AFF - Millennial Speech & Debate

NEG

1NCs

1NC vs. Conservation

“Sustainable development” is a lie –policies about sustainability are proposed based on whether or not they are economically beneficial,

NOT on whether or not they help the environment – the concept of sustainability as presented by the aff is a mask to continue the policing of political discourse by capitalist institutions – our reframing of sustainability solves the aff

Gridwood 07

- School of Accounting, Faculty of Economics and Business @ The University of Sydney (John, January

2007, “Rethinking sustainability, neo-liberalism and environmental managerialism in accounting”, p. 4-5, http://sydney.edu.au/business/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/56614/Rethinking_neoliberalism.pdf)

Using an analytics of government perspective foregrounds how

sustainability over recent decades

has emerged not as a concept with an "essentialist" meaning in policy making but as an important enabling and organizing concept

(Miller & O'Leary, 1994). It has been constituted by processes and practices and their historical circumstances such as systems of environmental political thought including 'sustainable development' or 'ecological modernization' (Dryzek, 1997).

Sustainability has mobilized dividing

practices of management regimes

that include and exclude truth claims of policy debates in political discourse by being deemed (un)sustainable solutions to environmental management problem solving. In political discourse on the environment,

sustainability is made a contingent nodal point of neo- liberal discursive formations in and

around which

, forms of

political discourse and their truth claims are articulated, voiced and dispersed

or marginalized and silenced

.

Corporate policy strategy, for example, is often the artifact of making green politics necessary for policy making, like 'environmental sustainability' and 'corporate social responsibility (CSR)' (Barry, 2004). Further, in contemporary political discourse on environmental management, sustainability is often staled in the form of policy statements of, amongst others, a government, political party or corporation connected to an ideal slate, like a green state (Eckersley, 1992), an ideal society, a set of principles, a social movement or a political theory of environmental practice (Eckersley, 1992). The making of the apocalyptic 'global ecological crisis' in political discourse on the future of planet earth, unless linked to slate responsibility and 'sustainability development' (Barry & Eckersley, 2005) is often marginalised and absolutely or partly denied or silenced in environmental management policy debates about political projects mobilized by a desire for sustainability variously defined (Dryzek, 1997). Thus, in these historical circumstances of political discourse on the environment and green politics

, sustainability emerges as an enabling concept linked

closely

to political discourses on 'sustainable development' and to a lesser extent, 'ecological modernization' (Dryzek, 1997) with an array of calculated and partisan meanings that reinforce specific truth claims.

On the other hand, a truth claim deemed to be unsustainable is an attempt to disable, weaken, marginalize and sometimes

silence an argument and rationale about environmental management. Given a multitude of possible perspectives and historical circumstances, a meaning of

sustainability

in a location with its milieu is usually associated with competing truth claims of political discourse on how to make the

future political security of economic terrains (the earth, nations, multinational corporations, SME enterprises, households)

manageable.

In this way

it is not understood as inherently or essentially

a

radical

enabling concept in the way it enables discursive struggle over policy truth claims but contingent on the political milieu of their historical circumstances. Hence

, sustainability needs to be understood in relation to the historical circumstances of

systems of dispersion and translation,

including global governmentality

(Lamer & Walters,

2004) and the political project of

governing international and other hybrid spaces

(Baxter & Chua, 2003).

In this context, sustainability enables the transgression of limits of dominant political regimes of truth about the desired progress and futures of parts (geopolitical terrains, the oceans and seas

, the atmosphere, etc.) or the whole curved, morphing surface of the earth. Here the earth is understood to be an historically contingent assembled artifact of a shifting ensemble of forces without any essential intrinsic nature.

Attempts at an anthropogenic environment result in domination of the planet -making the environment a second priority—turns case

Luke 97

(Timothy Luke, Professor of Political Science @ Virginia Polytechnic Institute, March 18-22,

1997 “The (Un)Wise (Ab)Use of Nature,” http://www.cddc.vt.edu/tim/tims/Tim528.htm)

To preserve the various ecologies of the planet on a global scale, as many environmental groups assert, the inhabitants of each human community must rethink the entire range of their economic and technological interconnections to their local habitats, as national discourses of green geo-politics

and grey geo-economics illustrate

, in terms of how they are meshed into the regional, national, and international exchange of goods and services.

Beginning this strategic review immediately poses the question of protecting all existing concrete "bioregions" in first nature, or the larger biosphere of the planet, within which the ecologies of any and all human communities are rooted.

Bioregions historically have constituted the particular spatial setting of human beings' social connections to specific lands, waters, plants, animals, peoples, and climates from which their communities culturally constitute meaningful places for themselves in the "first nature" of the natural biosphere.37

The "domination of nature" is not so much the total control of natural events in the environment as much as it is the willful disregard of such localized ecological conditions in building human settlements.38 The abstract "technoregions" constructed within the human fabrications of

"second nature," or the always emergent technosphere of the planet, within which modernizing human communities are now mostly embedded, operate by virtue of environmental transactions that often are over, beyond, or outside of rough equilibria of their natural habitats. These transactions create new anthropogenic ecological contexts, which typically generate an artificial hyperecology of an ultimately unsustainable type.39 A great deal of time and energy might be expended in core capitalist countries upon environmental regulations, resource surveys, ecological studies, and conservation policies, but these initiatives almost always are consumerist campaigns, aiming to reform the costs and regulate the benefits of these unsustainable flows of goods and services through the hyperecologies of second nature.40 Consumer society constitutes an entirely new system of objects out on the terrains of second nature.

Baudrillard shrewdly aspires to be recognized as second nature's Linneaus, asserting that second nature plainly has a fecundity or vitality of its own:

Could we classify the luxuriant growth of objects as we do a flora or fauna, complete with tropical and glacial species, sudden mutations, and varieties threatened by extinction? Our urban civilization is witness to an ever-accelerating procession of generations of products, appliances and gadgets by comparison with which mankind appears to be a remarkably stable species. This pollulation of objects is no odder, when we come to think about it, than that to be observed in countless natural species.41

Finding a rationality and systematicity in this quickening procession of products, Baudrillard believes his new technified taxonomies for every object

(products, goods, appliances, gadgets, etc.) of the system permits us to plumb the system of objects propounded by contemporary economies of mass production/mass consumption. To do so, however, one must push past the silences of the silent majorities, and decipher the meanings of mass consumption as the consuming masses reveal them.

Exploring consumption of objects in particular might disclose "the processes whereby people relate to them and with the systems of human behavior and relationships that result thereform," and thereby allowing anyone to reach "an understanding of what happens to objects by virtue of their being produced and consumed, possessed and personalized."42

Here is where habitus emerges from the systems of objects and objects of systems compounded with the technosphere. Bourdieu asserts habitus emerges out of "the capacity to produce classifiable practices and works, and the capacity to differentiate and appreciate these practices and products (taste), that the represented social world, i.e., the space of life-styles, is constituted."43 Yet, the dual dimensionality of habitus as a structured and structuring structure parallels the properties of habitat, which when taken in environmental terms, provides a scheme of systems generating classifiable practices and products as well as a scheme for systems of appreciating and comprehending within and amidst specific settings.

Consequently, the habitats of second nature out on the technoregionalized ranges of anthropogenic technospheres are formed out of habitus, or the system of distinctive signs in practices and works driving lives styled by the system of objects.

In these new spaces, terraformative

hyperecologies can be monitored to judge their relative success or failure in terms of abstract mathematical measures of consumption, surveying national gains or losses by the density, velocity, intensity, and quantity of goods and services being exchanged for mass consumption.

Here one finds geoeconomists pushing for wiser uses of all biotic assets in all anthropogenic exchanges. Consumption is outsourced from many different planetary sites by using varying levels of standardized energy, natural resources, food, water and labor inputs drawn from all over the Earth through transnational commodity, energy, and labor markets.44 Geo-economic forms of state power and/or market clout

, in turn, allegedly will provide the requisite force needed to impose these costs on the many outside for the benefit of the few inside. By substituting "Earth Days" for real ecological transformation, the hyperecologies of transnational exchange are successfully repacking themselves in green wrappers of ecological concern; but, they still often involve the profligate waste of energy, resources, and time to maintain the abstract aggregate subjectivity of "an average consumers" enjoying "the typical standard of living" in the developed world's cities and suburbs.

Yet, if this is indeed happening, then how did these patterns develop?

The alternative is to radically alter the way we live – environmental issues aren’t about large macro-level problems but rather the mentalities and actions that we take in our lives – that’s key to environmental change

Luke 03

– Department of PoliSci @ Virginia Tech (Timothy W., 2003, “Eco-Managerialism: Environmental Studies as a

Power/Knowledge Formation”, interview with Aurora Online Magazine, http://aurora.icaap.org/index.php/aurora/article/view/79/91)

Timothy Luke: I don't know about that. I think we can get out of it.

The question is, how do you get out of it? You could have a nuclear war. You could have a big bio-terrorist accident or attack. You could have an asteroid hit things and mess it up. There's a lot of ways to disrupt the global economy globally, which would get you out of it. You'd have to start back at some previous state. But making a conscious choice to get from where we're at now to whatever would seem to be a more

"rational, ecological" way of doing things, will

basically require

, sadly enough

, a value change. People have to value doing things differently

. I think over time, in the past what, 50 years there has been a radical value change in terms of how we deal with the environment.

There's far more environmental awareness now than there was 50 years ago.

Are things better environmentally now than they were 50 years ago? In some ways they are. So in some sense, keeping on this general track of self-reflection and change is not an inconsiderable development. But what really needs to be done is

, as we probably know, a complete new reconstitution of the way we live. Which gets us back to not thinking about environmental issues solely as environment.

In many ways, the problems with how we live are right there in front of you with the urban structure of this city.

It's miles across, and to do things in your day you might have to consume a lot of hydrocarbon energy to do things. You buy stuff that comes here from all over the world, much of which could maybe be made or produced pretty much closer to here. But that doesn't happen, because all of us are encouraged not to make or produce things close to where you live, because that's what losers do.

You don't want to be a loser, you want to be a winner.

The whole script and package of everyday life contains the environmental crisis within it.

How do you get people to see that and then decide to live differently, and make it their problem, not somebody else's problem, i.e. "Oh that's good for somebody else to do, but not for me. I've got mine jack and stick it where the sun don't shine for you, because I'm not going to change."

Which has been the traditional problem of environmental change. I'm on top and I'm going stay there.

Maybe my children or your children can live a life where everybody rides a bicycle, eats granola, and has no TV. But right now, this is pretty good. So that's a big problem

. It's a value change and if it's going to start it starts here, it starts in North America.

1NC vs. Exploitation

Eco-managerialism turns nature into resources for capitalism – it ensures that people who don’t benefit from the extraction of these resources will continue to suffer and be oppressed

Luke 03



So to conclude, each of these wrinkles in the record of eco-managerialism should give its supporters pause.

The more adaptive and collaborative dimensions of eco-managerial practice suggest its advocates truly are seeking to develop some post extractive approach to ecosystem management that might respect the worth and value of the survival of nonhuman life in its environments, and indeed some are. Nonetheless, it would appear that the commitments of ecomanagerialism to sustainability maybe are not that far removed from older programs for sustained yield, espoused under classical industrial regimes

. Even rehabilitation and restoration managerialism may not be as much post extractive in their managerial stance, as much as they are instead proving to be a more attractive form of ecological exploitation. Therefore, the newer iterations of eco-managerialism may only kick into a new register, one in which a concern for environmental renewability or ecological restoration just opens new domains for the eco-managerialists to operate within.

To even construct the problem in this fashion, however, nature still must be reduced to the encirclement of space and matter in national as well as global economies - to a system of systems, where flows of material and energy can be dismantled, redesigned, and assembled anew to produce resources efficiently, when and where needed, in the modern marketplace.

As an essentially self contained system of biophysical systems, nature seen this way is energies, materials, in sites that are repositioned by ecomanagerialism as stocks of manageable resources. Human beings, supposedly all human beings, can realize great material goods for sizeable numbers of people if the eco-managerialists succeed

. Nonetheless, eco-managerialism fails miserably with regard to the political. Instead, its work ensures that greater material and immaterial bads will also be inflicted upon even larger numbers of other people, who do not reside in or benefit from the advanced national economies that basically have monopolized the use of the world's resources.

This continues because eco-managerialism lets those remarkable material benefits accrue at only a handful of highly developed regional municipal and national sites. Those who do not benefit, in turn are left living on one dollar or two dollars a day, not able, of course, at that rate of pay, to pay for eco-managerialism

. So I'll stop there.

Attempts at an anthropogenic environment result in domination of the planet where all efforts to preserve it become commodified into methods to promote capitalism, making the environment a second priority—turns case

Luke 97







Bioregions historically have constituted the particular spatial setting of human beings' social connections to specific lands,

waters, plants, animals, peoples, and climates from which their communities culturally constitute meaningful places for themselves in the "first nature" of the natural biosphere.37


"second nature," or the always emergent technosphere of the planet, within which modernizing human communities are now mostly embedded, operate by virtue of environmental transactions that often are over, beyond, or outside of rough equilibria of their natural habitats. These transactions create new anthropogenic ecological contexts, which typically generate an artificial hyperecology of an ultimately unsustainable type.39 A great deal of time and energy might be expended in core capitalist countries upon environmental regulations, resource surveys, ecological studies, and conservation policies, but these initiatives almost always are consumerist campaigns, aiming to reform the costs and regulate the benefits of these unsustainable flows of goods and services through the hyperecologies of second nature.40 Consumer society constitutes an entirely new system of objects out on the terrains of second nature.








In these new spaces, terraformative hyperecologies can be monitored to judge their relative success or failure in terms of abstract mathematical measures of consumption, surveying national gains or losses by the density, velocity, intensity, and quantity of goods and services being exchanged for mass consumption.


, in turn, allegedly will provide the requisite force needed to impose these costs on the many outside for the benefit of the few inside. By substituting "Earth Days" for real ecological transformation, the hyperecologies of transnational exchange are successfully repacking themselves in green wrappers of ecological concern; but, they still often involve the profligate waste of energy, resources, and time to maintain the abstract

aggregate subjectivity of "an average consumers" enjoying "the typical standard of living" in the developed world's cities and suburbs.



Luke 03






basically require

, sadly enough














Links

Link – Aquaculture

Aquacultures are capitalist mechanisms to devalue and exploit other organisms in a contained environment

Clark and Clausen 08

(Brett Clark, assistant professor of sustainability at the university of Utah, Rebecca Clausen, monthlyreview author, 7-1-08, “capitalism and the degradation of marine ecosystem” http://monthlyreview.org/2008/07/01/the-oceanic-crisis-capitalism-andthe-degradation-of-marine-ecosystem mp)

The massive decline in fish stocks has led capitalist development to turn to a new way of increasing profits

— intensified production of fishes

.

Capitalist aquaculture represents not only a quantitative change in the intensification and concentration of production; it also places organisms’ life cycles under the complete control of private for-profit ownership

.31 This new industry, it is claimed, is “the fastest-growing form of agriculture in the world.” It boasts of having ownership from “egg to plate” and substantially alters the ecological and human dimensions of a fishery.32

Aquaculture

(sometimes also referred to as aquabusiness) involves subjecting nature to the logic of capital.

Capital attempts to overcome natural and social barriers through its constant innovations

. In this, enterprises attempt to commodify, invest in, and develop new elements of nature that previously existed outside the political-economic competitive sphere: As Edward Carr wrote in the Economist, the sea “is a resource that must be preserved and harvested….To enhance its uses, the water must become ever more like the land, with owners, laws and limits. Fishermen must behave more like ranchers than hunters.”33 As worldwide commercial fish stocks decline due to overharvest and other anthropogenic causes, aquaculture is witnessing a rapid expansion in the global economy. Aquaculture’s contribution to global supplies of fish increased from 3.9 percent of total worldwide production by weight in 1970 to 27.3 percent in 2000. In 2004, aquaculture and capture fisheries produced 106 million tons of fish and “aquaculture accounted for 43 percent.”34

According to Food and Agriculture Organization statistics, aquaculture is growing more rapidly than all other animal food producing sectors. Hailed as the “Blue Revolution,” aquaculture is frequently compared to agriculture’s Green Revolution as a way to achieve food security and economic growth among the poor and in the third world. The cultivation of farmed salmon as a high-value, carnivorous species destined for market in core nations has emerged as one of the more lucrative (and controversial) endeavors in aquaculture production.35

Much like the Green Revolution, the Blue Revolution may produce temporary increases in yields, but it does not usher in a solution to food security (or environmental problems)

. Food security is tied to issues of distribution. Given that the Blue Revolution is driven by the pursuit of profit, the desire for monetary gain trumps the distribution of food to those in need.36 Industrial aquaculture intensifies fish production by transforming the natural life histories of wild fish stocks into a combined animal feedlot

. Like monoculture agriculture, aquaculture furthers the capitalistic division of nature, only its realm of operation is the marine world. In order to maximize return on investment, aquaculture must raise thousands of fish in a confined net-pen.

Fish are separated from the natural environment and the various relations of exchange found in a food web and ecosystem. The fish’s reproductive life cycle is altered so that it can be propagated and raised until the optimum time for mechanical harvest.

Aquaculture interrupts the most fundamental metabolic process—the ability of an organism to obtain its required nutrient uptake

. Because the most profitable farmed fish are carnivorous, such as Atlantic salmon, they depend on a diet that is high in fishmeal and fish oil. For example, raising

Atlantic salmon requires four pounds of fishmeal to produce every one pound of salmon. Consequently, aquaculture production depends heavily on fishmeal imported from

South America to feed the farmed carnivorous species.37

The inherent contradiction in extracting fishmeal is that industries must increase their exploitation of marine fish in order to feed the farm-raised fish— thereby increasing the pressure on wild stocks to an even larger extent.

Such operations also increase the amount of bycatch.

Three of the world’s five largest fisheries are now exclusively harvesting pelagic fish for fishmeal, and these fisheries account for a quarter of the total global catch. Rather than diminishing the demands placed on marine ecosystems, capitalist aquaculture actually increases them, accelerating the fishing down the food chain process.

The environmental degradation of populations of marine species, ecosystems, and tropic levels continues

.38

Capitalist aquaculture

—which is really aquabusiness— represents a parallel example of capital following the patterns of agribusiness. Similar to combined animal feedlots, farmed fish are penned up in high-density cages making them susceptible to disease.

Thus, like in the production of beef, pork, and chicken, farmed fish are fed fishmeal that contains antibiotics, increasing concerns about antibiotic exposure in society. In “Silent

Spring of the Sea,” Don Staniford explains, “The use of antibiotics in salmon farming has been prevalent right from the beginning, and their use in aquaculture globally has grown to such an extent that resistance is now threatening human health as well as other marine species.” Aquaculturists use a variety of chemicals to kill parasites, such as sea lice, and diseases that spread quickly throughout the pens. The dangers and toxicities of these pesticides in the marine environment are magnified because of the long food chain.39 Once subsumed into the capitalist process, life cycles of animals are increasingly geared to economic cycles of exchange by decreasing the amount of time required for growth.

Aquabusiness conforms to these pressures, as researchers are attempting to shorten the growth time required for fish to reach market size

. Recombinant bovine growth hormone ( rBGH) has been added to some fish feeds to stimulate growth in fishes in aquaculture farms in Hawaii.

Experiments with fish transgenics—the transfer of DNA from one species to another—are being done to increase the rate of weight gain, causing altered fish to grow from 60 percent to 600 percent larger than wild stocks.40 These growth mechanisms illustrate capitalist aquaculture’s drive to transform nature to facilitate the generation of profit. In addition, aquaculture alters waste assimilation. The introduction of net-pens leads to a break in the natural assimilation of waste in the marine environment. The pens convert coastal ecosystems, such as bays, inlets, and fjords, into aquaculture ponds, destroying nursery areas that support ocean fisheries. For instance, salmon net-pens allow fish feces and uneaten feed to

flow directly into coastal waters, resulting in substantial discharges of nutrients. The excess nutrients are toxic to the marine communities that occupy the ocean floor beneath the net-pens, causing massive die offs of entire benthic populations.41 Other waste products are concentrated around net-pens as well, such as diseases and parasites introduced by the caged salmon to the surrounding marine organisms.

The Blue Revolution is not an environmental solution to declining fish stocks. In fact, it is an intensification of the social metabolic order that creates ruptures in marine ecosystems

. “The coastal and marine support areas needed for resource inputs and waste assimilation [is]…50,000 times the cultivation area for intensive salmon cage farming.”42

This form of aquaculture places even more demands upon ecosystems, undermining their resiliency

. Although aquabusiness is efficient at turning fish into a commodity for markets given the extensive control that is executed over the productive conditions, it is even more energy inefficient than fisheries, demanding more fuel energy investment than the energy produced.43

Confronted by declines in fish stock, capital is attempting to shift production to aquaculture. However, this intense form of production for profit continues to exhaust the oceans and produce a concentration of waste that causes further problems for ecosystems, undermining their ability to regenerate at all levels.

Link – Biodiversity

Preserving biodiversity is rooted in a biopolitical desire to catalog life to the extent at which it benefits humans

Biermann & Mansfield 14

(Christine Biermann, Becky Mansfield, Department of Geography, Ohio

State University, February 14, 2014, “Biodiversity, purity, and death: conservation biology as biopolitics,” http://www.envplan.com/epd/fulltext/d32/d13047p.pdf)

The emergence of conservation biology as a crisis-oriented discipline in the late 20th century marks a significant shift in the American relationship with ‘nature’.

Today’s conservationists by and large aim to foster and protect the diversity of nonhuman life, taking as their object

not individuals (eg, trees, charismatic animals, or geological formations) but populations, communities, and species.

In colonial and early America, by contrast, nature was commonly viewed as something to be seized, possessed, and exploited (Nash, 2001). Landscapes of the New World were perceived as vast, dangerous, or, at best, useless, and settlers moved to conquer, tame, and improve them by clearing forests, hunting predators to near extinction, and forcing native people westward—all acts of seizure and sovereignty both over nonhuman nature and over those humans understood to be outside of the American body politic. We see in the moment of westward expansion the culmination of sovereign power in “the privilege to seize hold of life in order to suppress it” (Foucault, 1990, page 136). By the late 19th century, as forests were cleared, prairies plowed, and Native American tribes defeated (in short, as there was less wilderness left to conquer), a new biopolitical desire to make nature live began to surface alongside sovereign control.

In the emerging Romantic understanding, nature took on new salience, as a

small but significant minority

of Americans began to view it as

sublime, sacred

, and an essential part of American national identity (Nash, 2001; Runte, 1987). Acclaimed natural landscapes such as the Grand Canyon, Yosemite Valley, and the geyser basins of Yellowstone served as proof of American exceptionalism, and although their preservation paved the way for the modern environmental movement, the early logic of this movement was one of “monumentalism, not environmentalism” (Runte, 1987, page 29). At the same time, conservationists

such as

Gifford Pinchot advocated a utilitarian and consumption-based approach to managing and stewarding natural resources for national development

(Knight and Bates, 1995). In these ways, the initial steps toward biopolitical environmentalism were not a departure from sovereign power but rather an expansion of it, exemplifying Bruce Braun’s claim that

“the government of ‘life’ has revealed itself to be intimately related to the exercise and extension of sovereign power”

(2007, page 8).

By the mid-

20th century, the overt justification for the protection of nature had shifted away from American exceptionalism and toward ecological health and integrity

(eg, Leopold, 1949). Ecology as a science developed to focus on interactions between organisms and their environments; with concepts such as ecosystems and the balance of nature, it became the central science associated with environmentalism (Worster, 1994). Conservation biology grew out of this intertwining of ecology, as a science, and the American environmental movement. The

‘official’ formation of conservation biology as a discipline is cited as early evening on May 8, 1985, at the end of the Second Conference on Conservation Biology in

Ann Arbor, Michigan. An informal motion established the Society for Conservation Biology along with a new academic journal Conservation Biology (Sarkar, 2009).

Those instrumental in establishing the discipline sought to separate themselves from scientists who perceived the environment as a set of natural resources to be protected for human consumption (Sarkar, 2009; Soulé, 1985). Whereas scientists in the natural resources and forestry worlds generally sought to manage a small number of highly valuable species (such as high-yield timber Conservation biology as biopolitics 263 species and wild fisheries), conservation biologists aimed to protect all species based on two somewhat conflicting ideas: the idea that nature has intrinsic value extending beyond its utility to human society, and the idea that nature’s diversity might someday be valuable to human society

[eg, to adapt agricultural crops to climate change (Soulé, 1985) ], even if not yet. Thus, the organizing principle is that it is not enough to know nature; one must also use that knowledge to effectively manage and even foster the diversity of life

. While scientific knowledge is always shaped by social processes and dominant social metaphors (Law, 2004; Sismondo, 2010; Worster, 1994), conservation biology is distinct from many other fields in that practitioners aim not merely to uncover facts but also to develop recommendations and take action (Soulé, 1985).

The “right of the sword” over nature has not been replaced per se but has been permeated by a new right to “make live and let die”, manifest as the right and duty to catalog life at the level of the species, organism, and genome, make nonhuman species live, and preserve certain visions of nature—all this while allowing abnormal or “debilitated” genes, individuals, and populations to die off

(Soulé, 1985, page 731). Biopower has not come to replace sovereign power, and the biological materiality of nature remains firmly tied to its political and social dimensions (Braun, 2007). Indeed, intervention in biological processes has both complemented and complicated human—and particularly capitalist—exploitation of nature. Ultimately, however, the random element of life can never be fully brought into the realm of management, as the “complexities of matters [make] governance and rule frighteningly unpredictable” (Hinchliffe and Bingham, 2008, page 1534). In other

words, life—both human and nonhuman—constantly escapes control, and to promote and protect life means to acknowledge the dynamism and inherent unpredictability of biological processes.

Hinchliffe and

Bingham (2008) explain that the challenge of securing life is a “paradox, where the need for control is also the need for an absence of control” (page 1547). This paradox lies at the root of conservation biology and associated fields

Categorization of bodies limits out an understanding of the non-human


(Christine Biermann, Becky Mansfield, Department of Geography, Ohio

State University, February 14, 2014, “Biodiversity, purity, and death: conservation biology as biopolitics,” http://www.envplan.com/epd/fulltext/d32/d13047p.pdf)

As the idea of a biodiversity crisis gained traction

in the 1980s and 1990s, the expectations for and of ecologists shifted toward action, prescription, and defense of life. The newfound missions for conservation were to promote life (synonymous with biodiversity), halt or slow extinction, and ensure that particular species continue to live and evolve.

In a sense this new mission represented an extension of the preservationist logic at work in the US environmental movement of the early 20th century, in which discourses about American landscapes increasingly emphasized the protection of nature and the cultural and national importance of unique natural landscapes. Modern conservation science, however, extended this preservationist logic in new directions, incorporating the wholesale protection and promotion of the biology of the earth writ large (Western, 1992). This paper examines modern conservation science through the lens of biopower, which Michel Foucault conceptualized as the power to “make live and let die” (Foucault, 2003, page 241). We posit not just that biopower is a useful analytical tool for understanding governance of human–nonhuman relationships but that failure to understand how nonhuman life has been the object of biopolitical concern risks privileging scientific knowledge and management as purely

objective and apolitical—that is, as outside the reach of power.

Here, we renarrate core conservation knowledge, practices, and policies in the US as a form of liberal biopolitical rule.

With its emphasis on making nature live, conservation science marks a shift from a sovereign form of rule that emphasized subduing and controlling nature.

We focus on key concepts in conservation biology, such as populations, evolution, extinction, and biological diversity and purity, to demonstrate that acts of truth-telling about nature occur within, and are necessarily shaped by

, the context of liberal biopolitical rule.

By truth-telling we refer not to the discovery of objective facts but rather to the ways in which particular ideas about nature are designated normal, natural, and true through the circulation of scientific discourses (Foucault, 1990; 2008).(1) In particular, we show that modern conservation science is shaped by a biopolitical logic that emphasizes distinctions between biological kinds and develops interventions based on these distinctions—a logic that also informs racial, biological distinctions among humans.

Ideas of abnormality and normality are produced and reproduced through racial projects, most of which are not racist per se but nonetheless engage in racial signification (Omi and Winant,

1994). In other words, biopolitical strategies rely on “logics of racial difference”

(Moore et al, 2003, page 18) to delineate between their target population and others.

Even as such sharp biological distinctions (ie, between races) are called into question when applied to human populations, distinctions between biological kinds are generally deemed both appropriate and scientific when applied to nonhuman populations

.

Conservation science is built upon distinctions between life forms, as it is these distinctions that constitute biodiversity and therefore must be defended and maintained.

In the next section, we review the concept of

Foucauldian biopower and discuss emerging scholarship on the biopolitics of nature. We add to this literature an explicit emphasis on racial differentiation and biological aberrance, arguing that understanding the let die part of biopolitics requires greater attention to the categorization of bodies.

We then turn to conservation science to consider the underlying biopolitical logic and truth discourses of the field.

Expanding on four themes— populations in crisis, evolution and its future orientation, extinction as death that is necessary for life, and diversity as purity

— we illustrate key assumptions, concepts, and practices (statistical and material) that work to secure biodiversity.

The final section briefly discusses the implications of contemporary conservation’s biopolitical logic, including the continued relevance of sovereign power in biopolitical nature–society relations.

Link – Climate Change

The aff’s method of solving climate change re-entrenches capitalist systems as well as authoritarian governance – empirics prove that their managerialism leads to the domination of human and nonhuman Others

Luke 09

– Dept. of PoliSci @ Virginia Tech (Timothy, 9/2/09-9/6/09, “An Emergent Mangle of Practice: Global Climate

Change as Vernacular Geoengineering”, p. 2-3, Social Science Research Network, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1450783&download=yes)

In view of today's ominous climate change trends, however, there now are many experts and interests at work trying to build some consensus around what "must be done."

Much of the conflict here is no longer over "whether or not," but rather what must be done by whom, where, when, what, and how? Individuals and/or groups; states and/or societies; bureaucratic regulators and/or market mechanisms, manufacturers plus networks of consumers, designers, users, scientific experts and/or ordinary laypersons: the complexity of the players to be invited to address the problems further complicates the solutions

. Yet. the ruse of rationality still positions the policy problematic as one of

pure geoengineering in order to occlude, as capitalist systems of exchange as well as authoritarian modes of governance

always have, the degree to which geoengineering implicitly but also inescapably, is much more, namely, socioengineering, ethnoengineering or archiengineering (Luke, 2005a). That is, any new twists in the modes of dominating nature necessarily imply fresh approaches to dominating men and women by reorganizing society, reconfiguring culture or reconstituting rulership. These two dynamics cannot be divided, and each presumes the other.

Whether one looks at Rousseau, Smith, Marx or

Polanyi, one insight about social power seems constant: a few men and women do tend to dominate most other human and nonhuman beings by perfecting the domination of nature

(Luke, forthcoming 2010).

Link – Deforestation

The aff only values forests insofar as their instrumental use for humanity – forest protection is controlled by experts who exercise their professional-technical knowledge in order to sustain the system that cause their impact in the first place

Luke 96

– Department of PoliSci @ Virginia Tech (Timothy W., “Generating Green Governmentality: A Cultural Critique of

Environmental Studies as a Power/Knowledge Formation”, p. 8-9, http://www.cddc.vt.edu/tim/tims/Tim514a.PDF)

This infrastructuralization of the environment can be illustrated in

Colorado State's

Forest Science recruitment brochure, which casts its knowledge as being dedicated to "Valuing our Forests and

Natural Resources"

both inside the classroom and outside in the mountains.

To imagine what forests are and do, the Department or Forest Science asks: Have you ever stopped to think how the health of our forests affects your own life.' without forests, there would be no wood for homes or fiber for countless paper products we use every day. forests also help maintain watersheds and keep our air tree of harmful pollutants. And, tor centuries, forests have been a very special place where people go to see and enjoy nature.

Whether you live in a city or small town, forests impact your lite in many ways.23

Forests are represented as open infrastructural networks, or quasi-subjective agencies whose health, growth, and location are quasi-objective structures needed by human beings as building materials, watershed maintenance mechanisms, air cleaners, or human enjoyment zones.

Moreover, the environmental infrastructure of our forests "need people who can understand and manage them" but, as Colorado State claims, " only with well-educated professionals can we ensure that our resources will be available for the benefit of present and future generations.

"24 So to rightly manage this vital green infrastructure it provides four concentrations of discursive understanding and applied practice—forest biology, forest fire science, forest management, and forest-business—to prepare environmental professionals. Learning about forests "from actual experience, not just from textbooks," Forest Science pledges comprehensive training as forest biology focuses "on the biology of trees and the ecology of forest;" forest fire science examines "fire as a forest management tool" as students "learn how prescribed fire can be used to enhance wildlife habitat, prepare seedbeds, control forest insects and disease, and reduce fuel hazards;" forest management concentrates on how state and commercial agencies exploit "forest productivity, economics, and conservation, along with the latest in computer- based management tools;" and, forest-business teaches business applications "if you seek employment with a private timber company, or you wish to develop your own forest business."25 Colorado State's

Forest Science Program

, therefore, promises to open doors to professional-technical jobs that oversee the technoscientific nexus of discipline/sovereignty/territoriality in managing forest resources as students either are able "to qualify as a professional forester and work with traditional national and international resource organizations" or find avenues that "pursue employment in fields such as land use planning, youth agency administration, natural resource communications, mining reclamation, business, law enforcement, or conservation biology."26 Indeed, forest science is a system of discursive truth production by which environmental professionals "learn to manage forests for maximum growth; to protect forests from fires and disease; and to conserve forest, soil, and water resources," because such knowing mediations of power do provide "a truly unique and rewarding opportunity"27 to exercise their professional-technical power/knowledge ecologically.

Link – Ecocritiques

Their attempt to protect the environment from modernity misses the boat – capitalism and technology have become an environment – they have already enveloped and besieged all life on Earth – this recognition is key to solving

Luke 99

– Department of PoliSci @ Virginia Tech (Timothy W., 1999, “Placing Ecocritique in Context: Technology,

Democracy and Capitalism as Environment”, p. 1-3, http://www.cddc.vt.edu/tim/tims/Tim653.PDF)

Many of

the most important

political debates

in this generation center upon working through the practical implications

in a handful of discursive dualisms: Nature/Society, Ecology/Economy,

Environment/Organism.

With each couplet, ongoing arguments contest the terms themselves: where one stops and the other starts, how the first limits the second, why each cannot exist without the other, what directives in the first guide the second, when the latter endangers the former are all questions sustaining innumerable intellectual exchanges. Because very little here is obvious as such, these terms are invested with new significance by every

individual or group that deploys them as meaningful constructs in environmental analysis. The result of so much pushing and pulling against the values and practices implied by these discursive oppositions is a vast body of ecocriticism.

Responding to the implications of these evergreen dualisms, in turn, produces many variants of "ecocritique," which articulate their visions of right conduct for individuals, how communities might safeguard their environments or why progress never comes to pass. In this context, many ecocritiques remain stuck in modernist ruts, assuming an operational terrain in which humans intervene in their natural environments in ways

—either intended or unanticipated— that turn out to be disastrous

. Thus, technology, democracy, and capitalism are cast as anthropogenic forces that impinge, with deleterious effects, on the Earth’s

theogenic, or, at least, autogenic environments.

Whether they are nature laments or anti-industrial polemics, ecocritiques rarely reposition their analyses outside of modernity’s constantly changing contexts.

Why not reverse some of these rhetorical relations? Perhaps technology, democracy, and capitalism are now coevolving into forces that have many effects

, some positive and some negative, including the fabrication of enduring anthropogenic environments.

Instead of being seen as factors intruding upon the environment, their joint interaction effects can be seen as an environment in itself.

If technology, democracy, and capitalism are recast as part and parcel of our environment, then their influence could be much greater and far different than what is attributed to them by other styles of ecocritique. Recognizing how the ensemble of technology/democracy/capitalism now exerts environing effects on a global scale and at a local level almost everywhere forces one to concede how thoroughly these social formations have become environmental

in dimension and duration. Industrial production and by-production, popular democratization and structural undemocratization, market success and market failure all coexist as dense networks of interaction and fixed grids of inaction.

Their net effects acquire a naturalized momentum and scope, turning them into an environment.

As Beck (1992) notes, modernization must become reflexive at this juncture: a reality that has been reaffirmed implicitly by many environmental movements

of the past generation.

The fusion of conflict studies, environmental policy, and cultural change in some quarters of the academy implicitly endorses Beck's vision of

"the risk society." That is, "the social production of wealth is systematically accompanied by the social production of risks." and, as a result, "the problems and conflicts relating to distribution in a society of scarcity overlap with the problems and conflicts that arise from the production, definition, and distribution of techno-scientifically produced risks" (Beck, 1992: 19).

Modernization is forcing many agencies and structures, to become reflexive, because it is making, and it already has remade technology/democracy/capitalism into an environment.

While the classical narratives of rationalization underpinning the modernization project presume greater command, control, communication, and intelligence will come from applying more rationality to life, the experiences of living amidst past, ongoing, and planned exercises of rationalization actually find us living with many consequences beyond anyone's command, control, communication or intelligence.

In other words, the growing calculability of

instrumental rationality also brings along with it new measures of incalculability — unintended and unanticipated — out of instrumental irrationality.

Link – Ecotourism

Ecotourism turns nature into a spectacle for humanity – it has to be carefully managed through elitist knowledge production in order to maximize its recreational value - this legitimizes authoritarianism in the name of expertise

Luke 96



Schools of environmental studies also must prepare their students for more tertiary uses of

Nature as recreational resources.

As the USDA says about its managed public lands, the natural environment is "a land of many uses," and mass tourism, commercial recreation, or park administration all require special knowledges end powers to be conducted successfully.

Instead of appraising Nature's resources as industrial production resource reserves, recreationist managerialism frames them as resource preserves for recurring consumption as positional goods, scenic assets, or leisure sites.

The entire idea behind national parks or protected areas is to park certain unique sites or particular undeveloped domains beyond the continuous turnover of industrial exploitation for primary products or agricultural produce. Yet, the recreational pursuits of getting to, using, and appreciating such ecological assets are mass produced through highly organized sets of practices.

Consequently, recreationist managerialism "develops expertise in managing public lands and waters

and in providing quality outdoor recreation experiences to their visitors."*' As Colorado State University's Department of Natural Resource Recreation and Tourism puts it, "there is an exciting trend to establish park and outdoor recreation programs worldwide."** So this graduate program moves beyond undergraduate studies of "recreationists and tourists" to examine other publics,

like "concessionaires, private land owners, policy-makers, agency personnel, communities, and special interest groups," which need to be managed as part of providing "quality outdoor recreation experiences" to visitors of parks and protected areas.** This focus upon "the human dimensions of natural resources" in recreationist management

, in turn, permits this disciplinary unit to tout its

Human

Resources Survey

Research Lab to prospective enrollees,

assuring them that this "state of the art telephone survey lab helps to develop skills in measuring preferences, perceptions, and behaviors among outdoor recreationists."*°

Armed with this sort of knowledge about recreationist management, graduates are assured secure professional placement with some power center

because the program "is oriented to employment with federal and state agencies, counties, and municipalities."1' Beyond the recreationist management functions of governmental resource management agencies, this graduate program also underscores a U.S. Department of Commerce study that forecasts tourism will be the world's largest industry by 2000. Hence, prospective students are assured how easily recreationist managerial knowledge can be pitched to "that sector of the tourism industry that is dependent on natural resources

: park and recreation concessionaires, adventure and tour guide companies, private campgrounds and hunting/fishing preserves, destination resorts, ecotourism establishments, and tourism development boards and advertising companies"*1 to embed green governmentality into private sector pursuits.

The obligation to supervise human recreationists rightly in "the conduct of their conduct" within the natural environments is

aptly summarized by Yale's Dean Cohon, who characterizes environmental studies as almost another mode of police work, or "helping to protect and manage the integrity and survival of natural systems and human health globally," because recreationist management, like all environmental studies, needs skilled people "who are focused, informed, and dedicated to leading

."'1 Discourses of green governmentality give dedicated students the right disciplinary paths for leading others to the right kind of information produced by professional schools of the environment. Their power/knowledge foci, in turn, authorize and legitimate the acts taken by "a corps of professionals" whose policing of anthropogenic environmental crises will bring about more positive recreational experiences.

Link – Environmental Protection

Discourse of environmental protection renders nature in commodities, legitimating capitalist consumption

Luke 97



The actions of the Worldwatch Institute, the Nature Conservancy, the World Wildlife Fund, and the Sierra Club are frameworks within which a new habitus with its own environmentalized relations of production and consumption has come alive by guarding habitat as consumer goods.

As Baudrillard observes, "The great signified, the great referent Nature is dead, replaced by environment, which simultaneously designates and designs its death and the restoration of nature as simulation model. . . . We enter a social environment of synthesis in which a total abstract communication and an immanent manipu- lation no longer leave any point exterior to the system."89

Rendering air, water, biodiversity, habitat, and nature into complex new systems of rare goods in the name of environmental protection, and then regulating the social consumption of them through ecological activism, shows how mainstream environmentalists can serve as agents of social control in the global economy by reimagining the in- tractable equations of (un) wise (ab) use along consummational rather than consumptive lines. Putting Earth first establishes ecological capital as the ultimate basis of life.

Infrastructuralizing nature renders everything on Earth, or "humanity's home," into capital - land, labor, animals, plants, air, water, genes, ecosystems - allowing mainstream environmentalism to operate as a very special kind of "home economics" to manage humanity's indoors and outdoors household accounts.

Household consumption ironically is always home consumption, because human economics rests upon terrestrial ecologies. The roots of ecology and economics intertwine in sustainability and development, revealing their double significance.

Sustainably managing the planet is the same thing as reproducing terrestrial stocks of infrastructorialized green capital.

Whether or not environmentalists

prevent the unwise abuse or promote wise use of natural resources is immaterial; everything they do optimize s the sign value of green goods and revalorize s global capital as environmentalized sites, stocks, and spaces

- an outcome that every Worldwatch Institute State of the World report or Sierra Club ecotour confirms.

Likewise, the scarcity measures of

Na- ture Conservancy or World Wildlife Fund scare campaigns underscore how everything now has a price, including wildlife preservation or ecological degradation, which global markets will mark and meet in their (un) wise (ab) use of environmentalized resources. Foucault's views on governmentality fit these activities.

State power is not "an entity which was developed above individuals, ignoring what they are and even their very existence," because its power/knowledge has indeed evolved "as a very sophisticated structure, in which individuals can be integrated, under one condition: that this individuality would be shaped in a new form, and submitted to a set of very specific patterns."90

Producing discourses of ecological living, articulating designs of sustainable development, and propagating definitions of environmental literacy

for contemporary individuals simply adds new twists to the "very specific patterns" by which the state formation constitutes "a modern matrix of individualiza- tion"91 out of environmental justice.

The emergent regime of green biopower, in turn, operates through ethical systems of identity as much as it does the policy directives of governmental bureaus within any discretely bordered territory.

Ecology resonates with effects from "one of the great innovations in the techniques of power in the eighteenth century"; namely, "the emergence of 'population' as an economic and political problem."92 Once demography emerges as a science of statist administration, its statistical attitudes diffuse into the quantitative surveillance of nature, or Earth environments and their nonhuman inhabitants, as well as the study of culture, or society and its human members. In ecogra- phies written by worldwatchers, technoscientific experts can steer effects exerted from their astropanopticons through nature conservancies, wildlife funds, and sierra clubs.93

Government, in the mediations of superpowered statist ecology, preoccupies itself with "the conduct of conduct," particularly in contemporary consumerism's "buying of buying" or "purchasing of purchasing." Habitus is habitat, as any good product semanticist or psychodemographer knows all too well.

Environments

- both the yet-to-be-built in "nature" or the already-built in "society" - are spaces under police supervision, expert management, risk avoidance, or technocratic control

.94 The ethical concerns of family, community, and nation continue to guide how conduct is to be conducted; yet,

at this juncture, the activities of the Worldwatch Institute, the Nature Conservancy, the World Wildlife Fund, and the Sierra Club show how

"the environment" increasingly serves as another decisive ground for normalizing each individual's behavior through consumerism.

Habitus is habitat, but habitat also defines, delimits, and directs habitus. Conservationist ethics, resource managerialism, and green rhetorics congeal as an unusually cohesive power/knowledge formation, whose (un) wise (ab) use operates smoothly within this new order of social normalization.

Link – Fossil Fuels

The aff’s privilege of short-term economic gains over the environment justifies the on-going destruction of the environment in the name of economic nationalism – prefer our evidence because fossil fuel lobbies influence theirs

Luke 2k

– Department of PoliSci @ Virginia Tech (Timothy W., “A Rough Road Out of Rio: The Right-Wing Reaction in the

United States Against Global Environmentalism”, p. 21-22, http://www.cddc.vt.edu/tim/tims/Tim599.PDF)

The efforts to reduce greenhouse gases, losses of biodiversity, and ozone destroying compounds can be dismissed as being based upon shoddy science and/or devious diplomacy

: both of which certainly seem aimed at curtailing American sovereignty. Consequently, any additional attempts to impose unwanted environmental regulations must be

, according to America's new anti-globalists, held before the demanding bar of an enlightened nationalism. The purposes of economic and environmental policy

in the United

States are not "to proper [hu]mankind--but Americans first

: our workers, farmers, businessmen, manufacturers. And what is good for the Global Economy is not automatically good for

America

" (Buchanan, 1998: 284).

Grassroots opposition such as this to major international agreements on the environment also affects many higher level policy deliberations.

Before the U.S. delegation departed to the conference on the global climate in Kyoto during 1997, the Senate unanimously passed the Byrd-Hagel resolution, which states the

United States must not sign any agreement on greenhouse gas emissions unless it stipulates specific commensurate reductions for developing nations

. Sponsored by Senators Robert Byrd (D) of West

Virginia and Chuck Hagel (R) of Nebraska, this bipartisan resolution has influenced the debates and negotiations over the

December 1997 treaty at home and abroad

(Passacantando, 1998: C5). On one level, this resolution marks an intense level of lobbying by coal, gas, and oil interests in the

Unites States, who do not want their markets to shrink

until Mexico, India, China, and Brazil also agree to reduce their consumption of dirty fossil fuels.

Link – General

The aff’s discourse of environmental sustainability becomes distorted into a form of green geo-politics allowing the state to justify biopolitical managerialism

Luke 97

(Timothy Luke, Professor of Political Science @ Virginia Polytechnic Institute,

March 18-22, 1997 “The (Un)Wise (Ab)Use of Nature,” http://www.cddc.vt.edu/tim/tims/Tim528.htm)

A political, economic, and technical incitement to talk about ecology, environments, and Nature, first surfaced as the social project of

"environmentalism" during the 1960s in the United States, but it plainly has become far more pronounced in the 1990s. Not much of this takes the form of general theory, because most of its practices have been instead steered toward analysis, stock taking, and classification in quantitative, causal, and humanistic studies. Nonetheless

, one can follow Foucault by exploring how mainstream environmentalism in the United States operates as "a whole series of different tactics that combined in varying proportions the objective of disciplining the body and that of regulating populations.

"3

The project of "sustainability,"

whether one speaks of sustainable development, growth or use in relation to Earth's ecologies, embodies this new responsibility for the life processes in the American state's rationalized harmonization of political economy with global ecology as a form of green geo-politics.

These interconnections become even more intriguing in the aftermath of the Cold War.

Having won the

long twilight struggle against communist totalitarianism, the United States is governed by leaders who now see "Earth in the balance," arguing that global ecologies incarnate what is best and worst in the human spirit. On the one hand, economists, industrialists, and political leaders increasingly tend to represent the strategic terrain of the post-1991 world system as one on which all nations must compete ruthlessly to control the future development of the world economy by developing new technologies, dominating more markets, and exploiting every national economic asset.

However, the phenomenon of "failed states,"

ranging from basket cases like Rwanda, Somalia or Angola to crippled entities like

Ukraine, Afghanistan or Kazakhstan, often is attributed to the severe environmental frictions associated with the (un)wise (ab)use of Nature by ineffective strategies for creating economic growth.4

Consequently, environmental protection issues

-ranging from resource conservation to sustainable development to ecosystem restoration

-are getting greater consideration

in the name of creating jobs, maintaining growth, or advancing technological development.

Taking "ecology" into account

, then, creates discourses on "the environment" that derive not only from morality, but from rationality as well.

As humanity has faced "the limits of growth" and heard "the population bomb" ticking away, ecologies and environments became something more than what one must judge morally; they became things that state must administer. Ecology has evolved into "a public potential; it called for management procedures; it had to be taken charge of by analytical discourses," as it was recognized in its environmentalized manifestations to be "a police matter"--"not the repression of disorder, but an ordered maximization of collective and individual forces."

Link – Management

Managing resources ensures exploitation and the constant expansion of capital to the point of ecological degradation

Luke 03 (

Timothy Luke, Professor of Political Science @ Virginia Polytechnic Institute, 2003, Aurora

Online, “Eco-Managerialism: Environmental Studies as a Power/Knowledge Formation,” http://aurora.icaap.org/index.php/aurora/article/view/79/91)

Resource managerialism can be read as the essence of today's enviro-mentality.

While voices in favour of conservation can be found in Europe early in the 19th century, there is a self-reflexive establishment of this stance in the United States in the late 19th century. From the 1880's to the 1920's, one saw the closing of the western frontier. And whether one looks at John Muir's preservationist programs or Gifford Pinchot's conservationist code, there is a spreading awareness of modern industry's power to deplete nature's stock of raw materials, which sparks widespread worries about the need to find systems for conserving their supply

from such unchecked exploitation.

Consequently, nature's stocks of materials are rendered down to resources, and the presumptions of resourcification become conceptually and operationally well entrenched in conservationist philosophies

.

The fundamental premises of resource managerialism in many ways have not changed over the past century. At best, this code of practice has

only become more formalized in many governments' applications and legal interpretations.

Working with the managerial vision

of the second industrial revolution, which tended to empower technical experts

like engineers or scientists, who had gotten their degrees from agricultural schools, mining schools, technology schools like the one I work at, Virginia Polytechnic Institute, which prides itself as they say on producing the worker bees of industry. Or, on the shop floor and professional managers, one found corporate executives and financial officers

in the main office, who are of course trained in business schools. Put together, resource managerialism casts corporate administrative frameworks over nature in order to find the supplies needed to feed the economy and provision society through national and international markets.

As scientific forestry, range management, and mineral extraction took hold in the U.S. during this era, an ethos of battling scarcity guided professional training, corporate profit making, and government policy. As a result, the operational agendas of what was called sustained yield were what directed the resource managerialism

of the 20th century.

In reviewing the enabling legislation of key federal agencies, one quickly discovers that the values and practices of resourcification anchor their institutional missions in a sustained yield philosophy.

As Cortner and

Moote observe, the statutory mandates for both the Forest Service, the Multiple Use Sustained Yield Act, and the National Forest Management Act, and the Bureau of Land Management, the

Federal Land Policy and Management Act, for example, specifically direct these agencies to employ a multiple use sustained yield approach to resource management. More often than not, however, these agencies adjusted their multiple use concept to correspond to their primary production objective

-- timber in the case of the Forest Service, grazing in terms of the Bureau of Land Management. Although sustained help is not specifically mentioned in the legislated mandate of agencies such as the National Parks Service or the Bureau of Reclamation, they too have traditionally managed for maximum sustained yield of a single resource - visitor use in the case of the parks, water supply in the case of water resources.

So the ethos of resourcification imagined nature as a vast input/output system. The mission statements of sustained yield pushed natural resource management towards realizing the maximum maintainable output up to or past even the point where one reached ecological collapse, which in turn of course caused wide-spread ecological degradation, which leads to the project of rehabilitation managerialism.

The acknowledgement of ecological degradation is not tremendously difficult. Indeed, the will to manage environments arises from this wide-spread recognition back in the 19th century. One obvious outcome of building and then living around the satanic mills of modern industrial capitalism was pollution of the air, water, and land. As it continued and spread, the health of humans, plants, and wildlife obviously suffered, while soils and waters were poisoned. Yet the imperatives of economic growth typically drove these processes of degradation until markets fell, technologies changed, or the ecosystem collapsed. At that juncture, business and government leaders, working at the local, regional, and national level, were faced with hard choices about either relocating people and settlements in industry to start these cycles of degradation anew, or maybe rehabilitating those existing economic and environmental assets to revitalize their resource extractive or commodity producing potential. Rehabilitation management then is about keeping production going in one way or another. Agricultural lands that once produced wheat might be turned to dairy production or low-end fibre outputs. Polluted water courses, poisoned soils, and poverty-stricken workers can all be remobilized in environmental rehabilitation schemes to revive aquatic ecologies, renew soil productivity, and replenish bank accounts. The engagements of rehabilitation management are to find a commodifiable or at least a valuable possibility in the brown fields of agricultural excess and industrial exhaustion. Even after decades of abuse, there are useful possibilities that always lie dormant in slag heaps, derelict factories, overused soil, polluted waterways, and rust belt towns. Management must search for and then implement strategies for their rehabilitation. Such operations can shift agricultural uses, refocus industrial practices, turn lands into eco-preserves, and retrain workers. But the goals here are not return ecosystems to some pristine natural state. On the contrary, its agendas are those of sustaining the yields of production. Of course, what will be yielded and at what levels it is sustained and for which environmental ends all remains to be determined. On the one hand, the motives of rehabilitation management are quite rational, because these moves delay or even cancel the need to sacrifice other lands, air, and soil preserves at other sites. Thus nature is perhaps protected elsewhere or at large by renewing industrial brown fields in agriculturalized domains for some ongoing project of industrial growth. On the other hand, rehabilitation managerialism may only shift the loci and the foci of damage, rehabilitating eco-systemic degradation caused in one commodity chain, while simply redirecting the inhabitants of these sites to suffer new

, albeit perhaps more regulated and rational levels, of

environmental contamination in other commodity chains.

If one doesn't want to rehabilitate what has been ruined, one can then perhaps get into restoring it.

Link – Marine Protected Areas

Marine protected areas begin with the question of how they will benefit humans, enforcing a mindset of control over nature

Orton 99

(David Orton, coordinator of the Green Web environmental research group, Earth First!

Journal Vol.20 No.2, December 1999, “Marine Protected Areas: A Human-Centric Concept,” http://www.ecospherics.net/pages/mpa.htm)

The proposal to establish Marine Protected Areas (MPAs), made by the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO), under the new 1996 Oceans Act needs to apply deep ecology to an actual environmental issue.

The literature that I have seen on MPAs seems to appeal to human economic self-interest,

such as how fishers can benefit. Yet fishers seem to feel that they have some proprietary lock on the oceans from which the public is excluded. It seems a stupid strategy to try and mollify fishers while trying to establish MPAs.

In order to create fully protected, extensive ocean sanctuaries which are not undercut by fishing or fossil fuel interests there must be a new social base

, including more than just fisher people.

Conservation must raise an all-species perspective and oppose anthropocentrism. The primary issue in any MPA discussion should be philosophical, trying to change how humans look at the oceans and their life forms. Choices in life are driven by philosophy, although few of us think about how our actions and philosophies are related. Those who support deep ecology believe that there has to be a fundamental change in consciousness of how humans relate to the natural world. This requires a change from an anthropocentric to an ecocentric perspective-seeing humans as a species with no superior status. All other species have a right to exist, irrespective of their usefulness to the human species. Humans cannot presume dominance over all non-human species of life and see nature as a resource for our utilization. We have to extend the ethical circle outwards, towards the oceans and the Earth. All life is one.

The true conservationist

, or Earth-citizen, must be prepared to oppose his/her own self-interest for the benefit of other creatures and their habitats.

The justification for MPAs should not be one of selfinterest. Protection of marine areas should not be based on which (human) shareholders shout the loudest in opposition. A fundamental question about MPAs is whether to appeal to economic interests or to rise above this, by promoting overall ecological and social interests.

A Marine Protected Area must mean full ecological protection from human exploitive interests, otherwise the term itself becomes debased.

Degrees of restriction of the human use of an oceans area could be encompassed, using another term such as Marine Regulated Area, rather than using, and debasing, the term "protected area." According to the Oceans Act,

MPAs rest on an assertion of ownership over the internal waters, the territorial sea and the exclusive economic zone.

In a press release December 19, 1996, the federal fishing minister said the passage of the Oceans Act "reaffirms Canada's sovereign ocean rights..." Supporters of deep ecology believe no one can own the Earth, whether from a state, individual or collective point of view.

Asserted ownership is ultimately a convenient social fiction deriving from a human society bent on enforcing a claim of control over other creatures and the Earth itself.

The

Oceans Act is not based on deep ecology. According to this Act, Canada's Ocean Management Strategy (of which MPAs are a part) is to be based on support for the principles of sustainable development. This concept, which sanctifies continuous economic growth and consumerism, should not be accepted. We need to drastically scale back economic growth and consumerism not expand it. Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees, in their 1996 book Our Ecological Footprint, though presenting quite a human-centered perspective, point out that to live sustainably, we must ensure "that we use the essential products and processes of nature no more quickly than they can be renewed, and that we discharge wastes no more quickly than they can be absorbed." Moreover, they point out that if everyone on

Earth had the average Canadian or American lifestyle, then three planets would be needed for a sustainable lifestyle for the world's population.

The Oceans

Act uses the word "resource" to cover non-human creatures living in the oceans. The automatic assumption that nature is a resource for corporate and human use is an indication of our total alienation from the natural world. It implies a human- centered, utilitarian world view and that humans are somehow the pinnacle of evolution. The word "stakeholder" means anyone interested in MPAs, lumping together those who want to exploit the oceans with people who have ecological and social interests.

It makes no distinction between, say, inshore fishers who have a long term personal commitment to living off of the oceans, and oil and gas companies who pack up and move whenever richer fields are found. The concept seems to imply that out of the various competing interests, a lowest common denominator, general good will emerge.

Ultimately, we are all stakeholders in a planetary well-being sense, yet non-human stakeholders are not considered. In terms of MPAs, who has more at stake than the seals, the fish and the algae?

The

Oceans Act says that its legislation upholds existing treaty rights of aboriginal peoples as outlined in the Constitution Act of 1982, under section 35. Translated, this means that a MPA can be subject to exploitation by aboriginal peoples. This puts ecology subordinate to human society. The DFO seems to have replaced Parks

Canada as the leading federal agency in marine protection, yet it has been intimately concerned with promoting corporate exploitive interests in fisheries policies.

Put another way, the DFO does not question the assumption that marine ecology should serve the industrial capitalist economy. For Parks Canada, maintenance of ecological integrity was considered the first priority in park zoning and visitor use.

The nature of our capitalist society influences how we think about MPAs. I support protecting marine areas, but free of human exploitation. MPAs need to become a reflection of ecocentric thinking. The question is: Will MPAs be the beginning of a new

ecological way of preservation or a subterfuge for the continued industrial exploitation of the oceans using greenwashing?

A step in choosing marine areas to protect is to assess all the stakeholders. Humans are one group-those with a direct economic interest being only a sub-group. After all, the term protected area implies protection from humans. The other stakeholders, who usually remain voiceless at meetings, are the marine animals, plants and other organisms. Their interests have to be given more weight than human concerns. MPAs cannot be just minor setasides. We cannot have dead zones between them.

MPAs are not about creating wildlife reservations, because the nature of our society influences life inside these areas. Wider phenomena, like global warming, do not stop at

MPA boundaries. Therefore a new, global, marine vision is necessary. Why don't we set aside oceans giving them protected status and then have workshops and meetings about which small areas should be opened up for human exploitation

, of course, done sustainably?

Link – New Colonies

The creation of new habitable spaces for humans operates by assuming control over natural spaces

Luke 97

(Timothy W. Luke, department of political science at Virginia polytechnic institute,

March 18-22, 1997, “The (Un)Wise (Ab)use of Nature: Environmentalism as Globalized

Consumerism?” http://www.cddc.vt.edu/tim/tims/Tim528.htm mp)

To preserve the various ecologies of the planet on a global scale, as many environmental groups assert, the inhabitants of each human community must rethink the entire range of their economic and technological interconnections to their local habitats, as national discourses of green geo-politics and grey geo-economics illustrate, in terms of how they are meshed into the regional, national, and international exchange of goods and services. Beginning this strategic review immediately poses the question of protecting all existing concrete "bioregions" in first nature, or the larger biosphere of the planet, within which the ecologies of any and all human communities are rooted. Bioregions historically have constituted the particular spatial setting of human beings' social connections to specific lands, waters, plants, animals, peoples, and climates from which their communities culturally constitute meaningful places for themselves in the "first nature" of the natural biosphere. The "domination of nature" is not so much the total control of natural events in the environment as much as it is the willful disregard of such localized ecological conditions in building human settlements.38 The abstract "technoregions" constructed within the human fabrications of "second nature," or the always emergent technosphere of the planet, within which modernizing human communities are now mostly embedded, operate by virtue of environmental transactions that often are over, beyond, or outside of rough equilibria of their natural habitats. These transactions create new

anthropogenic ecological contexts, which typically generate an artificial hyperecology of an ultimately unsustainable type.39 A great deal of time and energy might be expended in core capitalist countries upon environmental regulations, resource surveys, ecological studies, and conservation policies, but these initiatives almost always are consumerist campaigns, aiming to reform the costs and regulate the benefits of these unsustainable flows of goods and services through the hyperecologies of second nature.40

Link – Pollution Reduction

Their attempt to remove pollution from the environment fails because pollution has become the environment – it is a byproduct of capitalist industrial activity – rejecting the aff’s view of pollution and our environment is key to solve

Luke 99

– Department of PoliSci @ Virginia Tech (Timothy W., 1999, “Placing Ecocritique in Context: Technology,

Democracy and Capitalism as Environment”, p. 15-16, http://www.cddc.vt.edu/tim/tims/Tim653.PDF)

As Smith suggests, toxic wastes are "a by-product of energy development, agriculture, and

most industrial activity," which now "are found throughout the environment

, in our air, water, and soil" (1995:

170). Every modern industrial economy creates these outputs as intrinsic parts of ordinary everyday life.

They are centered nowhere, but their circumference is everywhere. While, the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment believes that "there are major uncertainties on how much hazardous waste has been generated, the types and capacities of existing waste management facilities, the number of uncontrolled waste sites and their hazard levels, and on the health and environmental effects of hazardous waste releases" (1983: 13), the ubiquity, opacity, and complexity of hazardous waste indicate how choices made as technology/democracy/capitalism now work as environment. Toxic wastes are

simply

one of the most obvious anthropogenic qualities of humanity’s omnipolitan condition.

Like weather, water, and wildlife, waste is to be found everywhere in the planetary environment, making this omnipolitan by-product a new fundamental and long-lasting characteristic of the

Earth’s ecology as it is transformed by modern agricultural, industrial, and technological development

(National Academy of Engineering, 1989).

The mechanisms that place chemicals outside specific locales, boost their concentrations beyond permissible thresholds, raise exposures so intensively as to threaten health, and disperse effects indiscriminately across space and time are all human artifices -- technology/democracy/capitalism

. Some are intended and understood, most are unintended and not at all comprehended, but they now surround all human and nonhuman life forms as elemental qualities in their environment.

Link – Resource Conservation

The aff’s managing of resources imposes their own framework upon

Nature in order to supply the economy – this reduces Nature to a system of operations that can be destroyed and re-created in order to produce resources efficiently in a way to benefit people who live in the richest countries in the world at the expense of others

Luke 96



Resource managerialism can be read as a geo-power/eco-knowledge of modern governmentality.

While voices in favor of conservation can be found in Europe early in the nineteenth century, the real establishment of this stance comes in the United States with the Second Industrial Revolution from the 1880s through the 1920s and the closing of the Western Frontier in the 1890s." Whether one looks at John Muir's preservationist programs or Gifford Pinchot's conservationist codes, an awareness of modern industry's power to deplete natural resources, and hence the need for systems of conserving their exploitation, is well-established by the early 1900s. Over the past nine decades, the fundamental premises of resource managerialism

have not changed significantly. At best, this code of eco-knowledge only has become more formalized in bureaucratic applications and legal interpretations.

Keying off of the managerial logic of the

Second Industrial Revolution, which empowered technical experts, or engineers and scientists, on the shop floor and professional managers, or corporate executives and financial officers, in the main office, resource managerialism imposes corporate administrative frameworks upon Nature in order to supply the economy and provision society through centralized state guidance. These frameworks assume that the national economy

, like the interacting capitalist firm and household, must avoid both overproduction

(excessive resource use coupled with inadequate demand) and underproduction

(inefficient resource use coming with excessive demand) on the supply-side as well as overconsumption

(excessive resource exploitation coming with excessive demand) and underconsumption

(inefficient resource exploitation coupled with inadequate demand) on the demand side.

To even construct the managerial problem in this fashion, Nature is reduced— through the encirclement of space and matter by national as well as global economies—to a system of geo-power systems that can be dismantled, redesigned, and assembled anew on demand to produce "resources" efficiently and when and where needed in the modern marketplace.

As a cybernetic system of biophysical systems.

Nature's energies, materials, and sites are redefined by the eco-knowledges of resource managerialism as manageable resources for human beings to realize great material "goods" for sizeable numbers of some people, even though greater material and immaterial "bads" also might be inflicted upon even larger numbers of other people, who do not reside in or benefit from the advanced national economies that basically monopolize the use of world resources at a comparative handful of highly developed regional and municipal sites.

Echoing California-Berkeley's declaration that environmental studies boil down to mobilizing the biological, physical and social sciences to address the major social and political effects of current and future anthropogenic environmental problems, Yale's Dean Cohon tells would-be environmental studies enrollees that their professional power/knowledge will be crucially significant in the coming years: "Your role in helping to protect and manage the integrity and survival of natural systems and human health globally could not be more important. Since so much is now in human hands, people are needed, more than ever, who are focused, informed, and dedicated to learning."18

Link – Resource Extraction

Resource extraction turns nature into a collection of resources to be managed by technocratic elites

Luke 03



So the book of nature then remains for the most part a readerly text. Different human beings will observe its patterns differently; they will choose to accentuate some while deciding to ignore others. Consequently, nature's meanings always will be multiple and fixed in the process of articulating eco-managerialist discourses. In the United States, the initial professionalized efforts to resourcify nature began with the second industrial revolution

, and the original conservation movements that emerged over a century ago, as progressively minded managers founded schools of agriculture, schools of engineering, schools of forestry, schools of management, and schools of mining, to master nature and transform its materiality into goods and services

. By their lights, the entire planet was reduced through resourcifying assumptions into a complex system of inter-related natural resource systems, whose ecological processes in turn are left for certain human beings to operate efficiently or inefficiently as the would-be managers of a vast terrestrial infrastructure. Directed towards generating greater profit and power from the rational insertion of natural and artificial bodies into the machinery of global production, the discourses of resource management work continuously to redefine the earth's physical and social ecologies, as sites where environmental professionals can operate in many different open-ended projects of eco-system management.

The scripts of eco-system management imbedded in most approaches to environmental policy,

however, are rarely rendered articulate by the existing scientific and technological discourses that train experts to be experts

.

Still, a logic of resourcification is woven into the technocratic lessons that people must acquire in acquiring their expert credentials.

In particular, there are perhaps six practices that orient how work goes here. Because

I have a weakness for alliteration, I call them Resource Managerialism, Rehabilitation Managerialism, Restoration Managerialism,

Renewables Managerialism, Risk Managerialism, and Recreationist Managerialism.

Eco-managerialism turns nature into resources for capitalism – it ensures that people who don’t benefit from the extraction of these resources will continue to suffer and be oppressed

Luke 03



So to conclude, each of these wrinkles in the record of eco-managerialism should give its supporters pause.

The more adaptive and collaborative dimensions of eco-managerial practice suggest its advocates truly are seeking to develop some post extractive approach to ecosystem management that might respect the worth and value of the survival of nonhuman life in its environments, and indeed some are. Nonetheless, it would appear that the commitments of ecomanagerialism to sustainability maybe are not that far removed from older programs for sustained yield, espoused under classical industrial regimes

. Even rehabilitation and restoration managerialism may not be as much post extractive in their managerial stance, as much as they are instead proving to be a more attractive form of ecological exploitation. Therefore, the newer iterations of eco-managerialism may only kick into a new register, one in which a concern for environmental renewability or ecological restoration just opens new domains for the eco-managerialists to operate within.

To even construct the problem in this fashion, however, nature still must be reduced to the encirclement of space and matter in national as well as global economies - to a system of systems, where flows of material and energy can be dismantled, redesigned, and assembled anew to produce resources efficiently, when and where needed, in the modern marketplace.

As an essentially self contained system of biophysical systems, nature seen this way is energies, materials, in sites that are repositioned by eco-

managerialism as stocks of manageable resources. Human beings, supposedly all human beings, can realize great material goods for sizeable numbers of people if the eco-managerialists succeed

. Nonetheless, eco-managerialism fails miserably with regard to the political. Instead, its work ensures that greater material and immaterial bads will also be inflicted upon even larger numbers of other people, who do not reside in or benefit from the advanced national economies that basically have monopolized the use of the world's resources.

This continues because eco-managerialism lets those remarkable material benefits accrue at only a handful of highly developed regional municipal and national sites. Those who do not benefit, in turn are left living on one dollar or two dollars a day, not able, of course, at that rate of pay, to pay for eco-managerialism

. So I'll stop there.

Eco-managerialism constructs nature as a group of resources to be used to fuel the global economy – control of the environment allows us to capture and constrain nature

Luke 03



Professional technical experts

working on and off campus create disciplinary articulations of various knowledge to generate performative techniques of power over

, but also within and through, what is worked up as nature in the managerial structures of modern economies and societies. These institutionalized attempts to capture and contain the forces of nature underpin the strategies of eco-managerialism. Techno-scientific knowledge about the environment

, however, is and always has been evolving with

changing interpretive fashions, shifting political agendas

, developing scientific advances.

Such variations

, as Foucault asserts designate a will to knowledge that is anonymous, polymorphous, and susceptible to regular transformations, and determined by the play of identifiable dependencies.

What are some of these dependencies and perhaps some of these transformations? In this polymorphous combination of anonymous scientific environmental knowledge, with organized market and state power, as Foucault indicates, we find that it traverses and produces things

.

It needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through the whole social body,

much more than a negative instance, whose function is repression. Schools of environmental studies and colleges of natural resources often provide the networks in which the relations of this productive power set the categories of knowledge and the limits of professional practice through the training of eco-managerialism. In accord with the prevailing regimes of truth within science, academic centres

of environmental studies reproduce these bodies of practice and types of discourse, which in turn the executive personnel managing contemporary state and social institutions, what they regard as objective, valid, or useful, to facilitate economic growth

.

From these discourses, one can define, as Foucault suggests, the way in which individuals or groups represent words to themselves, utilize their forms and meanings, compose real discourse, reveal and conceal it in what they are thinking or saying, perhaps unknown to themselves, more or less than they wish, but in any case leaving massive verbal traces of those thoughts which must be deciphered and restored as far as possible in their representative vivacity. So given these tendencies, might we look at the workings of eco-managerialism? Where life, labour, and language can join in a discourse of environmental studies, one finds another formation of power knowledge which shows how man and his being can be concerned with the things he knows, and know the things that in positivity determine his mode of being in highly vocalized academic constructions of "the environment." Instead, the environment emerges in part as a historical artifact of expert management that is constructed by these kinds of scientific interventions.

And in this network of interventions, there is a simulation of spaces and intensification of resources and incitement of discoveries, and a formation of special knowledges that strengthen the control that can be linked to one another as the impericities of nature for academic environmental sciences and studies. And probably in many ways, the key impericity here I would say, is the process of what I call the resourcification of nature.

How does nature get turned into resources? The new impericities behind eco-managerialism more or less presumes that the role of nature is one of a rough and ready resourcification for the global economy and national society. That is, the earth must be re-imagined to be little more

than a standing reserve, a resource supply centre, a waste reception site. Once presented in this fashion, nature then provides human markets with many different environmental sites for the productive use of resourcified flows of energy, information, and matter, as well as the sinks, dumps, and wastelands for all of the by-products that commercial products leave behind. Nature then is always a political asset. Still, its fungiblization, its liquidification, its capitalization, and eco-managerialism cannot occur without the work of experts whose resourcifying activities prep it, produce it, and then provide it in the global marketplace.

The trick in natural resources or environmental affairs education is to appear to be conservationist, while moving in fact, many times, very fast to help fungiblize, liquefy, or capitalize natural resources for a more thorough, rapid, and perhaps intensive utilization.

Link – Satellites

The use of satellites to gain understanding of the ocean leads to strategic policing of the Earth from the astropanopticon

Luke 97



'Humanity stands at a defining moment in history. We are confronted with a perpetuation of disparities between and within nations, a worsening of poverty, hunger, ill health and illiteracy, and the continuing deterioration of the ecosystems on which we depend for our well-being. However, integration of environment and development concerns and greater attention to them will lead to the fulfillment of basic needs, improved living standards for all, better protected and managed ecosystems and a safer, more prosperous future. No nation can achieve this on its own; but together we can - in a global partnership for sustainable development.'30 Plainly, the Preamble to Agenda 21

could as easily be named the Terraforming Compact inasmuch as its basic sentiments sum up "humanity's" managerial imperatives in the Earth's infrastructuralization, integrating environmental and developmental systems in "global partnership" to better protect all ecosystems and improve living standards for all through technoscientic terraforming.

Under this terraforming horizon, what seems little more than an a pious aside in Agenda 21, in fact, reveals a great deal more. When this document would have us recognize "the integral and interdependent Nature of the Earth

," it emphasizes how the Earth is "our home."

31 Terraforming, then, is a form of globalized "home building," whose processes and progress should be monitored from two sets of now commonly-denominated books: the registers of oikonomia as well as the ledgers of oikologos.

The infrastructuralization of the Earth reimagines it as a rational responsive household in which economically action commodifies everything, utilizes anything, wastes nothing, blending the natural and the social into a single but vast set of household accounts whose performativities must constantly weigh consumption against production

at every level of analysis from suburbia to the stratosphere in balancing the terrestrial budgets of ecological modernization. The infrastructuralization of Nature through environmentalizing movements and discourses propels contemporary societies and economies beyond the autogenic giveness of Nature into terraformative anthropogenesis

, dissolving the formal boundaries between inside/outside, Nature/Culture, or earth/economy. As Baudrillard observes, "it implies practical computation and conceptualization on the basis of a total abstraction, the notion of a world no longer given but instead produced--mastered, manipulated, inventoried, controlled: a world, in short, that has to be constructed."32 The workings of "the environment" as a concept now bring many contemporary terraforming efforts to rescue the Earth's ecology back to the sources of its original meanings. To note this ironic conjunction does not uncover some timeless semantic essence; it merely reaccentuates aspects in the term's origins that accompany it from its beginnings into the present. As a word, environment is brought into English from Old French, and in both languages "an environment" is a state of being produced by the verb "environ." And, environing as a verb marks a type of strategic action, or activities associated with encircling, enclosing, encompassing or enveloping. Environing, then, is the physical activity of surrounding, circumscribing, or ringing around something or someone. Its first uses denote stationing guards, thronging with hostile intent, or standing watch over a place or person. To environ a site or a subject is to beset, beleaguer or besiege. Consequently, an environment--either as the means of these activities or the product of such actions--should be treated in a far more liberal fashion.

An environmental act, even though the connotations of most contemporary greenspeak suggests otherwise, is a disciplinary move.

33

Environmentalism in these terms strategically polices space in order to encircle sites and subjects captured within these enveloping maneuvers, guarding them, standing watch over them, or even besieging them.

And, each of these actions aptly express the terraforming programs of sustainable development.

Seen from the astropanopticon, Earth is enveloped in the managerial designs of global commerce, which environmentalize once wild Nature as now controllable ecosystems. Terraforming the wild biophysical excesses and unoptimized geophysical wastes of the

Earth necessitates the mobilization of a worldwatch to maintain nature conservancies and husband the worldwide funds of wildlife.

Of course, Earth must be put first; the fully rational potentials of second nature's terraformations can be neither fabricated nor administered unless and until earth first is infrastructuralized.34 This is our time's Copernican revolution: the anthropogenic demands of terraforming require a biocentric worldview in which the alienated objectivity of natural subjectivity resurfaces objectively in managerial theory and practice as "ecosystem" and

"resource base" in "the environment."

Terraforming the Earth environmentalizes a once wild piece of the cosmos, domesticating it as "humanity's home" or "our environment." From narratives of world pandemics, global warming, or planetary pollution, global governance from the astropanopticon now runs its risk analyses and threat scenarios to protect Mother Earth from home-grown and foreign threats, as the latest security panics over asteroid impacts or X-File extraterrestrials in the United States express in the domains of popular culture.

Whether it is space locusts from Independence Day or space rocks snuffing out Dallas in Asteroid, new security threats

are casting their shadows over our homes, cities, and biomes for those thinking geo-economically in the astropanopticon.

From such sites of supervision, environmentalists see from above and from without, like the NASA-eyed view of Earth from

Apollo spacecraft, through the enveloping astropanoptic designs of administratively controllable terraformed systems.

35 Encircled by enclosures of alarm, environments can be disassembled, recombined, and subjected to expert managers' disciplinary designs. Beset and beleaguered by these all-encompassing interventions, environments as ecosystems and terraformations can be redirected to fulfill the ends of new economic scripts, managerial directives or administrative writs.

36 How various environmentalists might embed different instrumental rationalities into the policing of ecosystems is an intriguing question, which will be explored below.

Link – Science/Tech

The idea that only a technical, scientific solution exists to environmental problems allows capitalism to continue to produce which re-entrenches environmental problems – it also papers over other, non-capitalist ways to solve the aff

Rice 07

- Research Associate at the School of Geography and Development @ the University of Arizona (Jennifer L., 9/25/07,

“Ecomanagerialism”, from the Encyclopedia of Environment and Society, Sage Knowledge, http://knowledge.sagepub.com/view/environment/n332.xml)

Coined by virginia tech political science professor Timothy Luke, eco-managerialism refers to a particular type of environmental management carried out by “professional-technical workers” who are trained in environmental science and policy schools at Western universities, which emphasize

“sound scientific and technical” solutions to environmental crises.

Specifically, Luke argues that specially trained environmental experts define their

managerial

goals in relation ecosystem “goods” and “services,” which necessitate a treatment of the

physical

environment

primarily in terms of natural resources.

This means that environmental managers

, though charged with the protection and conservation of the physical environment, also protect the dominant economic and political interests that surround those resources.

This notion of ecomanagerialism favors a capitalistic and technocratic approach to environmental management, where efficiency and economic development are the primary motivations for environmental policy

and management, rather than other

potential

solutions to environmental concerns, such as behavioral changes, economic restrictions, or alternative technologies. In essence, Luke's idea of ecomanagerialism attempts to acknowledge and understand how modern resource management has cast nature primarily as an economic and political “asset” that can only properly be managed by technical environmental experts. The physical environment, under a regime of ecomanagerialism, is valued far less for its preexisting ecological processes, than its function in the modern capitalist economy. Furthermore, the material and discursive practices of ecomanagerialism constitute a form of power that Luke refers to as “geopower,” where only ecomanagers are employed for resource management and to solve impending ecological crises. This requires that

the goals of environmental management employed by eco-managers are defined in terms of modernization,

where the average citizen is made to think that he or she cannot

fully

understand the complexities of the natural environment.

The basis of

ecomanagerialism lies in the discursive

transformation of ecological processes and systems into economic commodities

or natural resources. Luke claims that this occurs in the modern research university. Here, students learn to manage, manipulate, and control nature as “a sanding reserve

, a resource supply center, a waste reception site.” This is essential for making nature and the physical environmental legible and comprehendible to various policy-makers and engineers, but also makes the physical world politically relevant (in so far as it has economic and social services). Drawing on Foucault's notions of discourse, power, and knowledge, Luke claims that these eco-managers

, produced by schools such as Berkeley's Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management and the

Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, use nature to “legitimize many political projects”

aimed at facilitating or sustaining capital accumulation. This is done through the exercise of disciplinary forms of

geo-power in the modern capitalist economy held by a new class of experts, specialist, engineers, and planners. Similarly,

this practice often disguises the role of the capitalist economy in creating the very

environmental problems ecomangers are required to solve. Luke identifies three primary forms of eco-managerialism, including resource managerialism (where ecosystem services are protected and supplied for economic production), risk managerialism (which calculates and oversees the amount of destruction on natural systems to sustain a minimum level of economic and social health), and recreationist managerialism (which manages the natural environment for recreational consumption as a resource, such as public parks). Luke's critique of ecomanagerialism lies in its assertion that

only

“positivistic technical knowledges” can be used as a means to address environmental concerns.

This

often excludes socially and politically based solutions to environmental concerns, which might not necessarily accelerate and

facilitate capitalist accumulation. These practices not only

obscure the complex and

uneven power relations

inherent

in environmental management, but also the way in which eco-mangers inevitably reproduce themselves by

reproducing the environmental crisis they are expected to solve.

Ecomanagerialism is a self reproducing and expanding form of modern environmental management.

Link - State

Geopower is institutionalized – working within the state ensures that technical solutions will be the only acceptable option to manage the environment – their science is paid off

Luke 96



In turn, these educational operations now routinely produce professional-technical workers with the specific knowledge—as it has been scientifically validated—and the operational power—as it is institutionally constructed—to cope with "the environmental crisis" on what are believed to be sound scientific and technical grounds. Still, graduate teaching in schools of the environment has little room for other social objectives beyond the rationalizing performativity norms embedded at the core of the current economic regime.

To understand the norms used by this regulatory regime

, as Lyotard asserts, " the State

and/or company must abandon the idealist and humanist narratives of legitimation in order to justify the new goals: in the discourse of today's financial backers of research, the only credible goal is power. Scientists, technicians, and instruments are purchased not to find truth, but to augment power."

This chapter asks how specialized discourses about Nature, or "the environment," are constructed

by American university programs in graduate- level teaching and research by professional-technical experts as disciplinary articulations of "eco-knowledge" to generate performative disciplinary systems of

"geo-power"

over, but also within and through. Nature in the managerial structures of modern economies and societies. The critical project of Michel Foucault—particularly his account of how

discursively formed disciplines operate inside regimes of truth as systems of governmentality

—provides a basis for advancing this critical reinterpretation.

These

continuously institutionalized attempts to capture and contain the forces of Nature by operationally deploying advanced technologies, and thereby linking many of Nature's

apparently intrinsic structures and processes to strategies of highly rationalized environmental management as geo-power, develops out of

university-level

"environmental studies" as a strategic supplement to various modes of biopower defined by existing academic "human studies" in promoting the growth of modern urban-industrial populations.3 Moreover, the rules of economic performativity now count far more materially

in these interventions than do those of ecological preservation.

Ecological control drives capitalistic consumption – every instance of state control allows for increased regulation of economic and ecological existence to generate new hierarchies

Luke 97

(Timothy W. Luke, department of political science at Virginia polytechnic institute,

March 18-22, 1997, “The (Un)Wise (Ab)use of Nature: Environmentalism as Globalized

Consumerism?” http://www.cddc.vt.edu/tim/tims/Tim528.htm mp)

Few consumers, however, are aware of the frightful significance lurking in the roots of their most prized economic labels. To consume, following from the Latin consumere, means to take up completely or lay hold of altogether. It also is to devour, waste, destroy, squander, or devastate. Consumers make away with food, drink, land, capital, or wealth, wearing out by use or spending without heed. Consumers exhaust exchangeable value or devour useful goods. Consumers counterbalance producers, or those who, in keeping with the Latin producere, lead, bring forth, extend or promote things. Producement leads to consumptiveness, the consumptuous follow from the producent. What has been brought forth must be taken up: production presumes consumption, and consumption assumes production. As a result of this collaboration, Horkheimer notes that for all their activity men are becoming more passive; for all their power over nature they are becoming more powerless in relation to society and themselves.

Society acts upon the masses in their fragmented state, which is exactly the state dictators dream of.

'The isolated individual, the pure subject of self-preservation,' says Adorno, 'embodies the innermost principle of society, but does so in unqualified contrast to society. The elements that are united in him, the elements that clash in him-his 'properties'--are simultaneously elements of the social whole.47 Starting first in the affluent upper-class core and middle-class suburbs of the major industrial cities and then spreading unequally at various rates of speed into more marginal market zones in the inner-city ethnic neighborhoods, racial ghettos, small towns and rural areas in advanced capitalist states, the new consumerist forms of personality and society emerged on the diverse terrains of corporate technoregions from within the bioregional wreckage of the pre-capitalist and bourgeois social orders

.

Whether it is defined as

"Americanization," "development," "modernization," or "progress," the Second Industrial

Revolution granted to the managers of corporate capital and the state power to decide the

ground rules of a new ecology.

48

They planned what particular material packages and behavioral scripts could be produced and provided in their various technoregions along a

multiple spectra of quality and quantity-graded and limited-quantity alternatives to the masses of consumers.

Consumers simply exercise their "free choice" among many buying alternatives sourced through corporate hyperecology. In turn, individuals would not look beyond these packaged material alternatives or back to more organically-grounded bio-regions for more natural options. Hyperecologies deliver the commodified need-satisfactions required to fulfill individual need-definitions as each consumer might have imagined them.

Massed consumption by the consuming masses is brute energy, information, and matter consumption as corporations and technoscience roughly organize it

.

Through this developmental path, the individual personality becomes an integral part of the collective means of production, and the modern family becomes yet another service delivery node in the hyperecologies of this global fast capitalism culture.

This circuit of economic reproduction expresses the essential logic of "consummativity" that now anchors the transnational economic system. Instead of maintaining the irreducible tension between the

"public" and "private" spheres that liberal economic and legal theory hold to be true for the individual contingency of rational living, the public and private have collapsed in circuits of identity all across the coding systems of corporate-managed consummativity, while the collective imperatives of the firm and/or the state are internalized by individuals as personalized lines of consumption in the family, firm and mass public.

49

Such linkages

, in turn, allow the state and firm to more closely regulate the economic and ecological existence of individuals inasmuch as most persons allegedly now desire the "needs" extended to them as the rewarding reified scripts of normal behavior by the media, mass education or professional experts and as the packages of mass-produced material goods made available by corporate manufacture and commerce

. Yet, these individual "needs" also are simultaneously required by the contemporary state and corporate firm. The aggregate possibility for economic growth and the specific quality of commodity claims, implied by these individual needs taken en masse, are the productive forces guaranteeing further development in today's transnational corporate system of capitalist production. The underlying codes of consummativity in corporate capitalism rarely manifest themselves openly. They are masked instead as an on-going democratic social and economic revolution "rooted in the democratic alibi of universals," like convenience, modernity, growth, utility or progress. As Baudrillard suggests, consummativity presents itself, ...as a function of human needs, and thus a universal empirical function. Objects, goods, services, all this "responds" to the universal motivations of the social and individual anthropos. On this basis one could even argue (the leitmotiv of the ideologues of consumption) that its function is to correct the social inequalities of a stratified society: confronting the hierarchy of power and social origins, there would be a democracy of leisure, of the expressway and the refrigerator.50 As inchoate mass demands for a better "standard of living" illustrate, corporate capital still can pose successfully as a revolutionary vanguard for those who want more bananas, autos, oranges, and washing machines out of life. Speaking on behalf of deprived consumers and challenging the apparently more oppressive stratification, inequality, and material deprivation of all other forms of precapitalist or anticapitalist society, fast capitalism offers hyperecological promises of complete economic democracy, social equality and material abundance through consumption. This pledge, in turn, is legitima ted by the expansive corporate collateral of new sparkling material goods, exciting cultural events, and satisfying social services. Under modern corporate capitalism, the plannable life course of all individuals qua "consumers" becomes a capital asset in that the consummative mobilization of production in any given market directly boosts the productivity, profitability and power of corporate capital's increasingly automated industries. Within the hyperecologies of second nature, corporate capital finds in consummativity ...the ultimate realization of the private individual as a productive force. The system of needs must wring liberty and pleasure from him as so many functional elements of the reproduction of the system of production and the relations of power that sanction it. It gives rise to these private functions according to the same principle of abstraction and radical "alienation" that was formerly (and still today) the case for his labor power. In this system, the "liberation" of needs, of consumers, of women, of the young, the body, etc., is always really the mobilization of needs, consumers, the body....It is never an explosive liberation, but a controlled emancipation, a mobilization whose end is competitive exploitation.51 As a result, the disciplinary managerial planning of corporate capital now can generate new hierarchies of status, power, and

privilege out of hyperecology's economic democracy of mass consumption by developing different "consumption communities" around distinct grades of material objects and professional services

.52

Creating and then serving even newer modes of desire in these symbolic communities perpetually drives the transnational market's hyperecologies of endless growth.

Allegedly competing capitalist firms increasingly produce very similar goods and services using very similar techniques and structures planned out on a massive scale to satisfy the desires of individual subjects that their "competing lines" of products now necessarily presume will exist. Subjectivity is encoded directly and indirectly in manufactured materiality. The increasingly homogenized object world in systems of corporate markets concomitantly is invested with rich, heterogeneous symbolic/imaginary differentiations in order to provide individual subjects with codes that they and others can distinguish the various relative status grades of community and personality across and within these consumption communities as marketing codes for the system of objects.

Link - Sustainability

“Sustainable development” is a lie –policies about sustainability are proposed based on whether or not they are economically beneficial,

NOT on whether or not they help the environment – the concept of sustainability as presented by the aff is a mask to continue the policing of political discourse by capitalist institutions – our reframing of sustainability solves the aff

Gridwood 07

- School of Accounting, Faculty of Economics and Business @ The University of Sydney (John, January

2007, “Rethinking sustainability, neo-liberalism and environmental managerialism in accounting”, p. 4-5, http://sydney.edu.au/business/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/56614/Rethinking_neoliberalism.pdf)

Using an analytics of government perspective foregrounds how

sustainability over recent decades

has emerged not as a concept with an "essentialist" meaning in policy making but as an important enabling and organizing concept

(Miller & O'Leary, 1994). It has been constituted by processes and practices and their historical circumstances such as systems of environmental political thought including 'sustainable development' or 'ecological modernization' (Dryzek, 1997).

Sustainability has mobilized dividing

practices of management regimes

that include and exclude truth claims of policy debates in political discourse by being deemed (un)sustainable solutions to environmental management problem solving. In political discourse on the environment,

sustainability is made a contingent nodal point of neo- liberal discursive formations in and

around which

, forms of

political discourse and their truth claims are articulated, voiced and dispersed

or marginalized and silenced

.

Corporate policy strategy, for example, is often the artifact of making green politics necessary for policy making, like 'environmental sustainability' and 'corporate social responsibility (CSR)' (Barry, 2004). Further, in contemporary political discourse on environmental management, sustainability is often staled in the form of policy statements of, amongst others, a government, political party or corporation connected to an ideal slate, like a green state (Eckersley, 1992), an ideal society, a set of principles, a social movement or a political theory of environmental practice (Eckersley, 1992). The making of the apocalyptic 'global ecological crisis' in political discourse on the future of planet earth, unless linked to slate responsibility and 'sustainability development' (Barry & Eckersley, 2005) is often marginalised and absolutely or partly denied or silenced in environmental management policy debates about political projects mobilized by a desire for sustainability variously defined (Dryzek, 1997). Thus, in these historical circumstances of political discourse on the environment and green politics

, sustainability emerges as an enabling concept linked

closely

to political discourses on 'sustainable development' and to a lesser extent, 'ecological modernization' (Dryzek, 1997) with an array of calculated and partisan meanings that reinforce specific truth claims.

On the other hand, a truth claim deemed to be unsustainable is an attempt to disable, weaken, marginalize and sometimes

silence an argument and rationale about environmental management. Given a multitude of possible perspectives and historical circumstances, a meaning of

sustainability

in a location with its milieu is usually associated with competing truth claims of political discourse on how to make the

future political security of economic terrains (the earth, nations, multinational corporations, SME enterprises, households)

manageable.

In this way

it is not understood as inherently or essentially

a

radical

enabling concept in the way it enables discursive struggle over policy truth claims but contingent on the political milieu of their historical circumstances. Hence

, sustainability needs to be understood in relation to the historical circumstances of

systems of dispersion and translation,

including global governmentality

(Lamer & Walters,

2004) and the political project of

governing international and other hybrid spaces

(Baxter & Chua, 2003).

In this context, sustainability enables the transgression of limits of dominant political regimes of truth about the desired progress and futures of parts (geopolitical terrains, the oceans and seas

, the atmosphere, etc.) or the whole curved, morphing surface of the earth. Here the earth is understood to be an historically contingent assembled artifact of a shifting ensemble of forces without any essential intrinsic nature.

Impacts

Impact – Biopower

Rejection of biopower is vital to solve extinction and prevent the most devastating wars – their impacts don’t matter at the point where they accept a state that can decide who gets to live and who doesn’t

Bernayer 90

– Professor of Philosophy @ Boston College (James, 1990, “Michael Foucault’s Force of Flight: Toward and

Ethics of Thought”, p. 141-2)

This capacity of power to conceal itself cannot cloak the tragedy of the implications contained in

Foucault's examination of its functioning.

While liberals have fought to extend rights and Marxists have denounced the injustice of capitalism, a political technology, acting in the interests of a better administration of life, has produced a politics that places human's "existence as a living being in question."

' The very period that proclaimed pride in having overthrown the tyranny of monarchy, that engaged in an endless clamor for reform, that is confident in the virtues of its humanistic faith this period's politics created a landscape dominated by history's bloodiest wars. What comparison is possible between a sovereigns authority to take a life and a power that, in the interest of protecting a societys quality of life, can plan, as well as develop the means for its implementation, a policy of mutually assured destruction. Such a policy is neither aberration of the fundamental principles of modern politics nor an abandonment of our age's humanism in favor of a more primitive right to kill; it is but the other side of a power that is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population. The bio-political project of administering and optimizing life closes its circle with the production of the Bomb. "The atomic situation is now at the end point of this process: the power to expose a whole population to death is the underside of a power to guarantee an individual's continued existence."

" The solace that Might have been expected from being able to gaze at scaffolds empty of the victims of a tyrant's vengeance has been stolen from us by the noose that has tightened around each of our own necks. That noose is loosened by breaking with the type of thinking that has led to its fashioning, and by a mode of politic action that dissents from those practices of normalization that have made us all potential victims. A prerequisite for this break is the recognition that human being and thought inhabit the domain of knowledge-power relations (savoir-pouvoir), a realization that is in opposition to traditional humanism. In the light of SP and VS, man that invention of recent date continued to gain sharper focus. By means of that web of techniques of discipline and methods of knowing that exists in modern society, by those minute steps of training through which the body was made into a fit instrument, and by those stages of examining the mind's growth, the "man of modern humanism was born.' The same humanism that has invested such energy in developing a science of man has foisted upon us the illusion that power is essentially (repressive) in doing so, it has led us into the dead end of regarding the pursuit and exercise of power as blinding the faculty of thought." Humanism maintains its position as

Foucault's

major opponent because it blocks the effort to think differently about the relations between knowledge and power. His weapon against this humanism continues to be a form of thinking that exposes human being to those dissonant series of events that subvert our normal philosophical and historical understanding.

Impact – Colonialism

Current discourse of environmental preservation legitimates a system of ecocolonialism where white, western ‘experts’ decides which habitats are more worth preserving than others

Luke 97



The work of the WWF as a result is often ironically seen by its American managers as a kind of "green man's burden" spreading the advances made by conservationists in the United States abroad because

, as

Train notes, " there has been almost total neglect of the problems outside our borders until the WWF came along

."93 Under the presidencies of Russell E. Train, Bill Reilly and Kathryn Fuller, the WWF grew from 25,000 members with an annual budget of about $2 million in 1978 to a membership of 1.2 million and an annual budget of $79 million in the mid-1990s by pushing this ecocolonialist agenda.94 The WWF has specialized in propagating its peculiar global vision in which experts from advanced industrial regions

, like the United States, Great Britain, or

Switzerland, take gentle custody of biological diversity in less advanced regions

, like Third World nations, as benevolent scientific guardians by retraining the locals to be reliable trustees of Earth's common endowments in their weak Third World nation-states.

In many ways, the WWF is one of the world's most systematic practitioners of eco-colonialism to reshape Nature consumption

. From its initial efforts to protect Africa's big fame trophy animals in the 1960s to the ivory ban campaigns of the 1990s, WWF wildlife protection programs have been concocted by small committees composed mostly of white, Western experts, using insights culled from analyses conducted by white, Western scientists that were paid for by affluent, white, Western suburbanites.

At the end of the day, many Africans and Asians, living near those WWF parks where the endangered wildlife actually roam wild, are not entirely pleased by such ecological solitude.

Indeed, these Third World peoples see the WWF quite clearly for what it is: "white people are making rules to protect animals that white people want to see in parks that white people visit."95 At some sites, the WWF also promotes sustainably harvesting animals for hides, meat, or other by-products, but then again these goods are mostly for markets in affluent, white, Western countries. As Train argues, these ecocolonial practices are an unavoidable imperative.

The WWF came to understand that "the great conservation challenges of today and of the future mostly lie in the tropics where the overwhelming preponderance of the Earth's biological diversity is found, particularly in the moist tropical forests and primarily in the developing world. Although the problems may often seem distance from our own shores and our own circumstances, we increasingly understand that the biological riches of this planet are part of a seamless web of life where a threat to any part threatens the whole."96 In mobilizing such discursive understandings to legitimize its actions, the WWF has empowered itself over the past thirty-five years to act as a transnational Environmental Protection Agency for Wildlife Consumption to safeguard "the Earth's biological diversity," internationalizing its management of "the biological riches of this planet" where they are threatened in territorialities with very weak sovereignty to protect their sustainable productivity for territories with quite strong sovereignty as parts of "a seamless web of life where a threat to any part threatens the whole."97 On one level, the American WWF frets over biodiversity, but many of its high Madison Avenue activities actually aim at developing systems of "biocelebrity."

From the adoption of the panda bear as its official logo to its ceaseless fascination with high-profile, heavily symbolic animals, or those which are most commonly on display in zoos or hunter's trophy rooms, the WWF-US has turned a small handful of mediagenic mammals, sea creatures, and birds into zoological celebrities as part and parcel of defending Nature. Whether it is giraffes, elephants, rhinos or kangaroos, ostriches, koalas or dolphins, humpbacks, seals, only a select cross-section of wild animals with potent mediagenic properties anchor its defense of Nature. Special campaigns are always aimed at saving the whales, rhinos or elephants, and not more obscure, but equally endangered fish, rodents, or insects.

This mobilization of biodiversity, then, all too often comes off like a stalking horse for its more entrenched vocations of defining, supplying, and defending biocelebrity.

On a second level, however, the WWF is increasingly devoted to defending biodiversity, because it is, as Edward O. Wilson asserts, "a priceless product of millions of years of evolution, and it should be cherished and protected for its own sake."98 Even though it should be saved for its own safe, it is not. Wilson provides the key additional justification, indicating implicitly how the World Wildlife Fund actually presumes to be the long-term worldwide fund of Nature as the unassayed stock of biodiversity is saved "for other reasons," including "we need the genetic diversity of wild plants to make our crops grow better and to provide new foods for the future. We also need biodiversity to develop new medicines....a newly discovered insect or plant might hold the cure for cancer or AIDS."99 Wilson argues, "you can think of biodiversity as a safety net that keeps ecosystems functioning and maintaining life on Earth."100 But, as the organization operating as the green bank with the biggest deposits from a worldwide fund of Nature, the WWF aspires to hold many of these bioplasmic assets in ecological banks as an enduring trust for all mankind. Fuller, is quite explicit on this critical side of the association's mission. Because "the biological riches of the planet are part of a seamless web of life in which a threat to any part weakens the whole," the WWF must ensure the integrity and well-being of the Earth's "web of life," giving it a most vital mission: Because so much of the current biodiversity crisis is rooted in human need and desire for economic advancement, it is essential that we work to bring human enterprise into greater harmony with nature.

Short-sighted efforts at economic development that come at the expense of biodiversity will impoverish everyone in the long run. That is why, in addition to establishing protected areas and preserving critical wildlife populations, WWF uses field and policy work to promote more rational, efficient use of the world's precious natural resources."101 Faced by an extinction wave of greater pervasiveness than any confronted during recorded history, the WWF-US mobilizes the assets of biocelebrity to leverage its limited guardianship over the planet's biodiversity,

because we may see as much as one quarter of the Earth's biodiversity going extinct in twenty or thirty years. Even so, the WWF fails to realize how closely its defense of the rational, efficient use of precious natural resources as third wave environmentalism may contribute to the extinction of biodiversity.

And, the conspicuous consternation of the WWF permits a focused fixation upon biocelebrities to occlude this fact for those who truly care about Nature--as long as it is equated with rhinos, tigers, and elephants. WWF ecotourism remanufactures Nature into consummational reserves, transforming habitat into assets, flora and fauna into operating plant, and indigenous communities into entrepreneurial stakeholders or, even worse, underpaid site managers, for global ecoconsummation.

Nature conservation becomes a game, and everyone involved becomes a player for the WWF. In fact, the WWF's worldwide banking powers over Nature's biological riches as interdependent mutual funds collateralizes the ecotourism bargain. As the WWF declares, the deal is dangerous, but potentially very rewarding, inasmuch as "for many rural communities and local and national governments, the booming travel industry is a rich resource for cash-starved economies and an important development tool that can foster conservation by giving communities an economic stake in the nonconsumptive use of their natural resources."102 The WWF-US believes pushing economies beyond primary and secondary sectors of production into tertiary "nonconsumptive uses of natural resources" in the leisure and recreation business will provide jobs that offer "people financial incentives to protect, rather than exploit or destroy, natural resources."103 From the WWF's global perspective of providing local regulation via global conservation, these planned means of consummational appropriation are the "wise use" of Nature, because

"these jobs are often better and last longer than occupations like logging and mining because they focus on the preservation and wise use of natural resources, not their extraction."104 From a WWF's regulationist perspective, these jobs are usually worse and longer suffering, because they pay much less than logging or mining, and lock local economies into low-yield, low-value adding, low-status service sector activities. Nonetheless, the ecotouristic strategy does reveal how one dimension in the WWF's vision of nature's "wise use" works. An (un)wise (mis)use of extractive industries promoting the hyperconsumptive use of natural resources cannot be taken seriously as "wise use." Instead, the protection of ecosystems in Nature preserves, which host low-impact sustainable cultivation of flora and fauna in traditional economies or high-traffic flows of conscientious ecotourists, becomes the sine qua non of "wise use" for WWF wildlife fund managers worldwide. As coequals in the circle of life coevolving in the webs of biodiversity, human beings nobly become another animal being responsible for other animal beings. Thus

, the World Wildlife Fund, becomes the key trustee of an international family of mutual funds for creating and operating these little wildlife worlds all over the planet.

Its consummational agenda for a transnational ecocolonialism pays out as a post-consumptive environmental reservation system where the Earth's last remaining wilderness and wildlife become the tamelife habitats and inhabitants of exotic biodiversity.

This is pathetic, but it is where whatever was once "wild nature" is now left. The wise use of Nature boils down to containing only a few of the most egregious instances of the unwise abuse of select charismatic megafauna by detaining a few survivors in little wildlife worlds all over the planet. And, in the current political environment, which increasingly favors legislative moves to rollback any serious Nature preservation initiative, even this ecocolonialist work of the WWF now can only be applauded. The WWF is caught within the same global capitalistic economy that promotes pollution, poaching, and profit, but its consummational good deeds advance the reproduction of global capitalism at all other unpreserved sites, shifting the role of the WWF from that of anti-consumptive resistance on a local level to one of pro-consummational rationalization on a global scale.

Impact – Environment

The capitalistic drive to maximize profit destroys the environment and devalues organisms not seen as profitable

Clark and Clausen 08

(Brett Clark, assistant professor of sustainability at the university of Utah, Rebecca Clausen, monthlyreview author, 7-1-08, “capitalism and the degradation of marine ecosystem” http://monthlyreview.org/2008/07/01/the-oceanic-crisis-capitalism-andthe-degradation-of-marine-ecosystem mp)

Humans have long been connected to the ocean’s metabolic processes by harvesting marine fish and vegetation. Harvesting methods and processes have varied depending on the structure of social production.

Subsistence fishing is a practice woven throughout human history, beginning with the harvesting of shellfish along seashores and shallow lakes, and progressing with the development of tools such as stone-tipped fishing spears, fishhooks, lines, and nets. This was originally based upon fishing for use of the fish. What was caught was used to feed families and communities. Through the process of fishing, human labor has been intimately linked to ocean processes, gaining an understanding of fish migrations, tides, and ocean currents. The size of a human population in a particular region influenced the extent of exploitation. But the introduction of commodity markets and private ownership under the capitalist system of production altered the relationship of fishing labor to the resources of the seas.

Specific species had an exchange value

. As a result, certain fish were seen as being more valuable. This led to fishing practices that focused on catching as many of a particular fish

, such as cod, as possible

.

Noncommercially viable species harvested indiscriminately alongside the target species were discarded as waste.

As capitalism developed and spread, intensive extraction by industrial capture fisheries became the norm

.

Increased demands were placed on the oceans and overfishing resulted in the severe depletion of wild fish stocks

. In Empty Ocean, Richard Ellis states, “Throughout the world’s oceans, food fishes once believed to be immeasurable in number are now recognized as greatly depleted and in some cases almost extinct. A million vessels now fish the world’s oceans, twice as many as there were twenty-five years ago. Are there twice as many fish as before? Hardly.” How did this situation develop?10 The beginning of capitalist industrialization marked the most noticeable and significant changes in fisheries practices.

Mechanization, automation, and mass production/consumption characterized an era of increased fixed capital investments

.

Profit-driven investment in efficient production led to fishing technologies that for the first time made the exhaustion of deep-sea fish stocks a real possibility.

Such transformations can be seen in how groundfishing, the capture of fish that swim in close proximity to the ocean’s bottom, changed through the years. Industrialization began to influence the groundfishery around the early 1900s, as technological developments were employed to further the accumulation of capital. The introduction of steam-powered trawlers from England in 1906 heralded a significant change in how groundfish were caught and rapidly replaced the sail-powered schooner fleets. Prior to steam trawling, groundfish were caught on schooners with baited lines during long journeys at sea. Due to lack of refrigeration and freezing, most of the cod catch was salted.

The competitive markets organized under capitalist production welcomed the increased efficiency of steam-powered vessels, without a critical assessment of the consequences of increased harvest levels.

More captured fish meant more profit

. The switch to trawling was complete by 1920, and the consequences of the second industrial revolution organized under capitalist forces would soon change the human-nature relationship to the ocean, extending the reach of capital. The expanded geographic range and speed of fishing fleets allowed for increased productivity of catch as well as increased diversity of captured species that were deemed “valuable” on the market. Technological developments and improved transportation routes allowed the fishing industry to grow, increasing its scale of operations. Cold storage ensured that fish would be fresh, reducing spoilage and loss of capital. In Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World, Mark Kurlansky explains, “Freezing

[cod] also changed the relationship of seafood companies to fishing ports. Frozen fish could be bought anywhere—wherever the fish was cheapest and most plentiful. With expanding markets, local fleets could not keep up with the needs of the companies.” Advances in the transportation infrastructure allowed people in the Midwest to consume the increased harvests of cod and haddock, leading to a significant expansion in the market.

Major marketing campaigns promoted the consumption of fish to increase sales

. Together these factors enhanced the accumulation of capital within the fishing industry, and companies invested some of this capital back into their fleets.11 By 1930 there were clear signals that the groundfishing fleet’s ability to capture massive quantities of fish had surpassed natural limits in fisheries. A Harvard University investigation reported that in 1930 the groundfishery landed 37 million haddock at Boston, with another 70–90 million juvenile haddock discarded dead at sea. The sudden rise in fisheries harvest (creating a subsequent rise in consumer demand through marketing campaigns) resulted in stress in the groundfish populations, and landings plummeted.

Competitive markets create incentives to expand production, regardless of resource decline

. Thus

, in reaction to decreased stocks due to overfishing, groundfishing fleets moved farther offshore into waters off of the coast of Canada to increase the supply of valuable fish to new market s.

The fleet’s ability to continue moving into unexploited waters obscured recognition of the severe resource depletion that was occurring.

As a result,

the process of overfishing particular ecosystems to supply a specific good for the market expanded, subjecting more of the ocean to the same system of degradation.

12 The distant water fleets were made possible by the advent of factory trawlers. Factory trawlers represent the pinnacle of capital investment and extractive intensification in the global fisheries. In Distant Water William Warner presents a portrayal of a factory trawler’s capacity: Try to imagine a mobile and completely selfcontained timber cutting machine that could smash through the roughest trails of the forest, cut down trees, mill them, and deliver consumer-ready lumber in half the time of normal logging and milling operations. This was exactly what factory trawlers did—this was exactly their effect on fish—in the forests of the deep. It could not long go unnoticed. Factory trawlers pull nylon nets a thousand feet long through the ocean, potentially capturing 400 tons of fish during a single netting. Industrial trawlers can process and freeze their catch as they travel.13 Such technological development extended the systematic exploitation and scale of harvesting of fishes.

The natural limits of fish populations combined with capital’s need to expand led to the development of immense trawlers that increased the productive capacity and efficiency of operations

. These ships allowed fishermen to seek out areas in the ocean where valuable fish were available, providing the means to capture massive quantities of fish in a single trip. Overcoming the shortage of fishes in one area was accomplished by even more intensive harvesting with new ships and equipment, such as sonar, in other regions of the oceans.

The pursuit of vast quantities of commercial fishes in different areas of the ocean expanded the depletion of other species, as they were exploited and discarded as bycatch

. The swath of the seas subjected to the dictates of the market increased, whether a fish

was sold as a commodity or thrown overboard as a waste product.14

Competition for market share between companies and capital’s investment in advanced technology intensified fishery exploitation. Competing international companies sought nature’s diminishing bounty, causing further international conflict in the

“race for fish

.” President Truman responded to these disputes by attempting to expand U.S. corporate interests. He issued two proclamations expanding U.S. authority beyond territorial waters trying to further territorial enclosure of its adjacent seas out to the limits of the continental shelf. Coastal states around the world struggled to transform the property rights of the open ocean to benefit their nations. In response to growing conflict, the United Nations convened the First United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea in Geneva in 1958.

The technocratic solutions of the plan lead to environmental destruction on a global scale – prefer our impacts because their risk analysis is flawed

Luke 96


Environmental Studies as a Power/Knowledge Formation”, p. 11, http://www.cddc.vt.edu/tim/tims/Tim514a.PDF)

These visions of environmental science recapitulate the logic of technical networks

as they already are given in the states and markets of the existing world-system.

Rather than the environment surrounding humanity, the friction-free global marketplace of transnational capital is what envelopes Nature.

Out of its metabolisms are produced ecotoxins, biohazards, hydrocontaminants, aeroparticulates, and enviropoisons whose impacts generate inexorable risks. These policy problematics unfold now on the global scale, because fast capitalism has colonized so many more sites on the planet as part and parcel of its own unique regime for sustainable development.

As Yale's Dean Cohon asserts:

The challenge we all face now

, as you know, is

not limited to one resource in one nation, but extends to the protection of the environment worldwide. The fabric of natural and human communities is

currently torn

or tattered in many places.

There is hardly a place on earth where human activity does not influence the environment

's current condition or its prospects for the future.36

In turn, well-trained environmental professionals

must measure, monitor or manage these risks, leaving the rational operations of global fast capitalism wholly intact as "risks won" for their owners and beneficiaries, while risk analyses performed by each environmental school's practitioners and programs deal with the victims of "risks lost."

Impact – Error Replication

Environmentalism will always fail in a capitalist society – the plan benefits the wrong groups, recreating their impacts

Gottlieb 99

- professor of philosophy @ Worcester Polytechnic Institute (Rodger S., Spring 1999, “Ecocritique: Contesting the Politics of Nature, Economy, and Culture by Timothy W. Luke; Nature's Keeper by Peter Wenz”, Social Theory and Practice, Vol.

25, No. 1, p. 149-154, review, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23560325?seq=3)

Nevertheless, Ecocritique, like Natures Keeper, is a book deserving of serious attention. That is because Luke gives each of his many subject areas a close and rewarding reading. His chapter on "Ecology and the ruse of recycling," for instance, correctly shows that the attempt to make environmental responsibility user-friendly in a consumerist, capitalist society ends up being friendly to the wrong interests and for the wrong reasons.

For instance, criticisms of our consumer mentality often obscure how corporate capital, big government and professional experts pushed the practices of the throwaway affluent society on consumers

after 1945 as a political strategy to sustain economic growth, forestall mass discontent, and empower scientific authority.

(128) Furthermore, advertising a "100% cotton" nightgown as "environmentally responsible" because it is composed of a "renewable resource" ignores the way the cotton may well be grown, harvested, and produced "using inefficient and dangerous inputs of oil-based pesticides, fertilizer, and fuels that ravage" local soil and water

(129).

Attempts at an anthropogenic environment result in domination of the planet where all efforts to preserve it become commodified into methods to promote capitalism, making the environment a second priority—turns case

Luke 97







Bioregions historically have constituted the particular spatial setting of human beings' social connections to specific lands, waters, plants, animals, peoples, and climates from which their communities culturally constitute meaningful places for themselves in the "first nature" of the natural biosphere.37


"second nature," or the always emergent technosphere of the planet, within which modernizing human communities are now mostly embedded, operate by virtue of environmental transactions that often are over, beyond, or outside of rough equilibria of their natural habitats. These transactions create new anthropogenic ecological contexts, which typically generate an artificial hyperecology of an ultimately unsustainable type.39 A great deal of time and energy might be expended in core capitalist countries upon environmental regulations, resource surveys, ecological studies, and conservation policies, but these initiatives almost always are consumerist campaigns, aiming to reform the costs and regulate the benefits of these unsustainable flows of goods and services through the hyperecologies of second

nature.40 Consumer society constitutes an entirely new system of objects out on the terrains of second nature.








In these new spaces, terraformative hyperecologies can be monitored to judge their relative success or failure in terms of abstract mathematical measures of consumption, surveying national gains or losses by the density, velocity, intensity, and quantity of goods and services being exchanged for mass consumption.


, in turn, allegedly will provide the requisite force needed to impose these costs on the many outside for the benefit of the few inside. By substituting "Earth Days" for real ecological transformation, the hyperecologies of transnational exchange are successfully repacking themselves in green wrappers of ecological concern; but, they still often involve the profligate waste of energy, resources, and time to maintain the abstract aggregate subjectivity of "an average consumers" enjoying "the typical standard of living" in the developed world's cities and suburbs.


Impact – Serial Policy Failure

Top-down approaches of solving environmental problems are a form of eco managerialism that ignores broader social context and the input of non-state actors in favor of technocentric bureaucrats-- leads to serial policy failure

Bryant & Wilson 98

(Department of Geography, King’s College London, Progress in Human Geography 22, 3 1998, pp. 321-343,

“Rethinking Environmental Management,” http://media.proquest.com.turing.library.northwestern.edu/media/pq/classic/doc/1082211041/fmt/pi/rep/NONE?hl=&cit%3Aauth=Bryant%2

C+R+L%3BWilson%2C+G+A&cit%3Atitle=Rethinking+environmental+management&cit%3Apub=Progress+in+Human+Geography&cit%3Avol=22

&cit%3Aiss=3&cit%3Apg=321&cit%3Adate=Sep+1998&ic=true&cit%3Aprod=ABI%2FINFORM+Global&_a=ChgyMDE0MDcwMjAxMDUwMjc1Nz o2MDg4NzYSBTk5OTQxGgpPTkVfU0VBUkNIIg8xMjkuMTA1LjIxNS4xNDYqBTM3MTM3MgkyMzA2ODM2MTc6DURvY3VtZW50SW1hZ2VCATBSBk

9ubGluZVoCRlRiA1BGVGoKMTk5OC8wOS8wMXIKMTk5OC8wOS8zMHoAggElUC0xMDAwMDAxLTEyODYxLUNVU1RPTUVSLW51bGwtMTE0NDQ wMpIBBk9ubGluZcoBbU1vemlsbGEvNS4wIChXaW5kb3dzIE5UIDYuMzsgV09XNjQpIEFwcGxlV2ViS2l0LzUzNy4zNiAoS0hUTUwsIGxpa2UgR2Vja28 pIENocm9tZS8zNS4wLjE5MTYuMTUzIFNhZmFyaS81MzcuMzbSARJTY2hvbGFybHkgSm91cm5hbHOaAgdQcmVQYWlkqgIoT1M6RU1TLVBkZkRvY1

ZpZXdCYXNlLWdldE1lZGlhVXJsRm9ySXRlbcoCBlJldmlld9ICAVniAgDqAgDyAgA%3D&_s=Qr50MjfLLi%2B%2Fk6rQ6E%2BeJaVu618%3D)

First, the state has long sought to manage the environment based on the assumption that the

'environment' can be divided into discrete entities for management purposes

(Hays, 1987; Mitchell, 1989; Williams,

1989; Roche, 1990; Wilson, 1992b; Bryant, 1997). As part of a wider functional definition of the state, environmental management was defined in relation to selected commercial resources

: timber, fish, minerals or agricultural products. The state's environmental management role was particularly elaborated during the 1960s and 1970s in response to a growing range of pollution problems linked to industrialization and the adoption of potentially hazardous new technologies (Beck, 1992; Mould, 1992). Yet the recognition that many environmental problems are interconnected has not led to a modification of the state's functional approach to environmental management in keeping with, say, the 'holistic' prescriptions of writers such as Devall and

Sessions (1985) and Lovelock (1995). Rather, such a recognition has only prompted further specialization as new agencies are created to deal with 'new' environmental problems (Hays, 1987; MacAndrews, 1994). Secondly, environmental management has been widely understood to be synonymous with the development of large bureaucracies and an associated 'top-down' approach to environmental problems

(Barratt and Fudge, 1981; Hogwood and Gunn, 1984; Mitchell, 1989).

In this view, environmental management is a service provided by the state, but which needs to be imposed (by force if necessary) on people living in a defined territory. The corollary of this view is that environmental management is

not a practice associated with nonstate professionals (see below), but is rather predicated on the 'rational' actions of state bureaucracies

(cf. Weber, 1968; Murphy, 1988). Environmental management is thus seen to be largely a matter of the formulation and implementation of environmental laws, policies and regulations by officials acting with the legal and coercive backing of the state

(Hurrell, 1994; Johnston, 1996). Thirdly, the traditional view sees environmental management as a process in which

state-affiliated 'experts' trained in western positivist science apply their 'expertise' to the attempted resolution of selected environmental problems

(Petak, 1981; Miller, 1984; 1985; Moffat, 1990; for a critique, see Park,

1997). Such science is involved in all stages of the environmental management process - from problem definition and investigation to policy formulation and implementation. Environmental problems cannot even be conceived without reference to scientific methods and principles: scientists diagnose the nature and causes of environmental problems and prescribe solutions in keeping with these diagnoses

(cf. Miller, 1994; Pickering and Owen, 1994; O'Riordan, 1995). Environmental management in this traditional view is a scientific process that is largely defined and manipulated by experts linked directly or indirectly to the state (e.g., Petak, 1980; 1981). Fourthly

, environmental management is seen to be a 'problem-solving' endeavour in which scientific expertise and the latest technology are applied to a specific environmental problem.

What O'Riordan (1981) terms

'technocentrism' imbues the attitudes of the vast

majority of state environmental managers and is often also reflected in ensuing management practices

(Petak, 1981; Nath et at., 1993).

The assumption is that environmental problems are amenable to technological resolution without any need to modify substantially broader political, economic or social forces. In this view, environmental management is seen as a process designed gradually and selectively to alter the status quo so as to solve environmental problems, but without upsetting prevailing political or economic interests

(cf. Dorney, 1987; Turner, 1988; Atchia and Tropp, 1995). This traditional understanding of environmental management is the subject of growing criticism. To begin with, critics frequently question the capacity of the state to reconcileenvironmental exploitation and conservation through its policies

and practices (Sachs, 1993; Redclift, 1987; 1994; Johnston, 1996). On the one hand,

'top-down' environmental management is condemned as being incompatible with the needs and interests of a heterogeneous group of

'grassroots' actors comprising, notably, farmers, fishers, nomadic pastoralists or shifting cultivators (actors, in turn, differentiated by class, gender, race or age) (Wilson and Bryant,

1997). Most officials are physically distant from the localities in which their policies are implemented such that they rarely (if ever) experience directly the effects of their decision-making. Further, the interests of officials and many grassroots actors (especially the poor) are frequently incompatible (Rush, 1991; Hurrell, 1994).

Indeed, some critics allege that the two sets of interests are inherently antithetical - that state decision-making invariably favours 'nonlocal' over local' interests

(e.g., Shiva, 1991; Sachs, 1993). On the other hand, many states often do not possess the physical capacity to enforce environmental policies in the territories nominally under their control. Rather, these states must acquiesce as powerful transnational corporations

(TNCs) or local

1x)sses' pursue environmental management activities that make a mockery of the law

(Migdal, 1988; Ribot, 1993;

Bryant and Bailey, 1997). While the problem of 'weak states' is most evident in parts of the third world, it is by no means confined to countries in Asia, Africa or

Latin America (Marchak, 1995; Vie Ecobgist, 1996). A further criticism of traditional understandings of environmental management relates to the question of potentially divergent ways of understanding the environment by state and nonstate actors (Blaikie and Brookfield, 1987; Bryant, 1996; Wilson, 1996). Thus, there is held to be a discrepancy between the environmental attitudes of trained scientists working for the state and the environmental attitudes of many grassroots actors who may possess a 'nonscientific' yet detailed knowledge of local ecological conditions

(Shiva, 1991; Sachs, 1993; Pretty, 1995; Wilson, 1997). Typically, the former are considered to adhere to technocentric attitudes informed by western positivist science, while the latter frequently adopt ecocentric attitudes linked to longstanding 'holistic' visions of human-environmental interaction (Miller, 1984; 1985; Denslow and Padoch, 1988; Harvey, 1993; Reichel-Dolmatoff, 1996). Such a classification is, however, simplistic, and does not allow for the heterogeneity of environmental attitudes among actors (Murdoch and Clark, 1994). Yet, there may be a disjuncture between the attitudes of many state officials dealing with the environment, and those attitudes held by many grassroots actors who are often mindful of the pitfalls of implementing state-held notions about the 'appropriate' way to manage the environment. Recurrent conflict over how to manage the environment often ensues from such attitudinal differences (Shiva, 1991; Peluso, 1992; Mitchell, 1995; Bryant, 1997). Perhaps the most severe criticism, though, concerns the problem-solving nature of the traditional approach to environmental management (Miller, 1985

). By adopting a perspective focused on the environmental problem at hand, this approach is accused of failing to integrate discrete problems into the wider political, economic and social context

(Blaikie and Brookfield, 1987). As Redclift (1994: 133) notes, 'the environmental consequences of development are separated from the social and economic ones'; the all-but-inevitable result is that management prescriptions do not address human- environment interaction in view of the contextual forces that condition such interaction. Yet interconnected social and environmental problems require much more than the 'off- the-shelf' techniques favoured by scientific experts. Indeed, a major reason why the conventional approach often falters at the implementation stage is because the input of many nonstate actors (including poor grassroots actors), critical to effective environmental decision-making, is excluded by 'knowledgeable' state officials who dominate that process

(Sachs, 1993).

Impact – VTL

Attempts at managing the environment preclude the ability to see beauty in the unpredictable parts of nature, killing value to life

Parker 96

(Kelly A. Parker, Pragmatism and Environmental Thought, in Environmental Pragmatism 28-

30, 1996 http://www.public.iastate.edu/~jwcwolf/Papers/Parker.pdf)

For the pragmatist, the environment is above all not something "out there," somehow separate from us, standing ready to be used up or preserved as we deem necessary.

As the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-

Ponty said, "Our own body is in the world as the heart is in the organism".17 We cannot talk about environment without talking about experience, the most basic term in pragmatism. All that we or any being can feel, know, value, or believe in, from the most concrete fact ("I am cold") to the most abstract or transcendental idea ("Justice," "God"), has its meaning, first of all, in some aspect of an immediately felt here and now.

Environment

, in the most basic sense, is the field where experience occurs

, where my life and the lives of others arise and take place. Experience, again, is not merely subjective. It has its "subjective" side, but experience as such is just another name for the manifestation of what is. What is the ongoing series of transactions between organisms and their environments.

The quality of experience

-whether life is rich or sterile, chaotic or orderly, harsh or pleasant - is determined at least as much by the quality of the environment involved as by what the organism brings to the encounter.

Environment is as much a part of each of us as we are parts of the environment, and moreover,

each of us is a part of the environment - a part of experience - with which other beings have to contend.

In asserting the fundamental relatedness among organisms and environments,

pragmatism commits us to treating all environments with equal seriousness

. Urban and rural; wilderness, park and city; ocean and prairie; housing project, hospital and mountain trail -

all are places where experience unfolds.

The world, in this view, is a continuum of various environments. Endangered environments perhaps rightly occupy our attention first, but environmental philosophy and ecological science arc at bottom attempts to understand all the environments we inhabit. Attention to the whole continuum of environments allows us to put into perspective what is truly valuable about each.

The environments we inhabit directly affect the kinds of lives that we and others can live.

There is an unfortunate tendency to draw crassly instrumentalist conclusions from this line of thought. I want to caution against this tendency. If environment "funds" experience, this reasoning might go, then let us use technology to turn the whole world into an easily manageable, convenient stock of environments that conduce to pleasant human experiences. This Theme Park: Earth line of

thinking neglects our inherent limitations as finite parts of the world, and sets us up for disaster.

Repeated attempts to dominate nature

(e.g., our damming the Nile and its damning us right back, or our tragicomic efforts to

"tame" the atom) should have begun to teach us something about the limits of human intelligence.

Such attempts to dominate nature assume that no part of the environment in question is beyond the field of settled experience. We can indeed exert remarkable control over parts of the experienced world, remaking it to suit our purposes. This may be appropriate, if our purposes make sense in the first place.

(I know of no reason to object to the prudent use of natural gas to heat our homes, for example.)

But the very idea that the environment funds experience involves the notion that there is an ineffable aspect of the world. It is indeed arrogant to think that we can master nature; it is moreover delusional and ultimately self-negating. If we have our being in the ongoing encounter with environment, then to will that the environment become a fully settled, predictable thing, a mere instrumental resource in which there can be no further novelty, is to will that we undergo no further growth in experience. The attempt to dominate nature completely is thus an attempt to annihilate the ultimate source of our growth, and hence to annihilate ourselves. What we must try to do is nor to master the natural world, but to cultivate meaningful lives within various environments.

We are exceedingly efficient at altering and destroying parts of the earth, but are for the most part inept at living well on it.

To exercise our power wisely would require that we

genuinely understand the sources of value in the world and in ourselves. Environmental philosophy must begin with close attention to the quality of experience that arises

(or could arise) from inhabiting

various environments.18 We need to ask what is valuable in experiences, what features of environments they are associated with, and what ways of inhabiting environments arc most appropriate.

All the while we must retain respect for the wild and ineffable aspect of the world. We need to ask once more the aesthetic

questions of what is good, and how goodness comes to be in our world - a world importantly different from that of Kant, of James or of John Muir - before we can go much further in implementing an ethics of environment.

Alt

Alt - Individualism


Luke 03






basically require

, sadly enough














Alt – Public Ecology

The alternative is to affirm public ecology - the interdisciplinary nature of the alt re-evaluates the way in which we approach environmental problems

Luke 01

– Department of PoliSci @ Virginia Tech (Timothy W., 10/28/01-10/30/01, “World Health and the Environment:

Globalization's Ambiguities”, p. 3, http://www.cddc.vt.edu/tim/tims/TIM807.PDF)

A public ecology should fuse the concerns of public health with the activist engagements of a critical political ecology.

By pushing past the exhausted conceptual divisions from the 1980s, which largely divided the more natural science-based "environmental sciences" from the more social science- focused "environmental studies," public ecology should mix the insights of life science, physical science, social science, applied humanities, and public policy into a cohesive conceptual whole. Public ecology should preserve, but also look beyond the "environmental problem" detection/monitoring/regulation regime

of the

National Environmental Protection Act (1970) in the USA. Instead it would work at the local and global level to develop "pre-pollutant" or "noncontaminant" approaches to environmental problems by using political pressure to work back up the commodity chain to lessen ecological damage by mobilizing solutions drawn from green engineering, industrial ecology or appropriate envirodesign. Public ecology must admit that the built and unbuilt environment are one and of a piece, not two and wholly separable.

The alternative reforms the political – that’s key to solving eco-imperialism and massive inequality inherent in our current ecology

Luke 03



Timothy Luke: I don't have a good answer for that. I'm working on it.

My approach is

, and what I'll talk about a bit tomorrow, is what I call public ecology.

Our ecology

is essential now seen as, in many ways it's a privatized affair. It is captured within the production and consumption of commodities that we buy that are produced for us to buy and that way of dealing with the environment is not sustainable.

It's destroying carrying capacity. I think what we need to do is see that in fact the built environment and the unbuilt environments are public commonly shared projects.

We need

I think to politicize things that have not been politicized, in

probably a Social

Democratic fashion, and to

maybe kind of ask these difficult questions

. We're an automotive society. At the end of the day, the first mass produced car, the Model T, was an ecologically more desirable automobile than the ones we have now. Low compression engine, low polluting production process, very simple. Anybody who paid attention to it could sit down, take it apart, rebuild it in their backyard using commonly available tools, could go almost anywhere, and carried you from point A to point B. It was an appliance. But we've spent 100 years seeing automobiles as more than an appliance. What is it in ourselves that makes us want to have a Boxter, an SUV or whatever, as opposed to this appliance, which was to provide the service of the car, which was to get you from point A to point B, and something that you had command over. You could fix it yourself, and it wasn't terribly polluting.

And is there something even better than that? Ironically, the more ecologically desirable car is the car that was available in 1914, not the car that's going to be available in 2014 and is the environmental car that's being offered to us -- you know, the hybrid cars, the electric cars, the fuel cell cars -- is that going to get us involved in even more destructive industrial ecologies? Or is it going to get us into a better kind of industrial ecology? What do we want out of this? I think if there's a politics engaged now in our environmentalism, it's

that of a kind of eco-imperialism

, which basically says, in the United States we've got ours and we're going to keep it.

What's ours is ours and what's yours is ours. That's the way it is.

Out of the guise of whatever - terrorism, radical Islamicism, whatever - if the United States needs to go somewhere in order to secure the world's oil or secure the world's anything, that will be done.

And the kind of politics that's engaged here is not one of mass democracy in the traditional sense of anybody who's part of the republic should be willing to fight for the republic. It's really

based upon technocratic experts who go out and engage in war in multinational coalitions to make this happen.

So there is a pretty perverse kind of eco-imperialism building in this kind of global ecology. And it's one that basically says a large number of people in the world are not going to get to live like United

States.

And instead they're going to live like they do now. The goal that the United States should have is to take those billion people that live on $1 a day and find a way to help them live on $3 a day.

That is a radical improvement in their lives. Then as that occurs, some of them will get to live maybe on $10 a day or $20 a day.

But then if you look at how people live in the United States

, maybe they live on $100 a day or $500 a day.

It presumes still radical inequality. That is a pretty disturbing ecological politics.

Yet at the same time, one could ask, well is living on $3 a day or $5 a day a more ecological way of doing things that maybe has a model for all of us in terms of how we might or should live?

And to recognize, for those of you who are worried about jobs

, to rebuild everything that's been built in the past 120 years to be ecological irrational and destructive will require lots of resources and lots of labour to remake everything in a more ecologically sustainable and less destructive fashion, it presumes a new built environment, it presumes a new urbanism. It presumes new land use formations. It presumes a new kind of

local, regional, national, international economy. It presumes new kinds of artifacts.

It really presumes the interrogation of everything that is around this kind of goal, and then the remaking of it to get it to you to that point. Which is a big project, but essentially that's what it asks. It really asks political questions of what have been seen as technical objects and technical systems, in a way that is very rarely done.

Doing that would require a different kind of politics

. The one that is most commonly able to get us there is a more Social Democratic one, but one of course that is not very popular in North America, because again, our ecologies hide behind this veil of expertise and this veil of property. That's mine, don't screw around with it, I like my SUV, I like my Corvette, and that's the way I want to live. Why do you want to do that? Well because

I'm a unique individual sitting there in the wheel of my SUV and Corvette, which is made in unit runs of 400,000 to 500,000 a year.

I'm a unique individual. I'm sitting here playing these unique individual tapes in my head as I drive down the road or sit in traffic, with all the other unique individuals playing these tapes in their head of how cool and groovy we are. But that is the script in terms of how it exists. That is a challenge for whatever environmental studies, environmental science, and environmental ethics to address.

But that's a very different one, but one I think needs to be done if you're going to get at the root of a lot of these problems.

Framework

FW – Biopower Discussion First

A discussion of biopower as it relates to human-nature relations is a necessary first step to understanding management of nature


(Christine Biermann, Becky Mansfield, Department of

Geography, Ohio State University, February 14, 2014, “Biodiversity, purity, and death: conservation biology as biopolitics,” http://www.envplan.com/epd/fulltext/d32/d13047p.pdf)

Most scholarship on biopower refers to power/knowledge relationships that target human populations, but recent literature has begun to put biopower into conversation with several variants of posthumanism

, including actor-network theory (Latour, 2005; Law and Hassard, 1999) and feminist studies of science

(Haraway, 2003; 2008).

This emerging literature, most of which focuses on human–animal relations, suggests that we have an anemic understanding of biopower if we look only at human life

(eg,

Hinchliffe and Bingham, 2008; Holloway et al, 2009; Lorimer and Driessen, 2013; Rutherford, 2007; 2011; Shukin, 2009). This scholarship shows not only that biopower enrolls the nonhuman in diverse and dynamic ways, but also that biopower is a set of relationships through which nature and society coproduce one another. For example, Holloway and colleagues call for “the formulation of more relational conceptions of biopower in which people work on nonhuman others as part of their work 260 C Biermann, B Mansfield on themselves” (2009, page 398). In other words, efforts to improve or optimize nonhuman nature

—whether through cattle breeding (Holloway et al, 2009; Lorimer and Driessen, 2013), protesting timber harvests (Braun, 2002), or materially and discursively enrolling the honeybee in the US ‘war on terror’ (Kosek, 2010)— are often connected to efforts to improve the individual and collective self.

At the same time, biological life is not merely a

“terrain for the exercise of power” (Moore et al, 2003, page 1) but also an active agent that can never be fully integrated into social relations. Foucault himself states that “it is not that life has been totally integrated into techniques that govern and administer it; it constantly escapes them” (1990, page

143). Life is therefore a source of resistance to dominant forms of power/knowledge.(2) In this sense, Foucault’s view of biological life as constantly escaping technologies of power is strikingly similar to the posthumanist emphasis on the agency of nonhumans. Together, these perspectives underscore that the messy realities of the material world are not impediments to the circulation of power; rather, it is in these messy realities that biopower is constituted (Law, 2004; Rutherford, 2007).

Including nonhuman nature in discussions of

biopower raises key questions regarding conservation and management of nature.

So doing challenges both the preservationist logic that nature is an inherently valuable external realm that must be protected by humans from humans and the capitalist logic that nature is a set of commodities with exchange values determined by the free market. That is, extending biopower to consider human–nonhuman relations allows us to understand the preservationist and capitalist logics not merely as opposing forces but as connected through the vast networks in which power circulates. In particular, considering the role of nonhuman nature in relations of biopower offers geographers a way to work through “the panoptic nature of the green project”

(Rutherford, 2007, page 295). Certainly it is not new to say that environmental projects are not innocent of power relations, as this has been a central message of political ecology (eg, Hecht and Cockburn, 1990; Kosek, 2006; Turner, 1993). But looking at conservation through the lens of biopolitics makes possible a series of new questions regarding the truth discourses, underlying logics, and calculative technologies by which distinctions among humans and nonhumans are “made, and made meaningful” (Mansfield,

2003, page 332). Who is able to assess, manage, and protect nature, and through what techniques are different forms of nature made both legible and lively? How do the truths that experts tell about nature relate to truths told about people?

Such questions are exemplified in Rafi Youatt’s analysis of biologist EO Wilson’s proposed global biodiversity census (Youatt, 2008). Youatt argues that the biodiversity census, and particularly its emphasis on identifying yet unknown neotropical species, justifies the panopticism of global biodiversity conservation and draws on colonialist discourses of exploration, discovery, and mastery of nature, despite its emphasis on protection rather than domination. Through the biodiversity census and its processes of identification, collection of specimens, and subsequent research, nonhuman nature is packaged neatly into discrete species—a designation that paves the way not only for conservation but also for commodification and capitalization.

Youatt explains: “Postmodern capitalism may protect nature materially even as it commodifies it semiotically, as in the case of protecting the Amazon rainforest for its pharmaceutical potentials” (2008, page 398).

By analyzing

biodiversity conservation using a framework that combines biopolitics with the posthumanist attention to the nonhuman, Youatt treats the biodiversity census as a form of biopolitical calculation. As with the rise of demographic statistics described by Foucault, nonhuman life is grasped in terms of distinct populations to be counted and managed as statistical entities; in other words, we see clearly the biodiversity census as a form of biopolitical making live.

FW – Epistemology

Don’t accept their advantages as unquestionable truth – they are constructions made in order to steer institutions of power like the state

Luke 96



Truths about ecology are not objective timeless verities, but rather are the operationalized findings of

continuously evolving practices for heterogeneous engineering as they have been constructed

by major research universities.

These institutions are sites where "truth,"

or "a system of order procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation, and operation of statements,"" arises from knowledge formations, like the disciplines of environmental science, to help steer power formations, like the decision-making bureaux of liberal democratic states and capitalist firms

. As Foucault asserts,

" there are manifold relations of power which permeate, characterize and constitute the social body, and these relations of power cannot themselves be established, consolidated nor implemented without the production, accumulation, circulation and functioning of a discourse.

There can be no possible exercise of power without a certain economy of discourses of truth which operates through and on the basis of this association.""

Environmental science, then, should reveal multiple traces of this vital cycle of cogeneration by which power charges truthful knowledges even as truthful knowledges mediate power in the scope and substance of its discursive construction at schools of environmental studies and colleges of natural resources.

FW – Starting Point

A bottom-up approach to environmental policy is the best starting point

Rai and Sharma 11

(A.K. Rai and R.N. Sharma, assistant professors at the faculty of education in Kamachha, Varansi, January 2011, SPIJE Volume 1, NO. 1, India, “Environmental

Ethics Education: A Necessity to Initiate Environment Oriented Action” http://www.aaebhu.com/IMG_0007.pdf mp)

The suggestion therefore is to make the discussion related to the subjective norms and the related prescriptive ethical norms as the focus of teaching in the framework of environmental education

. The pedagogical approach should follow a bottom-up approach wherein a local environmental issue is to be selected as the starting point

. Within the context of the local environmental issue selected, the teaching- learning experiences are suggested to emphasize on the harmonization of subjective norms and values of the individual with the wider values and moral norms desired in the context selected. Accordingly the learning opportunities should be supportive of promoting a discussion related to the normative beliefs

(i.e. beliefs that are prescribed and that are expected to guide action in the desired way) vis- a-vis their own subjective norms

(i.e. beliefs related to the environmental issue in question, that are an outcome of the individuals different concerns and the interaction of those concerns within a socio-cultural milieu).

FW – A2: Ecopragmatism

Ecopragmatism fails – it ignores root causes, it’s too instrumentalist, and is anthropocentric

Eckersley 02

- Professor and Head of Political Science in the School of Social and Political Sciences @ University of Melbourne (Robyn,

2002, “‘Environmental pragmatism, ecocentrism and deliberative democracy”, OpenLearn, http://www.open.edu/openlearn/natureenvironment/the-environment/nature-matters-systems-thinking-and-experts/content-section-2.2)

Eckersley identifies three limitations of environmental pragmatism

, which might be paraphrased as follows.

A narrow focus on the ‘problem-solving’ context means that there is a risk of being too accommodating to views and prejudices that are the root cause of environmental problems

. So, for example, a pragmatic discussion of the merits of biofuels as an alternative to fossil fuels may distract attention from a deeperrooted problem concerning the general over-consumption of fuels. Environmental pragmatism is too

‘instrumentalist’ and utilitarian, denying the value of non-instrumentalist ‘dialogue for dialogue's sake’

, which can sometimes of itself generate respect and trust (as much as conflict).

The ‘action’ of dialogue can itself have great intrinsic value. While professing pluralism, environmental pragmatism is not pluralist enough since it is essentially anthropocentric, based on a tradition of ‘liberal humanism’. This inherently alienates extreme forms of ecocentric representation, which see such traditions as being anthropocentric and therefore inappropriate to engage with.

Answers to:

A2: Perms

Sequencing DA -- Rethinking our relationship to the environment is a prerequisite to embracing any environmental ethics

Light and Katz 96

(Andrew Light, Eric Katz, London and New York, “Environmental

Pragmatism” http://www.public.iastate.edu/~jwcwolf/Papers/Parker.pdf mp)

Attention to the whole continuum of environments allows us to put into perspective what is truly valuable about each

. The environments we inhabit directly affect the kinds of lives that we and others can live.

There is an unfortunate tendency to draw crassly instrumentalist conclusions from this line of thought. I want to caution against this tendency.

If environment "funds" experience, this reasoning might go, then let us use technology to turn the whole world into an easily manageable, convenient stock of environments that conduce to pleasant human experiences

. This Theme Park:

Earth line of thinking neglects our inherent limitations as finite parts of the world, and sets us up for disaster

.

Repeated attempts to dominate nature

(e.g., our damming the Nile and its damning us right back, or our tragicomic' efforts to "tame" the atom) should have begun to teach us something about the limits of human intelligence

.

Such attempts to dominate nature assume that no part of the environment in question is beyond the field of settled experience.

We can indeed exert remarkable control over parts of the experienced world, remaking it to suit our purposes. This may be appropriate, if our purposes make sense in the first place. (I know of no reason to object to the prudent use of natural gas to heat our homes, for example.)

But the very idea that the environment funds experience involves the notion that there is an ineffable aspect of the world. It is indeed arrogant to think that we can master nature; it is moreover delusional and ultimately selfnegating

. If we have our being in the ongoing encounter with environment, then to will that the environment become a fully settled, predictable thing, a mere instrumental resource in which there can be no further novelty, is to will that we undergo no further growth in experience.

The attempt to dominate nature completely is thus an attempt to annihilate the ultimate source of our growth, and hence to annihilate ourselves. What we must try to do is not to master the natural world, but to cultivate meaningful lives within various environment s. We are exceedingly efficient at altering and destroying parts of the earth, but are for the most part inept at living well on it. To exercise our power wisely would require that we genuinely understand the sources of value in the world and in ourselves.

Environmental philosophy must begin with close attention to the quality of experience that arises (or could arise) from inhabiting various environments.

IS

We need to ask what is valuable in experiences, what features of environments they are associated with, and what ways of inhabiting environments are most appropriate

.

All the while we must retain respect for the wild and ineffable aspect of the world. We need to ask once more the aesthetic questions of what is good, and how goodness comes to be in our world - a world importantly different from that of Kant, of James or of John Muir - before we can go much further in implementing an ethics of environment.

No apologies - representations are key in the context of environmental policy – existing discourse means the perm gets co-opted

Luke 03

(Timothy Luke, Professor of Political Science @ Virginia Polytechnic Institute, 2003, Aurora

Online, “Eco-Managerialism: Environmental Studies as a Power/Knowledge Formation,” http://aurora.icaap.org/index.php/aurora/article/view/79/91)

So the book of nature

then remains for the most part a readerly text.

Different human beings will observe its patterns differently

; they will choose to accentuate some while deciding to ignore others. Consequently, nature's meanings always will be multiple and fixed in the process of articulating eco-managerialist discourses. In the

United States

, the initial professionalized efforts to resourcify nature began with the second industrial revolution, and the original conservation movements

that emerged

over a century ago, as progressively minded managers founded schools of agriculture, schools of engineering, schools of forestry, schools of management, and schools of mining

, to master nature and transform its

materiality into goods and services.

By their lights, the entire planet was reduced through resourcifying assumptions into a complex system of inter-related natural resource systems, whose ecological processes in turn are left for certain human beings to operate efficiently or inefficiently as the would-be managers of a vast terrestrial infrastructure.

Directed towards generating greater profit and power

from the rational insertion of natural and artificial bodies into the machinery of global production, the discourses of resource management work continuously to redefine the earth's physical and social ecologies, as sites where

environmental professionals can operate in

many different open-ended projects of eco-system management. The scripts of eco-system management imbedded in most approaches to environmental policy

, however, are rarely rendered articulate by the existing

scientific and technological discourses

that train experts to be experts. Still, a logic of resourcification is woven into the technocratic lessons that people must acquire in acquiring their expert credentials.

In particular, there are perhaps six practices that orient how work goes here. Because I have a weakness for alliteration, I call them Resource Managerialism, Rehabilitation Managerialism, Restoration Managerialism, Renewables Managerialism, Risk

Managerialism, and Recreationist Managerialism.

Attempts to work within the system fail

Luke 97



Compared to so many other environmental organizations, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) plainly is doing something immediate and significant to protect Nature--buying, holding and guarding large swatches of comparatively undisturbed natural habitat. Yet, it does this in accord with the consumeristic ground rules of the global capitalist economy.

Millions of acres, occupying many diverse ecosystems now are being held in trust by the Nature

Conservancy. This trust is being exercised not only for future generations of people, but also for all of the new generations of the plants and animals, fungi and insects, algae and microorganisms inhabiting these plots of land. Beginning with the 60 acres in the Mianus River Gorge, this organization has protected by direct acquisition and trust negotiations over 7.5 million acres of land in North America as well as Central America, South America, and the Caribbean in over separate

10,000 protection actions. In the past forty years, on pieces as small a quarter an acre to as large as hundreds of square miles, the Nature Conservancy in the United

States has arranged for the on-going protection of an area the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island.84 Given that so many ecological initiatives fail so frequently, this string of successes cannot be entirely ignored. Nonetheless, one must admit the Nature Conservancy's achievements are perhaps seriously flawed,

even though these flaws reveal much more about the consumption of public goods through a private property system and free enterprise economy than they show about environmentalism.

Because of what has happened to Nature, how capital operates, and where resources for change must be solicited, the Nature Conservancy does what it does: consume land to be held "in trust: for Nature. As a result, the tenets and tenor of the Conservancy's operations as "an environmentalist organization" are those of almost complete compliance, and not those of radical resistance to the fast capitalist global economy.

In the Nature Conservancy's operational codes of land consumption, a triage system comes into play. Some lands of Nature are more "ecologically significant," some regions are much more "natural areas," but some grounds are far less "protectable" than others.

The methods of the Conservancy show how it implicitly sees Nature as real estate properties inasmuch as its chapters must constantly grade the acreages they receive--labelling some as truly ecologically significant, some as plainly natural areas, some as merely "trade lands."85 The latter are sold, like old horses for glue or worn-out cattle for dogfood, and the proceeds can used elsewhere to promote conservation. In seeking to preserve Nature, the Nature Conservancy strangely oversees its final transformation into pure real estate, allowing even hitherto unsalable or undeveloped lands to become transubstantiated into

"natural areas" to green belt human settlements and recharge their scenic visits with ecological significance.

When it asks for land to protect wildlife and create sanctuary for ecosystems. However, the Nature Conservancy tends not to detail the ultimate cause of its concern. Protect it from what? Create sanctuary from what? The answer is, of course, the same consumeristic economy that is allowing its members to accumulate stock, mail in donations, buy and sell land.

In many ways, the Conservancy is disingenuous in its designation of only some of its lands as trade lands.

Actually, all of its protected lands are trade lands, trading sanctuary and protection here (where it is commercially possible or aesthetically imperative) to forsake

sanctuary and protection there (where it is commercially unviable or aesthetically dispensable). It extracts a title for partial permanence from a constant turnover of economic destruction anchored in total impermanence.86 The Conservancy ironically fights a perpetually losing battle, protecting rare species from what makes them rare and building sanctuary from what devastates everything on the land elsewhere with the proceeds of its members' successful capitalist rarification and despoliation.

The Nature Conservancy necessarily embraces the key counter-intuitive quality of all markets, namely, a dynamic in which the pursuit of private vices can advance public virtues.

This appears contradictory, but it has nonetheless a very valid basis. It agrees to sacrifice almost all land in general to development, because it knows that all land will not, in fact, be developed. On the one hand, excessive environmental regulations might destroy this delicate balance in land use patterns. In accepting the universal premise of development, on the other hand, it constantly can undercut economic development's specific enactments at sites where it is no longer or not yet profitable. Some land will be saved and can be saved, in fact, by allowing, in principle, all land to be liable to development. Hence, it needs trade lands to do land trades to isolate some land from any more trading. In allowing all to pursue their individual vices and desires in the market, one permits a differently motivated actor, like the Nature Conservancy, to trade for land, like any other speculator, and develop it to suit its selfish individual taste, which is in this case is "unselfish nondevelopment." This perversely antimarket outcome satisfies the Conservancy's desires and ends, while perhaps also advancing the collective good through market mechanisms. Over the past two decades, The Nature Conservancy has grown by leaps and bounds by sticking to the operational objectives of "preserving biodiversity."87 As powerful anthropogenic actions have recontoured the Earth to suit the basic material needs of corporate modes of production, these artificial contours now define new ecologies for all life forms caught within their "economy" and "environment." The "economy" becomes a world political economy's interior spaces defined by technoscience processes devoted to production and consumption, while "the environment," in this sense, becomes a planetary political economy's exterior spaces oriented to resource-creation, scenery-provision, and waste-reception. Natural resources exist, but Nature does not. Economic survival is imperative, but the commodity logics driving it need to be grounded in sound ecological common sense lest the limitless dynamism of commodification be permitted to submit everything to exchange logics immediately. Time is now what is scarce and centrally important in the highly compressed time-space continua of contemporary commodity chains. It is no longer a question of jobs versus the environment, because fewer jobs will not resurrect Nature. Nature is dead, and the environment generating global production assumes that jobs are necessary to define it as the space of natural resources. Doing jobs irrationally and too rapidly, however, is what destroys these environments, making jobs done rationally and at an apt pace ecologically acceptable. Consequently, the agendas of environmental protection must center on the "question of the short-term vs. the long-term," and this is "what the Conservancy is all about."88 Nature, in all of its wild mystery and awesome totality, is not being preserved by the Nature Conservancy. It is, in fact, dead, as McKibben and Merchant tell us.89 Nonetheless, its memory might be kept alive by the Nature Conservancy at numerous burial parks all over the nation where glimpses of its spirit should be remembered by human beings in a whiff of wild fight, the scent of a stream, or the aroma of surf. This goal may be a very well-intentioned one; but, in many ways all that the Nature Conservancy does boils down to serving as a burial society dedicated to giving perpetual maintenance and loving care at a variety of Nature cemeteries: Forest Glen, Mountain Meadow, Virgin River, Jade

Jungle, Prairie View, Harmony Bay, Sunny Savannah, Brilliant Beach, Desert Vista, Happy Hollow, Ctal Spring. As Nature's death is acknowledged, more and more plots are needed to bury the best bits of its body in gardens of eternal life. Thus, the call for members, funds, and donations always will grow and grow.

This mission is even more ironic given the means whereby it is funded. Those humans, whose production and consumption had so much to do with Nature's death, the middle and upper-middle classes, are given an opportunity to purchase some atonement for their anonymous sins as consumers by joining the Nature

Conservancy. Indeed, they even can transfer their accumulations of dead labor, and by extension, dead nature, to the Nature Conservancy to tend the gravesites of that which they murdered cheeseburger by cheeseburger, BTU by BTU, freon molecule by freon molecule in their lethal mode of suburban living.

Even more ironically, the hit men of these myriad murder for hire deals--or major corporations--also are solicited by the Conservancy to pony up land, capital or donations to sustain this noble enterprise.

Economy and environment are, of course, not incompatible, because this is the circuit of maggot and corpse, buzzard and body, grub and grave so common in today's postmodern ecology.

Capital and Nature, the dead and living, are incompatible, but the capital has won, Nature is dead. All that is left is the zombie world of economies and environments, or the cash credits inside corporate ledgers for capital circulation and the ecological debits outside of corporate accounting charged off as externalities. Some still think capitalism has not yet defeated Nature, but they are deluded. Everything is environment now, nothing is Nature except perhaps the last reaches of innerspace and outerspace where aquanauts and astronauts, riding hi-tech robotic probes, have not yet come in peace, killing everything before them to then rest in peace.

A2: Case OW’s

Their risk calculus is wrong - empirics prove that our impacts are substantially more likely and outweigh – theirs are falsified

Luke 96



Risk management

at colleges of natural resources presumes its calculations "are based on a

(spatially, temporally, and socially circumscribed) accident definition" or that its analyses truly do "estimate and legitimate the potential for catastrophe

of modern large-scale technologies and industries."33

Superfund site after supertanker spill after superstack bubble, however, indicate that this degree of managerial knowledge is precisely what risk management sciences

at schools of environmental studies fail to produce,

"and so they are falsifications, and can be criticized and reformed in accordance with their own claims to rationality

."34 This trend toward developing a fully self-conscious risk managerialism grounded in economistic trade-offs also surfaces fully in the curriculum of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, whose recent strategic restructuring commits it fully to risk assessment methods because these techniques are "redefining forestry to encompass all of the social and political factors which we know from experience to be fundamental to good forest management."35

A2: Experts = Activists

The majority of students who study environmental science don’t become activists

Luke 96



Those who continue to imagine all environmentalists as some sort of countercultural resistance lighters only need to consult the Nicholas School

or the Environment at

Duke to get a sense of where academic environmental studies actually lead

. While some of its graduates—only 16 percent—end up working for advocacy nonprofits, like the Rain Forest Alliance, World Wildlife Fund, or Chesapeake Bay Foundation, many

also find positions with staid groups

like Worldwatch, the Nature Conservancy or the National Geographic Society.

Another 32 percent work for federal and state governments, and 42 percent work for private consulting and industrial firm s, like ABT Association, ERM. Inc., ICF Kaiser International, General Motors, Texaco, or Westvaco

Corporation.,0

The key validation of academic environmental studies

at Duke is wholly careerist

: good placement and respectable salaries for newly graduated natural resource professionals.

Marketability of their labor equals effectiveness for their education. The performative truths such schools impart must be valid; otherwise, big business

, federal agencies, and global NGOs would not drop by to recruit their graduates. Their training

in Ecotoxicology and Risk Assessment, Resource Economics or Forest Resource Management does not stress post-anthropocentric deep ecology

; likewise, the Nicholas School will not count holistic New Age

Deep Ecology Studies among its in-house graduate programs.

Technoscientific truths are those tied to reproducing environmental studies as the coda of careerist knowledge and

professional power.

Luke Quals

he’s smart

Aurora 03

(Aurora Online Magazine, 2003, “Eco-Managerialism: Environmental Studies as a Power/Knowledge

Formation”, http://aurora.icaap.org/index.php/aurora/article/view/79/91)

Timothy W. Luke is University Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Virginia

Poly tech nic

Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Virginia.

He received his Ph.D. in political science from

Washington University, St. Louis

in 1981.

His research interests are political and social theory, international politics, and environmental politics.

Tim Luke is Executive Director of the Institute for Distance and Distributed Learning, the

Director of Graduate Studies in

the Department of Political

Science, and Co-Director of the Center for

Digital Discourse and Culture in the College of Arts and Sciences at Virginia

Poly tech nic.

He also was one of the founding members of the Virginia Tech Cyberschool in the College of Arts and

Sciences. He launched the On Line Master of Arts degree in the Department of Political Science, which was the first fully on line MA degree for political science in the U.S.A.

He is a member of Virginia Tech's

Academy of Teaching Excellence, and a winner of the Wine and Alumni Teaching Awards.

AFF

Pragmatism Key

Only pragmatic rationality solves -- connects philosophical ideals with material change

Holden 08 - Associate Professor of Urban Studies based at Simon Fraser University in

Vancouver, Canada (Meg, December 2008, Planning Theory and Practice, Vol. 9, No. 4,

“The Tough Minded and the Tender Minded: A Pragmatic Turn for Sustainable

Development Planning and Policy”, Ebsco)

An important and influential group of present-day planning theorists argue for, demonstrate, and regularly employ

American pragmatism in their writing, thinking and practice.

Their most obvious pragmatist hero is

John Dewey, and rightly so, as Dewey’s writings are the most prolific of the original pragmatists, and his approach and style could be considered the most readily accessible to planners. Indeed, in terms of James’s metaphor that will guide this paper, Dewey belongs squarely in the camp of the tough minded.5 The work of William James is more tender minded: it was his intent in his writing to evoke feelings, as he himself admitted:

“I wish that I could convince you of it the way I feel it myself” (p. 645). Though this approach makes it harder to relate James’s ideas to planning, as planning engages in ethically and emotionally charged realms such as that of sustainable development, James emerges as a crucial ally and guide.

Verma

(1996, 1998), in particular, has carefully traced and explicated the value of drawing upon James in planning theory and practice, and has used James’s pragmatism to argue for a renewed commitment to a pragmatic rationality in planning. My argument follows from Verma’s, considering more specifically the growing need for planners to address the challenges of sustainable development.

The idea that holds the most revolutionary implications for planning theory is the pragmatist concept of “truth”. As a public philosophy that brings inquiry out of the realm of a private search for truth, pragmatism searches for thoughts able to guide action in morally relevant ways and to answer: “How does this help?”

(Rawls, 1995). What is true depends on context as much as it does on correspondence with facts: “

Truth is not only a matter of logical agreement between different elements of knowledge; it is also the 4psychological agreement between messenger, the message, and its receiver

”

(Verma, 1996, p. 6).

The implication for planners of thinking about truth in this way is that more attention needs to be paid to the consequences of adopting a particular version of the truth than to its ability to be proven true for all time.

As Verma points out, this does not sound on the surface to be a particularly new idea for planners: planners have always had to think about context and consequences. The novelty for planners in a pragmatic way of thinking

, according to Verma (1996, p. 8), lies in the philosophy’s ability to resist

“an analytic division of the world.” Planners’ use of analytical steps and categories may protect the replicability and verifiability of their work but does not serve great practical purpose. Instead, the pragmatic position is that this approach to professional practice detracts from our ability to create “firstbest” solutions that respect the integrity of the lived context of our communities.

Commodification Turn

Their critique of commodification by capitalism links to itself – the K itself is a literary commodity used to win debate ballots

Thiele 98

- teaches political theory and is the Director of Sustainability Studies @ University of Florida (Leslie P.,

September 1998, “Ecocritique: Contesting the Politics of Nature, Economy, and Culture by Timothy W. Luke”, The American

Political Science Review, Vol. 92, No. 3, p. 689-691, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2585504?origin=JSTOR-pdf)

For Luke, nature has been denatured through the corn- modification of life

that accompanies corporate hegemony. Instead of directly taking on the institutions of translational capitalism, however, he criticizes environmentalists for being insufficiently radical in their own struggles against these institutions.

There is

, of course, a long tradition of armchair philosophers haranguing social activists for their compromises.

Still, the irony is pungent.

It is heightened by the fact that

Luke's critique of

too-timid,

business-friendly environmentalism has been accompanied by the

standard academic practice of producing a resource-consuming literary commodity of dubious recyclable value.

A2: Biopower

Biopower isn’t inherently bad – only without liberalism checking sovereign power can it result in genocide

Dean 04

- Professor of Public Governance @ Copenhagen Business School, and Professor of Sociology @ the University of

Newcastle in Australia (Mitchell M., December 2004, “Four Theses on the Powers of Life and Death”, http://sydney.edu.au/contretemps/5december2004/dean.pdf)

Second Thesis:

It is not

merely the succession or addition of the modern powers over life to the ancient right of death but their

very combination within modern states that is of significance. How these powers are combined accounts for whether they are malign or benign.

According to this view, it is not the moment that life became a political objec t in the eighteenth century that defined the disturbing features of modern states.

Rather, the different ways in which bio-politics is combined with sovereign power decide their character

. Certain passages from Foucault's lectures and from the

History of Sexuality can be interpreted in this way. In a passage from the latter, Foucault shows that the genocidal character of National Socialism did not

simply arise from its extension of bio-power.16 Nazism

was concerned with the total administration of the life, of the family, of marriage, procreation, education and with the intensification of disciplinary micro-powers. But it

articulated

this with another set of features concerned with

"the oneiric exaltation of a superior blood," of fatherland, and of the triumph of the race

. In other words

, if we are to understand how the

most dramatic forces of life and death

were unleashed in the twentieth century, we have to understand how bio-power was articulated with elements of sovereignty

and its symbolics

.

Pace Bauman, it is not

simply the development of instrumental rationality in the form of

modern

bio-power, or a bureaucratic power applied to life

that makes the Holocaust possible. It is the system of linkages, recodings and re-inscriptions of sovereign notions of fatherland, territory, and blood within the new bio-political discourses of eugenics and racial hygiene that makes the unthinkable thinkable.

The fact that all modern states must articulate elements of sovereignty with bio-politics also allows for a virtuous combination

. The virtue of liberal and democratic forms of government is that they deploy

two instruments to check the unfettered imperatives of

bio-power

, one drawn from political economy and the other from sovereignty itself.17

Liberalism seeks to review the imperative to govern too much by pointing to

the quasi- natural processes of the market or of the exchanges of commercial society that are external to government.

To govern economically means to govern through economic and other social processes external to government and also to govern in an efficient, cost-effective way.

Liberalism also invokes the freedom and rights of a new subject—the sovereign individual.

By 'governing through freedom' and in relation to freedom, advanced liberal democracies are able to differentiate their bio-politics from that of modern totalitarian states and older police states.

Democracy checks the impact

Dickinson 04

(Edward Ross Dickens, Associate Professor, History Ph.D., U.C. Berkley – 2004,

“Biopolitics, Fascism, Democracy: Some Reflections on Our Discourse About Modernity,” Central

European History, Vol. 37, No. 1, 1-48 )

At its simplest, this view of the politics of expertise and professionalization is certainly plausible. Historically speaking, however, the further conjecture that this "micropolitical" dynamic creates authoritarian, totalitarian, or homicidal potentials at the level of the state does not seem very tenable.

Historically, it appears that the greatest advocates of political democracy

in Germany left- liberals and

Social Democrats have been also the greatest advocates of

every kind of biopolitical social engineering

, from public health and welfare programs through social insurance to city planning and, yes, even eugenics.102 The state they built has intervened in social relations to an (until recently) ever-growing degree; professionalization has run ever more rampant in Western societies; the production of scientistic and technocratic expert knowledge has proceeded at an ever more frenetic pace. And yet, from the perspective of the first years of

the millennium, the second half of the twentieth century appears to be the great age of democracy

in precisely those societies where these processes have been most in evidence.

What is more, the interventionist state has steadily expanded both the rights and the resources of virtually every citizen

including those who were stigmatized and persecuted as biologically defective under National Socialism. Perhaps these processes have created an ever more restrictive "iron cage" of rationality in European societies. But if so, it seems clear that there is no necessary correlation between rationalization and authoritarian politics; the opposite seems in fact to be at least equally true.

A2: Alt Solves

No alt solvency -- We can never understand the “voices of the environment” – all human thinking and processing is anthropocentric

Light and Katz 96

(Andrew Light, Eric Katz, London and New York, “Environmental

Pragmatism” http://www.public.iastate.edu/~jwcwolf/Papers/Parker.pdf mp)

I have spoken of the experience of organisms-in-environments as centrally important.

Pragmatism is "anthropocentric

"

(or better, "anthropometric")24 in one respect: the human organism is inevitably the one that discusses value.

This is

so because human experience,

the human perspective on value, is the only thing we know as humans

.

Many other entities indeed have experience and do value things.

Again, this isnot to saythat human whim isthe measure of all things, only that humans are in fact the measurers. This must be a factor in all our deliberations about environmental issues

.

We can and should speak on the others' behalf when appropriate, but we cannot speak from their experience. We can in some sense hear their voices, but we cannot speak in their voices

. I seeno way out of our own distinctively human bodies. In this sense, the human yardstick of experience becomes, by default, the measure of all things. Although the debate over environmental issues is thus limited to human participants, this is not inappropriate - after all, the debate centers almost exclusively on human threats to the world

. Wolves, spotted owls, and old- growth forests are unable to enter the ethics debate except through their human spokespersons, and that is perhaps regrettable. Far better that they should speak for themselves!Lacking this, they do at least have spokespersons - and these spokespersons, their advocates, need to communicate their concerns only to other humans. To do this in anthropic value categories is not shameful. It is, after all, the only way to go.

Alt fails – rejection allows corporations to continue exploiting the environment.

Luke 97

(Timothy W. Luke, department of political science at Virginia polytechnic institute

“Ecocritique: Contesting the Politics of Nature, Economy, and Culture” mp)

Although resource managerialism

can be criticized on many levels, it has provisionally guaranteed some measure of limited protection to wilderness areas, animal species, and watercourses in the United States.

And, whatever its flaws, the attempt to extend the scope of its oversight to other regions of the world probably could have a similar impact.

Resource managerialism directly confronts the existing cultural, economic, and social regime of transnational corporate capitalism with the fact that millions of Americans, as well as billions of other human beings, must be provisioned from the living things populating Earth’s biosphere (the situation of all these other living things, of course, is usually ignored or reduced to an aesthetic question). And, if they are left unregulated, as history as shown, the existing corporate circuits of commodity production will degrade the biosphere to the point that all living things will not be able to renew themselves.

Other ecological activists can fault resource managerialism, but few, if any, of them face these present-day realities as forthrightly in actual practice, largely because the prevailing regimes of state and corporate power

, now assuming the forms of the “wise-use” movement often regard even this limited challenge as far too radical

. Still, this record of “success” is not a license to ignore the flawed working of resource managerialism. In fact, this forthright engagement with resource realities raises very serious questions, as the global tactics of such agencies as the Worldwatch Institute reveal.

No alternative solvency – there’s no practical way to get to the point that they talk about – reject their hopeless utopianism

Thiele 98

- teaches political theory and is the Director of Sustainability Studies @ University of Florida (Leslie P.,

September 1998, “Ecocritique: Contesting the Politics of Nature, Economy, and Culture by Timothy W. Luke”, The American

Political Science Review, Vol. 92, No. 3, p. 689-691, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2585504?origin=JSTOR-pdf)

Luke disparages the efforts of those who espouse individ-ual responsibility—organizations such as the Earth Works Group, which wrote the best-selling 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth. The naivety of such do-good approaches is troubling to be sure. Though political action and community organizing is recommended, it is not empha-sized. For Luke, however, the problem is simply that these approaches are not radical enough. "Rather than pushing for waste elimination," Luke writes, "the Earth Works

Group stands for waste reduction. Instead of advocating total eco-nomic transformation, it accepts weak bureaucratic regula-tion of

present-day polluting processes. Unable to support the total reconstitution of today's productive forces, it advo-cates piecemeal reforms to lessen, but never end, their most environmentally destructive activities" (p. 123).

Luke

rejects "weak reformist strategy"

(p. 122). He calls instead for a radical social transformation that would yield bioregionally decentralized communities

operating in "equal partnership with Nature" (p. 208). The ultimate goal is "survivable communitarian ecologies within which people dominate nei-ther other human beings nor their fellow nonhuman beings" (p. xiii).

Presumably these biocentric. egalitarian, protoanar-chistic communities would produce neither waste nor pollu-tion. Luke rejects

"ecosocialist millenarianism." He also dis- misses the "utopian ecologism" of deep ecologists because it fails to outline the practicable means for realizing its moral vision and

, like most other revolutionary programs, lacks "a theory of the transition"

(pp. 24-5).

This is clearly a case of the pot calling the kettle black

. Notwithstanding a fine chapter on Murray Bookchin's environmental philosophy and Luke's insistence that all environmental advocacy must be "workable and realistic" (p. 203),

Ecocritique remains divorced from practicality and is a stranger to transitional strategy.

The "ecological populism" promoted by Luke would entail "rebuilding the contemporary city and society from the ground up around new aesthetic sensibilities." It would require "equal participation by every community member in shared action to make collective decisions," such that, in the end, everyone will hold

"equitable shares of property, power, and privilege in the community commonwealth" (pp. 200-1).

Luke's unwillingness to suggest any viable means of achieving these ends is troubling. It is particularly suspect owing to his disparagement of those who take the small steps that might slowly move individuals and societies down the road to ecological responsibility

. Luke insists that "only the actions of a very small handful of the humans that are now living, namely those in significant positions of decisive managerial power in business or central executive authority in government, can truly do something to determine the future" (p. 126). That conviction is what most separates environmental activists from those who write books about environmental activists. Reflecting on Plato's idealism, Aristotle observed that the best often becomes the enemy of the good.

One senses that

Luke's diatribe against environmental reformism gains its fire from a vision of the ecological and sociopolitical best. This alluring vision will never come closer to realization

, however, if yearnings for what is best undermine all concrete efforts to achieve what is good,

[jike's ideal of a global confederation of ecologically benign and fully egalitarian communities is infatuating. Yet, in the end

, Luke's unwillingness to address the practical means of its achievement leaves the reader forlorn

. One is reminded of the traveler who asked a resident for directions to a small town in the region. "Ah, yes, that's quite a few turns in the road, if I were you, I wouldn't start from here!"

State Key

The state is key to preserve the ocean

National Ocean Council 13

(April 2013, “National Ocean Policy Implementation Plan” http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/national_ocean_policy_implementation_plan.p

df mp)

The ocean, our coasts, and the Great Lakes are among our most treasured resources. They are an integral part of our national identity and our future. A healthy marine environment feeds our

Nation, fuels our economy, supports our cultures, provides and creates jobs, gives mobility to our Armed Forces, enables safe movement of goods, and provides places for recreation. Healthy, productive, and resilient oceans, coasts, and Great Lakes contribute significantly to our quality of life. At the same time, these resources are vulnerable to activities and impacts that diminish their health, productivity, and resilience. Pollution, for example, degrades marine habitats, reduces access to recreational and commercial opportunities, and threatens public health and safety. Habitat loss impacts the stability of marine populations, leading to significant economic and cultural consequences. Overfishing threatens current and future opportunities for recreational and commercial fishing, compromises our national food security, and reduces the ability of marine ecosystems to recover from disturbances. The impacts of climate change, such as sea-level rise, increase the vulnerability of coastal communities to storm damage. Moreover, these problems interact with one another, collectively amplifying their impact on the health of the ocean. In addition, a growing population of ocean users is increasingly competing for ocean space both for established uses such as fishing, shipping, military activities, and conventional energy development, and for emerging uses such as renewable energy development and aquaculture. This competition creates conflicts between users and presents new challenges for decision-makers. Inefficient government decision-making can compound the problem, hampering economic opportunities and impeding the entrepreneurial, problem-solving efforts of commercial and conservation interests alike. At the same time, the Nation is encountering new opportunities to improve our understanding of the ocean, how it works, and how we can expand our use of the ocean while maintaining its health and resilience. Advances in research, science, and technology are necessary to help us better understand how marine environments function, and how they influence and are influenced by human activities. Application of this knowledge will inform locally-driven management practices and will improve and maintain the health of the ocean, support employment and new economic opportunities, enhance the

Nation’s safety and security, and help preserve the ocean as a valuable resource.

Institutional engagement is necessary to ensure sustainable change– the alternative is doomed to fail

Luke 97

(Timothy W. Luke, department of political science at Virginia polytechnic institute

“Ecocritique: Contesting the Politics of Nature, Economy, and Culture” mp)

It may be true that “the actions of those now living will determine the future and possibly the very survival of the species”, but it is, in fact, mostly a mystification.

Only the actions of a very small handful of the humans who are now living, namely, those in

significant positions of decisive managerial power in business or central executive authority in government, can truly do something to determine the future.

Hollander’s belief that thousands of his readers,

who will replace their light bulbs, water heaters, automobiles, or toilets with ecologically improved alternatives, can decisively affect the survival of the species is pure ideology.

It may sell new kinds of toilets, cars, appliances, and light bulbs, but it does not guarantee planetary survival. Hollander does not stop here. He even asserts that everyone on the planet, not merely the average consumers in affluent societies, is to blame for the ecological crisis

. Therefore, he maintains, rightly and wrongly, that “no attempt to protect the environment will be successful in the long run unless ordinary people—the California executive, the Mexican peasant, the Soviet [sic] factory worker, the Chinese farmer—are willing to adjust their life-styles and values. Our

wasteful, careless ways must become a thing of the past.” The wasteful, careless ways of the California executive plainly must be ecologically reconstituted, but the impoverished practices of Mexican peasants and

Chinese farmers, short of what many others would see as their presumed contributions to “overpopulation,” are probably already at levels of consumption that Hollander happily would ratify as ecologically sustainable if the California executive could only attain and abide by them. As Hollander asserts, “ every aspect of our lives has some environmental impact

,” and, in some sense, everyone he claims, “must acknowledge the responsibility we were all given as citizens of the planet and act on the hundreds of opportunities to save our planet that present themselves every day.” Nevertheless,

the typical consumer does not control the critical aspects of his or her existence in ways that have any major environmental impact

. Nor do we all encounter hundreds of opportunities every day to do much to save the planet. The absurd claim that average consumers only need to shop, bicycle, or garden their way to an ecological failure merely moves most of the responsibility and much of the blame away from the institutional center of power whose decisions actually maintain the wasteful, careless ways of material exchange that Hollander would end by having everyone recycle all their soda cans.

Attempts to move away from ecological modernization fail- they face local opposition and need for help from the state

Pepper 99

(David Pepper, Professor of Geography, Oxford Brooks University, (1999), Ecological modernisation or the ‘ideal model’ of sustainable development?” Environmental Politics, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/09644019908414492)

None of which is to suggest that adopting the model would be unproblematic.

Kirby recalls how past struggles by marginalized communities

in Ireland have been piecemeal and fragmented.

As Friedmann [1992: 158} notes, attempts at endogenous development are likely to flounder without external stimulus and help, perhaps particularly from the state.

But the Irish state obstructed one of the most notable attempts to establish that economic autonomy which Fotopoulos rightly identifies as crucial, when it opposed the communistic plans of the Glenc olumbcille (Co. Donegal) Communal Farming

Cooperative in the 1960s to pool labor and rights to use local land [Tucker, undated].

Such opposition is indeed likely to be triggered by attempts to practice

IM, since the model is fundamentally incompatible with and often overtly antipathetic to capitalist dynamics

(whether there are roles within it for local markets and a decentralized state constitute open questions, vigorously debated amongst IM's proponents). It is this, rather than anti- modernist sentiments, which mainly distinguishes IM from Barry's 'collective ecological management', Lang and Hines' 'new protectionism', Christoff’s 'strong EM', or Friedmann's [1992] 'alternative development'. These could all be described as situated around the junction between 'strong sustainability' and the ideal model in Baker el al.'s ladder, but distinguishable from IM because they appear to accept global marketization 'as a fact' [Friedmann, 1992], seeking to restrain it through intervention. It also follows from most of the analyses reviewed here that the ideal model is not likely to be sustainable on its own: it cannot be applied to 'peripheries' unless it also applies to 'cores' since one of its major functions is to eliminate cores and peripheries. Correspondingly, current attempts within ecological modernization to encourage community-led SD in EU peripheries via bottom-up 'democratic' rural initiatives are arguably futile. For they take as read the wider context of the Single Market set within a global market, with their irresistible forces for concentrating economic power.

Expecting the ideal model to develop by

'stealth' in this context could itself be Utopian.

How IM discourse can gain currency, and become a cultural and economic project in the face of global, 'ecological' modernization is a difficult question to answer. It is not likely to be attempted in the mainstream until the inability of global modernization to meet the requirements of strong sustainability becomes even more starkly apparent than at present. Some commentators make much of existing, potentially 'transitional', forms that have some significance in impoverished geographical peripheries. They include credit unions, community land banks, LETS, local provident societies, banks and borrowing schemes, community councils, producer cooperatives, permaculture and soft energy projects and 'self-reliant' communes. There is often intense debate about their real revolutionary potential. Some one-time enthusiasts have rejected them because they easily come, perhaps by cooption, to resemble the social- economic forms they were meant to counter [Bookchin, 1995; also Pepper, 1991).

However it is hard to resist the conclusion that they may at least contribute to an emerging counterhegemonic consciousness: one that the victims of increasing failures within the mainstream approach to sustainable development might need to draw on before long.

Permutation Solves

Permutation solves – a combination of environmental ethics and pragmatic policies allows for the best environmental approach

De-Shalit

,

2k(Avner De-Shalit, Associate Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Environment, Ethics, and Society and Professor of Political Theory at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem “The

Environment: Between Theory and Practice” mp)

Before continuing, I would like point out a possible challenge to my argument so far. I have claimed that environmental philosophers should decide how to persuade the public of the need for environmental policies. It could, however, be argued that many of these philosophers are convinced that animals have rights, or that there is intrinsic value in nature (I discuss this idea in depth in the next chapter), and they may feel they have to discuss this, as a mission. They don't want to give up persuading people about animal rights or intrinsic value, and they don't want to 'sell out' just in order to persuade. It seems (the argument would continue) that I might expect these philosophers to suppress their ideas and feelings. However, philosophers should be loyal to their ideas and thoughts as well: they should be authentic; their role is not merely to persuade for the sake of forming a majority of well-informed citizens. I need of course to emphasize that this is not what I expect philosophers to do. Indeed, I think that a place does exist for environmental ethics and meta-ethics and that there is also a time to discuss issues bearing no relation to policies

. However, environmental philosophers cannot escape the need to engage in real-life public deliberation because what they discuss is not wholly 'academic'

. 18

The issues at stake are crucial both to human beings and their welfare, and to ecosystems and the state of the environment

. The ecological crisis is not a question that can be discussed in tranquillity, and one cannot experiment with thinking about it for too long.

There is a strong and urgent need for some thoughts and theories that are oriented towards institutions and policies. So, while accepting that environmental ethics and meta-ethics reflect sincere and authentic concerns, and that these concerns should be voiced, as an important part of this debate, I would stress that these cannot replace political theory concerning the environment

. Such theory is vital for obvious reasons.

Perm do both—combining the aff’s strategy of environmental sustainability with the questioning of the alt allows us to avoid strict managerial control of the environment while still participating in politics and finding common ground

Flournoy 03

(Alyson Flourney, University of Florida Levin College of Law, “Building an Environmental

Ethic from the Ground Up,” Fall 2003, http://scholarship.law.ufl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1080&context=facultypub)

A first question is how to define sustainability.

The most widely accepted definition of sustainability is providing for the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.

46 Decisions or policies are deemed sustainable only if they incorporate consideration of three co-equal factors: ecology, economics and social equity.47

Because of the explicit focus on human needs, the concept is compatible with anthropocentrism.

48 On its face, sustainability values the environment and economic activity, not intrinsically but for their utility to humans. The explicit valuing of equity among humans in the allocation of environmental and economic benefits seems to introduce a complementary rights-based approach. So what is potentially useful about this concept? First, let me be clear about what sustainability does not accomplish. It does not address the problem that motivates so much of the work in environmental philosophy; that is, it does not expand the community of morally valued entities beyond humans.49 To that ex tent, it is consistent with a calculus of utility like that employed under many laws today. It does not appeal to any inchoate non-anthropocentric intuitions that members of the public may possess.

However, sustainability has six attributes that endow it with the potential to expand public discourse and to help us confront problems that must be addressed if any environmental philosophy is to take root. By framing and focusing public debate on these important issues, sustainability may facilitate future ethical development.

First, the concept of sustainability provides an elegant way to address the critical problem of long time horizons.0 Legal scholars have done much that shows the failures of current cost-benefit methodology in dealing with long time horizons. Scholars have revealed both the controversial value choices about time horizons made in current policies and the flawed technical analysis sometimes performed under our current laws, which tends to undervalue future harms.

"1 But much of the work is necessarily very technical and abstract, removed from the concrete conflicts that shape public debate. It may be critically important that the public be engaged directly with this central moral issue in environmental policy.

Sustainability can provide an anchor for debate about the appropriate time horizon to consider in law and policy. The challenge of extending our ethical horizon to include a longer timeframe is an enormously important one for anyone who cares about the environment, under almost any justification for caring. Sustainability is a concept that can perform this heavy lifting. Future generations of humans are front and center and must be considered. The questions of how far into the future we want to consider and how we weigh our interest in the future against current needs are not easy. But as Bryan Norton's work shows, sustainability frames the issue and focuses attention on this key value choice that we must make."2 Second, by virtue of its explicit focus on environmental impacts over a long time horizon, sustainability demands that we employ the tools and knowledge of ecology to understand these consequences. Of course, the same claim could be made of a utilitarian philosophy: accurately determining the greatest good for the greatest number demands that we employ our best methodologies to determine the human consequences of our actions. However, sustainability suggests the need for an antidote to current practices in two ways. First, the emphasis on the environment as an equal factor of consideration alongside economics and equity elevates the importance of ecological impacts and our analysis of them. Further, sustainability envisions integrated decisionmaking, a key prerequisite to incorporating ecology effectively into decisions.' Again, this is not a panacea, but a spotlight that can illuminate the issues, bringing them into the public's field of vision. Third, sustainability focuses attention on the role of uncertainty and the ethical implications of our choices related to burdens of proof. Engaging people on the subject of scientific uncertainty and burdens of proof is likely to induce glazed eyes; sustainability provides a concrete entry point for initiating public debate on the relevant moral questions. Inadequate data and limited understanding about the consequences of human activity on the environment have long been recognized by scholars as serious challenges to developing effective environmental policy and law.

No matter what our ethical stance, we must all confront the central question of how we ought to deal with uncertainty.

This is not purely a philosophical

problem. But as a practical matter, if an approach to uncertainty is not embedded in the ethical framework we apply, then questions about coping with uncertainty may be wrongly relegated, as they often are today, to the realm of technical questions, removed from public debate and concern.

Sustainability has promise for bringing the question of uncertainty back into the public eye because it embodies the premise that all decisions must preserve options for future generations.

Sustainability reframes the debate, thus introducing the possibility for a different approach to uncertainty than that embedded in current law, policy, and ethics.

In place of legal standards that demand proof of harm in the face of uncertainty, sustainability raises the possibility that we should assess human decisions to see if they are sustainable. As such, the concept of sustainability can expose the significant issue of how to assess technological optimism in light of what is unknown. 4

Because sustainability provides a positive standard against which to measure human activity, it facilitates placing the burden of proof of sustainability on those whose actions deplete resources rather than on those who advocate protective regulation.

Asking whether a given activity is sustainable redirects the focus from whether human activity causes harm. In the harm prevention context, the relative concreteness of the term "harm" serves to focus our attention on the issue of harm as the operative inquiry. This focus on whether harm has occurred gives force to the argument for placing the burden of proof (and thus of uncertainty) on those who would prove harm. Because sustainability is a positive attribute of a decision, a focus on sustainability may lend at least rhetorical strength to the argument for shifting the burden of coping with uncertainty to those who seek to justify their activities as sustainable.55 Further, the international discourse on sustainability, which has made the precautionary principle one of its operational elements, also supports this shift. Of course, just as the argument is made under current law that it is unreasonable to ask economic actors to prove a negative (that there will be no harm to health or the environment), there will undoubtedly still be claims that it is unreasonable to ask economic actors to prove such a broad positive (that a decision is sustainable). In other words, sustainability will not eliminate controversy over policies on the burden of proof and how to cope with uncertainty. But broader adoption of the concept of sustainability would remind us that this is a value question and not a technical issue. It may, therefore, renew p ublic interest in, and attention to, the question of the burden of proof in light of uncertainty.

Fourth, sustainability embraces the reality that a broad array of human values must inevitably be weighed along with values associated with the environment, whether in a traditional or a non-traditional ethical framework. Other human values do not simply disappear when values56 related to interactions with the nonhuman environment appear.

Resolving conflicts that exist among values is perhaps the most important context in which environmental values are invoked 7

Advocates on all sides of environmental debates may not always want to highlight the fact that environmental protection measures that make us feel virtuous often serve our self-interest as well.

But the prevailing polarized discourse and false dichotomies impede mature debate about environmental ethics and may undermine long-term support for environmental law.

Sustainability may provide an antidote for extreme polarization by recasting the debate to emphasize that decisions affecting the environment inevitably affect other human values.

Sustainability makes a virtue of this necessary tension by acknowledging the need to consider other values.

Recognizing that environmental statutes and an environmental worldview already incorporate rather than exclude these other values is an important step.

Incorporation of a broad array of values, linked with a long time horizon, ecological principles, and social equity, may have tremendous power to enrich public debate. There is an obvious risk that comes with the inclusion of non- environmental human values alongside environmental values. The risk is that despite the nominal embracing of the environment, other more easily quantifiable values will outweigh non-economic environmental values. Many commentators have pointed out this failing under current laws that mandate cost-benefit analysis. If this critique of sustainability proves correct, sustainability will produce decisions no different than those we have today or worse.

For this reason, embracing the broad range of values associated with sustainability may justifiably be rejected by many advocates in the polarized debate on environmental law and policy. But the work of philosophers, scientists, and legal scholars can help us avoid this peril by siving the concept of sustainability meaning and preventing its dilution. The fifth promising aspect of sustainability is its inclusion of social equity as a third factor to be considered along with the environment and economics. By including social equity, sustainability introduces a human value that

, although not necessarily in tension with valuing of the environment, is often excluded from consideration

and ignored in environmental law and policy. The breadth and depth of the environmental justice movement has demonstrated the importance of social equity in the allocation of environmental benefits and burdens.59

Sustainability incorporates concern about environmental justice rather than relegating it to a separate domain.

Finally, there is one practical advantage sustainability has: accessibility. Sustainability may be a particularly strong starting point from which to reach people who are interested in the environment because it comports with people's current ethical intuitions.

Results of a recent survey showed that the top justification people gave for caring about environmental protection was the current generation's responsibility to future generations.6 The reason selected most frequently as being a "very important reason" to protect biodiversity was biodiversity's value in providing natural services to humans.

61

Thus sustainability shows promise as a stepping stone from current ethics and values held by the public. It builds both on the utilitarian justification most people identify as foremost among their reasons for caring about the environment, and on their concern for future generations.

In addition, sustainability seems compatible with views that are grounded in a sense of religious duty. If the public is broa dly committed to protecting the environment for future generations and for spiritual reasons, as surveys suggest,62 the concept of sustainability will help citizens to evaluate whether certain policies and decisions are consistent or inconsistent with widely shared values.

Sustainable Development Good

Sustainable development is not managerialist – it’s the only way to maintain ecological resilience

Colding 2k

(Johan Colding, Department of Systems Ecology at Stockholm University,

December 4, 2000, “Ecologists as the New Management Elite?” http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol4/iss2/art8/ mp)

The most striking and provocative part of the book is when Roe takes the guise of a critical theorist. In this part, Roe characterizes the ecologists participating in the Ecological Applications debate as "New Class ecologists," "the techno-manage elite," or "management gurus." He also argues that the debate itself is not really a debate, but rather the "New Class jockeying among themselves" to settle disagreements about rules and means of management among "They Who Must Be Obeyed." These are provocative words to most ecologists, I suspect. Thus, when the subject of sustainable development is examined using a critical theory approach, the message is that we should simply distrust these ecologists, because they offer reductionist solutions to complex problems in the social domain.

Because the critical theory approach is so provocative,

I would like to suggest some reasons why I think this view may be unproductive from the perspective of environmental management. If we go along with the idea that sustainable development is nothing more than the

"

New Class version of resource managerialism" or that

"nothing needs to be done

, because organic negativity will eliminate the need for New Class domination," we may end up in a situation of laissez-faire management of ecosystems

.

By turning the sustainable development debate into nothing more than an issue of local politics, we ignore the fact that the interplay of biotic and abiotic processes does not acknowledge any geographic or social boundaries

.

Regardless of whether

local, regional, or national borders actually exist, aquatic systems, migratory species, greenhouse gases, CFC emissions, and the ecosystem services required to maintain human well-being do not recognize such borders

. It is precisely for this reason that regional, supranational, and global policies are necessary to maintain resilience in combined social-ecological systems. If the conclusion is that biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation can be prevented without scientific ecological knowledge, I think that we are oversimplifying the notion of what sustainable development is all about

. In fact, such an argument may lead to the same kind of reductionism that critical theorists criticize ecologists for adopting.

Managerialism Good

‘Managerial’ government action is necessary to solve the broader effects of environmental destruction

Moloney et al 10

(Moloney, S. Horne, R E. and Fien J. (2010) “Transitioning to Low Carbon

Communities – From Behaviour Change to Systemic Change: Lessons from Australia,” Energy Policy Dec.

Vol. 38, Issue 12, p. 7614-7623, http://researchbank.rmit.edu.au/eserv/rmit:5869/n2006016057.pdf)

Transitioning to low carbon communities will require shifts in social practices and the norms and values which shape them. ‘Normalised’ pro-environmental behaviours will occur hand in hand with particular changes to the infrastructures, institutional arrangements and systems of governance which shape and reinforce social practices.

To identify what is necessary to assist in the transition to low carbon communities we need to understand the dynamic relationship between the formation of social practices and the contexts in which they exist.

The current dominance of the ‘rational choice model’ of consumer behaviour which is reinforced by the ‘techno-economic’ model of change prioritises technological solutions and is preoccupied with the individualisation of responsibility for environmental problems.

This has given rise, on the one hand, to a range of technological solutions which have not sufficiently or explicitly taken account of social practices and social contexts and therefore have not resulted in the expected energy efficiency gains (e.g. pricing signals and energy efficient appliances) and, on the other hand, to the emergence of a plethora of behaviour change programmes designed to assist individuals, households and businesses identify the steps they can take to reduce their energy, water and resource consumption.

Channelling policy and programme development towards individualised behaviour change is misguided without also addressing the broad regulatory, institutional and social setting in which those behaviours form.

Current approaches to behaviour change programmes largely targeting energy use in households in the Australian context may typically also include a home energy audit, some basic retrofits (e.g. lighting and shower heads), the provision of information and a list of key actions for individuals to adopt. In this study, many programmes with the broad aim of encouraging sustainable lifestyles were found to adopt education based techniques including the use of workshops, forums and community events. The majority are delivered through local and state governments as well as non-government organisations. The relatively few community based programmes reviewed were found to have been developed by volunteer driven climate action or environmental groups, and were the most likely to adopt a combination of approaches to addressing both technical and social dimensions of change. This is perhaps a reflection of the socially embedded nature of many of these groups, the knowledge of their local communities, the strength of relationships they have built up over time, their role in advocating for local needs and the opportunity they develop in trialling and adapting a range of approaches over time which best suit their local contexts. While this paper does not advocate a standard template for programmes aimed at changing behaviour, the research indicates that there are critical factors that could usefully be considered when developing behaviour change programmes.

Moreover, if behaviour change programmes are to achieve sustained changes to social practices, broader systemic changes will invariably also be required. The review of behaviour change and socio-technical literature led to the identification of five themes for policies and programmes: behaviour and social practices; barriers and constraints; agency and empowerment; systemic changes; and learning and integration.

There is a critical role for government at the national, state and local level to coordinate and better integrate current approaches to both the technical and social transitions needed to address climate change. It is not enough to just expect people to ‘just try harder’ through taking ‘small steps’, without addressing the systemic nature of both environmental problems and daily practices. Governments shape institutional and infrastructure systems. They also play a critical role in supporting community based organisations and practices, through systemic support structures, funding models, infrastructure projects and policy and regulatory mechanisms. While climate action groups and other environmental organisations have a role in assisting the transition to low carbon communities, their ongoing work will need the support of government to be sustained, and will also rely on the necessary wider systemic changes which governments can effect.

The next stage of this research will further explore a selection of key programmes and organisations identified in this review. The intention is to examine in more depth the questions that have emerged within each of the five themes highlighted in this paper which it is hoped will give further insight into what is necessary to make the transition towards low carbon communities.

Foucault Theory Bad

Foucaldian theory obscures genuine critical analysis and prevents political action

Sangren 95

(P. Steven Sangren, Department of Anthropology, Cornell University, “"Power" against

Ideology: A Critique of Foucaultian Usage,” Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Feb., 1995), pp. 3-40)

It is

Foucault's explicit disarticulation of power from subjectivity or agency

that arguably most defines the novelty of his usage

, and it is this element of his thinking that is most widely emulated by other scholars. Against Fou- cault's reifying, transcendental notion of power-a notion in which intentional action is incidental to power-I argue that power can be employed coherently as an analytical category only when it is linkable to some socially constituted agent

-that is, to a person or to a socially constituted collectivity. This is not to say that actors or agents are possessed of complete knowledge of how their own desires and motives are also products of complex social circumstances or of how their actions have effects that exceed intentions.8 As Foucault frequently emphasizes, people, selves, the subjects are in part products of historically and lo- cationally specific circumstances, cultures, discourses. However, denying agency-that is, power-to actors, viewing people even at the level of their desires primarily as products and only trivially

, if at all, as producers, is not only fatalistic, it significantly misrecognizes the realities of social life.

9 In comparing "Chinese" notions of power (or, more precisely, some notions of power produced by Chinese culture) with Foucault's, my intention is to draw attention to similarities in their alienating properties. I suggest that in the

Foucaultian categories of power and its ineluctable other, resistance, one can perceive remarkable affinities to Chinese contrastive oppositions such as yang (a metaphysically conceived representation of ordering) and yin (yang's disor- dering, resistant alter).

Far from providing the kind of critical insights that Fou- cault would claim, Foucaultian power and resistance obstruct genuine critical analysis and constitute elements of a romantic ideology whose "effects of truth" are most socially manifest in providing an avant-gardist intelligentsia an ideology that dissociates its

"theory" from its own individual and class interests- and, paradoxically, all this in the name of reflexivity and high-minded political virtue.

This representative dissociation of power from intention in Foucault is also apparent in Chinese ideologies of power.

Such dissociations-forms of alienation-are defining characteristics of ideology's operations in social processes.

AFF - Millennial Speech & Debate

1NCs

1NC vs. Conservation

“Sustainable development” is a lie –policies about sustainability are proposed based on whether or not they are economically beneficial,

NOT on whether or not they help the environment – the concept of sustainability as presented by the aff is a mask to continue the policing of political discourse by capitalist institutions – our reframing of sustainability solves the aff

Gridwood 07

Attempts at an anthropogenic environment result in domination of the planet -making the environment a second priority—turns case

Luke 97

The alternative is to radically alter the way we live – environmental issues aren’t about large macro-level problems but rather the mentalities and actions that we take in our lives – that’s key to environmental change

Luke 03

1NC vs. Exploitation

Eco-managerialism turns nature into resources for capitalism – it ensures that people who don’t benefit from the extraction of these resources will continue to suffer and be oppressed

Luke 03

Attempts at an anthropogenic environment result in domination of the planet where all efforts to preserve it become commodified into methods to promote capitalism, making the environment a second priority—turns case

Luke 97

The alternative is to radically alter the way we live – environmental issues aren’t about large macro-level problems but rather the mentalities and actions that we take in our lives – that’s key to environmental change

Luke 03

Links

Link – Aquaculture

Aquacultures are capitalist mechanisms to devalue and exploit other organisms in a contained environment

Clark and Clausen 08

Link – Biodiversity

Preserving biodiversity is rooted in a biopolitical desire to catalog life to the extent at which it benefits humans

Biermann & Mansfield 14

Categorization of bodies limits out an understanding of the non-human

Biermann & Mansfield 14

Link – Climate Change

The aff’s method of solving climate change re-entrenches capitalist systems as well as authoritarian governance – empirics prove that their managerialism leads to the domination of human and nonhuman Others

Luke 09

Link – Deforestation

The aff only values forests insofar as their instrumental use for humanity – forest protection is controlled by experts who exercise their professional-technical knowledge in order to sustain the system that cause their impact in the first place

Luke 96

Link – Ecocritiques

Their attempt to protect the environment from modernity misses the boat – capitalism and technology have become an environment – they have already enveloped and besieged all life on Earth – this recognition is key to solving

Luke 99

Link – Ecotourism

Ecotourism turns nature into a spectacle for humanity – it has to be carefully managed through elitist knowledge production in order to maximize its recreational value - this legitimizes authoritarianism in the name of expertise

Luke 96

Link – Environmental Protection

Discourse of environmental protection renders nature in commodities, legitimating capitalist consumption

Luke 97

Link – Fossil Fuels

The aff’s privilege of short-term economic gains over the environment justifies the on-going destruction of the environment in the name of economic nationalism – prefer our evidence because fossil fuel lobbies influence theirs

Luke 2k

Link – General

The aff’s discourse of environmental sustainability becomes distorted into a form of green geo-politics allowing the state to justify biopolitical managerialism

Luke 97

Link – Management

Managing resources ensures exploitation and the constant expansion of capital to the point of ecological degradation

Luke 03 (

Link – Marine Protected Areas

Marine protected areas begin with the question of how they will benefit humans, enforcing a mindset of control over nature

Orton 99

Link – New Colonies

The creation of new habitable spaces for humans operates by assuming control over natural spaces

Luke 97

Link – Pollution Reduction

Their attempt to remove pollution from the environment fails because pollution has become the environment – it is a byproduct of capitalist industrial activity – rejecting the aff’s view of pollution and our environment is key to solve

Luke 99

Link – Resource Conservation

The aff’s managing of resources imposes their own framework upon

Nature in order to supply the economy – this reduces Nature to a system of operations that can be destroyed and re-created in order to produce resources efficiently in a way to benefit people who live in the richest countries in the world at the expense of others

Luke 96

Link – Resource Extraction

Resource extraction turns nature into a collection of resources to be managed by technocratic elites

Luke 03

Eco-managerialism turns nature into resources for capitalism – it ensures that people who don’t benefit from the extraction of these resources will continue to suffer and be oppressed

Luke 03

Eco-managerialism constructs nature as a group of resources to be used to fuel the global economy – control of the environment allows us to capture and constrain nature

Luke 03

Link – Satellites

The use of satellites to gain understanding of the ocean leads to strategic policing of the Earth from the astropanopticon

Luke 97

Link – Science/Tech

The idea that only a technical, scientific solution exists to environmental problems allows capitalism to continue to produce which re-entrenches environmental problems – it also papers over other, non-capitalist ways to solve the aff

Rice 07

Link - State

Geopower is institutionalized – working within the state ensures that technical solutions will be the only acceptable option to manage the environment – their science is paid off

Luke 96

Ecological control drives capitalistic consumption – every instance of state control allows for increased regulation of economic and ecological existence to generate new hierarchies