Wild Antarctica: science, healing, conservation

Where The Earth Meets The Sky: A Story of Penguins, People and Place in Antarctica
by Louise K. Blight

Toronto: Doubleday Canada / Bond Street Books, 2026
$38  /  9780385702102

Reviewed by Loÿs Maingon

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“Earth has no sorrows that earth cannot heal.”
-John Muir

In a sometimes poetic and sometimes terse prose, Louise K. Blight re-visits now classical interpretations of the romance of Antarctica within the unfolding reality of a rupturing industrial world that drives climate change.  “Rupture,” a theme that Mark Carney universalized at his now famous Davos speech, might well be the central theme of  Louise K. Blight’s timely introspective mémoire of her first research trip in Antarctica from November 2003 to January 2004. 

She reflects in hindsight on the Antarctic summer that brought her to Cape Royds to study Adélie penguins with David Ainley, after the untimely death of her sister and father.  Ainley whose reputation for terse communication and introspection is well known, was already in 2004 an authority on Adélie penguins.  The recipient of many prestigious awards for his conservation work in Antarctica, he is the co-author in 1983 of Breeding Biology of The Adélie Penguin with Robert Leresche and Bill Sladen, as well as The Aquatic World of Penguins: Biology of Fish-Birds. In 2022, Ainley was the recipient of the American Ornithological Society’s prestigious Ralph W. Schreiber Conservation Award, and is an authority on the ecology of the Ross Sea. 

In this mémoire, as a mentor to Blight, Ainley is responsible in part for her choice of PhD thesis question which , as she notes, was influenced by his reading of Daniel Pauly’s and Jay Maclean’s  (2003), In a Perfect Ocean: The State of Fisheries and Ecosystems in The North Atlantic Ocean.  Ainley and Blight would go on to write jointly about the ecology of the Ross Sea and the importance of preserving the integrity of this fragile ocean.¹ While Pauly and Maclean and others documented the extent to which other seas were pillaged and broken, the Ross Sea in 2004 remained intact, as Ainley remarks: “All other oceans are broken.” As Blight points out in the introduction and conclusion, some twenty-three years on after her initial research season, the pillage of Antarctic Seas has begun. The Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) has approved commercial fisheries for Antarctic toothfish “without sufficient biological data.” However, the toothfish fishery is but one of the many resources on which predatory capitalism has now set its sights in the Antarctic.  Automated deep-sea mining is also a consideration, as is the growing concern of the militarization of Antarctica by the superpowers, in contravention of the multilateral logic of the Antarctic Treaty System established in 1959.

Importantly, but not overtly discussed by Blight, who may assume that her readers are aware, well-documented krill overfishing is currently well underway. Regrettably, when more than ever corporate media serves oligarchic interests, environmental priorities that informed public attitudes and the voting interests of politicians twenty years ago are now relegated to the past. What does not make Canadian media front pages is that, as I write, on the high seas, Paul Watson’s much-reviled Sea Shepherd organization is waging a righteous campaign with the trawling fleets of Norway, China, Russia, and other nations. The limits set for krill fisheries in 2016 are up for revision, since the plateau was reached in December 2025. Today the United States, China, and Russia as well as two dozen other countries vie to expand that limit. Krill are the base of the Antarctic food chain, they sustain everything, including the Adélie penguin populations studied by Ainley and Blight.  They are fished to provide fish farm fishmeal, pet food, and dietary supplements.  Yet, the environmental and ecological importance of krill is largely taken for granted and minimized by commercial interests.  Krill biomass sequesters massive amounts of carbon dioxide making their conservation essential to addressing climate change.²  Furthermore, the casualties of the krill fishery include whales who are trapped in the fishing lines, or whose cull is called for to limit whale competition for krill biomass.  Yet the ecology of these whales exemplifies the vital interdependence of prey and predator in Antarctic food chains.  These whales are themselves an essential source of nutrients for krill biomass (the loss of whales is a loss of whale poop which constitutes an essential nutrient for krill biomass). 

The book is set in the memory-time of when Ainley was first advocating for the Ross Sea to become a marine protected area.  “Protected area” is in fact a very relative term in practice. Most “marine protected areas” still allow for commercial fishing and have been found to be over-fished. Even terrestrial “protected areas” like Strathcona Provincial Park, still include a recently expanded mine.  As BC’s recent scandal over the Association for Mineral Exploration report which claims that 47% of BC is “protected” shows, political interpretations of “protected nature” are tainted by commercial biases and interests.³  (Following International Union for the Conservation of Nature standards, only 19.9 percent of BC is “protected”, still short of the 30×30 target.)  This is the reality 23 years on. After much hard work by Ainley to protect the Ross Sea, much of the original proposal was cut back, and to date only a mere 5% of Antarctica is officially “protected.”  Commercial predation of resources continues unabated even as governments talk about the illusion that is 30×30.

As many visitors to Antarctica have remarked, time spent witnessing the stunning abundance of life beyond the polar zone of extreme cold waters and the sheer beauty of that continent is life-changing.  Blight witnesses that unlike her experience of previous research sites, which include the Canadian Arctic, Antarctica forever changed her “understanding of the world.”  This is her account of that break from “The Other World, The Real World, The World,” as she and most scientists working in Antarctica refer to the outside world beyond the polar seas.  Antarctica is her discovery and recovery back to a saner place of nature, no matter how harsh.  It is a place where life meets death and grows from it.

Antarctica is often described by travellers as an easily disorienting place where cloud can melt and fuse boundaries and horizons.  It is both a physical entity and a place of mind.  It is a place where one leaves behind the familiar real world of post-industrial civilization and is compelled to learn to listen to the draw of nature.  Blight’s descriptions of the residents and  life at the American McMurdo Base and the New Zealand Scott Base all hinge on the rupture between Antarctica and “the every-day real world” of commuting, formalities, and appearances that research scientists leave behind.

But overreaching that personal rupture with the life we are all familiar with, is the grander concern for the internal ecological rupture that Antarctica is now undergoing through climate change, and the more recent political infringements on the multilateral conventions essential to the conservation of Antarctica’s distinctiveness. Blight’s writing is largely referential to classical texts that have shaped the romantic colonial image of Antarctica, as well as our understanding of marine ecology, fisheries, and climate change, as do the references to Daniel Pauly’s work. Blight generously refers to and quotes these texts to guide the reader. 

Readers who want to make the most of her personal excellent insightful account will do well to move beyond the school classics of Robert Falcon Scott’s  Scott’s Last Expedition and Ernest Shackleton’s South: The Story of the 1914-1917 Expedition. Knowledge of these classics will help appreciate the intellectual construction of space in her account since much of Blight’s time is spent in McMurdo Sound, particularly at Cape Royds, in close proximity to Shackleton’s camp. In this masterful presentation of her Antarctic experience it is not just earth that meets the sky as horizons fade, it is time and the ghosts of time that break boundaries, sometimes to the edge of what may seem like “polar madness” as she discovers her “resistance to Antarctica’s enchantment waning and I spend more time staring at the wildness.”  A prior familiarity with  Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s classic and very literary account of the Terra Nova expedition which was supposed to meet and relieve Scott’s returning party in The Worst Journey in the World will enhance Blight’s own account of her journey.

Also pivotal to her narrative is Douglas Mawson’s account of his terrifying three-man 1912-1913 Eastern Party journey as part of the Australasian Expedition of 1911-1914, of which he was the sole survivor, The Home of the Blizzard. Mawson’s account in particular details the psychological and physical extremes which isolation and Antarctica’s weather and terrain impose on human life and death.

The new twist which Blight brings to classic perceptions hinges on the threats that climate change and industrial fisheries bring to Antarctica’s ecosystems, and in turn to humanity. While Antarctica has no large terrestrial predators and may lull humans into complacency, at the interface of ice and sea dangers constantly lurk. Leopard seals which can loom beneath the ice are documented to track human movements and erupt to grab even human prey, and divers sometimes disappear, as Blight documents.  On a global scale climate change and shifts of ice loom like leopard seals, loom unexpectedly as a threat to global ecosystems on which humanity depends. While much is made of the potential impacts of melting ice shelves on sea-level rise, impacts on marine-dependent ecosystems and their implications are too often overlooked.

In that respect the context of Blight’s stay in 2004-2005 is somewhat understated. By sheer serendipity, Blight’s three months stay on Ross Island coincided with a historic moment in Antarctic climate research. In 2000, Iceberg B-15, the largest iceberg on record (295 by 37 kms), about the size of Jamaica, calved from the Ross Ice shelf.  In 2004, a large part, B-15A, broke off and could be observed heading north into the Ross Sea, a point that Blight alludes to several times (this ice mass was still observable in January 2025 near South Georgia Island).  Whether the 2000 event was part of a natural cycle or was accelerated by anthropogenic climate change is open to debate, largely because the exact nature of melting processes is not yet fully understood. What is not open to debate is that surface melt is expanding and is expected to continue to do so for this century.⁴ The expansion of ice melt in Antarctica will have implications both for Antarctica’s ecosystems, the survival of endemic species, and for the functioning humanity’s global life support system.

What matters most is that the rupture of B-15 was a turning point in our understanding of the implication of climate change for ocean currents and the ecology of marine populations, because it allowed scientists to study the broader impacts of the kind of calving that is expected to occur increasingly frequently as climate change progresses. Locally, the break-up of B-15A interfered with normal ocean currents and winds in McMurdo Sound. It increased the distance that breeding penguins had to travel. It was expected to affect penguin, skua, and seal populations, with general adverse impacts on the ecology of the Ross Sea.

Blight’s narrative weaves together a personal journey of recovery following the deaths of the author’s sister and father.  She traces her emotional path of rediscovery of self during her experience of Antarctica and re-connection with the humanity of fellow researchers. Throughout the narrative life and death interweave in a wild Antarctic desert, where the only soil is “ornithogenic” soil, the millennial accumulation of penguin guano and dead or frozen corpses of penguin chicks out of which life arises and is sustained. Antarctica becomes a liminal experience, an essential place of passage where life and death co-exist in a sublime experience. Quietly the narrative deals with a big metaphysical theme: the reality and importance of wilderness. It presents a wilderness independent from human cultural constructs.  While it has become fashionable to deny the reality of wilderness as an artefact of western colonial culture, Blight’s experience of a timeless Antarctica can serve as a reminder that a grander nature oblivious to the temporal passage of humankind dwarves our petty personal and cultural pretensions and commands our respect.

In wilderness Blight discovers that even as we pass through apparent death experiences life endures, just as life is likely to overcome climate change and industrial civilization.  That insight really crystallizes around her experience of penguin 1091, a grievously wounded female whose mortality she associates with her sister. Blight observes a bloodied and mangled 1091 pulling herself from water’s edge to her nest by the strength of her beak after being mauled by a leopard seal, When she initially suggests to Ainley that 1091 will die shortly, Ainley laconically notes: “Be prepared to be amazed.”  Indeed 1091 amazingly makes it through the season and joins the fall migration.  It is not just that Adélies are tough little birds.  It is that life itself is extraordinarily resilient, and arises out of death, as much of the ecology of Antarctica suggests.  It may not be coincidental that Ainley did his undergraduate degree in “Biology and Religious Studies,” and therefore unlike many scientists, came prepared to work in Antarctica with a sound preparation in philosophy and the humanities, as well as science.  What Blight gained in Antarctica was a greater philosophical outlook, one needed more than ever to face the challenges that climate change and industrial society pose for humankind.

Good books tell simple tales only to raise more questions than they answer because they invite the reader to open what Huxley called the doors of perception. In Where Earth Meets the Sky Blightsucceeds in inviting readers to look beyond the text.  From the humdrum regimented life at McMurdo Base or MacTown and Scott Base to Shackletown camp and the narrow confines of a mountain tent at twenty degrees below she succeeds in forcing her readers to reflect with her on learning to listen to nature and see into a penguin’s eyes.  Were she to have written in the eighteenth century’s Age of Reason, her mémoire might have been named “An Inquiry into the physics and metaphysics of Antarctica.”

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Dr. Loÿs Maingon was arrested at Clayoquot Sound in 1993 and remains a strong advocate for social, economic, and environmental change. He contributed a chapter to Clayoquot & Dissent (Ronsdale Press: 1994), and authored Field Guide to Basic Lichens of Strathcona Park (Strathcona Wilderness Institute Press: 2022). [Editor’s note: Dr. Loÿs Maingon has reviewed books by Sarah Boon, Rhonda Bailey (ed.) andThe Cumberland Museum and Archives, M.V. Ramana, Arthur S. Reber, Frantisek Baluska and William B. Miller Jr., Peter R. Grant, and Joel Bakan, Melissa Aronczyk & Maria I. Espinoza, William K. Carroll (ed.) for The British Columbia Review.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster

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Notes

1. Ainley, David G. And Louise K. Blight, “ecological repercussions of historical fish extraction from the Southern Ocean,” Fish and Fisheries 10, no.1:13-38. ↩︎
2. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-52135-6 ↩︎
3. https://thenarwhal.ca/mining-lobbying-bc-conservation-targets/ ↩︎
4. Zheng, Y., Golledge, N.R., Gossart, A. et al. Expansion of Antarctic surface melt through the 21st century. Nat Commun (2026). ↩︎