World Park Base was a non-governmental year-round Antarctic base located at Cape Evans on Ross Island in the Ross Dependency. The international environmental organization Greenpeace established World Park Base in 1987 in order to press its demand for the Antarctic Treaty nations to declare all of the continent of Antarctica a World Park. This would make the entire continent off-limits to commercial exploitation and pollution, and permit only limited scientific research. Greenpeace closed down and completely dismantled the base in 1992.
The official attitude amongst the Antarctic Treaty nations was that World Park Base was to be ignored and that no assistance be given to it, although New Zealand, which claims jurisdiction over Ross Dependency (though all territorial claims are in abeyance under the Antarctic Treaty), would have assisted if a life-threatening situation arose.
Famous quotes containing the words world, park and/or base:
“As he watched from windows in the failing light
For his world that was always just out of sight
Where weakness was part of the ordinary landscape
And the friendly road knew his footstep, his footstep.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“Is a park any better than a coal mine? What’s a mountain got that a slag pile hasn’t? What would you rather have in your garden—an almond tree or an oil well?”
—Jean Giraudoux (1882–1944)
“The base of all artistic genius is the power of conceiving humanity in a new, striking, rejoicing way, of putting a happy world of its own creation in place of the meaner world of common days, of generating around itself an atmosphere with a novel power of refraction, selecting, transforming, recombining the images it transmits, according to the choice of the imaginative intellect. In exercising this power, painting and poetry have a choice of subject almost unlimited.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)