Monday 17 July 2006

Antarctica - does anyone still care?

Midnight Oil wrote a song about it as the last untouched wilderness... now the Russians are drilling into a lake buried for 14,000 years under 4km of ice (they say they've figured out how to prevent the oil in the drill from entering the lake... ) and India is building a new research station in an environmentally sensitive location (goodness, I think the whole place is environmentally sensitive!) - see http://www.theage.com.au/news/in-depth/black-ice/2006/07/16/1152988408997.html

Should we respect Antarctica as the last wilderness and try to protect it as such (note: international law shenannigans have rendered this rather ineffective to date), or do we need to move forward and recognise that we can no longer afford to reserve a place on this planet without a significant human footprint?