “ki” (singular – key) and “kin” (plural) for more-than-human beings offered one possibility.
The richness emerged as much from participants as panellists. Carolina Sánchez de Jaegher, speaking from the Netherlands as an Indigenous descendant, delivered perhaps the most challenging intervention. The human/non-human dichotomy, she argued, is a “skilful political division” that enables all forms of dispossession, of Earth, of Antarctica, of Indigenous peoples themselves.
“Indigenous peoples do not say rosy things all the time,” she warned. “You will hear things you are not going to like. But that’s the start of the healing process with reality and with the colonial divide that has been imposed on all of us.” Her call to return to “literature that is erased from your curriculums” highlighted how much wisdom remains systematically excluded from mainstream discussions.
Mark Brown from London offered a remarkably honest self-assessment, diagnosing himself with “tribal brainwashing” and “blickering”.
Blickering is a term that describes the way we skim over half-thought ideas without truly challenging our own thinking.
Mark Brown
His top three identified forms of conditioning (blickering) – egocentric worldview, compulsive possessiveness, and in-group favouritism. This insight resonated widely as critical barriers to the kind of thinking the polycrisis demands.
Brown’s proposal for “a Language From and For the Future” sparked extensive discussion.
If we imagine a world fifty years from now that has avoided both dystopia and authoritarianism, what language concepts need to be dropped as “past their sell-by date”? What new “verb forms” might enable “profoundly caring, loving conversations” beyond ego and nationalism?
Amaya Steensma, a recent graduate in strategic design from Copenhagen, embodied the energy many felt building throughout the conversation. “I have a lot of energy and not much of a career history or network (yet),” she said with refreshing directness, “and I’m asking if there’s any platform that continues from here where I could participate in moving this civil society forward.”
Her question touched something vital. As multiple speakers noted, this wasn’t just another intellectual discussion. People wanted to contribute, to channel their skills and energy into meaningful action. The Antarctic offered what Johar called a “portal”, an entry point into planetary-scale challenges that might otherwise feel overwhelming.
Michael Hrebeniak from the New School of the Anthropocene highlighted a crucial missing element:
“The arts and humanities are all but marginalised from the discourses of polycrisis. Yet arts aren’t just decoration for scientific and political discussions. This is how we imagine our future. We need an imaginary of the post-Anthropocene where we can renegotiate these boundaries between the human and non-human world.”
The arts, Hrebeniak suggested, provide “encounters with difference” and “new models of sociality” essential for moving beyond extractivist thinking. As “language beings” overdetermined by mechanistic principles, we need arts to open what he termed “the cathedrals of the mind.”
Perhaps the most structured analysis came from Avila Kilmurray, drawing on decades of peace-building experience in Northern Ireland. Kilmurray offered what she called “four Cs” for understanding the conversation’s deeper dynamics.
Connection with the Issue proved fundamental. “How many people know this?” she asked, echoing a question that had haunted the entire discussion. Andrew’s presentation was “absolutely fascinating,” but also revealed the challenge: without connection to the issue, it goes unrecognised. Kilmurray noted Indy’s crucial point about existential risk perception, people who are focused on immediate survival can’t worry about thirty-year horizons.
Convening required careful strategy. Rather than creating more silos, Kilmurray suggested identifying multiple pressure points like Antarctica, the Amazon, other critical sites that could work together and build a “future-focused non-aligned movement” offered an alternative to depending on major geopolitical powers locked in their own conflicts.
Communication demanded layered approaches that avoided becoming an “elite discussion.” While new concepts and future language might be necessary, “we don’t lose people along the way.” The conversation needed empathy, not just elegance, connecting to current issues with clear values. “Who are the villains at the moment? And where’s the vision? Where’s the solution-focused vision?” The arts, she noted, become crucial for this empathetic engagement.
Critical Thinking emerged as perhaps most important. The philosophical questions raised “What does it mean to be human?” and the need for “moral imagination” not bound by traditional academic frameworks, required what she called “new framing” so people could “think around corners.”
Her most challenging observation was the need for “bringing minds together without the interference of egos.” As she put it with characteristic understatement, “I think that is a real challenge.”
Several participants noted something qualitatively different about this third conversation – there is an active and inherent search for how we can build on something. Andrew Kelly identified it as “invitational space” rather than predetermined solutions, creating room for people to step into rather than just receive information.
Johar captured the moment’s pregnant possibility: “I think people want to contribute to this agenda. You can sense the stream has started bubbling and is now ready to flow.” The next dialogue on Antarctica and Pre-emptive Peace will be held on December 1st to honour Antarctica day and the launch of the Antarctic Alliance launch, plans for potentially longer discussions, and exploration of different formats that might better accommodate the energy seeking expression.
Perhaps most important was the recognition that Antarctica serves as what Johar called “the right portal” for planetary thinking, a place with no permanent human inhabitants that nevertheless affects every community on Earth. Learning about Antarctica’s true importance hits like a punch to the solar plexus, it is a sudden realisation of how much we don’t know about what keeps us alive.
The conversation left many with Donella Meadows’ words ringing in their ears:
“There is yet one leverage point that is even higher than changing a paradigm, that is to keep oneself unattached in the arena of paradigms, to stay flexible, to realise that no paradigm is true.
That flexibility, what Indy calls “the capacity to live in doubt and uncertainty” might be our greatest strength.
Join us again on December 1st 2025 at 2pm UK. Register on zoom here.
📅 Date: December 1st, 2025
⏰ Time: 2PM GMT / 3PM CET / 4PM SAST / 9 AM ET / 6AM PST
🔗 Register for the zoom link