Ocean Development Kritik
1NC ......................................................................................................................................... 2
Development Link ................................................................................................................... 8
Leadership/Hegemony Link .................................................................................................. 11
Wind Links ............................................................................................................................ 15
Climate Change Links ........................................................................................................... 20
Alternative - Ext .................................................................................................................... 27
2NC – K Prior – Aff Suspect ................................................................................................. 31
2NC – Turns Case (Energy/Climate)..................................................................................... 34
2NC Impact – Structural Violence ........................................................................................ 36
2NC Impact – Energy Technocracy ...................................................................................... 40
AT: Climate O/W .................................................................................................................. 43
AT: Renewables Better than FF ............................................................................................ 45
AT: Perm ............................................................................................................................... 47
AT: Enviro-Pragmatism ........................................................................................................ 51
AT: Prioritize Scientific Method ........................................................................................... 54
1NC
The discourse of ocean development requires a system of ecological and
economic destruction. The aff’s framing of ocean policy is unsustainable.
Peter JACQUES Poli Sci @ Central Flordia (Orlando) ‘6 Globalization and the World Ocean p.
3-6
Respected ecological philosopher Andrew Dobson provides a helpful discussion of the
accompanying asymmetry to this expansion when he considers how globalization has changed
citizenship. Dobson uses Castells for context: In a global approach, there has been, over the past
three decades, increasing inequality and polarization in the di stribution of wealth .... The poorest
20 percent of the world's people have seen their share of global income decline from 2.3 percent
to I .4 percent .... Meanwhile, the share of the richest 20 percent has risen from 70 percent to 85
percent." (Castells in Dobson 2003, I 9) Thus, globalization is not an even process of economic
expansion and opportunity where everyone is connected and everyone becon1es an equal part of a
wondrous network of global invisible hands. Instead, while there are some opportunities for poor
countries and their civic groups, globalization moves mostly in one direction. Global activist
Vandana Shiva elaborates that "Through its global reach, the North exists in the South, but the
South exists only within itself, since it has no global reach" (Shiva in Dobson I 7). T his does not
mean that globalization is inherently "bad" and localization "good"; it means that historically,
globalization has occurred to the privilege of some and at the expense of others. Nonsustainable
trends are embedded in inequitable power relationships; thus, global material equity is necessary
for curbing maldistribution and exploitation of resources. Dobson rejects the more
cosmopolitan belief that there is a reciprocal obligation of everyone to one another in favor of a
distributional responsibility such as from North to South based on the materials produced and
reproduced through asymmetrical globalization. This is a more sophisticated iteration of the
material equity included in the Borgese Test described below. I take Dobson's (and Shiva' s) point
that globalization enables this connectivity through and within ecological spaces and budgets, and
that sustainability requires benefits to be redistributed throughout transnational communities
(Dobson 2003). It is worthwhile to reflect on the question "How much has changed for the
majority of poor countries in the last fifty years, and in particular the last twenty years, in the face
of Western 'help'?" and then to simultaneously ask, "What is the direction of ecology in this same
last 50 years?" Minus a few exceptions, the promise and dream of "development" 2 for the global
South has actually "produced its opposite: massive underdevelopment and impoverishment,
untold exploitation and oppression" (Escobar I994, 4) at the same time ecology has seen
"structural" decline-that is, a decline of the frame and foundation of ocean ecology. Structure is
important economically and socially as well and implies the same meaning of the larger frame
and construction of a system where constituent agents and decisions are made, but which do not
fundamentally alter the larger design. As a political scientist, I cannot count this situation as an
accident, but instead a purposeful result that can come about only through disproportionate and
asymmetrical structural arrangements of power-but from where? While localities cannot escape
some responsibility, poor localities have unquestionably been marginalized, and their ability to
change their situation has been fraught with obstructions that originate from the colonial period.
Much of this power has cone from development discourses and projects which embody the
ideals of what progress should be (through modernity), and this has then framed the reality that
poor countries find themselves in when needing stabilization loans or making trading
arrangements (Escobar I 995). This follows the various ghosts of modernity, now supported, recreated, and defended most by the ideology of " neoliberalism." Liberalism is the central Western
political theory, ideology, and political economy preferring a least restricted market, pluralistic
competing political groups such as NGOs, various strong civil freedoms for individual citizens (
e.g., of speech, religion, etc.), and a neutral State which affords procedural equity (procedures of
the state treat everyone the same, e.g., in a courtroom) to all citizens and most agendas.
Neoliberalism is a reformed liberalism that places much more focus on the market aspect of
liberalism and much less focus on civil liberties. Neoliberal policies focus on privatizing formerly
public enterprises and industry; lowering social expenditures of the state (particularly those which
tend to redistribute wealth); reducing or eliminating tariffs toward other countries; and creating a
tax and physical infrastructure that favors industrial production and trickles down to lower classes
to create economic growth and employment and reduce poverty (Fri edman I 962). Neoliberal
policies are not concerned with creating a social safety net, leaving this up to a robust economic
growth, nor do they like regulatory environmental policies, which they prefer to leave up to the
pricing of goods. This ideology is exported through trade and loan arrangements to other
countries from the Western power elite, such as World Bank, the OECD, or individually through
the United States, Britain, and some other European countries that have majority voting power in
the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Neoliberalism changed its focus
from simple capital accumulation models to include the development of institutions. Evans
(2004) sees these institutions imposed, such as through international finance institutions, which
are AngloAmerican generated models. These institutional designs are all the same; he calls them
"institutional monocropping," where the "best response to bad governance is less governance" (
35). This arrangement is a fundamental problem with neo liberalism because it creates fewer
limits on exploitation of people and natural resources, and places the profit motive of firms in a
privileged position without any sense of citizenship mentioned above. In contrast, Evans
proposes, along with scholars Dani Roderick and Amartya Sen, that the building of institutions
should center around more direct and participatory deliberative democratic institutions where
minority voices have more influence to stem exploitation. Ironically, the Anglo-American set of
institutions and countries never strictly employed neoliberalism themselves. It is well known that
state involvement and guarantees (to differing degrees) of some civil rights and social welfare
have been key elements in the building of stable industrialized affluent countries (H ettne, Inotai,
and Sunkel 2001). The United States and the European Union (EU) consistently use state
subsidies and protections, such as for agriculture-the primary area in which industrializing
countries have a competitive advantage (Kutting 2004). For ocean politics, the Northern subsidies
of fishing fleets are a source of overfishing and a prime example of a non-neoliberal policy,
which is now being negotiated in the World Trade Organization (WTO). Nonetheless, AngloAmerican countries demand lightning-fast change toward free markets and liberal democracy,
without some level of democratic guarantees and social welfare. Evidence indicates that this can
and has led to instability, violence, and ethnic genocide because these rapid changes create
unequal market and political controls among factious rival groups (Chua 2003). This is not
occurring only at the national level. The Third World cannot compete against Northern subsidies.
This problem was symbolized by a South Korean farmer, Lee Kyoung Hae, who committed
suicide outside the 2003 WTO meeting in Cancun, Mex ico, as a protest to WTO rules that allow
agricultural protections from the free market (Vidal 2003). Protesters at this n1eeting numbered
over ten thousand and hailed from more than thirty countries; they presented some recurrent
demands, which " included protection from big business, abandonment of genetically modified
crops in developing states, and no privatization of water, forests and land" (Vidal 2003). Now, the
world economy is growing at about 5 percent per year-the fastest in almost thirry years
(International Monetary Fund 2004). This global economy is based on flows of energy, material,
and capital. This flow is called throughput, and is used to sustain (and impoverish) groups within
the population greater than six billion people. These energy flows start and end within natural
systems. More throughput means more withdrawals and additions from and into natural systems.
Therefore, the basis for connecting economic globalization to ecological decline is that current
globalization expands the scale and intensity of throughput; this kind of growth is viewed as
essential to progress and development within neoliberalism. The inherent disconnect between
resource decline and global economic expansion is hidden structurally by distancing, or
"distanciation" (Kutting 2004). Capitalism in general, but in particular petroleum-based
capitalism, creates expedited pathways for export and trade that become separated, or distanced,
from their local meaning so that "Time-space separation disconnects social activity from its
particular social context" (Kutting 2004, 33). This is related to what ecological economists have
described in terms of ecological burdens remaining outside the pricing system as externalities
which ecology and third parties eventually pay. Current globalization allows affluent populations
to shift environmental costs through a global economy, and these populations are structurally
permitted to live off of the carrying capacity of others (Kutting 2004; Muradian and
MartinezAlier 200Ia, 200Ib; Martinez-Alier 1995; Bunker 1985). When one fishery is depleted,
the world economy can move on to the next fishery, structurally obscuring the problem because
consumers are not dependent on local ecological budgets. Changes do not affect affluent
consumers because these customers are not forced to care about the first depleted fishery, and in
this way human-ocean relations have fundamentally changed with economic globalization.
Development discourse defines the range of ocean problems and solutions.
Displacing development is a pre-requisite to policies not defined by
exploitation.
Philip STEINBERG Geography @ Durham ‘1 The Social Construction of the Ocean p. 32-35
Representations of ocean-space: discourse The third pillar of the territorial political economy
perspective is representation, the process by which social meaning (including the social meaning
of spaces) is transmitted among individuals through literary creations, visual images, and other
media. The history that follows makes frequent reference to representations in art, law,
cartography, literature, public policy, and advertising. Each of these media is generated in a social
context and serves as a means by which ideas are communicated and diffused throughout the
general public, inscribed into the images and assumptions that guide the everyday thoughts and
behaviors of individuals. The significance of representation lies in its role in the perpetuation and
contestation of discourses, "frameworks ... [that] constitute the limits within which ideas and
practices are considered to be natural; that is, [that] set the bounds on what questions are
considered relevant or even intelligent" (Barnes and Duncan 1992: 8). Mobilized by policy
makers, discourses are used to establish "common-sense" parameters for problems and solutions
(Roe 1994). ;: While discourses are utilized by policy makers, their reach is deeper than policymaking elites, and their truth-claims are more resilient than that of elite-generated ideologies.
Unlike an ideology, a discourse does not misrepresent the power relations underlying material
reality. Rather, discourses enable, reproduce, and, perhaps most importantly, diffuse these
relations throughout society. By reproducing the hegemonic discourse - something that
individuals do unwittingly as they act, speak, and think within existing social conventions,
definitions, and categories - individuals reproduce their own domination. Conversely, the
conscious creation of alternative discourses can play a central role in the imagination, promotion,
and implementation of strategies for social change (Foucault 1977; Marcuse 1969). > Because the
sea so often is referred to in literary and artistic creations, there is a substantial literature on
marine representation and its meaning within broader social discourse (see, for instance, Connery
1996). Interpretations of modernity's obsession with the sea have ranged from its being the
embodiment of the desire of "Modern Man" to return to the womb, to His desire to deny His
corporeality, to His search for new material conquests. To look at these (and other) marine
representations within their social contexts, this book focuses on the emergence of marine
representations within three discourses: development, geopolitics, and law. The discourse of
development is built around an absolute definition of progress, an assumption that the more
developed can lead the less developed along this path to progress, and the belief that this progress
can be achieved by applying scientific rationality to development "problems" (Sachs 1992; Watts
1993). The development discourse is rooted in Enlightenment concepts of science and reason:
The world is knowable and individuals can shape it to serve themselves if only they utilize
science to find the proper formula. It follows that both society and space are amenable to
development. Space is perceived as an abstract field in which individuals can embed and
redistribute social relations and structures in an attempt to better their lives. By establishing a grid
(graphically expressed in the system of latitude and longitude lines), the location of every space
in relation to every other space is made generalizable, a key prerequisite for scientific inquiry and
the formation of scientific laws. An abstract element susceptible to manipulation (or, to use
Sack's terminology, "emptying" and "filling"), space is represented as a canvas on which planners
and engineers may test and apply their insights and work toward human progress (Harvey 1989;
Lefebvre 1991; Smith 1990). < The modern construction of ocean-space is in some senses the
antithesis of this land-space territorial construction. The sea largely has been constructed as a
"non-territory," an untamable space that resists "filling" or "development." And yet, this
construction of oceanspace as a "non-territory" or "other" in which rational planning cannot
prevail also lies within the development discourse of scientific rationality and space-oriented
planning. This discursive construction is possible only as a counterpoint to the paradigmatic
modern construction of land-space as amenable to rational planning, and, as Said (1993) notes,
antithetical counterpoints play a crucial role in producing discourses. A second discourse
frequently informing (and being reproduced by) the construction of ocean-space is the discourse
of geopolitics, by which "intellectuals of statecraft 'spatialize' international politics in such a way
as to present it as a 'world' characterized by particular places, peoples, and dramas" (6 Tuathail
and Agnew 1992: 192; see also 6 Tuathail 1996~n the modern era's geopolitical discourse, as in
the era's development discourse, ocean-space typically is represented as a "special" space that
lacks the paradigmatic attributes of "regular" space. For the development discourse, the key
spatial unit is the manageable block of land that can be "filled" and "developed," and the ocean
therefore is unique and an "other" because it is "undevelopable.( For the geopolitical discourse,
the key unit is the territorially defined state that interacts with the world's other states. As space
outside state territory, the ocean is constructed within the geopolitical discourse as an empty
"force-field" within which and across which states exercise their relative power over their
competitors. This geopolitical counterpoint, like that of the development discourse, lies firmly
within dominant ways of thinking: It reproduces the representation of space as a landscape of
(developable and governable) terrestrial nation-states separated by an (undevelopable and
anarchic) marine void. A third discourse referred to here is that of law. Legal discourse theorists
challenge the accepted perception of law as an autonomous set of rules and reasoning systems
lying outside the structures and power relations of social life: Legal critics ... insist that law ... is
not only deeply embedded in the messy and politicized contingencies of social life but [is]
actually constitutive of social and political relations. (Blomley 1994: 7- 8) Like the other
discourses discussed here, the legal discourse does more than operationalize and legitimize social
relations. When one appeals to the legal discourse, one represents relations in a particular manner
that serves to "naturalize" material reality as well as the autonomy of a seemingly distinct sphere
of legal reasoning. Critical legal geographers demonstrate how this scripting of social relations
within a legal discourse serves to define places, their hierarchical order, and the scale and
boundaries of social organization. The legal discourse historically has served both to reflect and
construct social conceptions of space. Ideas about property and the relative mobility of privately
held goods within the realm of one sovereign and among the realms of multiple sovereigns are at
the foundation of legal thinking.qhe legal discourse plays a crucial role in reproducing the ideal of
mutually exclusive sovereign nation-state territories that, taken as a whole and mapped next to
each other serially across the surface of the earth, represent the rule of law and the space of
society. As with the other discourses, the legal discourse implies that the sea is a "lawless,"
antithetical "other" lying outside the rational organization of the world, an external space to be
feared, used, crossed, or conquered, but not a space of society.
Criticizing ocean development discourse reframes ocean policy towards
sustainability and environmental justice.
Deborah KENNEDY PhD Philosophy & Research Associate Curtin University Sustainability
Policy Institute ‘7 Ocean Views: An investigation into human-ocean relations (Dissertation) p. 46
In this dissertation I chart several meanings attributed to oceans in modern Western societies that
are highly influential in shaping human-ocean relations and highlight ethical and political issues
to which we should respond. In so doing, the examination of conceptions of oceans I carry out
throughout this dissertation does not provide a complete narrative of the historical development
of meanings attributed to oceans in Western societies. Rather, this dissertation plots a particular
course through the great, though insufficiently explored, expanses of Western conceptions of
oceans. My approach examines meanings attributed to oceans that are anchored in the Western
discourses of law, science and aesthetics.5 I seek out these three discourses of law, aesthetics and
science because they are productive dimensions for illuminating human-ocean relations in
Western societies. Moreover, as these three discourses are complex, I deal with only a fraction of
their possible scope. But to limit is sometimes to reveal and thus I hope the limited scope of my
engagement has resulted in a purposive analysis of the way certain Western discourses have
produced particular norms that influence the way the Western subject relates to the oceans. I
suggest that the contemporary discourses of oceanic lives I am concerned with have been
totalising, leaving little room for diversity. They have also been colonising, leaving little room
for non-human flourishing. I argue that totalising and colonising practices in relation to oceans
need to be resisted in order to facilitate just existences for oceans. My focus on the facilitation of
just existences for oceans will beelaborated upon further in this dissertation. But to briefly
indicate here how just existences for oceans may be facilitated, I argue for inclusive knowledge
production and decision-making processes in which there is a capacity for a diversity of views to
influence outcomes. Part of my task in valuing and vouching for just ocean existences in this
way—for humans and non-humans—leads me to argue in this dissertation that some conceptions
of oceans are better than others. I concur with Haraway when she writes: We exist in a sea of
powerful stories: They are the condition of finite rationality and personal and collective life
histories. There is no way out of stories; but no matter what the One-Eyed Father says, there are
many possible structures, not to mention contents, of narration. Changing the stories, in both
material and semiotic senses, is a modest intervention worth making. (1997, 45) Accordingly, my
thesis is that particular conceptions of oceans developed and perpetuated in the Western
discourses of law, aesthetics and science are highly influential in structuring contemporary
human-ocean relations. Moreover, the conceptions that I discuss unnecessarily constrain
possibilities for imagining and understanding human-ocean relations in Western societies.
Consequently, just ocean existences are being hindered for identifiable reasons. Improving the
prospects of just ocean existences can be achieved through the use of politically generated
knowledges about oceans to shift policy towards a set of social-environmental goals that are not
widely imagined by the Western mind. As will become clear in the course of my discussion, the
scope of my thesis does not provide for sustained engagement with specific marine environmental
disputes or policy initiatives. My concern is with the discourses that frame debates and
policymaking more generally, and then with a model in which specific disputes and
policymaking activities can take place. In arguing my thesis, I take on board and travel with a
number of philosophical, social and political theories. Principally, the insights of feminist and
ecological feminist thinkers into forms of oppression and social and environmental justice have
stirred the analysis I carry out. The conceptual analysis and theoretical insights of avariety of
thinkers across a range of disciplines assist me to develop a critique targeted toward the social
and cultural dimensions of human exploitation and degradation of oceans. I also go beyond
critique to explore ways of acknowledging non-human agency that work toward addressing the
abuse. It is important to add that in going beyond critique I advocate for a view in which policy
debates and outcomes are driven, at least in part, with forms of political epistemology that decentres the experts—scientists in particular. Political epistemology is a term I use to conceptualise
democratic “reciprocal knowledge making” (Fawcett 2000, 136). I also advocate for ocean
policy that centres both the non-human realm (which is often backgrounded) and our active
construction of reality (which is often overlooked). A theme in my interventions in this
dissertation is to advocate for understandings of oceans that acknowledge “both our active
construction of reality and nature’s role in these negotiations” (Cheney 1994, 175). Political
epistemology that is inclusive of a diversity of perspectives and roles— human and non-human—
and takes seriously the possibilities of a democratic process is, for me, the basis of ethical
politics. My concern with democratic political epistemology is discussed in detail in my final
Chapter. However, the central themes in my dissertation of democratic process and ethical
politics bear further elaboration prior to introducing the contents of each chapter. The following
preamble establishes the background against which much of my discussion of the Western
discourses of law, aesthetics and science can be read. That is to say, much of what is considered
the ‘reality’ of oceans through these discourses is a social construction wherein rarely, if ever, do
these discourses take seriously the possibility that oceans have agency.
Development Link
Ocean development discourse empowers imperialist politics and resource
exploitation. Rationalizing ocean extraction increases hierarchical
concentration of power in the global North.
Peter JACQUES Poli Sci @ Central Flordia (Orlando) ‘6 Globalization and the World Ocean p.
29-31
Critical Theory: Deconstructing the World and Putting it Back Together Again? Critical theory is
more interested in deconstructing meamng, power, and connections than it is in building them;
nonetheless, I describe here how critical theory might be used to understand global phenontena as
well as some thoughts about global "nature" from a critical theory perspective. While "critical
theory" has been understood by the so-called Frankfurt School of German Western Marxism.
through the writings of Horkheimer and Adorno, Habermas, Marcuse, and Lukacs, I refer to
critical theory more as a systematic critique of modernity. Escobar (2003) clarifies: I understand
modernity as a particular form of social organisation that emerged with the Conquest of America
and that crystallised initially in Northwestern Europe in the eighteenth century. Socially,
modernity is characterized by institutions such as the nation-state and the bureaucratisation of
daily life based on expert knowledge; culturally, by orientations such as the belief in continual
progress, the rationalisation of culture, and the principles of individuation and universalisation;
and eco nomically, by its links to various forms of capitalism, including state socialism as a form
of modernity. ( I 58) Modernity has been the foundation for "development" politics from the
beginning of the first wave of globalization. Escobar sees development and modernity as spatialcultural projects that require continuous conquest of territories, people, and ecology to sustain it.
Further, this project is now carried through the modern global capitalist economy, led by an
imperial United States, "which seems more inhumane than ever," bent on exploitation particularly
of the Third World (Escobar 2004, 208). As such, counterhegemonic movements which are
locally based but transnational in effort are important for the preservation of people and ecology
slated for violent displacement. This last point is one reason why, to preserve the World Ocean, I
look to regional civil-society efforts that may be transnational and even globalizing. Instrumental
reason and scientific justifications for the manipulation of a mechanistic nature are compatible
with the "development" of natural resources, which requires labor and its exploitation. This is not
without political impact. Allan Schnaiberg ( I980) describes the concentration of power that
comes from ever-growing intensified withdrawals from and additions to the natural world as a
result of intensifying and expanding capital-described as the "treadmills of production." This
cycle then expands outward, with global extensity. However, science, as the systematic pursuit of
knowledge, cannot be blamed en masse. Specifically, Enlightenment science which is science
based in modernity that pursues and promo tes single notions of Truth and a pure objectivity
through a separation of object/ subject justifies the global exploitation of nature (Marcuse I 964 );
it is likely that current interdisciplinary science does not allow for exploitation in the same way
because power in knowledge is more dispersed. Also, work in conservation biology, marine
sciences, atmospheric sciences, and other important areas provides several reference points that
legitimize resistance against expanding imperialism through the impacts of this economic
expansion upon hum.an ecology and vice versa. This assumes that interdisciplinary knowledge
claims work against the concentration of power because authority is negotiated across
epistemological conunitments, instead of being self-reproducing within them (Daly and Cobb
1989). I take several points from critical theory about globalizing changes. One is that the
protection of human social diversity, and in particular the differences provided by the subaltern (
antimodern, oppressed resistant groups), is important. Also, that knowledge serves certain
interests; and scientific knowledge especially does so, given its credibility, which ironically
comes from the improper assumption that it is objective and without ideology. Caveats and
suspicions about science need to be kept alive so that the power in knowledge is not concentrated
in any one purpose, interest, or part of the world. This is a theoretical reason to remain skeptical
about, for example, fishery knowledge or methods that come from "globalizing" nations and
attempts to replace other fishery knowledge, such as traditional artisanal fisher knowledge. It is
also a reason to have more faith in the reverse because the orientation of power through
modernity is organized against artisanal fishers. Finally, that agents of modernity seek to convert
natural resources on large scales also homogenizes cultural values toward instrumental reason
since instrumental reason pacifies resistance in the name of Mother Earth or other
noninstrumental relationships with the natural world (Ridgeway 1996). Critical theory provides a
framework for viewing specific structural economic conditions and pressures through its neoMarxist founding in conjunction with its critique of Western science and hegemonic culture.
Consequently, critical theory is a balance against romanticizing the human "we" (even though I
believe it is still a reasonable orientation) by looking at the power found in structures created to
promote a globalizing interest. As Held and others ( 1999) note, all globalization studies need to
confront modernity in some way; using critical theory as a theoretical framework is my way to do
this.
Constructing the oceans as underdeveloped drives the systematic disfunction
of capitalist development.
Philip STEINBERG Geography @ Durham ‘1 The Social Construction of the Ocean p. 24-26
A second group of theorists who influence the understanding of capitalist spatiality that informs
the territorial political economy perspective are those who argue that Third World societies are
characterized by transitional social formations with "articulated" modes of production. As
capitalism has expanded into new areas it has constructed social formations that are characterized
only partially by capitalist relations of production, and in which many of the social reproduction
functions remain less than fully commodified. These partially incorporated, semicapitalist areas
serve global capitalism well; workers can be paid subsubsistence wages while the goods they
produce enter the global trade system that is dominated by capitalist countries. The transitional
social formations of the Third World are creations of capitalism and they participate in the
capitalist-dominated world trade network, but they are not sensu stricto capitalist (Brenner 1977;
Foster-Carter 1978; Laclau 1971; Luxemburg 1964; Meillasoux 1981; Wolpe 1980). Articulation
theory informs this study of the social construction of ocean-space in two ways, one general and
one more specific. Like worldsystems theorists, articulation theorists suggest that the spatiality of
the modern world, far from being contingent to fundamental capitalist processes, is a necessary
component of capitalism. Locations of partial incorporation play an essential role in reproducing
capitalism. While this theory does not directly address ocean-space, it raises the possibility that
ocean-space, as another area that lacks definitive capitalist processes but serves a crucial role in
the global economy, is in some manner a necessary and unique "place" within the capitalistdominated world economy. More specifically, articulationists show how First World capitalists
enter a non-capitalist region and selectively buttress elements of the non-capitalist social
formation so that the region, when integrated into the global trading system, is of exceptional
service to the capitalists who dominate the world econom~ven as capitalists transform a Third
World region so as to be compatible with First World interests, selective non-capitalist
characteristics of the region are emphasized both in reality and in representation. This selective
emphasizing of non-capitalist, "non-First World" characteristics both serves to facilitate
domination and to justify it.("~ the narrative presented here, an analogous process is revealed:
First World capitalists have constructed the ocean in a manner that selectively reproduces and
emphasizes its existence as a space apart from land-based capitalist society. This construction
has been adjusted over time to serve specific stages of capitalism, much as the techniques of
imperialism have shifted over time from plantations and trading posts to colonies to post-colonial
domination. Yet through all the different definitions and social constructions of ocean-space, the
ocean consistently has been a creation of capitalism even as it has lacked some of capitalism's
essential characteristics, just as the Third World continually has been (re)constructed to serve
capitalism even as it has remained immune from the labor system that is paradigmatic of the
capitalist mode of production. Indeed, in both the Third World and the ocean, the designation of
these spaces as "incomplete" (or "less developed") justifies further intervention and
manipulation. .> A third theory of capitalist spatiality that informs the territorial political
economy perspective employed here is spatial dialectics theory. According to spatial dialectics
theorists, the cycles of investment and disinvestment that characterize modern political economy
are driven by the interplay of two contradictory tendencies of capital. On the one hand, capital
characteristically is mobile as it seeks out new markets, low-cost inputs, and undervalued
investment sites. Thus, there is a tendency toward diffusion of investment across space,
eventually tending toward geographical equalization. On the other hand, productive investments
and their supportive physical and social infrastructure frequently are immobile, and so there is
also a tendency toward capital concentration as investors attempt to maximize their return on
investments. This tendency toward capital concentration suggests that investments and value will
be distributed highly unequally over space (Harvey 1982; Smith 1990). Like world-systems and
articulation theories, spatial dialectics theory holds that the spatial patterning of the world is not
merely incidental to capitalist expansion; it is a result of and a necessary condition for
foundational capitalist processes. The very existence of an "underdeveloped" Third World is due
both to the capitalist drive toward mobility and expansion (hence the incorporation of the Third
World into the capitalist-dominated trading and investment system) and the capitalist tendency
toward fixity (hence the lack of comprehensive investments in the Third World that might spur
Western-style "development"). Thus, the conflict between capital's two spatial tendencies is
dialectical, and one result of this conflict is a third, long-run tendency toward systemic
dysfunction: Uneven development (which results from the tendency toward capital fixity)
encourages mobility which encourages equalization which, in the long-run, stymies the
unevenness and mobility necessary for the continuation of capital investment and valorization.
Among spatial dialectics theorists, Manuel Castells (1996) is particularly germane because of his
work on how contemporary society is being impacted by a qualitative transformation in this
tension between the "spaces of flows" within which social processes of movement occur and the
lived spaces of production and reproduction. Although Cas tells' assertion of a fundamental shift
in this tension is questioned (see Chapters 5 and 6), this book is fully in accord with his argument
that in order to understand the evolving spatiality of capitalism (and its social ramifications), one
must study dialectical change in the spaces of flows as well as the spaces of fixity.
Leadership/Hegemony Link
US Ocean leadership and forward presence relies on unsustainable
exploitation. The pursuit of hegemonic power creates the insecurity it
attempts to solve.
Peter JACQUES Poli Sci @ Central Flordia (Orlando) ‘6 Globalization and the World Ocean p.
156-159
Regarding the major ecological changes around the world, the United States is a leading force in
the cruise ship industry, supplying a bulk of the passengers and a majority of the consumers for
the drug trade that plagues the Caribbean. The United States is also the world's leading emitter of
carbon, the most important human-related climate change driver. T his is literally killing coral
reefs in large percentages, and is an act which has direct impacts on fish nurseries and coastal
storm and sea level rise protections for people who typically do not contribute to global carbon
emissions in commensurable ways. The fact that the United States is also the primary aquariumfish consumer is also a major factor in the loss of coral reefs. Further, the United States is one of
the top two consumers of shrimp. The other is Japan, another important global center, and this is a
factor in unsustainable coastal development, social policy, and commons management. All of
these factors also have local counterpart agents, but there is no doubt that the United States is
among the more powerful agents in ocean matters- it is, for example, the only globally forward
deployed navy (Jacques and Smith 2003)-and it is mostly driving ecological conditions toward
undesirable and potentially irreversible changes. Through complex systems theory, the United
States can be seen as an attractor of information and structure through its own matrix of
commerce and material power, which then is significant in creating the system itself. In order to
change the global capitalist system, the relationships with the United States and the rest of the
world will have to change. CST demands that ultimately, if the United States is in part creating a
stable system, the system will become more complex because more and more nodes will be
allowed to gain a foothold. Globalization of commerce is increasing the diversity of members in
the global market, though there is a measurable concentration of firms at the top, even if the
quality of these relations is suspect. However, when we connect the commercial system to the
ecological one, a more complex biological world is not apparent. Therefore, if we define the
Earth system as being the sum of the commercial/ economic, social, and all ecological systems
together, the loss of diversity in the latter two indicates an unstable larger system. In other words,
the United States may be stabilizing the global economic subsystem, but this effort is
undermining other parts of the Earth that will ultimately disrupt these very efforts. This would
also mean that changes are likely on the way for the role of the United States in the larger
sociopolitical world. The United States cannot be expected to continue to maintain its position of
relative hegemony if this very unipolar position destabilizes vast social and ecological patterns
around it; this structure has already begun to unravel in Southeast Asia (Beeson 2004 ). From a
hermeneutic perspective, the role of the United States and its hegemonic power is one that
interferes with the messages from other agents and the ecological world. The United States itself
has the power to consume other countries' and regions' resources while distancing itself from
local consequences. Also, given its use of instrumental reason and ethics in relation to nature, the
United States has undoubtedly created numerous intermediary relations with nature so that the
direct signs from nature, and its limits, are hidden. I assume that this kind of communication
block is another way that limits the viability of U.S. hegemony and its future security. Similarly,
from a critical theory perspective, such as according to Wallerstein's ( 1989) "world system
theory," where the hegemonic powers order a coherent and single capitalist system, this power
historically operates in phases where hegemons overextend themselves so much that they devour
their own power base and create their own disintegration, opening up the way for a new hegemon.
Indeed, as much as this perspective is informed by the concept of historical material dialectic, the
creation of a hegemonic order creates and embeds its own antithesis, and the role of civil society
and other nations and forces will be to undermine this material power in the world over time
through counterhegemonic resistance. Thus, through all of these theories, it is possible to see that
singular agents of unsustainable systems create their own means of insecurity in the same way
that they create insecurity for others. Pragmatic ramifications of this loss are the changes that
are occurring in fisheries, and therefore in food security for the world. Overfishing has been
shown to affect fisheries in nonlinear ways, indicating that the lessons from complex systems
theory may be important. For example, if the Atlantic cod is any indication, fisheries can sustain
themselves in the face of mounting pressures until they approach some "cliff" of permanent
decline and perhaps decimation. Given that about three-quarters of the world's fisheries are facing
such pressures, we should view this potential with the utmost gravity. The language of the ocean
continues to tell us through fairly clear signs that this limit is real-fish are becoming harder and
harder to catch, and the kinds of fish caught are increasingly found lower on the food chain. The
world's poor, even when their commons are not being enclosed for private interests, are going to
feel the first human burden because they depend on this fish for more basic survival than affluent
consumers who have other choices. That fish is simply becoming more expensive and harder to
attain is one example of how our depletion of fisheries will further threaten the security (overall
well-being) of the most vulnerable people. Ecological and social diversity is becoming simplified
at the same time, and should not be seen as accidental, but rather as a function of structural
pressures creating global patterns, demonstrated by loss of higher trophic levels of fish, the loss
of coral reef around the world through climate changes and unsustainable coastal development,
and the loss of mangroves and coastal forest and grasslands in addition to the losses of indigenous
cultures, languages, and lifestyles that have pers isted for eons (which in itself says something
about their sustainability ). Complex systems theory sees this as unsustainable in relation to the
future options systems can take; hermeneutics sees this as unsustainable because it is a sign of a
sincere loss of meaning in the world; and critical theory sees this loss of social and ecological
diversity as an unsustainable concentration of power that enables abuse and exploitation of nature
and nonhuman nature. In all cases, humanity is diminished by such losses because we are a part
of these threatened spheres of the World Ocean. Between the three perspectives, then, ocean
communities are reducing their options for future pathways, losing depth and meaning in addition
to the relative power to resist such trends. Gender inequality pervades each of the regions with
only a little variation, apparently found mostly on the local level. Women are disempowered in
each of the regions, and this has important implications for sustainability according to each of the
three theories. In CST, the suppression of nodes in the system will again have a negative effect on
available options in future syst ems. In hermeneutics, a reading of the whole social system sees
that welfare is not improving, and key conditions indicate that over 50 percent of the world's
population experience a disproportionate share of violence, poverty, and ecological problems in
their labor in the household and in the workforce. Sustainability is implausible for only one
gender, and these conditions indicate that the meaning of sustainability very often overlooks the
condition of women in society. Even as I make this note, I admit that the conditions of women
have not been the focus of this study and I can see that this area requires more research and
theorizing. From what little attention I have paid this issue, it is clear that information and
knowledge are organized without a gender component, leaving the lives of women unaddressed
and mostly silent, a state that is a prerequisite for the institutionalization of social hierarchies
(Enloe I 990). So long as current power relations and governance structures in and out of civil
society remain the same and rely on the continued silent work and suppression of women, none of
the improvements in sustainability will matter much, and half of the world's lifestyles will be
relying on the other half's work. In the end, this is representative of the different levels of
hierarchy that are experienced in civil society and in the organization of government that Gandhi
and Borgese warn against. So long as society looks more like a pyramid with the apex resting on
the conditions of the base, the World Ocean communities will not be sustainable.
Power projection discourse frames the Ocean as an anarchic space to be
controlled. Nation-state competition over ocean resources is neither natural
nor inevitable.
Philip STEINBERG Geography @ Durham ‘1 The Social Construction of the Ocean p. 16-18
In modern times a third variation on the military construction of ocean-space has emerged. Said
notes that in modern Britain, France, and the United States, the idea of projecting power across
vast expanses of ocean-space to distant lands has played an important role in discourses of
empire: The idea of overseas rule - jumping beyond adjacent territories to very distant lands- has
a privileged status in these three cultures. This idea has a lot to do with projections, whether in
fiction or geography or art, and it acquires a continuous presence through actual expansion,
administration, investment, and commitment. (Said 1993: xxiii) The ideological significance of
the projection of military power across and in ocean-space is revealed in one of the classic
twentieth-century works promoting United States overseas expansion: Maritime mobility is the
basis for a new type of geopolitical structure, the overseas empire. Formerly, history had given us
the pattern of great land powers based on the control of contiguous land masses such as the
Roman, Chinese, and Russian empires. Now the sea has become a great artery of communication
and we have been given a new structure of great power and enormous extent. The British, French,
and Japanese empires and the sea power of the United States have all contributed to the
development of a modern world which is a single field for the interplay of political forces. It is
sea power which has made it possible to conceive of the Eurasian Continent as a unit and it is sea
power which governs the relationships between the Old and the New Worlds. (Spykman 1944:
35) In fact, most modern-era advocates of sea power, from Sir Walter Raleigh to Alfred Mahan
and Nicholas Spykman, have combined this new, ideological value of sea power with the two
more traditional uses, stressing the key role of a strong "blue-water" fleet in troop mobility, naval
warfare, and domination of distant lands. < Much like the "transport-surface" construction of
ocean-space, the construction of the ocean as a "force-field"10 is dependent upon an idealization
of the sea as an unmanaged and unmanageable surface, an idealization that resonates with the
spatial assumptions that permeate realist theories of international politics. According to realists,
individual societies, as embodied by spatially defined nation-states, are the repositories of order,
while international relations are characterized by anarchic competition (Grieco 1990; Morgenthau
and Thompson 1985). As unclaimed and unclaimable "international" space, the world-ocean
lends itself to being constructed as the space of anarchic competition par excellence, where
ontologically pre-existent and essentially equivalent nation-states do battle in unbridled
competition for global spoils. In realist geopolitics (a subset of realist international relations
theory), control of specific loca tions on the earth's surface is considered crucial in the
competition for global power (Cohen 1973; Mackinder 1904; Parker 1985). Within this group of
geopolitical realists, certain theorists have put a premium on control of portions or the entirety of
the world-ocean (Mahan 1890; Raleigh 1829; Spykman 1944). Leaving aside for the moment any
further critique of the realist conception of either the state or international relations (both of
which are taken up again later in this chapter), it is argued here that the military history
perspective is deficient for much the same reason as the commercial history perspective: Both
perspectives are premised upon a denial of the ocean's long history as a space that continuously
has been regulated and managed. Even those who study the history of sea power from an
explicitly social angle- such as Modelski and Thompson (1988), who trace the rise and fall of
maritime powers as indicators of world-systemic long cycles and the shifting fortunes of
individual countries - fail to investigate the ocean itself as a space within which the social contest
is played olf'l\ Rather than being a neutral surface across and within which states have vied for
power and moved troops, the sea, like the nation-states themselves, has been socially constructed
throughout history. Although in the modern era the sea has been constructed outside the territory
of individual states, it has been constructed as a space amenable to a degree of governance within
the state system. Indeed, as Thomson (1994) has shown, this construction of the sea has played an
important role in the construction of modern norms of international relations. As was the case
with Harlow's definition of the sea as unregulatable transport space, the very act of defining the
sea as a space of anarchic military competition both reflects and creates specific social
constructions of both ocean-space and land-space.
Wind Links
Wind energy promotion supports overconsumption. The ideology of
production-first solutions guarantees environmental exploitation.
Ozzie ZEHNER Visiting Scholar @ Cal (Berkeley) ’12 Green Illusions: The Dirty Secrets of
Clean Energy and the Future of Environmentalism p. 55-60
Their response was telling. They made it apparent that even though the report claims to contain
“influential scientific information,” its analyses might not be recognized as such by the greater
scientific community.40 One of the report’s lead editors told me, “The 20% Wind work was
carried out to develop a picture of a future in which 20 percent of the nation’s electricity is
provided from the wind, and to assess the feasibility of that picture. The work was based on the
assumption that reasonable orderly advancement of the technology would continue, and that key
issues needing resolution would be addressed and favorably resolved. Hence the work used input
information and assumptions that were forward-looking rather than constrained by recent
history.”41 Indeed, the authors did not allow recent history to stand in their way. In fact, some
might argue that their answer echoes the rhetoric used to defend the fabrication of data for which
no historical justification or cultural context exists. Energy players employed such lines of
reasoning to suggest that by the 1960s, nuclear energy would produce abundant clean energy for
all, that by the 1970s, fusion power would be too cheap to meter, and that solar cells would be
fueling the world’s economies by 1986.42 With the advantage of hindsight, historians of science
romp in the particulars of how such declarations rose to prominence. They show how genuine
inquiry was often pushed aside to make room for the interests of industrial elites in their attempts
to pry open taxpayer coffers for subsidies. Will future historians judge the 20% Wind Energy by
2030 report similarly? Yes, reasons Nicolas Boccard, author of two academic papers recently
published in Energy Policy.43 In his opinion, the kind of tomfoolery going on at the doe is
nothing particularly shocking. Boccard, who studies the phenomenon of capacity factor
exaggerations in Europe, found that when solid data do not exist, wind proponents are all too
willing to make “unsubstantiated guesses.” They get away with it because the public, politicians,
journalists, and even many energy experts don’t understand how capacity factors are involved in
influencing prospects for wind power development. Or, perhaps caught up in the excitement
surrounding wind energy, proponents may simply not care, due to a psychological phenomenon
called selection bias, whereby people tend to overvalue information that reinforces their ideology
and undervalue that which contradicts it. Boccard insists, “We cannot fail to observe that
academic outlets geared at renewable energy sources naturally attract the authors themselves
supportive of renewable energy sources, as their writing style clearly indicates. As a consequence,
this community has (unconsciously) turned a blind eye to the capacity factor issue.” He compared
wind farm data across many European countries, where wind power penetration is many times
higher than in the United States. He uncovered a worrisome gap between the anticipated and
realized output of wind turbines. In fact, Boccard maintains, the difference was so large that wind
power ended up being on average 67 percent more expensive and 40 percent less effective than
researchers had predicted. As a rule of thumb, he maintains that any country-level assumptions of
capacity factors exceeding 30 percent should be regarded as “mere leaps of faith.”44 It might
seem counterproductive for wind firms to risk overinflating expectations, but only if we assume
that real-life turbine performance will impact their profit potential. It won’t. Consulting firms
such as Black and Veatch stand to lock in profits during the study and design phase, long before
the turbines are even brought online. The awea manufacturers stand to gain from the sale of wind
turbines, regardless of the side effects they produce or the limitations they encounter during
operation. And by placing bets on both sides of the line, with both wind turbines and natural gas,
Pickens was positioned to gain regardless of the wind’s motivations. If the turbines don’t return
on the promise, it’s no big deal for those in the money. The real trick is convincing the
government, and ultimately taxpayers, into flipping for as much of the bill as possible. And one
of the best tools for achieving that objective? A report that can be summarized in a sound bite
struts with an air of authority, and can glide off the president’s tongue with ease. 20% Wind
Energy by 2030. It may be tempting to characterize this whole charade as some sort of cover-up.
But the Department of Energy officials I interviewed were certainly open (if nervous) to my
questions; anyone with an Internet connection can access the report and its suspect
methodologies; and the doe regularly publishes its field measurements in a report called the
Annual Energy Outlook. There’s no secret. Energy corporations develop “forward-looking”
datasets favorable to their cause, government employees slide those datasets into formal reports,
the Department of Energy stamps its seal on the reports, and the Government Printing Office
publishes them. Then legislators hold up the reports to argue for legislation, the legislation guides
the money, and the money gets translated into actions—usually actions with productivist
leanings. It isn’t a cover-up. It’s standard operating procedure. This may be good or bad,
depending on your political persuasion. This well-oiled system has operated for years, with all
actors performing their assigned duties. As a result, Americans enjoy access to ample and
inexpensive energy services and we have a high standard of living to show for it. But this process
nevertheless leads to a certain type of policy development— one that is intrinsically predisposed
to favor energy production over energy reduction. As we shall see, this sort of policy bent—while
magnificently efficient at creating wealth for those involved—does not so clearly lead to longterm wellbeing for everyone else. Step Away from the Pom-Poms When Big Oil leverages
questionable science to their benefit, environmentalists fight back en masse. As they should. But
when it comes to the mesmerizing power of wind, they acquiesce. No op-eds. No investigative
reports. No magazine covers. Nothing. If environmentalists suspected anything funny about the
20% Wind Energy by 2030 report, they didn’t say anything about it in public. Instead, fifty
environmental groups and research institutes, including the Natural Resources Defense Council,
Sierra Club, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory opted to double-down their windy bets
by formally backing the study. When the nation’s smartest and most dedicated research scientists,
physicists, and environmentalists roll over to look up googlyeyed at any corporate energy
production report, it’s worthy of our attention. This love affair, however, is harmful to the
environmentalists’ cause for a number of reasons. First, fetishizing overly optimistic expectations
for wind power takes attention away from another grave concern of environmental groups—
reducing dirty coal use. Even if the United States could attain 20 percent wind energy by 2030,
the achievement alone might not remove a single fossil-fuel plant from the grid. There is a
common misconception that building additional alternative energy capacity will displace fossilfuel use; however, over past years, this hasn’t been the case. Producing more energy simply
increases supply, lowers cost, and stimulates additional energy consumption. Incidentally,
some analysts argue that the mass deployment of wind turbines in Europe has not decreased the
region’s carbon footprint by even a single gram. They point to Spain, which prided itself on being
a solar and wind power leader over the last two decades only to see its greenhouse gas emissions
rise 40 percent over the same period. Second, the pomp and circumstance around wind diverts
attention from competing solutions that possess promising social and ecological value. In a cashstrapped economy, we have to consider the trade-offs. As journalist Anselm Waldermann points
out, “when it comes to climate change, investments in wind and solar energy are not very
efficient. Preventing one ton of co2 emissions requires a relatively large amount of money. Other
measures, especially building renovations, cost much less—and have the same effect.”45 The
third problem is the problem with all myths. When they don’t come true, people grow cynical.
Inflated projections today endanger the very legitimacy of the environmental movement
tomorrow. Every energy-production technology carries its own yoke of drawbacks and
limitations. However, the allure of a magical silver bullet can bring harms one step closer.
Illusory diversions act to prop up and stabilize a system of extreme energy consumption and
waste. Hype surrounding wind energy might even shield the fossil-fuel establishment—if clean
and abundant energy is just over the horizon, then there is less motivation to clean up existing
energy production or use energy more wisely. It doesn’t help when the government maintains two
ledgers of incompatible expectations. One set, based on fieldwork and historical trends, is used
internally by people in the know. The second set, crafted from industry speculation and
“unconstrained” by history, is disseminated via press releases, websites, and even by the president
himself to an unwitting public. It may be time for mainstream environmental organizations to
take note of this incongruence, put away the clean energy pom-poms, and get back to work
speaking up for global ecosystems, which are hurt, not helped, by additional energy production.
Because as we shall see, the United States doesn’t have an energy crisis. It has a consumption
crisis. Flashy diversions created through the disingenuous grandstanding of alternative energy
mechanisms act to obscure this simple reality.
Big wind supports an alienated consumerist energy regime.
John BYRNE Director Center for Energy and Environmental Policy & Public Policy @
Delaware AND Noah TOLY Research Associate Center for Energy and Environmental Policy ‘6
in Transforming Power eds. Byrne, Toly, & Glover p. 14-17
Catching the Wind To date, the greatest success in 'real' green energy development is the spread
of wind power. From a miniscule 1,930 MW in 1990 to more than 4 7,317 MW in 2005, wind
power has come of age. Especially noteworthy is the rapid growth of wind power in Denmark (35
percent per year since 1997), Spain (30 percent per year since 1997), and Germany (an
astonishing 68 percent per year since 2000), where policies have caused this source to threaten
the hegemony of fossil fuels and nuclear energy. Wind now generates more than 20 percent of
Denmark's electricity and the country is the world leader in turbine manufacture. And as the
Danes have demonstrated, offshore wind has the potential to skirt some of the land-use conflicts
that have sometimes beset renewable energy alternatives. Indeed, some claim that offshore wind
alone might produce all of Europe's residential electricity (Brown, 2004). National energy
strategists and environmental movements in and beyond Europe have recognized the
achievements of the Danes, Spaniards, and Germans with initiatives designed to imitate their
success. What are the characteristics of this success? One envied feature is the remarkable decline
in the price of wind-generated electricity, from $0.46 per kWh in 1980 to $0.03 to $0.07 per kWh
today (Sawin, 2004), very close to conventionally-fueled utility generating costs in many
countries, even before environmental impacts are included. Jubilant over wind's winning market
performance, advocates of sustainable energy foresee a new era that is ecologically much greener
and, yet, in which electricity remains (comparatively) cheap. Lester Brown (2003: 159) notes that
wind satisfies seemingly equally weighted criteria of environmental benefit, social gain, and
economic efficiency: Wind is ... clean. Wind energy does not produce sulfur dioxide emissions or
nitrous oxides to cause acid rain. Nor are there any emissions of health-threatening mercury that
come from coal-fired power plants. No mountains are leveled, no streams are polluted, and there
are no deaths from black lung disease. Wind does not disrupt the earth's climate ... [l]t is
inexhaustible ... [and] cheap. This would certainly satisfy the canon of economic rationalism. lt is
also consistent with the ideology of modern consumerism. Its politics bestow sovereignty on
consumers not unlike the formula of Pareto optimality, a situation in which additional
consumption of a good or service is warranted until it cannot improve the circumstance of one
person (or group) without decreasing the welfare of another person (or group).17 How would one
know "better off' from "worse off' in the wind-rich sustainable energy era? Interestingly,
proponents seem to apply a logic that leaves valuation of "better" and "worse" devoid of explicit
content. In a manner reminiscent of modern economic thinking, cheap-and-green enthusiasts
appear willing to set wind to the task of making "whatever"-whether that is the manufacture of
low-cost teeth whitening toothpaste or lower cost SUVs. In economic accounting, all of these
applications potentially make some in society "better off' (if one accepts that economic growth
and higher incomes are signs of improvement). Possible detrimental side effects or externalities
(an economic term for potential harm) could be rehabilitated by the possession of more
purchasing power, which could enable society to invent environmentally friendly toothpaste and
make affordable, energy-efficient SUVs. Sustainable energy in this construct cooperates in the
abstraction of consumption and production. Consumption of-what, ·by-whom, and -for-whatpurpose, and, relatedly, production-of-what, -by-whom, and -for-what-purpose are not issues. The
construct altogether ignores the possibility that "more-is-better" consumption production relations
may actually reinforce middle class ideology and capitalist political economy, as well as
contribute to environmental crises such as climate change. In the celebration of its coming market
victory, the cheap-and-green wind version of sustainable energy development may not readily
distinguish the economic/class underpinnings of its victory from those of the conventional energy
regime. Wind enthusiasts also appear to be largely untroubled by trends toward larger and larger
turbines and farms, the necessity of more exotic materials to achieve results, and the advancing
complications of catching the wind. There is nothing new about these sorts of trends in the
modern period. The trajectory of change in a myriad of human activities follows this pattern. Nor
is a critique per se intended in an observation of this trend. Rather, the question we wish to raise
is whether another feature in this pattern will likewise be replicated-namely, a "technological
mystique" (Bazin, 1986) in which social life finds its inspiration and hope in technical acumen
and searches for fulfillment in the ideals of technique (Mumford, 1934; Ellul, 1964; Marc use,
1964; Winner, 1977, 1986; Vanderburg, 2005). This prospect is not a distant one, as a popular
magazine recently illustrated. In a special section devoted to thinking "After Oil," National
Geographic approvingly compared the latest wind technology to a well-known monument, the
Statue of Liberty, and noted that the new machines tower more than 400 feet above this symbol
(Parfit, 2005: 15- 16). It was not hard to extrapolate from the story the message of Big Wind's
liberatory potential. Popular Science also commended new wind systems as technological
marvels, repeating the theme that, with its elevation in height and complexity lending the
technology greater status, wind can now be taken seriously by scientists and engineers
(Tompkins, 2005). A recent issue of The Economist (2005) included an article on the wonder of
electricity generated by an artificial tornado in which wind is technologically spun to high
velocities in a building equipped with a giant turbine to convert the energy into electricity.
Indeed, wind is being contemplated as a rival able to serve society by the sheer technical prowess
that bas often been a defining characteristic of modern energy systems. Obviously, wind energy
has a long way to go before it can claim to have dethroned conventional energy's "technological
cathedrals" (Weinberg, 1985). But its mission seems largely to supplant other spectacular
methods of generating electricity with its own. The politics supporting its rapid rise express no
qualms about endorsing the inevitability of its victories on technical grounds. In fact, Big Wind
appears to seek monumental status in the psyche of ecologically modern society. A recent
alliance of the American Wind Energy Association and the U.S. electric utility industry to
champion national (subsidized) investment in higher voltage transmission lines (to deliver greenand-cheap electricity), illustrates the desire of Big Wind to plug into Giant Power's hardware and,
correspondingly, its ideology (see American Wind Energy Association, 2005, supporting
"Transmission Infrastructure Modernization"). The transformative features of such a politics are
unclear. Indeed, wind power-if it can continue to be harvested by ever larger machines-may
penetrate the conventional energy order so successfully that it will diffuse, without perceptible
disruption, to the regime. The air will be cleaner but the source of this achievement will be duly
noted: science will have triumphed still again in wresting from stingy nature the resources that a
wealthy life has grown to expect. Social transformation to achieve sustainability may actually be
unnecessary by this political view of things, as middle-class existence is assured via clean, lowcost and easy-to-plug-in wind power.
Climate Change Links
The 1AC uses climate change as an empty signifier that supports the
exploitative energy regime.
Chris METHMANN Research Associate @ Poli Sci Inst. Hamburg ’10 “‘Climate Protection’ as
Empty Signifier: A Discourse Theoretical Perspective on Climate Mainstreaming in World
Politics” Millennium 39 (2) p. 352-357
In order to delimit a discursive space and temporarily fix a hegemonic discursive formation, it is
necessary to establish empty signifiers: discursive elements that have been emptied of their actual
content and provide for the unity of the discourse .38 According to Laclau and Mouffe,
establishing a discourse is ‘to dominate the field of discursivity, to arrest the flow of differences,
to construct a centre. We will call these privileged discursive points of this partial fixation “nodal
points”.’39 But since discourses are purely relational and differential systems of signification
without any underlying ground that would provide for such nodal points, these have to root in the
discourses themselves. Discourses allow for two basic operations: elements can be articulated
according to either a logic of equivalence or a logic of difference.40 Difference constitutes
meaning as a relational system of differences, stressing the autonomy and dissimilarity of
discursive elements without detaching them completely (father is adiscrete unit in a family but
exists only in relation to mother and child). But because every signifier enters into a differential
relation with every other signifier, a logic of difference alone cannot constitute society; social life
would be a uniform dispersion of differences without any structure. In order to allow for stable
discursive formations, it is necessary to exclude certain elements. But the construction of
boundaries is impossible to achieve through logics of difference, since every item outside the
limits then just becomes another difference and – since discourses are systems of differences – is
again part of the discourse. Thus, it is necessary to interrupt the flow of differences and construct
a radical otherness, an absolute outside. This is accomplished through the introduction of a logic
of equivalence among the elements of a discursive formation that stresses the similarity of its
elements. However, this is not possible with reference to their inherent properties (since signs are
relational and not essential), so that it is necessary to construct a chain of equivalence with
another signifier. This master-signifier- or nodal-point-to-be has to be equivalent to the whole
discursive formation but initially also is in differential relation to all other elements. Therefore,
these differential relations have to be cancelled out.41 And as difference is nothing other than
meaning, as a result this master signifier is ‘discharged’ of any content. It becomes more equal
than equal, an ‘empty signifier’ that only represents ‘the pure being of the system’ and the nonbeing of those elements that are not part of the system.42 Therefore, for a discourse to become
hegemonic it is necessary to construct an empty signifier that stabilises the discursive formation –
a constructed and fragile stability that is rather ‘a horizon and not a ground’.43 The construction
of an empty signifier as nodal point is what Laclau and Mouffe have termed hegemony. Analysis,
then, has to explore by what discursive strategies empty signifiers create relations of equivalence
among elements of a discourse and relations of opposition towards excluded elements. Such a
hegemonic closure of discourses always gives rise to social antagonism and power relations. The
construction of a hegemonic discourse presupposes the exclusion of certain elements, which are
constructed as a radical other. Power is inherent to all discursive formations.44 On the other hand,
as unity is fragile and contingent, the power relations always impend to break open and give rise
to social antagonism. Hegemony comes at the cost of the constant threat of its own subversion.
Antagonism, in this sense, means that ‘we are faced with a “constitutive outside”. It is an
“outside” which blocks the identity of the “inside” and is nonetheless the prerequisite for its
constitution at the same time.’45 A situation in which there is an invasion of the outside into the
discourse is termed dislocation. It occurs when disruptive events cannot be explained or
represented in the existing discursive order. They threaten the stability of existing social
structures, which become subject to political contestation again. Therefore, dislocation appears in
the form of a ‘structural or organic crisis, in which there is a proliferation of floating
signifiers’.46 Dislocation is followed by a hegemonic struggle over the integration of those
floating signifiers into the dominant discourse. It might result in a ‘passive revolution’47 whereby
hegemonic forces succeed in resettling social structures. Or it is followed by social change
initiated by counter-hegemonic actors. However, because it is necessary to make new decisions
on a ‘terrain of undecidability’,48 either way dislocation gives rise to indeterminate human
action. The subject is ‘nothing but the distance between the undecidable structure and the
decision’.49 These considerations clarify why Laclau states that discourse theory introduces a
‘primacy of the political’ into the analysis of hegemony.50 He distinguishes between two layers
of society. The social represents the sedimented structures of a given social setting that are taken
for granted. On the contrary, the political refers to those areas of social life where this
implicitness has dissolved through dislocation. This sphere is marked by contestation and
instability. Unlike the whole tradition of critical theory which articulates the two in a more or less
hierarchical way, deriving the political superstructure from the social structure,51 poststructuralist
discourse theory rejects such an essentialist economism. It acknowledges the fact that all social
structures have primarily been established by political acts of hegemonic closure. Hegemonic
discourses, hence, may not be derived from capitalist relations but represent the very terrain on
which these are constructed and defended. In sum, the various concepts that centre around the
notion of discourse make up the toolbox for analysing change and continuity in discourse. If a
governmentality perspective highlights how government is interweaved with discourses,
discourse theory can trace the mutations of these discourses: how they emerge, spread, transform,
become hegemonic and decline.52 Through climate mainstreaming, from this perspective,
climate protection turns into an empty signifier and so succeeds in transforming demands for
climate protection into the hegemonic order via a passive revolution. Such a perspective will be
introduced in the remainder of this article. Dislocation and the Global Governmentality of
Climate Protection Against the background of this theoretical framework, the history of climate
change can be read as a history of growing discursive dislocation. Global warming appears as an
ever aggravating and still not sufficiently tackled problem with potentially catastrophic
consequences for human civilisation.53 Thus, it represents the discursive ‘outside’ that tends to
rupture the existing hegemonic order and reactivates various other signifiers that seemed to be
deeply sedimented. This is especially the case for the basic social structures of the world
economy: climate change undermines the genuine modern narrative of infinite progress and
growth. It is located within the wider discursive field of environmental destruction that since the
1970s systematically linked pollution and resource depletion to capitalist patterns of production
and consumption and put issues such as limits to growth and renouncement of consumption on
the agenda. It relates continued ecological destruction to the ‘ treadmill of production’ .54 The
need to significantly lower greenhouse gas emissions is a particular challenge to ‘carboniferous
capitalism’55 – the model of fossil-fuel-based growth that still overwhelmingly dominates the
world economy. This is not to say that climate change actually stops these economic logics from
working – at least not in its present stage. What it does do, however, is to stop them from working
as taken-for-granted institutions and undermines their social acceptance. In this sense, it can be
said that climate change dislocates the legitimacy of global capitalism – that is, its hegemonic
position. Attempts to deal with the dislocatory character of climate change gave rise to the
politics of sustainable development. This hegemonic discourse can be seen as a passive revolution
in the sense introduced above. Its primary aim was to remedy the dislocatory effects of climate
change while preventing any deeper or even counter-hegemonic social transformation. In
other words, sustainable development is mostly about ‘sustaining capitalism’ in its present
condition.56 In particular the UNFCCC, adopted in 1992 by 192states in Rio de Janeiro, as well
as the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 obligating industrialised countries to reduce their greenhouse gas
emissions by 5.2 percent, represent attempts to make climate change governable on a global
scale. However, the climate regime is only the kernel of a far more comprehensive institutional
landscape which has emerged around the issue of climate protection – comprising actors from
transnational civil society, city networks, business initiatives, private research institutions and
consumer initiatives.57 All together, these institutions make up the sphere of global climate
governance – or, in Foucauldian terms, a global regime of government of climate change. This
institutional landscape is embedded in and constituted on a multifaceted global governmentality
of climate protection. For instance, Oels argues that both a green governmentality and an
ecological modernisation discourse are involved in the international climate regime.58 Green
governmentality is ‘a system of geo-power, eco-knowledge and enviro-disciplines’.59 Climate
change is conducted according to the idea of ‘ planetary management’ , which rests on
extensive expert knowledge and interventions on a global scale.60 Ecological modernisation,
on the other hand, ‘believes that a free market setting and limited government incentives will
spur technological innovation that solves the ecological crisis in a cost-efficient manner’.61
Economic thinking and flexible mechanisms make up the basis of climate protection. The
adoption of the Kyoto Protocol represents a remarkable shift from green governmentality towards
ecological modernisation. In a similar vein, Bäckstrand and Lövbrand show that there were
contesting governmental discourses – green governmentality and ecological modernisation – that
rendered the tackling of the forest issue in the climate regime in different ways and were
predominant at distinct times.62 However, despite their conflicting nature, both discourses
support and mutually reinforce each other: ‘[T]he green governmentality discourse has provided
the scientific and administrative rationale for measuring, monitoring and certifying carbon
removals .… In contrast, ecological modernisation operates as a legitimising discourse – a
blueprint for action.’63 Oels also admits that ‘[ecological modernisation] still draws extensively
on the apparatuses of [green governmentality], but progressively recodes them in economic
terms’.64 Together they provide core pillars of a governmental discourse of climate protection, an
assemblage that allows for governing climate change on a global scale. With reference to the
aforementioned dimensions of governmentality, it is possible to identify four major discursive
patterns. Greengovernmentality turns climate protection into a global issue (problem structure), to
be based on constant scientific enquiry (form of knowledge). On the contrary, ecological
modernisation conceives climate change as to be regulated through efficiency (art), and as
legitimised by economic growth and profitability (ethics). These strands, which will be explicated
throughout the empirical analysis, are mutually supportive though sometimes contentious in
nature. However, as will be argued in the following section, they provide for a unified climate
protection discourse that links together a range of contradictory practices and concepts. Climate
Protection as an Empty Signifier If climate change dislocates the basic social structures of the
world economy – free trade, economic growth and fossil-fuel combustion – how does this affect
the institutions of global economic governance that embody and support these structures? How is
climate protection integrated into their hegemonic discourse? Analysis of texts put forward by the
WTO, IMF, World Bank and OECD suggests that all of these organisations seek to remedy the
dislocatory effects of climate change while not altering their practices. They claim to be in favour
of climate protection but do not question the sedimented world economic structures. All of the
texts seek to establish a relation of equivalence between, for example, growth, free trade and
climate protection. As Table 1 shows, the four discursive pillars of the global governmentality of
climate protection are recurrent themes throughout the sample. Furthermore, it turns out that they
allow organisations to become part of the climate protection discourse without significantly
altering their behaviour. Climate protection works as an empty signifier that links together a
range of heterogeneous and sometimes contradictory practices into a unified discourse but
prevents fundamental social changes. The following sections discuss in detail how globalism,
scientism, growth ethics and efficiency serve as discursive strategies to construct climate change
as such an empty signifier. Subsequently, subordinate discursive patterns are presented which
contest the climate protection discourse but were only rarely found in the sample.65
Apocalyptic climate discourse erases social, economic, and political
differences and empowers a global managerial elite. Tipping point
depoliticizes the response to climate change.
Chris METHMANN Research Associate Poli Sci Inst. @ Hamburg AND Delf ROTHE IR PhD
Candidate @ Hamburg ’12 “Politics for the day after tomorrow: The logic of apocalypse in global
climate politics” Security Dialogue 43 p. 327-330
Climate change and the logic of apocalypse As was shown in the previous section, the
relationship between risk and security cannot be theoretically determined in advance but results
from the empirical articulation of antagonism. In the remainder of this article, we highlight one
particular form through which antagonism can be created: a form best captured by the term
apocalypse. In the case of climate change, the logic of apocalypse constitutes antagonism in such
a radical and existential way that, paradoxically, it does not result in exceptional measures, but
rather in the micro- and routine practices of risk management. In accordance with the concept of
discourse advocated by Laclau and Mouffe, we have focused not on authoritative speech acts, but
on the constitution of antagonisms in discourses of climate change in general. The first step of our
empirical analysis involves an investigation of how climate change is expressed metaphorically.
The bottom line of this analysis in all three of the cases we examine – mitigation, adaptation and
the UN Security Council – is that climate change is featured as a kind of external enemy. One of
the terms most commonly associated with ‘climate change’ throughout our sample, for example,
is the word ‘dangerous’. The usage of this term may not be so surprising given that it is used in
the text of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) of 1992. In
that particular context, the objective of policy is said to be the ‘stabilization of greenhouse gas
concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic
interference with the climate system’.7 In subsequent discussions and documents, however, this
formulation turned virtually ubiquitously into ‘dangerous climate change’ (see, for example,
UNDP, 2007: 3; Steiner, 2009: 9; World Resources Institute, 2007: 7). Semantically, the
UNFCCC formulation seeks to qualify the degree of human interaction with the climate system as
dangerous, whereas the latter expression attaches this label to climate change itself. The nature of
the initial activity that causes climate change – human interference – is accordingly concealed
through use of the statement that climate change itself would be dangerous. Climate change
mutates from a process rooted in human activity to a dangerous Other. This externalization of
climate change is particularly mirrored by two very salient metaphors. For example, it is evident
within the anticipation of ‘ climate shocks ’ (see, for example, Up in Smoke Coalition, 2004: 29;
UNDP, 2007: 88; World Bank, 2010: 14). Shocks are generally external to those they affect; they
are caused by sudden changes from the outside. Similar reasoning applies in the case of the very
common depiction of climate change as a ‘threat’ or as ‘threatening’ something (see, for example,
World Resources Institute, 2008: 40; UNEP, 2009a: 7; World Trade Organization and UNEP,
2009: v). Climate change is understood as an external and independent thing. Very obviously, this
discursive articulation, which is dominant in all three cases, represents the exceptional rhetoric of
the logic of security; or, in terms of hegemony theory, it articulates an antagonism. In line with
our theoretical argument, however, the nature of this antagonism needs to be further specified.
Important in this regard is the notion of catastrophe. A striking example is the perception that
climate change poses an imminent risk of ‘catastrophic events’/‘catastrophic outcomes’ (see, for
example, Up in Smoke Coalition, 2004: 8; UNDP, 2007: 7; Global Humanitarian Forum, 2009:
ii). These include the possibility of ‘unpredictable and non-linear events that could open the door
to ecological catastrophes’ (UNDP, 2007: 2). What does the notion of catastrophe tell us about
the nature of antagonism? A very useful approach to the political implications of this term is
offered by Aradau and Van Munster (2011), whose ‘genealogy of the unknown’ traces different
forms of knowledge and practices for dealing with an unknown future in Cold War security
policy. They distinguish between dispositifs of security centring on crisis, on disaster, and on
catastrophe, while showing how these subsequently strengthened each other. The dispositif of
catastrophe deals with low-probability, high-impact risks. These are characterized by their
disruptive and transformative impact and involve a ‘ tipping point’ – the point of no return
between a relatively linear and steady development and a radically contingent and potentially
chaotic future. The crucial point for the argument of this article is that catastrophe merges the
logic of security with that of risk. We argue that the securitization of climate change draws on the
central characteristics of catastrophe but advances it towards a new stage in this series of
dispositifs of security: the logic of apocalypse.8 First, while catastrophic risks often affect a
particular delimited political community (such as the West threatened by terrorism), a logic of
apocalypse inherently invokes an encompassing and universal threat. Climate change, for
example, is very often articulated as a global ‘war’ (Sorcar, in UN Security Council, 2007b: 10)
or even as comparable to ‘the two world wars’ (UNDP, 2007: 2). This war metaphor definitely
implies an agglomeration of various catastrophes. In line with this, climate is defined as a ‘threat
multiplier’, so that ‘climate change threatens markets, economies and development gains. It can
deplete food and water supplies, provoke conflict and migration, destabilize fragile societies and
even topple governments’ (Ban Ki-moon, 2009: 6). In this sense, it takes the form of a masterthreat that is not simply a catastrophe: ‘climate change is a security issue, but it is not a matter of
narrow national security. It has a new dimension. It is about our collective security in a fragile
and increasingly interdependent world’ (Becket in UN Security Council, 2007a: 19). In line with
the approach of Buzan and Wæver (2009), the discursive strategy at play here could be called a
‘macro-securitization’ at the global level. As Figure 2 illustrates for the case of the Security
Council, it creates a chain of equivalence combining a broad range of phenomena that are
increased or induced by climate change into the master-threat of dangerous climate change. On
the other hand, however, it simultaneously invokes humanity as the one collective victim and
opponent of dangerous climate change. Hence Kofi Annan’s statement at the beginning of the
15th Convention of the Parties to the UNFCCC: ‘Climate change threatens the entire human
family. Yet it also provides an opportunity to come together and forge a collective response to a
global problem’ (Annan, 2006). Hence ‘the battle against dangerous climate change is part of the
fight for humanity’ (UNDP, 2007: 6); and hence, ‘there are no sides in the fight for climate
justice’ (Global Humanitarian Forum, 2009: iv). The hegemonic discourse of climate change
eradicates differences across the globe and presents humanity as a universal sufferer
(Swyngedouw, 2010). In this sense, across the three cases, the climate-change discourse
articulates global warming as an external antagonism that coincides with the limits of humanity
and so constitutes the latter as a homogeneous social space that can be governed according to the
logic of risk – a point to which we will return below. Second, the temporality displayed by the
logic of apocalypse differs from that of the catastrophe. While the catastrophe represents the
interruption of a linear development by an unknowable event, the apocalypse represents the
(sometimes even teleological) endpoint of an accelerating development. Thus, time is not
interrupted by but directed at a certain event. For example, in the Security Council debate in
2007, this is expressed in the paradigmatic statement that ‘everyone’s future is at stake now’
(Aboud in UN Security Council, 2007a: 35). The World Bank (2010: 100) equally indicates a
radical break in time, because ‘in a changing climate the past is no longer prologue’. For security
politics in general, Dillon (2011: 782) has diagnosed a ‘political eschatology’ that is ‘concerned
with the end of things’ and gives rise to a modern politics of security that ‘derives from the
positive exigencies of government and rule that arise in restricting that end’. This is mirrored in
the securitization of climate change. What is at stake is the very end of time itself, which has to
be deferred through political interventions: ‘We are confronted with a chemical war of immense
proportions. It is not a struggle against anyone; rather it is a fight against time and for the benefit
of humanity’ (Weisleder in UN Security Council, 2007b: 32, emphasis added). Climate change
not only is external to ‘humanity’ as a spatial category (each and every inhabitant of the planet),
but also constitutes a sort of a temporal limit to society – radicalizing the antagonism even
further. The last quotation also points to the third apocalyptic characteristic of the securitization
of climate change: it is organized around biblical/religious master-signifiers and metaphors. On
the one hand, many of the consequences of climate change that are invoked throughout the
discourse bear close resemblance to the four horsemen of the apocalypse: war, death, disease and
famine (see Appendix) – for example, the ‘consequences of flooding, disease and famine – and,
from that, migration on an unprecedented scale’ (Beckett in UN Security Council, 2007a: 18).
This migration is cast as an ‘exodus of entire populations’ (Craxi in UN Security Council, 2007a:
4, emphasis added). On the other hand, the solution of the climate crisis is often thought of as a
sort of universal salvation : ‘The silver – indeed gilt-edged – lining to the climate change cloud
is that many solutions already exist or are in the pipeline. … These are not some whimsical
Nirvana but real opportunities to deliver a Green Economy’ (UNEP, 2008: 3). Climate change
marks the crossroads between apocalyptic doom and universal salvation. This religious dimension
exaggerates the antagonism at the limits of humanity even further, to such an extent that climate
change becomes the radical opposite of humanity as such (UNDP, 2007: 1). The religious
dimension expressed in these apocalyptic metaphors is all the more important in that it presents a
first bridge to the logic of risk – which is based on ‘pastoral power’ (Foucault, 2007: 123–4; on
Foucault’s analysis of Christianity, see Macmillan, 2011). Foucault disregarded, or at least
downplayed, the fact that Christianity and/or its oriental ancestors not only gave birth to the
pastorate but also were the first apocalyptic religions (for the notion of apocalypse, see
Swyngedouw, 2010: 218–9). We could thus say that the ideological background of pastoral
power is a narrative that takes the twofold form of a promise and a warning. On the one hand it
foretells the end of the world; on the other it promises an absolute fullness-to-come if the subjects
behave properly in the eyes of God. The subject’s fear and its perceived lack of identity can be
regarded as the primary governmental resource behind the pastoral power. Judgment Day could
be tomorrow. The pastoral power is only effective because the Last Judgment must be feared at
any moment. The confession thus not only deploys ongoing micro-practices of self-optimization
and spiritual guidance, but at the same time serves the function of recalling the millenarian
context of human life. In this sense, the Christian ‘conduct of conduct’ draws inherently on the
idea of living in the end times. In sum, we argue that the pastoral power – in its modern form of
government – is still grounded upon and legitimized through similar narratives. In these modern
forms of pastoral power, God has disappeared and been replaced by different concepts – such as a
nature out of control or the poor that have become dangerous. Macro-securitizations like
dangerous climate change, then, spread a pastoral responsibility at the international level – for
example, by constructing humanity as a political subject confronted with an external antagonism
like dangerous climate change, which is to be governed by a logic of risk following from pastoral
power. Lastly, the logic of apocalypse is marked by a certain anti-epistemology – the
impossibility of knowing. While the dispositif of catastrophe in general is characterized by eager
attempts to make the future present, the apocalypse is marked by systematic ignorance. In the
field of climate change, this might be a surprising argument given the fact that climate policy –
maybe like no other policy – is characterized by the will to know the future (see, for example,
Anderson, 2010). We absolutely agree with that, yet still we would argue that there are large parts
of the global climate polity that are governed through technologies that creatively exploit the
impossibility of knowing. In our sample, climate-change threats are depicted as ‘unprecedented’,
‘unpredictable’, ‘uncontrollable’ or even ‘unthinkable’ (see Figure 2). Yet, and this is decisive, it
is also not necessary that these threats can be known by the subject. For example, Eric
Swyngedouw (2010) has argued that it is the vagueness of dangerous climate change that enables
it to function as an empty signifier to be shared by everyone. And, below, we will argue that it
is the systematic lack of knowledge in the face of the apocalypse that enables particular
dispositifs of risk. As a first conclusion, we argue that the antagonism constitutive of climate
discourses takes the form of an apocalypse, a form that even exaggerates the notion of ‘macrosecuritization’ or ‘catastrophe’ by invoking climate change as a total threat to the entire planet,
radically undermining the temporal organization of existing societies, drawing on religious
metaphors and a specific antiepistemology. The remainder of this article seeks to flesh out how
exactly apocalypse articulates the logic of security with different dispositifs of risk and
accordingly does not result in exceptional measures but instead invokes micro-practices of
governmental management.
Alternative - Ext
Changing our relationship with ocean policy from a development frame to a
sufficiency frame is a pre-requisite for sustainability.
Peter JACQUES Poli Sci @ Central Flordia (Orlando) ‘6 Globalization and the World Ocean p.
10-11
The Borgese Test Most simply, sustainability is the convergence of improving social, political,
economic, and ecological conditions (Goodland I995). In what I am calling the "Borgese Test," I
specify what this means for the ocean. Borgese was a political scientist and international-law
scholar at Dalhousie University in Canada, as well as a strident advocate for the ocean and hunun
justice. Moreover, along with her colleague and Maltese delegate, Arvid Pardoe, she was a
sincere advocate for the "common heritage of humankind" (chapter 3) provision within the Law
of the Sea, which intends to distribute resources from the high sea soil to the poor and the cause
of international development. Borgese wrote several important documents, but The Oceanic
Circle (published in I 998) was among her most important contributions. The Oceanic Circle
describes sustainable ocean governance, and she uses Gandhian thought to make her case for
saving the seas and people who are dependent on them. Nonhierarchical and nonviolent social
relations should inform local management of resources with global cosmopolitan consciousness
(knowing that what one locality does affects and has a responsibility to others). This is what she
meant by making "oceanic circles," which she believed reflected the actual organization of the
ocean itself. Her plea is for radical democracy, nonviolence, and material equity, which are
essential to nonhierarchical relations. Importantly, global equity means that no one is deprived of
basic needs. It does not imply equal shares of goods or wealth. Further, she argues that this social
change can occur as societies develop a deepening relationship with the global ocean. This
requires grassroots empowerment to make global governance accountable; nonviolence;
knowledge of interdisciplinarity; and global North-South equity, some of which is articulated by
Gandhi in his poem "Oceanic Circles" (Borgese I998). Resources should be comanaged through
decentralized democratic authority, with the aim of using and improving ecological productivity
and function, coordinated with national, regional, and global governance (part of
"comanagen1ent"). North-South equity implies that material conditions of the industrialized
countries should not impoverish poor countries. Interdisciplinary science is used to avoid
hierarchical knowledge-based power to approach complex environmental problematiques with
"solutiques," or holistic global solutions. I impose on this definition the expectation that
sustainability is a set of long-term processes, instead of an ideal which can easily become a form
of authoritarian design from above; I believe Borgese would find this acceptable (see Lee I993;
Capra 2002). In sum, sustainability is the evolution of nonviolent governance accountable to
multiple levels of human organization ensuring global human material equity and productive
ecologies through interdisciplinary knowledge. I will refer to this definition of sustainability as
the "Borgese Test." One region cannot live unsustainably without endangering the livelihoods of
the rest. This is captured in Borgese' s ideas of North-South equity. If the North lives off of and
undermines Southern ecology while the South lives in squalor, social and ecological
sustainability is endangered, to varying degrees, around the world. Also note that sustainability
could be defined as simple stocks and flows of energy and material, but I use Borgese' s ideal
because it includes the politics of justice that determine human use of stocks and flows. Steep
social hierarchy, often empowered through violence, allows for ecological resources to become
concentrated and overexploited, reinforcing the hierarchy and flow of resources and potentially
triggering scarcity and more violence, ad infinitum until the system reaches impenetrable limits
forcing rearrangement. Thus, distributive and nonviolent justice is fundamental to a sustainable
world. We are not building Borgese' s hopeful oceanic circles, and global ocean sustainability is,
if anything, slipping farther and farther away. Neoliberal globalization has increased hierarchies
at the coastal level, and I show that along with increased economic globalization comes increased
armed conflict. Violence and neoliberal economics seem to be globalized together (Chua 2003).
Alternative – changing social construction of ocean space.
Philip STEINBERG Geography @ Durham ‘1 The Social Construction of the Ocean p. 188-191
Thus, there is an intensifying dialectic in capitalism's marine spatial order. On the one hand,
capital is drawn toward constructing oceanspace as a great void across which ships, commodities,
labor, and capital travel with exceeding ease, a "hyperspace of pure circulation." On the other
hand, capital is drawn toward constructing ocean-space as a series of potential "places" in the
capitalist sense of the word: locations where value can be created by placing or removing
immobile capital investment and where a high degree of territorial control is needed. Indeed, the
progress of the first half of this dialectic supports the progress of the second, even as it increases
the intensity of the conflict. As capital represents ocean-space as annihilated, it diminishes the
identity of the ocean as res extra commercium, an "other" that plays a distinct role as a special
space of movement within society. Thus, it becomes easier to conceive of the ocean as res nullius,
space that is so devoid of any social content that it is available for appropriation and
development, even though the appropriation of the sea necessarily conflicts with the "great void"
idealization that makes this appropriation possibl~Finally, each of these tendencies, besides
conflicting with each other, intensifies the speed with which the ocean is transformed to obtain
value. As a result, a third tendency- the mandate for rational management so as to extend the
ocean's resource value- emerges amidst (and in contradiction to) the other two. As in earlier eras
of capitalism, the ocean-space construction of postmodern capitalism is rooted in the spatiality of
the era's dominant political-economic processes. As the contradictions within postmodern
capitalism's social institutions are more intense than in previous eras, so are the contradictions
within the postmodern ocean-space construction. The manner in which these contradictions will
resolve themselves will be intertwined with the manner in which other social contradictions will
be resolved, and that is a topic beyond the scope of this study. Nonetheless, this history of the
uses, regulations, and representations of ocean-space and the manner in which its construction has
been embedded in social processes suggest a few options, and these are considered in Chapter 6.
Beyond postmodern capitalism, beyond ocean-space Social change in the marine heterotopia As
capital pursues its mutually reinforcing but ultimately contradictory trajectories in ocean-space,
one can expect a broad range of social constructions to be considered in the future. small
variations on the current set of management priorities will not, in the long run, diminish the
conflicts within contemporary capitalist uses of ocean-space. As was demonstrated by the saga of
the manganese nodule mining regime, contradictions within the social construction are
increasingly intense, and, in an attempt to support their particular interests, fractions of capital
may be expected to favor uncharacteristic regimes and to make unusual alliance Some of these
proposals may buttress the general organization of society, but some (perhaps inadvertently) may
open cracks in its foundation. At first glance one might question the likelihood that a marginal
space, apparently on the fringe of social structures and institutions, would be a fertile location for
imagining and actually constructing significant social change. Marxists might protest that
relatively little value-added production occurs in ocean-space and little surplus labor is extracted
there, so it is not likely to be a significant space of social transformation. Feminists similarly
might protest that little of the social reproduction that characterizes everyday life transpires at sea.
Here, these protests are met with two responses./The first response derives from the
postmodernist assertion that any attempt to define a "center" to political (or social) economy
inadvertently reinforces this center, even if the stated aim is to transform it (Gibson-Graham
1996). Although one's first instinct may be to direct efforts at social change toward processes
(and spaces) that are central to existing power structures, postmodern theorists suggest that
margins - where the "fit" of systemic practices is problematic- also may be fruitful locuses for
social contestation. It is at the margins that actors struggle over individual, social, and spatial
constructions that are both inside and outside the system. As zones of partial incorporation,
margins provide fertile ground both for imagining and constructing alternative social futures
(hooks 1984). ..J The second response derives from the insight of Henri Lefebvre (1991), who
views all spaces as sites of contention. As Peet notes in his summary of Lefebvre: Every society,
every mode of production, produces its own space. But the production of social space is not like
the production of commodities, because space subsumes many different things, is both outcome
and means (of fresh action), and is both product (made by repetitious labor) and work (i.e.
something unique and original).lt consists of objects (natural and social) and their relations
(networks and pathways). Space contains things yet is not a material object; it is a set of relations
between things. Hence, we are confronted with many, interpenetrated social spaces superimposed
one on the other, a "hypercomplexity" in which each fragment of space masks not one social
relationship but many. For Lefebvre, the "problematic" of space has displaced that of
industrialization. (Peet 1998: 103) ~s capitalism progresses, space increasingly becomes
"abstract" (i.e. socially constructed), and as this happens there is increasing potential for the
various elements that construct a space to conflict with each other. Thus, the production of space
emerges as an arena for the implosion of the structural contradictions of capitalism. j Lefebvre
presents a more robust model of socio-spatial construction than that offered by Castells. For
Castells, social change may engender massive changes in spatial organization, but once those
changes are implemented the new spatial formations are unstable only to the extent that there is
instability in the social system underlying them. Thus certain spaces, such as the first layer of the
space of flows, may be written off by Castells as relatively unproblematic. For Lefebvre,
however, spaces require continual reproduction, and, because every space has multiple facets, the
act of space construction inherently is dialectical, the intensity of this dialectic increasing
commensurate with the level of a space's abstraction. It follows that every socially constructed
space - including the sea which, as the previous chapters have demonstrated, increasingly is
constructed as a multi-faceted, abstract space- is a potential site and subject of social change.
While the sea may not be a space where significant value is added and it may not be experienced
directly by most individuals, it is a space of social construction, and as individuals construct the
sea they are participating in the construction of the institutions and structures that govern their
lives. Consumers of the Nike sneakers that remained on the Hansa Carrier during the 1990 storm
referred to at the beginning of this book probably did not think of the sea when they purchased
their pair of sneakers, but through this action they did more than reproduce the exploitative social
relations at the factory in Asia where the shoes were made. They also reaffirmed the construction
of the sea as a friction-free transport surface, a necessary counterpoint to the hierarchical division
of the world into a series of developable investment sites that are at different rungs on the ladder
of modernizatim[The social construction of ocean-space, like that of land-space, is a process by
which axes of hierarchy, identity, cooperation, and community are contested, establishing bases
for both social domination and social opposition. J There is a long history of marine-based social
formations serving as models for social change in land-space. While the Grotius-Freitas-Selden
debate was an exercise to construct a regime for a marginal area of the world-economy, it resulted
in the establishment of a structure for all interaction among land-based states. Indeed, it was
because of his contributions to the nascent Law of the Sea that Grotius is known as the "Father of
the Law of Nations" (Colombos 1967: 8). Likewise, the efforts by sixteenth-century
cartographers to draw lines through the ocean as they reinterpreted the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas
contributed to the establishment of the modern norm of the sovereign, territorial state (Steinberg
2000). In a similar vein, late mercantilist-era sailors established many of the norms and
solidarities that went on to characterize the industrial capitalist-era proletariat (Rediker 1987).
Early twentiethcentury communists, anarchists, and syndicalists looked to the sea as a likely
arena for developing new structures to govern social relations in land-space (Sekula 1995), and a
number of contemporary anarchists and scholars continue to find inspiration in the communal,
non-statist ethics of the mercantile-era pirate band (Kuhn 1997; Osborne 1998; Rediker 1987;
Wilson 1995).
2NC – K Prior – Aff Suspect
Production-first energy ideology skews technology assessment – all aff
solvency evidence is suspect.
Ozzie ZEHNER Visiting Scholar @ Cal (Berkeley) ’12 Green Illusions: The Dirty Secrets of
Clean Energy and the Future of Environmentalism p. 161-164
Power Tools Unsurprisingly, profit motives likely induce much of the gravitational field
surrounding productivist energy solutions. For the most part, knowledge elites can patent or
otherwise control productivist technologies—manufacturing, marketing, and selling them for a
profit (or at least federal handouts). On the other hand, many energy reduction strategies are not
patentable because they are based on age-old wisdom and common sense. Solar photovoltaic
circuitry, wind turbine modulators, nuclear processes, and even biomass crops are all patentable
and commodifiable in a way that passive solar strategies and walkable neighborhoods are not.
The profit motive of this ilk is a chronic theme in America; we are a country that values drug
research (commodifiable) over preventative health (not commodifiable); most of our soybean
fields are planted with corporate issue genetically modified plants (patentable) rather than seed
saved from last year’s crop (not patentable). The debate about whether profits are a noble or a
corrupted motivation is a political matter to be argued over a pint of beer, not here in these pages.
I aim only to shed the humblest flicker of light on the illusion that the world of alternative energy
operates within some virtuous form of economics. It doesn’t. The global economic system
rewards the commoditization of knowledge and resources for profit—why would we expect it to
be any different for the field of alternative energy? It’s not just our economic system that offers
virulence to our productivist inclinations; our political system does as well. The politics of
production are far more palatable than the politics of restraint, as President Jimmy Carter learned
in the 1970s. When he asked Americans to turn down the thermostat and put on a sweater, he
received a boost in the polls. But voters ultimately turned to label him a pedantic president of
limits. “No one has yet won an election in the United States by lecturing Americans about limits,
even if common sense suggests such homilies may be overdue,” remarks historian Simon
Schama. “Each time the United States has experienced an unaccustomed sense of claustrophobia,
new versions of frontier reinvigoration have been sold to the electors as national tonic.”31 Clean
energy is the tonic of choice for the discerning environmentalist. Over recent decades, flows of
power within America and other parts of the world began pooling around alternative energy
technologies. Mainstream environmental organizations took a technological turn, which gained
momentum during the 1970s and became especially palpable in the 1980s when the Brundtland
Commission brought the idea of sustainable development into the spotlight. The commission
passed over societal programs to instead underline technology as the central focus of sustainable
development policy.32 The commission’s 1987 report, Our Common Future, stated, “New and
emerging technologies offer enormous opportunities for raising productivity and living standards,
for improving health, and for conserving the natural resource base.”33 This faith in the ability of
technologies to deliver sustainable forms of development evolved during a period of public
euphoria surrounding information technology, agricultural efficiency through petrochemicals,
management technology, and genetic engineering. As in other periods throughout American
history, there was a sense that if nature came up short, the wellspring of good ol’ American
know-how would take up the slack.34 Mainstream environmental organizations were all too
eager to fill the pews of this newly energized church of technological sustainability, which they
themselves had helped to consecrate. For instance, a World Resources Institute publication
declared in 1991, “Technological change has contributed most to the expansion of wealth and
productivity. Properly channeled, it could hold the key to environmental sustainability as well.”35
The next year the United Nations developed a sustainable development action plan called Agenda
21, which charged technological development with alleviating harmful impacts of growth. As the
new centerpiece of social policy, there was little debate around technology, other than how to
implement it. During the 1980s and ’90s, environmental organizations began to disengage from
the dominant 1960s ideals, which centered on the earth’s limits to growth. They shifted to
embrace technological interventions that might act to continually push such limits back, making
room for so-called sustainable development. The former enthusiasm for stringent government
regulation waned as environmental organizations expanded the roles for “corporate
responsibility” and “voluntary restrictions.” As a result, legislators pushed aside public
environmental stewardship and filled the gap with corporate techniques such as triple-bottomline
accounting and closed-loop production systems, which purported to be good for the environment
and good for profits.36 In 2002, breaking with past mandates, the United Nations World Summit
on Sustainable Development’s Plan of Implementation narrowed its assessments by assuming that
technological sustainability would require “little if any political and cultural negotiation about
modern lifestyles, or about the global systems of production, information, and finance on which
they rest.”37 And by 2004, Australia Research Council Fellow Aidan Davison observed that “the
instrumentalist representation of technologies as unquestioned loyal servants” had come to fully
dominate sustainable development policy.38
Renewables solvency claims are symptoms of productivist ideology.
Ozzie ZEHNER Visiting Scholar @ Cal (Berkeley) ’12 Green Illusions: The Dirty Secrets of
Clean Energy and the Future of Environmentalism p. 166-169
Erecting the Clean-Energy Spectacle Since progrowth ideals are well-funded, politically
powerful, connected with media, and pervasive in public thought, it’s no surprise that most of us
have come to accept many progrowth premises as self-evident truth. Together they form a
formidable force within local and international polity and economy. We expect companies to
increase their earnings, labor to expand, and material wealth to increase throughout the world
until every last child is fed, clothed, educated, and prosperous. This story line is conceivable only
if we are willing to delude ourselves into believing there are enough resources on the planet for
many more inhabitants of the future to consume, eat, play, and work at the standards that wealthy
citizens enjoy. I’ve come across little convincing research to support the possibility that this is
physically viable today, let alone in a more heavily populated and resource depleted planet of the
future.41 These progrowth ideals act to structure future energy investments. For instance, the
International Energy Agency (iea), as do other governmental agencies, crafts long-term
predictions of world energy use, primarily extrapolating from past trends in population growth,
consumption, efficiency, and other factors. Subsequently, large energy firms evoke these
predictions in their business plans in efforts to prod governments and investors to support drilling,
exploration, pipeline construction, and other productivist undertakings. Alternative-energy
companies have historically done the same. Once firms translate these predictions into
investment, and investment into new energy supply, energy becomes more affordable and
available. Energy consumption increases and the original predictions come true. Numerous actors
and factors hold the self-fulfilling prophecy together. Powerful energy lobbies promote their
productivist inclinations in the halls of government. Industry and a consumer driven public sop up
any excess supply with a corresponding increase in demand.42 And since side effects are often
hidden or displaced, the beneficiaries can continue at the expense of others who are less
politically powerful, or who have not yet been born. For all practical purposes these side effects
must remain hidden in order for the process to continue.43 Experts have developed a language to
determine what is counted and what is not.44 For instance, an influential congressional report
from the National Research Council, entitled The Hidden Costs of Energy, explicates numerous
disadvantages, limitations, and side effects of energy production and use. But it specifically
excludes some of the most horrible of these—including deaths and injuries from energy-related
activities as well as food price increases stemming from biofuel production.45 The authors
dedicate several pages and even a clumsy appendix to convincing readers that such factors
needn’t be interrogated because they don’t meet the economic definition of “externalities.” Here
their tightly scripted definition comes to run the show. It stands in for human judgment to decide
what gets counted and what doesn’t. Within this code, a whole world of side effects needn’t be
interrogated if they don’t fit neatly within the confines of a definition.46 In a moment of trained
incapacity, the authors miss that it’s the definition itself that requires interrogation.47 It’s not
particularly shocking that this could happen in a formal policy report. It happens all the time.
What’s shocking is that a report featuring such glaring omissions could attract the signoff of over
one hundred of the nation’s most influential scientific advisers. There are some oversights it takes
a PhD to make.48 Since we live on a finite planet with finite resources, the system of everincreasing expectations, translated into ever-increasing demand, and resulting in again increased
expectations will someday come to an end, at least within the physical rules of the natural world
as we understand them. Whether that end is due to an intervention in the cycle that humanity
plans and executes or a more unpredictable and perhaps cataclysmic end that comes unexpectedly
in the night is a decision that may ultimately be made by the generations of people alive today.
Perhaps we should find the courage to do more than simply extrapolate recent trends into the
future and instead develop predictions for a future we would like to inhabit. These are, after all,
the aspirations that will become the basis for policy, investment, technological development, and
ultimately the future state of the planet and its occupants.49 The immediate problem, it seems, is
not that we will run out of fossil-fuel sources any time soon, but that the places we tap for these
resources—tar sands, deep seabeds, and wildlife preserves— will constitute a much dirtier, more
unstable, and far more expensive portfolio of fossil-fuel choices in the future. Certainly
alternative-energy technologies seem an alluring solution to this challenge. Set against the
backdrop of a clear blue sky, alternative-energy technologies shimmer with hope for a cleaner,
better future. Understandably, we like that. Alternative energy technologies are already
generating a small, yet enticing, impact on our energy system, making it easier for us to envision
solar-powered transporters flying around gleaming spires of the future metropolis. And while this
is a pristine and alluring vision, the sad fact is that alternative-energy technologies have no such
great potential within the context that Americans have created for them. An impact, yes, perhaps
even a meaningful one someday in an alternate milieu. However, little convincing evidence
supports the fantasy that alternative-energy technologies could equitably fulfill our current energy
consumption, let alone an even larger human population living at higher standards of living.
2NC – Turns Case (Energy/Climate)
Changing the ideological structure that governs energy use is a pre-requisite
for renewables to have a positive impact.
Ozzie ZEHNER Visiting Scholar @ Cal (Berkeley) ’12 Green Illusions: The Dirty Secrets of
Clean Energy and the Future of Environmentalism p. 173
In the existing American context, increasing alternative energy production will not displace
fossil-fuel side effects but will instead simply add more side effects to the mix (and as we have
seen, there are plenty of alternative-energy side effects to be wary of ). So instead of a world with
just the dreadful side effects of fossil fuels, we will enter into a future world with the dreadful
side effects of fossil fuel plus the dreadful side effects of alternative-energy technologies—hardly
a durable formula for community or environmental prosperity. If we had different political, legal,
and economic structures and backstops to assure that alternative-energy production would
directly offset fossilfuel use, these technologies might make more sense. But it will take years to
institute such vital changes. Focusing our efforts on alternative-energy production now only
serves to distract us from the real job that needs to be done. Worse yet, if fundamental economic,
social, and cultural upgrades are not instituted, the project of alternative energy is bound to fail,
which would likely lead to crippling levels of public cynicism toward future efforts to produce
cleaner forms of power. As it stands now, even if alternative-energy schemes were free, they
might still be too expensive given their extreme social costs and striking inability to displace
fossil-fuel use. But as it turns out, they aren’t free at all—they’re enormously expensive.
Shifting the discourse of renewable energy from development to sufficiency is
a pre-requisite for solvency.
Karena SHAW Envt’l Studies @ Victoria ’11 “Climate deadlocks: the environmental politics of
energy systems” Environmental Politics 20:5 p.757-758
Keeping an eye on the ball Unpacking what is at stake in the conflicts over climate and energy
policy in BC is a struggle, not least as so many different things are at stake.19 What I seek to
resist here is what I argue was the source of the conflict amongst environmentalists described
above: the reduction of climate change policy to an emissions-reduction agenda. Reducing the
problem in this way – although it does make it more tractable as a policy issue – runs a range of
very real risks.20 Most centrally, it runs the risk of decreasing the sustainability of our
societies precisely as we seek to address climate change, through increasing the environmental
impact and social inequality produced by our energy systems. Although the impact within BC of
the kind of large-scale renewable energy development promoted by the Liberal government will
depend largely on the policy framework through which it is enacted, there are few indications
that this framework will include attentiveness to values of ecological resilience and social
equity – quite the opposite.21 Further, it is unclear that developing renewable energy for export
will actually have much impact in reducing GHG emissions. There is no clear policy framework
to ensure that exported energy will displace GHG-producing sources,22 and even if maximized
BC’s export capacity will be a drop in the bucket of demand from its southern neighbors. The
most concrete impact is likely to be economic, but private ownership of the plants minimizes
some of this benefit to British Columbians, even as it also distributes some of the risk.23 So the
current approach runs some serious risks – to biodiversity, equity, and climate change mitigation
itself – for some fairly tenuous benefits. All of this is not to say that the Liberal climate policy is
for naught: it contains many important elements, and may well result in a reduction of domestic
GHG emissions. It may also do so in a way that is economically beneficial to the province.
However, the energy policy element of it also runs the risk of worsening the longer term
sustainability profile of the province. Most worrisome in this regard is the further exclusion of the
public from any engagement with energy policy itself. Decisions are being made at a range of
scales that will determine the character of BC for the foreseeable future – its economic structure,
large-scale infrastructure, environmental impact (both generalized and specific), capacities for
mitigating and adapting to climate change – without the explicit engagement of the citizens of the
province. And the trend is towards reducing their capacity to participate in such decisionmaking:
with the passage of the Clean Energy Act, all major energy decisions in the province will be
removed from any independent oversight. These are decisions with direct ramifications for
climate change: whether to build a large transmission line to northwestern BC to facilitate largescale oil and gas development there, for example, or whether to build a large (900 MW) dam on
the Peace River. Likewise the decision to change BC’s own energy policy priority from one of
cost-effective self-sufficiency to being a ‘clean energy powerhouse’ suggests a maximization
of energy production in the province, something that may in fact be deeply problematic in
terms of mitigating and adapting to climate change. The point I wish to emphasize here concerns
less the substance of the decisions being made, however, than the implications of, on the one
hand, failing to robustly integrate climate and energy policy, and, on the other, of excluding the
public from engagement with these policy decisions. If we accept the framing of climate change
as an energy problem presented above, these decisions are some of the most vital when it comes
to choosing how to respond to climate change. Further, they are decisions with direct and very
long-term implications for society. Given the nature of climate change as an energy problem, the
energy system could provide a powerful tool to assist society in responding to climate change.
Establishing feedback loops around energy use and impact, for example, could encourage
individual, social and technological innovation to increase the sustainability of society. Creating
the possibility that the energy system should be developed in accordance with wider social values
and commitments could in this way provide a robust focus for the kind of social transformation
necessary to respond effectively to climate change. Perhaps many of the decisions reached
collectively would mirror or echo those being made on behalf of the public now, but if so they
would proceed with social license – and understanding and appreciation of what is at stake in the
decisions – rather than the resistance they face today. As this suggests, perhaps the most
important issue raised when we reframe climate change as an energy problem is the issue of
politics. When we understand how central energy systems are both to climate mitigation and to
social, economic, and ecological futures, it poses the question of how to respond to this
politically. It causes us to confront the considerable momentum around an emissions reduction
policy focus that might indeed achieve part of its goal, but whose goal is insufficient to the
potential we face. At the very least, a primary focus on emissions reduction is a risky strategy –
the possibilities for climate change mitigation that arise from an energy systems focus are much
more diverse and robust. But more, such a focus excludes the social, ecological and political
benefits that could arise from a serious engagement with energy systems. What such an
engagement might look like is beyond the scope of this paper, but we can see potential roots of it
emerging in the struggle of environmental groups in BC to situate energy policy within an
ecological, social and political context. To put it perhaps most bluntly: the challenges of putting
energy systems at the center of environmental politics are myriad, but in a world seeking to
respond to climate change there is no more salient political focus.
2NC Impact – Structural Violence
Unsustainable consumption produces limitless slow violence – we should
privilege displaced structural violence over their immediate scenarios.
Rob NIXON English @ Wisconsin ’11 Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor p.
1-4
When Lawrence Summers, then president of the World Bank, advocated that the bank develop a
scheme to export rich nation garbage, toxic waste, and heavily polluting industries to Africa, he
did so in the calm voice of global managerial reasoning. Such a scheme, Summers elaborated,
would help correct an inefficient global imbalance in toxicity. Underlying his plan is an
overlooked but crucial subsidiary benefit that he outlined: offloading rich-nation toxins onto the
world's poorest continent would help ease the growing pressure from rich-nation
environmentalists who were campaigning against garbage dumps and industrial effluent that they
condemned as health threats and found aesthetically offensive. Summers thus rationalized his
poison-redistribution ethic as offering a double gain: it would benefit the United States and
Europe economically, while helping appease the rising discontent of rich-nation
environmentalists. Summers' arguments assumed a direct link between aesthetically unsightly
waste and Africa as an out-of-sight continent, a place remote from green activists' terrain of
concern. In Summers' win-win scenario for the global North, the African recipients of his plan
were triply discounted : discounted as political agents, discounted as long-term casualties of
what I call in this book " slow violence," and discounted as cultures possessing environmental
practices and concerns of their own. I begin with Summers' extraordinary proposal because it
captures the strategic and representational challenges posed by slow violence as it impacts the
environments-and the environmentalism of the poor. Three primary concerns animate this book,
chief among them my conviction that we urgently need to rethink-politically, imaginatively, and
theoretically-what I call "slow violence." By slow violence I mean a violence that occurs
gradually and out of Sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and
space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all. Violence is
customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular
in space, and as erupting into instant sensational viSibility. We need, I believe, to engage a
different kind of violence, a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather
incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal
scales. In so doing, we also need to engage the representational, narrative, and strategic
challenges posed by the relative invisibility of slow violence. Climate change, the thawing
cryosphere, toxic drift, biomagnification, deforestation, the radioactive aftermaths of wars,
acidifying oceans, and a host of other slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes present
formidable representational obstacles that can hinder our efforts to mobilize and act decisively.
The long dyings-the staggered and staggeringly discounted casualties, both human and ecological
that result from war's toxic aftermaths or climate change-are underrepresented in strategic
planning as well as in human memory. Had Summers advocated invading Africa with weapons of
mass destruction, his proposal would have fallen under conventional definitions of violence and
been perceived as a military or even an imperial invasion. Advocating invading countries with
mass forms of slow-motion toxicity, however, requires rethinking our accepted assumptions of
violence to include slow violence. Such a rethinking requires that we complicate conventional
assumptions about violence as a highly visible act that is newsworthy because it is event focused,
time bound, and body bound. We need to account for how the temporal dispersion of slow
violence affects the way we perceive and respond to a variety of social afflictions-from domestic
abuse to posttraumatic stress and, in particular, environmental calamities. A major challenge is
representational: how to devise arresting stories, images, and symbols adequate to the pervasive
but elusive violence of delayed effects. Crucially, slow violence is often not just attritional but
also exponential, operating as a major threat multiplier; it can fuel long-term, proliferating
conflicts in situations where the conditions for sustaining life become increasingly but gradually
degraded. Politically and emotionally, different kinds of disaster possess unequal heft. Falling
bodies, burning towers, exploding heads, avalanches, volcanoes, and tsunamis have a visceral,
eye-catching and page-turning power that tales of slow violence, unfolding over years, decades,
even centuries, cannot match. Stories of toxic buildup, massing greenhouse gases, and accelerated
species loss due to ravaged habitats are all cataclysmic, but they are scientifically convoluted
cataclysms in which casualties are postponed, often for generations. In an age when the media
venerate the spectacular, when public policy is shaped primarily around perceived immediate
need, a central question is strategic and representational: how can we convert into image and
narrative the disasters that are slow moving and long in the making, disasters that are anonymous
and that star nobody, disasters that are attritional and of indifferent interest to the sensation-driven
technologies of our image-world? How can we turn the long emergencies of slow violence into
stories dramatic enough to rouse public sentiment and warrant political intervention, these
emergencies whose repercussions have given rise to some of the most critical challenges of our
time? This book's second, related focus concerns the environmentalism of the poor, for it is those
people lacking resources who are the principal casualties of slow violence. Their unseen poverty
is compounded by the invisibility of the slow violence that permeates so many of their lives. Our
media bias toward spectacular violence exacerbates the vulnerability of ecosystems treated as
disposable by turbo-capitalism while simultaneously exacerbating the vulnerability of those
whom Kevin Bale, in another context, has called" disposable people ."z It is against such
conjoined ecological and human disposability that we have witnessed a resurgent
environmentalism of the poor, particularly (though not excluSively) across the so-called global
South. So a central issue that emerges is strategic: if the neoliberal era has intensified assaults on
resources, it has also intensified resistance, whether through isolated site-specific struggles or
through activism that has reached across national boundaries in an effort to build translocal
alliances. "The poor" is a compendious category subject to almost infinite local variation as well
as to fracture along fault lines of ethnicity, gender, race, class, region, religion, and generation.
Confronted with the militarization of both commerce and development, impoverished
communities are often assailed by coercion and bribery that test their cohesive resilience. How
much control will, say, a poor hardwood forest community have over the mix of subsistence and
market strategies it deploys in attempts at adaptive survival? How will that community negotiate
competing definitions of its own poverty and long-term wealth when the guns, the bulldozers, and
the moneymen arrive? Such communities typically have to patch together threadbare improvised
alliances against vastly superior military, corporate, and media forces. As such, impoverished
resource rebels can seldom afford to be single-issue activists: their green commitments are
seamed through with other economic and cultural causes as they experience environmental threat
not as a planetary abstraction but as a set of inhabited risks, some imminent, others obscurely
long term.
Survival rhetoric is ideological – their impacts prove we need to critique the
ideology of development and production.
Wolfgang SACHS Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy ’99 Planet
Dialectics p. 67-68
In the late 1980s, concern about dwindling resources and worldwide pollution reached the
commanding heights of international politics. Multilateral agencies now distribute biomass
converters and design forestry programmes, economic summits quarrel about carbon dioxide
emissions, and scientists launch satellites into orbit in order to check on the planet's health. But
the discourse that is rising to prominence has taken on a fundamentally biased orientation: it calls
for extended management, but disregards intelligent self-limitation. As the dangers mount, new
products, procedures and programmes are invented to stave off the threatening effects of
industrialism and keep the system afloat. Capital, bureaucracy and science - the venerable trinity
of Western modernization - declare themselves indispensable in the new crisis and promise to
prevent the worst through better engineering, integrated planning and more sophisticated models.
However, fuel efficient machines, environmental risk assessment analyses, the close monitoring
of natural processes and the like, well-intended as they may be, have two assumptions in
common: first, that society will always be driven to test nature to its limits, and second, that the
exploitation of nature should be neither maximized nor minimized, but ought to be optimized. As
the 1987 report of the World Resources Institute states programmatically on its first page: 'The
human race relies on the environment and therefore must manage it wisely. ' Clearly, the word
'therefore' is the crux of the matter; it is relevant only if the competitive dynamic of the industrial
system is taken for granted. Otherwise, the environment would not be in danger and could be left
without management. Calls for securing the survival of the planet are often, upon closer
inspection, nothing more than calls for the survival of the industrial system . Capital-,
bureaucracy- and science-intensive solutions to environmental decline, in addition, are not
without social costs. The herculean task of keeping the global industrial machine running at ever
increasing speed, and at the same time safeguarding the bisophere, will require a giant leap in
surveillance and regulation. How else should the myriad decisions, from the individual to the
national and the global levels, be brought into line? It is of secondary importance whether the
streamlining of industrialism will be achieved, if at all, through market incentives, strict
legislation, remedial programmes, sophisticated spying or outright prohibitions. What matters is
that all these strategies call for more centralism , in particular for a stronger state. Since ecocrats
rarely call into question the industrial model of living in order to reduce the burden on nature,
they are left with the necessity of synchronizing the innumerable activities of society with all the
skill, foresight and tools of advancing technology they can muster. The real historical challenge,
therefore, must be addressed in something other than ecocratic terms: how is it possible to build
ecological societies with less government and less professional dominance? The ecocratic
discourse that is about to unfold in the 1990s starts from the conceptual marriage of 'environment
' and 'development', finds its cognitive base in ecosystems theory, and aims at new levels of
administrative monitoring and control. Unwilling to reconsider the logic of competitive
productivism that is at the root of the planet's ecological plight, it reduces ecology to a set of
managerial strategies aiming at resource efficiency and risk management. It treats as a technical
problem what in fact amounts to no less than a civilizational impasse - namely, that the level of
productive performance already achieved turns out to be not viable in the North, let alone for the
rest of the globe. With the rise of ecocracy, however, the fundamental debate that is needed on
issues of public morality - how society should live, or what, how much and in what way it
should produce and consume - falls into oblivion . Instead, Western aspirations are taken for
granted, and not only in the West but worldwide, and societies that choose not to put all their
energy into production and deliberately accept a lower throughput of commodities become
unthinkable. What falls by the wayside are efforts to elucidate the much broader range of
futures open to societies that limit their levels of material output in order to cherish whatever
ideals emerge from their cultural heritages. The ecocratic perception remains blind to diversity
outside the economic society of the West.
2NC Impact – Energy Technocracy
The supply-side energy regime produces chronic failure. Energy becomes an
end-in-itself with no social or ethical guidance.
John BYRNE Director Center for Energy and Environmental Policy & Public Policy @
Delaware AND Noah TOLY Research Associate Center for Energy and Environmental Policy ‘6
in Transforming Power eds. Byrne, Toly, & Glover p. 20-21 [Gender paraphrased]
The Technique of Modern Energy Governance While moderns usually declare strong preferences
for democratic governance, their preoccupation with technique and efficiency may preclude the
achievement of such ambitions, or require changes in the meaning of democracy that are so
extensive as to raise doubts about its coherence. A veneration of technical monuments typifies
both conventional and sustainable energy strategies and reflects a shared belief in technological
advance as commensurate with, and even a cause of, contemporary social progress. The modern
proclivity to search for human destiny in the march of scientific discovery has led some to warn
of a technological politics (Ellul, 1997a, 1997b, 1997c; Winner, 1977, 1986) in which social
values are sublimated by the objective norms of technical success (e.g., the celebration of
efficiency in all things). In this politics, technology and its use become the end of society and
members have the responsibility, as rational beings, to learn from the technical milieu what
should be valorized. An encroaching autonomy of technique (Ellul, 1964: 133- 146) replaces
critical thinking about modern life with an awed sense and acceptance of its inevitable reality .
From dreams of endless energy provided by Green Fossil Fuels and Giant Power, to the utopian
promises of Big Wind and Small-Is-Beautiful Solar, technical excellence powers modernist
energy transitions. Refinement of technical accomplishments and/or technological revolutions are
conceived to drive social transformation, despite the unending inequality that has accompanied
two centuries of modern energy's social project. As one observer has noted (Roszak, 1972: 479),
the "great paradox of the technological mystique [is] its remarkable ability to grow strong by
chronic failure . While the treachery of our technology may provide many occasions for
disenchantment, the sum total of failures has the effect of increasing dependence on technical
expertise." Even the vanguard of a sustainable energy transition seems swayed by the magnetism
of technical acumen, leading to the result that enthusiast and critic alike embrace a strain of
technological politics. Necessarily, the elevation of technique in both strategies to authoritative
status vests political power in experts most familiar with energy technologies and systems. Such a
governance structure derives from the democratic-authoritarian bargain described by Mumford (
1964). Governance "by the people" consists of authorizing qualified experts to assist political
leaders in finding the efficient, modern solution. In the narratives of both conventional and
sustainable energy, citizens are empowered to consume the products of the energy regime while
largely divesting themselves of authority to govern its operations. Indeed, systems of the sort
envisioned by advocates of conventional and sustainable strategies are not governable in a
democratic manner. Mumford suggests ( 1964: I) that the classical idea of democracy includes "a
group of related ideas and practices ... [including] communal self-government ... unimpeded
access to the common store of knowledge, protection against arbitrary external controls, and a
sense of moral responsibility for behavior that affects the whole community." Modern
conventional and sustainable energy strategies invest in external controls, authorize abstract,
depersonalized interactions of suppliers and demanders, and celebrate economic growth and
technical excellence without end. Their social consequences are relegated in both paradigms to
the status of problems-to-be-solved, rather than being recognized as the emblems of modernist
politics. As a result, modernist democratic practice becomes imbued with an authoritarian quality,
which "deliberately eliminates the whole human personality, ignores the historic process, [and]
overplays the role of abstract intelligence, and makes control over physical nature, ultimately
control over [hu]man[ity] himself, the chief purpose of existence" (Mumford, 1964: 5).
Meaningful democratic governance is willingly sacrificed for an energy transition that is regarded
as scientifically and technologically unassailable.
Challenging technocratic energy regimes is a pre-requisite for meaningful
existence.
Andrew FEENBERG Philosophy of Technology @ Simon Fraser (Canada) ’10 Between Reason
and Experience p. 69-72
For many critics of technological society, Marx is now irrelevant, an advocate of outdated
economic theories. But Marx had important insights for philosophy of technology that must not
be lost along with his discredited economics. He focused so exclusively on economics because
production was the principal domain of application of technology in his time. With the
penetration of technical mediation into every sphere of social life, contradictions and potentials
similar to those he identified in the factory follow as well. In Marx's view, the capitalist is
ultimately distinguished not just by ownership of wealth but also by control of the conditions of
labor. The owner has a technical as well as an economic interest in what goes on within his
factory. By reorganizing the work process, he can increase production and profits. Control of the
work process, in turn, gives rise to new ideas for machinery, and the mechanization of industry
follows in short order. This leads over time to the invention of a specific type of machinery that
deskills workers and requires management. Management acts technically on persons, extending
the hierarchy of technical subject and object into human relations in pursuit of efficiency.
Eventually professional managers represent and in some sense replace owners in control of the
new industrial organizations. Marx calls this the "impersonal domination" inherent in capitalism
in contradistinction to the personal domination of earlier social formations. It is materialized in
the design of machines and the organization of production. In a final stage, which Marx did not
anticipate, techniques of management and organization and types of technology first applied to
the private sector are exported to the public sector, where they influence government
administration, medicine, and education. The whole life environment of society comes under the
rule of technique . In this form the technological essence of the capitalist system can be
transferred to socialist regimes built on the model of the Soviet Union. The entire development of
modern societies is thus marked by the paradigm of unqualified control over the labor process on
which capitalist industrialism rests. Technical development is oriented toward the disempowering
of workers and the massification of the public. This is "operational autonomy," the freedom of the
owner or her representative to make independent decisions about how to carry on the business of
the organization, regardless of the views or interests of subordinate actors and the surrounding
community. The operational autonomy of management and administration positions them in a
technical relation to the world, safe from the consequences of their own actions. These
consequences may be dire where the enterprise rides roughshod over worker and community
interests, but from the suppression of the Luddites down to the present, the agents of enterprise
have usually been protected from the resulting outcry. In addition, operational autonomy enables
them to reproduce the conditions of their own supremacy at each change in the technologies they
command. Technocracy is an extension of such a system to society as a whole in response to the
spread of technology and management to every sector of social life. Technocracy armors itself
against public pressures, sacrifices community values, and ignores needs incompatible with its
own reproduction and the perpetuation of its technical traditions. The technocratic tendency of
modern societies represents one possible path of development, a path shaped by the demands of
power. In subjecting human beings to technical control at the expense of traditional modes of life
while sharply restricting participation in design, technocracy perpetuates elite power structures
inherited from the past in technically rational forms. In the process it mutilates not just human
beings and nature but also technology. Technology has beneficial potentialities that are
suppressed under capitalism and state socialism. These potentialities could be realized along a
different developmental path were power more equally distributed. Critical theory of technology
identifies the limits of the technical codes elaborated under the rule of operational autonomy. The
very same process in which capitalists and technocrats were freed to make technical decisions
without regard for the needs of workers and communities generated a wealth of new "values,"
ethical demands forced to seek voice discursively. Democratization of technology is about
finding new ways of privileging these excluded values and realizing them in technical
arrangements. A fuller realization of technology is possible and necessary. We are more and more
frequently alerted to this necessity by the threatening side effects of technological advance. These
side effects constitute feedback loops from the objects of our technical control to us as the
subjects of that control. Normally the feedback is reduced or deferred so that the subject of
technical action is safe from the power unleashed by its own actions. But technology can "bite
back," as Edward Tenner reminds us, with fearful consequences as the feedback loops that join
technical subject and object become more obtrusive (Tenner 1996). Today we are most obviously
aware of this from the example of climate change, an unintended consequence of almost
everything we do. The very success of our technology ensures that these loops will grow shorter
as we disturb nature more violently in attempting to control it. In a society such as ours, which is
completely organized around ever-more-powerful technologies, the threat to survival is clear .
AT: Climate O/W
Only an alternative to development and production can create the
institutional changes to cope with climate impacts.
Ozzie ZEHNER Visiting Scholar @ Cal (Berkeley) ’12 Green Illusions: The Dirty Secrets of
Clean Energy and the Future of Environmentalism p. 338-339
Preparing for Climate Change More than a few climate scientists fear it may not matter what we
do to slow climate change—it may already be too late. Others believe that harms could be
avoided but hold little hope that humans are capable of mobilizing the necessary changes. Even if
Americans stop burning oil, coal, and natural gas, some say, the Russians, Indians, and Chinese
will burn it anyway, leading to the same global outcome either way. Keeping the world below a
two-degree-Celsius global temperature rise will require every signatory nation of the Copenhagen
Accord to perform within the top range of their promises according to the International Energy
Agency, a goal the organization’s chief economist Fatih Birol claims is “too good to be
believed.”6 Climatologists claim we’ll be lucky if sea levels rise less than two feet. They expect
that in forty years the probability of experiencing a summer hotter than any yet recorded will be
10– 50 percent. In eighty years the chances rise to 90 percent.7 Long before then, scientists
believe that heat waves will increasingly shock crops—a single hot day can cut local agricultural
yields by 7 percent. In a world with unbounded emissions, they warn, yields could decline 63–82
percent.8 Are these pessimistic outlooks justified? Perhaps. Does it mean we shouldn’t bother
implementing the first steps outlined in this book? Absolutely not, and here ’s why: In a world
ravaged by climate change, these initial strategies will become not only valuable, but vital. Even
if the first steps I have proposed are only partially realized (as they already are to varying degrees
throughout the world), they should still prove advantageous. In a world with a rapidly changing
climate, we ’ll be better equipped to coordinate international cooperation if we’ve been peacefully
supporting world democracies, transparency, and the rights of workers. We ’ll be better prepared
to deal with local calamities if our neighborhoods are more accessible by walking and biking and
our civic organizations are strong. If storms ravage the world’s fields, it will be easier to move
crop production to lesser-quality fields if there are fewer mouths to feed. If heating or cooling our
homes becomes too expensive, we’ll be thankful they are well insulated and designed to make the
most of the sun’s energy. If members of society are unequally impacted, we ’ll be fortunate to
have a government designed for citizens, not moneyed special interests. If it comes to making
difficult choices about goods and services, we ’ll benefit from economies with more socially
based enterprises rather than those devised to consolidate profits for distant shareholders. And
when the holidays arrive, we’ll be thankful we’ve come to appreciate the many gifts of our
friends and family, even if they are not the kinds that arrive wrapped in a box. In short, the
strategies we can embrace to avoid catastrophic global climate change are the same ones we ’ll
need should the worst occur. And if those horrors don’t unfurl? Well then, we’ll likely be left
with stronger communities, empowered women and girls, lower crime rates, cleaner air, more
free time, and higher levels of happiness. Not a bad wager.
Specific scenarios in energy-transition planning should receive less weight
than social goals. Expert specificity is more vulnerable to short-term thinking
and bias in favor of existing interests.
Derk LOORBACH Dutch Research Institute For Transitions @ Erasmus University
(Netherlands) ‘7 Transition Management: New Mode of Governance for Sustainable
Development p. 91-92
Anticipative strategies in general help to deal with three problems of intelligent change: 1)
ignorance: uncertainties about the future and the causal structure of experience, 2) conflict:
inconsistencies in preferences and interests, 3) ambiguity: lack of clarity, instability and
endogeneity in preferences and interests (March and Olson 1995). Like Lindblom, March and
Olsen are negative about the use of expert intelligence, saying that "the history of efforts to act
intelligently in democracies is a history of mistakes". They are especially critical about political
change based on anticipatory rationality , based on backward reasoning from anticipated
consequences5 : "Too many atrocities of stupidity and immorality have been based on
anticipatory rationality, and too many efforts to improve human action through importing
technologies of decision engineering have been disappointing" (March and Olson 1995 198-199).
They clearly show the limitations of the use of anticipatory outcomes but are too negative with
regard to anticipation in general. Anticipation in general seems to be a good basis for action, at
least when taking into account uncertainties and maintaining reflexive. In part, this is what
transition management tries to make explicit through its use of visions. Although transition
visions are primarily meant as guidance for short-term action (Grin and Grunwald 2000), they
also help to influence or shape expectations about what might happen (thereby also influencing
anticipatory behaviour). Transition visions and goals are therefore by no means expert
predictions or 'hard' goals for policy , but much more represent qualitative societal goals and
ambitions that evolve through new insights, knowledge and experiences derived from short-term
experiments. In transition management experiences thus inform next steps as much as long-term
visions and ambitions do. So visions and transition processes are mutually dependent: visions are
guiding in transition processes but transitions do also co-shape the visions developed. This is
exactly the aim of transition management, to pressurize the current regime subtly, by developing
alternative visions and an alternative agenda within protected environments, transition arenas
(Meadowcroft 2005).
AT: Renewables Better than FF
Comparing different production sources detracts from genuine debate
changing consumption.
Ozzie ZEHNER Visiting Scholar @ Cal (Berkeley) ’12 Green Illusions: The Dirty Secrets of
Clean Energy and the Future of Environmentalism p. 333-335
Asking Better Questions When I criticize alternative-energy technologies, clean-energy
proponents frequently grumble that I just don’t get it. Each energy technology needn’t be perfect,
they say, because in the future we ’ll rely on a mix of energy sources—a little solar, a little wind,
a little biofuel, and so on. They have a valid point, to be sure; I won’t argue with that. But I would
argue instead that “a little, plus a little, plus a little” won’t get a growing consumption based
economy very far. We would need “a lot, plus a lot, plus a lot” for that. Creating meaningful
quantities of any so called clean energy certainly won’t be easy or affordable. Even if we were
able to pull it off, these technologies stand to intensify and entrench energy-intensive ways of
life—hardly a durable formula for social or environmental prosperity. This boomerang effect is
most pronounced in economic, political, and social contexts that prioritize material growth as the
sole measurement of well-being. In the United States, lavishly fueling this Wall Street model of
economic expansion has led to drops in almost every quality-of-life indicator compared to other
industrialized nations, including health care, happiness, equality, primary education, and trust.1
Cheap power drives growth, expands gdp, ratchets up sprawl, and fuels surplus material
consumption. Generating even more power, regardless of the means used, won’t quench these
factors but will rather extend their reach. Given present American demographics and
consumption, an alternative-energy future doesn’t look especially probable or desirable. Even if
we could afford to dramatically increase alternative energy production, what would such a future
look like? Would simply adding alternative energy to our current sociopolitical system lead to
greater well-being? Or would it just leave us with another strain of fossil-fuel dependence,
spinning off hyperconsumption and additional side effects? When alternative-energy
productivists do acknowledge the leaks, waste, and other consequences of “clean” energy, they
quickly follow up by asserting that these effluents are less harmful than those from the
exceptionally dirty fossil-fuel industries. In a very limited sense, they may be right, but they are
using an inappropriate and misleading benchmark. Comparing every new energy technology to
the filth of fossil fuels is hardly a reasonable yardstick for thoughtful people—especially when we
have no historical experience, current data, or future backstops in place to assume that these
technologies will even offset fossil fuel use at all. Nevertheless, energy rhetoric in the United
States has largely devolved into arguments pitting production versus production in manufactured
pseudodebates that fool us into thinking we are making genuine energy choices. The only reason
these appear to be reasonable comparisons is that we are so deeply immersed in the dirty fossilfuel way of life that a less-dirty bad idea can seem good. (We should remember that the rise of
petroleum itself was seen initially as an environmental benefit as it slowed the extermination of
whales for their oil.) Why not measure the virtues of electric vehicles against the virtues of
walkable neighborhoods? Or the benefits of solar cells against the benefits of supporting
comprehensive women’s rights? Or the costs of nuclear energy against the costs of plugging
energy leaks? These are the comparisons environmentalists should be thinking about, because in a
world of limited finances and pricey resources, these are the very real trade-offs that will define
our lived experience. So where can we best invest our time, energy, resources, and research?
Consider a dilemma many environmental organizations face. If you had a million dollars to
reduce environmental harms, where would you spend it? Numerous researchers have attempted to
locate where you’d get the best bang for your buck. Nearly a decade ago, Robert Socolow and
Stephan Pacala published an article in Science envisioning fifteen potential “wedges” to flatten
the upward trend of co2 emissions (e.g., vehicle efficiency, carbon sequestration, solar power,
cropping alterations, etc.), only seven of which would have to be fully implemented for success.2
Another team at the consultancy McKinsey and Company extended this work by ranking co2
reduction schemes by cost and benefit.3 Their rankings fall into three overlapping clusters: (1)
energy-efficiency strategies that typically save money, (2) agriculture and forestry management
that either save a little or cost a little, and (3) energy-production strategies that cost the most per
ton of “avoided co2.” Both of these prominent studies greatly influence environmental research
and policy. Nevertheless, while these studies are helpful analytical tools, they are perfectly
unsuitable for high-level decisionmaking. First, they draw upon the ahistorical assumption that
increasing efficiency or expanding alternative-energy production will automatically displace
fossil-fuel use. Further, they limit their options to trendy interventions and leave their results to be
narrowly dictated by convenient cost and co2 abatement measurements. More fundamentally,
they attend to the symptoms rather than the sources of our energy troubles. Foundational
strategies such as human rights, or costs extending beyond dollars and cents, or benefits aside
from co2 abatement are all unintelligible within such fact-making missions. Truths are as much a
matter of questions as answers.
AT: Perm
Discourse of sustainable development intensifies the ecological and economic
contradictions in capitalist exploitation of the oceans.
Philip STEINBERG Geography @ Durham ‘1 The Social Construction of the Ocean p. 176-180
The stewardship of ocean-space The third aspect of the postmodern era's social construction of
oceanspacestewardship - fuses the late capitalist concern for nature with the concept of
stewardship that characterized the Roman Mediterranean and mercantilist-era ocean-space
constructions as well as elements of the industrial capitalist-era construction. Under the
stewardship paradigm, the ocean is seen as a socially significant space providing crucial resources
(whether these are resources of connection or material resources). To ensure access to these
resources, the ocean (or areas thereof) is designated as off-limits to territorial appropriation, but
individual states, the community of states, and/ or non-state actors are permitted to exercise social
power in the interest of stewarding marine resources. I The postmodern doctrine of marine
stewardship continues and intensifies this construction, but with a key difference: In the
mercantilist era, the sea was designated as a special space insulated from the norms of possession
and property (res extra commercium) because of the special function that it served as a surface for
trade. In the postmodern era, the basis for this designation has been expanded because the sea
increasingly also serves as a special space of nature. In contrast to the intervening industrial era,
when the sea was denigrated as a void between the terrestrial spaces of production and
consumption, the ocean once again is constructed as a significant space wherein states and
intergovernmental entities are permitted to exercise non-territorial power so as to manage the
ocean's resources in a rational, efficiency-maximizing manner and to ensure continued access to
resources deemed necessary for the long-term survival of the social system. -1 This "naturespace" (or "resource-space") perspective on the ocean, which expands upon some of the resourcespecific non-territorial treaties of the late industrial era, can be seen in a number of recent
intergovernmental initiatives, such as Part XII of the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea
(United Nations 1983); Chapter 17 of Agenda 21, the report of the UN Conference on
Environment and Development (United Nations 1993); and the events and programs surrounding
the International Year of the Ocean, 1998. These programs and documents, especially the latter
two, explicitly place the world-ocean within the discourse of sustainable development, a
discourse that others have noted is devoted to the rational management of scarce resources so that
nature can continue to serve as a material base for capital accumulation well into the twenty-first
century (M. O'Connor 1994a). As the statement of objectives for the International Year of the
Ocean (IYO) reads, in its entirety: The overall objective is to focus and reinforce the attention of
the public, governments and decision makers at large on the importance of the oceans and the
marine environment as resources for sustainable development. The major aim of the joint efforts
during 1998 will be to create awareness and obtain commitments from governments to take
action, provide adequate resources and give the priority to the ocean and coastal areas which they
deserve as finite economical assets. This is most important, in view of the increasing threats of
pollution, population pressure, excessive fishing, coastal zone degradation and climate variability
to the finite resource the ocean represents. Without a healthy ocean, the life-supporting system of
the earth would be seriously endangered. (TOC 1997b, emphasis added)5 An IYO planning
document leaves little doubt about its overall orientation toward what Esteva (1992) calls "the
reign of scarcity": "Finite size must be emphasized" in all IYO activities and publications
(Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission 1997a). This application of the sustainable
development discourse to the ocean at the intergovernmental level has been supported by
representations of the ocean in the popular media. In 1995 alone, two major US publications,
Time and National Geographic Magazine, featured cover stories celebrating the ocean as a
resource-rich, but fragile environment (Lemonick 1995; Parfit 1995). Time tells an optimistic
story: The sea is a frontier replete with opportunity, at last capable of being "conquered."
National Geographic Magazine tells a more pessimistic story: The sea is an endangered
environment wherein new technologies both respond to and reproduce scarcity. Both stories,
however, place the sea within a discourse of sustainable development similar to that constructed
by the promoters of the IYO: As the sea is a space of "finite economical assets," the
commodification of its environment should be guided by long-term planning for maximum
efficiency and productivity. Also associated with these efforts to promote investment in the
sustained exploitation of the ocean's riches is a general campaign for what Leddy (1996) calls the
"Cousteauization" of the oceans, a popular movement to cultivate public interest in the ocean's
biota with the effect of generating support for further marine research and governmental and / or
corporate stewardship of marine resources, similar to the "Audubonization" of birdlife identified
by Luke (2000). In the United States, perhaps the most visible spokesperson for this movement
has been publicist/ author / bureaucrat/ oceanographer Sylvia Earle, supported by a marine
research and development military-industrial complex represented by individuals such as
computer entrepreneur and former US Deputy Secretary of Defense David Packard and retired
Admiral James Watkins, a former US Chief of Naval Operations and US Secretary of Energy,
who headed the Consortium for Oceanographic Research ,a..n . d Education to January 2001
(Broad 1997). 1 Like the other two aspects of the postmodern ocean-space construction, the rise
of the stewardship principle reflects specific aspects of the spatiality of postmodern capitalism.
Capitalism has a tendency to abstract space and time from nature (Lefebvre 1991) and, as
Altvater (1994) notes, this abstraction has become exceptionally intense as the parameters of time
and space within which individual capitalists make investment decisions collide with the reality
of nature, which is variable, contingent, and unpredictable. The discourse of sustainable
development is an attempt to bypass capitalism's "ecological contradiction" by incorporating the
material obstacles of space and time into the business cycle, with corporate leadership providing
environmental stewardship (M. O'Connor 1994b). The discourse of a resource-rich, but fragile
ocean in need of comprehensive management and planning is the result (Nichols 1999). Kfhus,
National Geographic Magazine asserts that individuals engaged fishing must come to terms with
"this world of inevitable limits" and give way to long-range planning undertaken by states and
corporations (Parfit 1995: 29). Although National Geographic Magazine regrets the loss of the
independent fishing boat owner plying the ocean's wilds, the bureaucratization of ocean
management and the privatization of rights to its resources is presented as the maturation of our
attitudes toward nature. The stewardship of marine resources by agents of capital is naturalized
through explicit parallels to the enclosure of agricultural land in the western United States:
Fisheries, like post-Dust Bowl agriculture, must be allowed to evolve into "big industry: highly
regulated, tidy," where rational management is applied for long-term sustainability (Parfit 1995:
37). A similar perspective is advocated by The Economist: If people want both to preserve the sea
and extract the full benefit from it, they must now moderate their demands, and structure them.
They must put aside ideas of the sea's immensity and power, and instead take stewardship of the
ocean, with all the privileges and responsibilities that implies. (Economist 1998: 18) /While this
element of the postmodern construction of ocean-space should meet some of the requirements of
postmodern capitalism, it, like the other two elements, cannot offer a permanent solution to the
problems that inspired its creation. Considering that every adjustment in capitalism's mechanism
for (de)valuing nature implicitly poses a challenge to its means of ordering social relations
(Harvey 1996), it appears unlikely that corporate decision-makers truly will be willing (or able) to
adopt a calculus that incorporates the spatial and temporal conditions of production (J. O'Connor
1994). _\ r Secondly, even if an ocean-management regime consistent with the stewardship
principle were to negotiate successfully the ecological contradiction of capital, it still would need
to negotiate capitalism's spatial contradiction. Under postmodern capitalism, this spatial
contradiction is more intense than ever, as the ocean is increasingly used as an asocial space of
movement (supported by the great void principle and the tendency toward annihilation), a social
space of development (supported by the land-like principle and the tendency toward
territorialization), and a non-possessible space that provides crucial resources for the social
system (supported by the nature-space principle and the tendency toward stewardship). Each of
these objectives leads to contradictory policies. The territorialization of the sea (whether by an
intergovernmental authority or individual states) would probably interfere with its maintenance as
a friction-free transport surface. A regime dedicated to the preservation of free trade and the
annihilation of barriers in oceanspace would probably fail to provide sufficient security for
potential investors in extra-state P,roduction sites where they seek to locate spatially fixed
investments. \And the granting of marine governance to a global ecocracy with the mission of
stewarding marine nature would probably interfere both with development objectives and with
the ideal of constructing the sea as a space immune to socially generated friction. j jDuring the
industrial era, a blending of these three principles was possible because their associated activities
were performed less intensively and - to a large extent - they were carried out in distinct areas of
the ocean. Now, as the associated uses intensify and overlap, they are increasingly in conflic.!:)To
date, one of the most dramatic of these conflicts has been the controversy surrounding the
establishment of a regime to govern the mining of manganese nodules from the deep seabed.
Changing the set of resources the ocean provides doesn’t alter the
development frame.
Philip STEINBERG Geography @ Durham ‘1 The Social Construction of the Ocean p.19-20
Because the international regime/resource management perspective begins with the observation
that there are multiple, conflicting uses (and users) of ocean-space, this perspective especially is
amenable to a more complex rethinking of the relationship between land-space and oceanspace.
The "pluralist" nature of this perspective allows it to be expanded to include non-extractive
"resources" provided by the ocean, including the "resources" of connection (as mobilized through
shipping) and domination (as mobilized through naval power). The merging of the various
perspectives on ocean-space also has been encouraged by the intensification of ocean-space uses.
J uda and Burroughs (1990), for instance, have argued that extractive-, military-, and transportoriented activities now conflict so often within any given region of the ocean that the time has
come for a series of strong, regional ocean-space regimes to replace the many global single-use
organizations (e.g., the International Whaling Commission) that currently prevail. This expansion
of the resource management perspective amidst multiple, conflicting uses is exemplified by a
"multiple use" chart published in The Times Atlas and Encyclopaedia of the Sea, in which
navigation/ communication, waste disposal/ pollution, strategy I defense, research, and recreation
uses and concerns are considered alongside and in interaction and competition with the extraction
and harnessing of mineral/ energy and biological resources (Couper 1989: 208). ~Still, even this
perspective fails to provide a framework for viewing ocean-space as an integral space of ongoing
social processes. The "expanded" resource management perspective, like the other traditional
perspectives, still implies that the ocean is a space designed and managed by land-based societies
to serve land-based societies. In contrast, it is proposed here that the ocean - like land-space - is
simultaneously an arena wherein social conflicts occur and a space shaped by these conflicts. The
"socially constructed" ocean that results then goes on to shape social relations, on land and at sea.
In short, the ocean is not merely a space used by society; it is one component of the space of
society.
The aff is technological opposition to technology – reducing political debates
to a choice between energy inputs supports existing power and economic
distribution.
Ulrich BECK Sociology @ Munich ’95 Ecological Enlightenment: Essays on the Politics of the
Risk Society Trans. Mark Ritter p. 38-39
Undoubtedly, there are many basic improvements, in all areas of our life, that we cannot imagine
doing without. In this sense, modernity has become second nature to us. But humanity has never
before had to live so much under the threat of self-annihilation . Never before have entire oceans
been threatened with poisoning. Never before have entire animal species disappeared from the
face of the earth, almost overnight, through greed or carelessness. Never before has an artificial
overheating of the atmosphere threatened world climate. There is no need to glorify the past to
keep one's eyes open very wide to all the so-called side effects of modernization. The public
critique of modernity has largely been snagged on the issues in the area between science and
technology. The "big secret" in the prevailing self-concept is technology. In technology are
gathered all the forces that keep the motor of innovation running, transforming the still-new
society into an old one. Religions may decline, cultures may collapse, nature may be dyingindustrial-society man is virtually hypnotized by the machine. In it his creativity becomes
tangible. This fascination is especially obvious where industrial-society man risks losing control
of technology, where utility and destruction go hand in hand. It is a paradox of modernity that it
created a social system that assigns a central position to technology, and that thereby conceals its
own sociality behind the facade and the fascination of technological processes. In particular, the
debates of the past few decades, which have deployed the entire arsenal of arguments critical of
technology and industry, have remained at heart technocratic and naturalistic. They exhaust
themselves in exchanging and citing figures for pollutant levels in the air, water, and food, figures
comparing population growth, energy consumption , nutritional requirements, raw material
shortage, and so on, with as much ardor and intensity as if there had never been anyone-a certain
Max Weber for instance-who (apparently) wasted his time proving that this debate is either
senseless or vacuous , and probably both, unless one also considers society's power structures
and distribution structures , its bureaucracies and its prevailing norms and thought patterns .
A preconception has crept in and established itself by which modernity is truncated to the
reference frame of technology and nature as perpetrator and victim. In the process, however, the
very thing one had hoped to combat is involuntarily promoted. The possibilities for structuring
technology remain hidden from this conception of modernity (as well as from the political
environmental movement) behind the ideology of objective constraints, which is further
strengthened by the technological opposition to technology . And is modernity really off the
hook, so to speak, if wastewater is taken care of? Isn't humanity implicitly abolished once again if
our concern is limited to modernity's impact on nature and health? isn't humankind then reduced
to its biological basis-a reduction with which we in Germany are only too familiar?
AT: Enviro-Pragmatism
Pragmatism maintains dualism between theory and practice. purely
pragmatic response can’t create value changes in our approach to energy.
Ruth IRWIN Political Studies @ Auckland ‘8 “The Neoliberal State, Environmental
Pragmatism, and its discontents” Environmental Politics 16: 4 p. 648-649
This last tendency to separate practise from theory pervades contemporary Pragmatism.
Separating practise from concepts is extremely detrimental and serves to maintain a very
conservative position amongst Pragmatic environmentalists. For example, in the prologue of their
book Environmental Pragmatism, Light and Katz (1996) make extraordinary claims against
theorising about the environment – that ‘The ideas within environmental ethics are, apparently,
inert – like Hume’s (1958) Treatise, they fall deadborn form the press’. They ‘argue that
theoretical debates are hindering the ability of the environmental movement to forge agreement
on basic policy imperatives’ (Light & Katz, 1996: 7). The aim of contemporary Environmental
Pragmatists is to stifle some elements of environmental debate, especially poststructuralist
positions, in favour of a consensus of ideas which are presumed to guide policy from above.
Unlike their predecessors (who were more like Hume than their later namesakes), contemporary
Pragmatists make a stark distinction that separates practice from theory, and they valorise one
side of other dualisms such as anthropocentricism over non-anthropocentricism, instrumentality
over intrinsic value, and culture over nature. The common sense assumptions of contemporary
Pragmatist emerge from a very explicit group of Classical Grand Masters – Pierce, Royce, James,
Mead, Dewey – and a less explicit set of theoretical influences, most notably Hegel, materialism
and Liberal Utilitarianism. Cultural conservatism makes contemporary Pragmatism inadequate
for attempting the kinds of cultural transformation that are necessary to adequately achieve a
more ethical and genuinely sustainable interaction between human societies and the ecosystem.
The heyday of recent Environmental Pragmatism seems to have been in 1996 yet it is important
to examine it because like many other American ideologies, it dominates much environmental
theoretical debate at present. In 2001 Mintz advocates contemporary Pragmatism as a guide for
the law because, pragmatic thought has much to add to contemporary discourse regarding
environmental laws and policies. Pragmatism’s stress on concrete facts, flexibility,
experimentation, and practical, workable solutions to realworld problems, combined with its clear
preference for democratic consensus-building and social justice, appears to provide a sensible
intellectual framework for innovation and reform in environmental decision-making at all levels.
(Mintz, 2001) Pragmatists address the perceived gap between environmental theorists and policy
analysts, activists, and the public. To achieve this cohesiveness contemporary Pragmatists
theorise a normative basis that will provide the ground for the convergence of activists on policy
choices and at the same time win theoretical and meta-theoretical arguments about moral
pluralism as opposed to poststructuralist ‘relativism’ in ‘normative’ environmental theory.
Eco-pragmatism is anti-practical—it only caters to the american middle class.
voting negative is the only way to ensure that critical questions about global
equity and imperialism get priority.
Ruth IRWIN Political Studies @ Auckland ‘8 “The Neoliberal State, Environmental
Pragmatism, and its discontents” Environmental Politics 16: 4 p. 656-657
Light is intrigued by the need to ‘convince people’ to pursue environmental ends. Unfortunately
this is the only element of interest in his essay, ‘The case for a practical pluralism’, which is a
superficial skate over what is for him familiar terrain. He does little to explain the various forms
of pluralism apparently advocated by the authors he surveys. He blithely avoids any engagement
with ‘deconstructive poststructuralist differance’ (Light, 2002b: 15) by naming and shaming it as
moral relativism.
Relativism entails abandoning the view that there are some moral stances better than others that
could guide our ethical claims about how we should treat nature. If we admit relativism then, one
could argue, we would give up on attempts to form a moral response to the cultural justifications
put forward to defend the abuse or destruction of other animals, species or ecosystems.
Relativism entails that ethics is relative to different cultural traditions. (Light, 2002b: 7)Light
maintains a North American faith in the ‘normative force’ of American cultural superiority. This
criticism of relativism neglects the emphasis on critique, where evaluation based on mutual
respect for differing viewpoints can still come to an ethical decision – but quite possibly not a
consensus. ‘Pragmatic’ resignation to Western prejudice avoids the hard ‘development’ questions
about uneven global wealth distribution, skewed global economic and environmental policy.
Avoiding theory results in ignoring the absorption of old liberal and more recent environmental
terms, such as ‘choice’, ‘freedom’, ‘equality’, ‘sustainability’ into the neoliberal lexicon and its
resultant policy initiatives that are being implemented in nations around the planet. Ignoring
theory is to ignore what is actually going on.
Perm creates theoretical monoculture. Theoretical frameworks for
approaching environmental issues are more important than immediacy. Our
alternative doesn’t mean inaction—it means careful thinking about how and
why we act.
Ruth IRWIN Political Studies @ Auckland ‘8 “The Neoliberal State, Environmental
Pragmatism, and its discontents” Environmental Politics 16: 4 p. 653-654
Light argues that the antagonism towards anthropocentricism is so pervasive in environmental
ethics it has become dogma. His complaint is that theories about the environment based on nonanthropocentric values (or non- Utilitarian values) are mere ‘intramural’ word-play. They do not
ground the actions of most environmental activists. Instead, using the example of the Amazon
Rainforest, Light notes that the environmentalist Chico Mendes was motivated to protect the
Rainforest because it was the livelihood of his entire community. Light looks to American
Pragmatism to sort out the theory versus practice debate. The many different theoretical
approaches in environmental ethics, whether they be anthropocentric or non-anthropocentric, all
seem to end up in a practical ‘convergence’ which tends towards protecting or creating ecological
habitats. Bryan Norton developed this theory of ‘convergence’, arguing that in the end, if taken in
their ‘pure’ form, both anthropocentric and ecocentric environmentalisms would eventually turn
up the same policy results (Norton, 2005: 508). So, even the animal rights theorists such as Singer
will prudently advise the humane hunting of exogenous rabbits, for example, for the larger good
of the Australian Outback. While I sympathise with the desire for urgent and practical action, I do
not think careful thinking requires postponing all environmental care. It is naive and even
dangerous to relegate the myriad debates about Utilitarian versus intrinsic value, or
anthropocentric versus non-anthropocentric, or individualist versus community aims, and even
monad versus pluralist beliefs, to a ‘convergent’ interest in environmental protection. Norton
believes that nonanthropocentric ethics will turn out to converge with anthropocentric ethics
because in the end both are politically contested by humans (Norton, 2005: 508). While I think
his point that political dualism may collapse towards the same ends, the notion of a mature
political convergence, or dialectical synthesis is not necessarily going to be the case. Clearly not
all political views are interested in environmental protection. Some interest groups claim to be
environmentally motivated, such as big business including ‘sustainability’ in their mission
statements and advertising without any genuine attempt to alter capitalist practices in a farreaching way. Conflicting strategies produce divergent politics that play out in the practices of
activists, politicians, citizens and schoolteachers. Theoretical premises affect the organising
paradigms, selfunderstanding and the actions of societies, communities, and individuals. In a
global world, anthropocentric capitalism dominates the ‘view’ that the media, advertising,
education, work ethic, consumerism and so forth take on the environment. As Heidegger cogently
argues, everything in the modern world is enframed and understood as potential resource. So
thinking our way out of these conundrums is vitally important, in both the short and long term,
for realigning the relationship that humanity as a whole has with the earth in all its aspects.
Diverging ideas about how the relationship between humanity and the earth can be best cared for
is a constructive way forward (and impossible to annihilate) because different contexts generate
different relationships. Thought is like biodiversity; difference shelters contingent possibilities for
unexpected problems, monoculture fails when confronted with new disease, or new weather
conditions, new predators, new constraints, and new conditions of possibility.
AT: Prioritize Scientific Method
Prioritizing mechanistic scientific thinking can’t account for the constitutive
relations between humans and ocean environments.
Peter JACQUES Poli Sci @ Central Flordia (Orlando) ‘6 Globalization and the World Ocean p.
21-25
Parts and Pieces: Mechanistic Epistemology Mechanistic thinking is premised on the idea that
individual replaceable cogs can adequately explain the whole. If this is in reference to nature,
then the cogs are organisms that lose their inherent value and there is little violation in exploiting
them because the relationship is an instrumental one defined by the needs of the user. Mechanistic
epistemology is an obstacle to understanding global phenomena and meaning because it is blind
to constitutive relationships. Constitutive relationships are relationships that make up a system
where the joined pieces are more meaningful than their isolated individuality. These relationships
create all theories of the global, but the nature of how these relationships change is based on the
theoretical outlook. Thus, constitutive relationships make a group of parts n1.ore than their simple
sum, and looking only at the isolated parts will, by definition, miss the dynamics of the system
created by these connections. This implies a complexity so deep that humans' interaction with, in
particular, large ecosystems like the World Ocean may be sustainable only through pragmatic
experimentation (Lee 1993). Perhaps a good example of a system with constitutive relations is a
family. People in families are indeed individuals with the ir own lives, and it is important to
social scientists to understand individuals to the best of the scientist's capacity. However, the
family is responsible, to at least some degree, for who individuals become and how they act. The
family is not entirely responsible for who the individuals become, and the individuals are rarely,
if ever, entirely independent of their family. Nonetheless, people in the family become a part of
one another, making the family something sometimes intangible, but constitutive. Concern over
only individual units, such as individual people, rs important, but it necessarily blurs the
importance of the systems and subsystems of which the individual is a part-language systems,
ethnic and historical subsystems, religious creeds, geographic subsystems like watersheds, and in
our case, ocean systems. This concern over the individual requires a certain rationality that
focuses on the interests and behavior of individual parts. Similarly there is rationality within
global theory that focuses on the interests of the whole and the system. And, like the family, the
human and ecological systems examined here are alive and have their own inherent value so that
mechanistic exploitation of the ocean will lead to dysfunction just as exploitation of a family or
family member leads to the same. Work that ideologically favors these systemic interests is
sometimes labeled "globalism." However, this designation is really not specific enough to be
helpful. Nearly everyone would support the globalization of peace and prosperity, though activist
Arundhati Roy is well known for saying that the "only thing worth globalizing is dissent."
However, along with this she says we need a sharing of spirit and community-across the world.
This implies that other things are worthy of globalization: What we need to search for and find,
what we need to hone and perfect into a magnificent, shining thing, is a new kind of politics. Not
the politics of governance, but the politics of resistance. The politics of opposition. The politics of
forcing accountability. The politics of slowing things down. The politics of joining hands across
the world and preventing certain destruction. In the present circumstances, I'd say that the only
thing worth globalizing is dissent. (Roy 2002, online) This sentiment of resistance and common
spirit implies that the tone and structure of this new politics are important because the peace and
prosperity cannot arrive through authoritarian rule that forces these conditions. Nor can the peace
and prosperity come with a short time horizon that ends because of ecological changes forced by
exploitation. I am a globalist in the sense that I do see . humanity in a common lot; however, this
lot has been purposefully segregated and cosmopolitan ("we are all in it together") sentiments do
not ring true while the majority of people in the world suffer important deprivations while a
minority dine elegantly. Consequently, I assume that because we are in a common lot, this
extreme difference in well-being is undesirable, and that moderating the extremes of economic
globalization for the middle ground of economic wellbeing is morally right (see Conca 200 I for a
discussion on "sustaining the middle"). When we take a global frame of reference, we are forced
to place ourselves and our subjectivity within the system, because there is nowhere for human
subjectivity to hide, and human interests become tied into the interests of the whole. This is
because ifi am thinking of the whole, I am included within the configuration, and it is implausible
to think that there is a viable mechanical distance between the subject and objects of inquiry.
Overtly dissolving mechanistic claims of distance and objectivity are important, since many
philosophers have indicated this line of attack is often used to conceal exploitation of nature and
society. A mechanistic epistemology breaks the pieces into distinct units and studies them apart
from the whole, like cogs in a machine. The object of inquiry becomes the parts, not their
relationships, which may be equally or more important. What are the pieces that are obscuring the
whole in ocean politics? Perhaps the most dizzying factor is that of the single-species fishery
catch statistics. So much of our current understanding of the state of fisheries is made up of these
numbers. This is problematic for several reasons. First, the number of fish caught does not and
cannot indicate the health of a fish population because the precise number of the populations are
not known, and are very often estimated based on those very catch levels, as a proportion of effort
used in catching the fish. This is referred to as "catch per unit of effort." An increase in effort but
not in fish catch implies a lower population. Second, this means we are relatively limited in the
knowledge about fish populations outside what people try to catch. Because about 7 5 percent of
the world's marine fish focuses on 200 species, or about I percent of existing known species, the
knowledge that is not captured in single marine fish catch statistics is startling (Holmlund and
Hammer I999). The fact that fish catch has risen tren1endously since the 1950s (by about 300
percent) gives the impression that fish stocks are fine. This does not say anything about the
structure of these fish, such as how much of the catch is top predator and how that proportion has
changed over time, nor does it say anything about the state of marine biodiversity in general
through these increased catches. Despite the fact that there have not been studies that justify
single-species fish statistics as a measure of how much catch can be sustained, this is the primary
method by which fishing policies are made (Earle 1995; Jacques and Smith 2003). Even more
menacing is the fact that fishing policies based on these singlespecies catch trends By in the face
of increasing ecological change. Loss of mangroves and other important coastal destruction, as
noted in chapter 6, is disconnected from future policy on fishing levels, despite the importance of
mangroves for fish nurseries. Likewise increased pollution levels from urbanizing areas in both
the Caribbean and Southeast Asia. Likewise for climate changes for any of these regions. Thus
focusing on the single-species catch per unit of effort is terribly inadequate to set sustainable
fishing levels. As a way to conceive of the ocean system without making the above kind of
critical error (some of which cannot be avoided given available information), I have conceived of
the World Ocean system as an amalgam of material, energy, and life that is functionally
integrated. The material of the system is the water column, which contains heat and kinetic
energy and the coastal zone that phases the terrestrial into the marine. Life in the system is seen
through coral reefs and fisheries. I think of the coral and the fisheries as communities that
function within these material settings, but changes in either can impact both. For example,
changes in the coastal zone impact fish populations, which then change the diversity and kinds of
plants and animals on the reefs. This specific functional relationship is seen in all of the regions
because overfishing is contributing to declining reefs. The energy in the system- the heat and
currents and waves (not to mention the chemical energy not discussed here )--impacts all of these
sections. Thus, mechanistically breaking the "object" of knowledge into pieces fundamentally
distorts our ability to see "reality" and empirically and morally understand the world around us.
Ecofeminist Carolyn Merchant has famously argued that changing from an organic model of the
planet-one that promoted the image of the earth as a single living organism- to a mechanistic one
was the beginning of industrialized environmental degradation because there was no ethical
obligation to dead, discrete cogs in the earth (Merchant I 980). However, one does not need to be
an ecofeminist to argue in favor of holistic epistemologies. Raymond Holder Wheeler argued as
early as I936 that science is cyclic in its focus on the whole and on the part, what he terms
vitalism/ organicism versus atomism/ mechanism. To see this cycle, Wheeler must use a holistic
analysis: In order to see clearly, why science is now turning organismic, it is necessary to look at
history as a whole. Such a perspective shows us that the main problem of science, any science,
always has been to solve the part-whole relation, the problem of the many in the one, of pluralism
and unity, of permanence and change, if the role played by the part in the whole. (30; emphasis in
original) The possibility of holism is precluded by the mechanistic approach to knowledge. This
problem extends into ecology. If one turns to ecological scientific journals, the inevitable findings
will be particularistic, minutely specified research working off assumptions of ceteris paribus,
that is, all things being equal. Through an assumption of ceteris paribus, isolation of a part and its
changes can be subjected to reproducible tests of causation from independent variables. Tests
purposefully isolate influences on the object to see which one can explain more, accurately.
Precision is gained from mechanism, but context and the meaning and importance of constitutive
relationships are lost. One of the things we have learned (hopefully) in social science is that one
method should not dominate and undermine other equally valid approaches, since the voice of
research starts with its methodology. Relying only on mechanistic science reduces the diversity of
voices and analysis that will be essential for creative and innovative thinking crucial for complex
problem solving. Further, reading about the effects of one microinfluence in a microregion on a
particular species needs to be balanced with interpretations of the "big picture" that these studies
create. I acknowledge here that choosing holisms blinds me to the specifics of a part-in this case,
the dynamics of a single country. I also acknowledge that looking at these parts is important
work, and I am glad others do this work; but this effort is one which, for better or worse, is
hoisted on the mast, looking at the horizon, not at the waves on the bow. This too is of value. I
will now discuss some epistemological frames for globalizing changes in the World Ocean. This
thought experiment begins with complex systems theory.