Neg vs. NOAA
The neg strat to use against this aff would be:
- Ocean Instrumentalization K
- Case
ANTHRO LINKS – RETAG EV
Exploration and development is anthropocentric
Sivil 2 [Richard Sivil , University of Durban Westville, and at the University of Natal, Durban. “Why We Need A New Ethic For The
Environment”, 2000]
Three most significant and pressing factors contributing to the environmental crisis are the ever increasing human population, the
energy crisis, and the abuse and pollution of the earth’s natural systems. These and other factors contributing to the
environmental crisis can be directly linked to anthropocentric views of the world. The
perception that value is located in, and emanates from, humanity has resulted in
understanding human life as an ultimate value, superior to all other beings. This has driven innovators in
medicine and technology to ever improve our medical and material conditions, in an attempt to preserve human life, resulting in
more people being born and living longer. In achieving this aim, they have indirectly contributed to increasing the human
population. Perceptions of superiority, coupled with developing technologies have resulted in a social outlook that generally does
not rest content with the basic necessities of life. Demands for more medical and social aid, more entertainment and more comfort
translate into demands for improved standards of living. Increasing population numbers, together with the material demands of
modern society, place ever increasing demands on energy supplies. While wanting a better life is not a bad thing, given the
population explosion the current energy crisis is inevitable, which brings a whole host of environmental implications in tow. This is
not to say that every improvement in the standard of living is necessarily wasteful of energy or polluting to the planet, but rather it is
the cumulative effect of these improvements that is damaging to the environment. The
abuses facing the natural
environment as a result of the energy crisis and the food demand are clearly
manifestations of anthropocentric views that treat the environment as a resource and
instrument for human ends. The pollution and destruction of the non-human natural
world is deemed acceptable, provided that it does not interfere with other human
beings. It could be argued that there is nothing essentially wrong with anthropocentric assumptions, since it is natural, even
instinctual, to favour one’s self and species over and above all other forms of life. However, it is problematic in that
such perceptions influence our actions and dealings with the world to the extent that
the well-being of life on this planet is threatened, making the continuance of a huge proportion of existing
life forms "tenuous if not improbable" (Elliot 1995: 1). Denying the non-human world ethical
consideration, it is evident that anthropocentric assumptions provide a rationale for
the exploitation of the natural world and, therefore, have been largely responsible for
the present environmental crisis (Des Jardins 1997: 93). Fox identifies three broad approaches to
the environment informed by anthropocentric assumptions, which in reality are not distinct and separate, but
occur in a variety of combinations. The "expansionist" approach is characterised by the
recognition that nature has a purely instrumental value to humans. This value is
accessed through the physical transformation of the non-human natural world, by farming,
mining, damming etc. Such practices create an economic value, which tends to "equate the physical
transformation of ‘resources’ with economic growth" (Fox 1990: 152). Legitimising continuous expansion and
exploitation, this approach relies on the idea that there is an unending supply of
resources. The "conservationist" approach, like the first, recognises the economic value of natural resources through their
physical transformation, while at the same time accepting the fact that there are limits to these resources. It therefore emphasises
the importance of conserving natural resources, while prioritising the importance of developing the non-human natural world in the
quest for financial gain. The "preservationist" approach differs from the first two in that it recognises the enjoyment and aesthetic
enrichment human beings receive from an undisturbed natural world. Focusing on the psychical nourishment value of the nonhuman natural world for humans, this approach stresses the importance of preserving resources in their natural states. All
three
approaches are informed by anthropocentric assumptions. This results in a one-sided
understanding of the human-nature relationship. Nature is understood to have a
singular role of serving humanity, while humanity is understood to have no obligations toward nature. Such a
perception represents "not only a deluded but also a very dangerous orientation to
the world" (Fox 1990: 13), as only the lives of human beings are recognised to have direct moral worth, while the moral
consideration of non-human entities is entirely contingent upon the interests of human beings (Pierce & Van De Veer 1995: 9).
Humanity is favoured as inherently valuable, while the non-human natural world counts only in terms of its use value to human
beings. The "expansionist" and "conservationist" approaches recognise an economic value, while the "preservationist" approach
recognises a hedonistic, aesthetic or spiritual value. They
accept, without challenge, the assumption that the
value of the non-human natural world is entirely dependent on human needs and
interests. None attempt to move beyond the assumption that nature has any worth other than the value humans can derive
from it, let alone search for a deeper value in nature. This ensures that human duties retain a purely human focus, thereby avoiding
the possibility that humans may have duties that extend to non-humans. This can lead to viewing the non-human world, devoid of
direct moral consideration, as a mere resource with a purely instrumental value of servitude. This gives rise to a principle of ‘total
use’, whereby every natural area is seen for its potential cultivation value, to be used for human ends (Zimmerman 1998: 19). This
provides limited means to criticise the behaviour of those who use nature purely as a warehouse of resources (Pierce & Van De Veer
1995: 184). It is clear that humanity has the capacity to transform and degrade the environment. Given
the
consequences inherent in having such capacities, "the need for a coherent,
comprehensive, rationally persuasive environmental ethic is imperative" (Pierce & Van De
Veer 1995: 2). The purpose of an environmental ethic would be to account for the moral
relations that exist between humans and the environment, and to provide a rational
basis from which to decide how we ought and ought not to treat the environment. The
environment was defined as the world in which we are enveloped and immersed, constituted by both animate and inanimate
objects. This includes both individual living creatures, such as plants and animals, as well as non-living, non-individual entities, such
as rivers and oceans, forests and velds, essentially, the whole planet Earth. This constitutes a vast and all-inclusive sphere, and, for
purposes of clarity, shall be referred to as the "greater environment". In order to account for the moral relations that exist between
humans and the greater environment, an environmental ethic should have a significantly wide range of focus. I argue that
anthropocentric value systems are not suitable to the task of developing a
comprehensive environmental ethic. Firstly, anthropocentric assumptions have been
shown to be largely responsible for the current environmental crisis . While this in itself does not
provide strong support for the claim, it does cast a dim light on any theory that is informed by such assumptions. Secondly, an
environmental ethic requires a significantly wide range of focus. As such, it should consider the
interests of a wide range of beings. It has been shown that anthropocentric approaches do not entertain the notion that non-human
entities can have interests independent of human interests. "Expansionist", "conservationist" and "preservationist" approaches only
acknowledge a value in nature that is determined by the needs and interests of humans. Thirdly,
because
anthropocentric approaches provide a moral account for the interests of humans
alone, while excluding non-humans from direct moral consideration, they are not sufficiently encompassing.
An environmental ethic needs to be suitably encompassing to ensure that a moral account is provided for all entities that constitute
the environment. It could be argued that the indirect moral concern for the environment arising out of an anthropocentric approach
is sufficient to ensure the protection of the greater environment. In response, only those entities that are in the interest of humans
will be morally considered, albeit indirectly, while those entities which fall outside of this realm will be seen to be morally irrelevant.
Assuming that there are more entities on this planet that are not in the interest of
humans than entities that are, it is safe to say that anthropocentric approaches are
not adequately encompassing. Fourthly, the goals of an environmental ethic should
protect and maintain the greater environment. It is clear that the expansionist
approach, which is primarily concerned with the transformation of nature for economic
return, does not meet these goals. Similarly, neither does the conservationist approach, which is arguably the
same as the expansionist approach. The preservationist approach does, in principle satisfy this requirement. However, this is
problematic for such preservation is based upon the needs and interests of humans, and "as human interests and needs change, so
too would human uses for the environment" (Des Jardins 1997: 129). Non-human entities, held captive by the needs and interests of
humans, are open to whatever fancies the interests of humans. In light of the above, it is my contention that
anthropocentric value systems fail to provide a stable ground for the development of
an environmental ethic.
bioD link - Aff values species with what matters most to humans – inherently
anthropocentric
Anton 97 – director of policy and international llaw @ University of Melbourne Donald K., Columbia Journal of Transnational
Law
In order to appreciate the need for new international law to provide greater
protection to marine biological diversity beyond the continental shelf and the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ),
it is necessary to appreciate the value of such diversity, why we care about conserving
it, and why threats to it are a matter of concern. From some ethical points of view all
forms of life, and the habitats that support them, can be considered intrinsically valuable for their
own sake. Under this premise, it follows that protection and preservation ought to follow as a matter of course. However,
excepting certain philosophical, religious or cultural systems, the value of biological diversity
overwhelmingly has been viewed from the narrow position of worth to humans . Of
course, this presents problems for the protection of biological diversity, because it has
recognized value that cannot be calculated in dollar terms . Further, under current accounting systems,
the cost of losing biodiversity is ordinarily shifted to society rather than internalized
by private actors responsible for the loss. The problem is even more acute in the case of marine biodiversity
found beyond national jurisdiction because of its common nature. Consequently, systems for valuing biodiversity need to use
monetary valuation as one tool among many. The debates surrounding the CBD have
suffered from this myopic
of the value of biodiversity. Instead of focusing on the widespread
protection and conservation of ecosystems, species, and genetic variability, the
debates have primarily involved access to biological diversity and rights to profits
generated through the exploitation of genetic material.
economic view
Diseases link – turns science
Yong 14 – Mphil in Biochemistry from University College London (Ed, “Does our anthropocentric view of genetics keep us from
scientific discovery?,” Genetic Literacy Project, 6/11/14)
In a normal laboratory setting, one can usually find a human behind the bench with the pipette and bacteria in the petri dish. But
for much of evolution microbes were actually running the show. In the laboratory that is life,
bacteria have been inadvertently experimenting with each other for millions of years
before humans came into existence. In fact, Ed Yong writes at Aeon, humans are just bystanders
in the epic battle between microbes. And, the diseases they give us, which we view as a
microbe’s purpose for living, is likely nothing more than a chance twist of fate . Is this
anthropocentric view of our world keeping science from discovering and pursuing
experiments and ideas that could more efficiently unravel the workings of biology ? Some
scientists think yes. For example, instead of focusing on the few varieties of the streptococcus
bacteria that cause human infection, why are we not looking at the thousands of
varieties that coexist in our noses and airways? A growing number of studies show that our
anthropocentric view is sometimes unjustified. The adaptations that allow bacteria, fungi
and other pathogens to cause us harm can easily evolve outside the context of human
disease. They are part of a microbial narrative that affects us, and can even kill us, but
that isn’t about us.
Science is linked to technology and tries to control the environment
Lee 99, (Keekok, Visiting Chair in Philosophy at Lancaster University, “The Natural and the Artefactual” p. 62-64)
Initially, one would be tempted just simply to distinguish between Phase I and Phase II by proposing that the word
"technology" be confined only to the former, and that some other term, such as "applied science," be used in connection with
the relationship between science and technology
in Phase I is a contingent one, and (b) the relationship between science and applied
science in Phase II is more than contingent. However, this possible way of defining
terms may not find favor, as it produces too much of a discontinuity in the history of
humans in their attempts to modify nature in order to secure their own ends, be it
survival, improvement of material well-being or whatever. The new technology is but
a form of technology in the long history of that subject. It would be less misleading and distorting in
recognizing it as such. So it would be clearer to say that science and technology are really two separate, though
related, forms of activities, and that the very intimate relationship that has grown up between the
two since roughly 1850 is, nevertheless, a contingent one, in spite of the avowed aim of modern
science to produce a technology which can control nature in a thoroughly systematic
manner, guided by theoretical understanding rather than crude empirical
happenstance. To prevent misunderstanding of what has just been said, one needs to return to one of the main points
the latter. It follows from this proposed usage that (a)
raised in the last chapter. There, it was argued that (a) modern science from its first beginnings was backed up by the new
its ideological goal was the
advancement of material well-being via its technology to control and manipulate
nature. These two theses may be said to constitute the Modern Project of Science and Technology. The ideological goal to
philosophy, in particular by its metaphysics of Scientific Naturalism, and (b)
control and manipulate nature renders the Modern Project au fond a technologically oriented one. Under the Modern Project ,
modern science may be said to be really theoretical technology, a view associated
with, for instance, Heidegger and Jonas. From this standpoint, the science and the technology appear
to be inextricably linked—the linkage is more than an accidental one. As such, it is more than
merely contingent. It is, then, not surprising that such Science should eventually spawn successful Technology, even though
the Modem Project itself took over two hundred years, since its inception, 'to deliver the goods,' so to speak. To quote
lies behind or beneath modern technology as a revealing that
sets up and challenges the world is what he calls Ge-stell. Ge-stell names, to use Kantian language,
the transcendental precondition of modern technology. ... "Ge-stell" refers to the gathering together
of the setting-up that sets up human beings, that is, challenges them, to reveal reality,
by the mode of ordering, as Bestand" or resource. ... "Ge-stell refers to the mode of revealing that rules in the
Mitcham: For Heidegger what
essence of modern technology and is not itself anything technological." ... Not only does Ge-stell "set-up" and "challenge" the
world ... it also sets upon and challenges human beings to set upon and challenge the world. ... "The
essence of
modern technology starts human beings upon the way of that revealing through
which reality everywhere, more or less distinctly, becomes resource."32 The same point about
Heidegger is, more or less, made by Zimmerman: Far from being a dispassionate quest for truth, scientific
methodology had become the modern version of the power-oriented salvific
methodologies developed in the Middle Ages. Hence, Heidegger argued, even though modern science
preceded the rise of modern technology by about two hundred years, modern science was already
essentially "technological" in character, i.e., oriented toward power. ... Science ...
seeks not to let the entity show itself in ways appropriate to the entity in question,
but instead compels the entity to reveal those aspects of itself that are consistent with
the power aims of scientific culture.31 Jonas has written in the same vein about Bacon's view of science:
Theory must be so revised that it yields "designations and directions for works," even has "the invention of arts" for its very
end, and thus becomes itself an art of invention. Theory it is nonetheless, as it is discovery and rational account of first causes
It thus agrees with classical theory in that it has the nature of
things and the totality of nature for its object; but it is such a science of causes and
laws, or a science of such causes and laws, as then makes it possible "to command
nature in action." It makes this possible because from the outset it looks at nature gua
acting, and achieves knowledge of nature's laws of action by itself engaging nature in
action—that is,-in experiment, and therefore on terms set by man himself. It yields
and universal laws (forms).
directions for works because it first catches nature "at work." A science of "nature at work" is a mechanics, or a dynamics, of
nature. For such a science Galileo and Descartes provided the speculative premises and the method of analysis and synthesis.
Giving birth to a theory with inherently technological potential, they set on its actual course that fusion of theory and practice
which Bacon was dreaming of.34 In the light of the above and of the points raised in the preceding section, there is, perhaps,
Modern Technology,
nevertheless, is applied science. To see why this latter claim may be justified, one
must distinguish the Modern Project itself—embedded in a certain metaphysical and
ideological framework—from (a) the formulation and the testing of specific scientific
theories in the history and philosophy of science, (b) the relationship, if any, between
a specific theoiy and a related specific technology, and (c) the epistemic goals of
theory formulation and theory testing on the one hand, and the testing of
technological hypotheses on the other. Here, as we have seen, the linkage in the case of any one specific
some justification in saying that Modern Science is Theoretical Technology. But all the same,
theory and any one specific technology throughout the modern period, in particular during Phase I, appears to be much looser
than the postulated linkage between Science and Technology in the Modern Project itself. (However, in Phase II and especially
IIB the intensely intimate causal relationship does obtain between certain specific theories and the specific technologies they
induce and render possible.35) Moreover, the epistemic goals of theory formulation and testing are also perceived to be
somewhat different and distinct from those of testing hypotheses in the technological domain even in Phase II.
1NC
Ocean Instrumentalization
Instrumentalization of the ocean undergirds modernity, racism, slavery,
ecological collapse and ongoing systems of colonial brutality
Jacques 12
Environmental Governance: Power and Knowledge in a Local-Global World, ed Gabriela Kütting,
Ronnie Lipschutz
Peter Jacques, Ph.D. Department of Political Science University of Central Florida
Education Ph.D., Political Science, Northern Arizona University, 2003, with distinction. Masters
in Public Administration (M.P.A.), environmental policy focus, Northern Arizona University,
2000. B.A., Philosophy, Montana State University, with honors, 1993. B.A., Film and Theater
Arts, Montana State University, with honors,1993
Natural law here is important to the construction of power also, because it normalizes a specific
ontology as infallible. Thus, I have argued that it was not that Grotius made the ocean open for
all to use that set up matrices of world power and marine crises, but rather it was what he made
it open for that became so disastrous. Even after the open pool regime is closed, the purpose
remains the same— instrumental enterprise —and closing mare liberum fails to change the
essential place that the World Ocean holds in the minds of technocratic elite of the
modern nation-state. During modernity, such violence is unaccountable to the living
spaces of the World Ocean whether as the source of life, a home, an organism, an integrated
part in the universe that creates identity, or other purpose, because what had been “as
common once as light and air” had been bound in logos that precludes noninstrumental ontologies and converts the oceans into a global water closet and avenue
to other lockers, just like South Africa became for Grotius’ Netherlands. Where mare liberum
originates a few years after the Dutch East India Company, the Dutch colonial seeds are soon
thereafter spread to South Africa in 1652. One space on the ocean became the same as
any other in its function and purpose. Thus, with a natural law of European privileged
trade and accumulation via a World Ocean, all other purposes, histories, and geographies
are erased or shrouded. See, for example, Hegel's view on Africa as a subject of such
globalization that is only possible after social relations and human-ocean relations are
commodified and open up the world to barbaric subjugation : Africa is not interesting from
the point of view of its own history. ... Man [in Africa] is in a state of barbarism and savagery
which is preventing him from being an integral part of civilization. ... [Africa] is the country of
gold which closed in on itself, the country of infancy, beyond the daylight of conscious history,
wrapped in the blackness of night. Of course the “blackness of night” appears to be a crude
reference to skin color , and blackness equating the undeveloped, the empty, and the savage.
Colonizing the “heart of darkness” then is rationalized by erasing geography through
the sea, making European development the end of history, and replacing other purposc(s) with
a singular global purpose of free access to the rest of the worlds spaces and homes as
naturalized right. Such erasure connects Grotius to Stephen Biko—where Biko led Black South
Africans to see “blackness of their skin” as the cause of their collective oppression and articulate
a Black Consciousness to reinstate not just political power in the face of Apartheid (apartness),
but to reinstate pre-colonial South African purposes and ontologies (sec Abdi 1999). Colonial
and neo-colonial periods expunge the meanings of the local connection of inlet to stars
of the South Pacific, or the organic functions of a living water . Perhaps this is the most
powerful reducer of modernity where all life and home is made to serve one master,
making the habitation of multiple “overseas” spaces (see Luke, this volume) less palpable
because there is no perceptible loss of purpose or function to the then colonial and now
globalized “Northern” minds. Enterprise, use, and free access to habitat and home
underlies the structure of contemporary political order, which means that this very
order must maintain a hegemonic hold on ontological notions of not just the ocean or
of social relations, but of all-inclusive ecology (human and non-human) itself. Plumwood
agrees that a main explanation for how the rationalist culture of the west has been able
to expand and conquer other cultures as well as nature was that it has long lacked
their respectbased constraints on the use of nature—a thought that puts the “success” of
the west in a rather different and more dangerous light. (Plumwood 2002: 117) The success is
“more” dangerous because it leads in a boomerang effect back to the West where
ecological collapse presses hard on the doors of the West threatening broad social
collapse, and the West will not be immune regardless of how remote it tries to make itself.
Nonetheless, without the Grotian or Scldenian ocean, the colonial nations could not have
gone across the sea to siphon off resources, and ultimately create the structure of a
world capitalist system we now live in. Imagine the power of the current core states, such as
those in the G-8, without a colonial legacy to found their current power, and through this image
we can imagine a counterfactual position for the modem power of the sea . Certainly,
this power of the sea was not lost on Alfred Thayer Mahan, who knew that control of the ocean
was a prerequisite for extending national and imperial power . Control the sea, control the
world . was his modem contribution. In order to control the sea, it has to be something
ontologically that can be controlled, such as the “heap of matter that Nature could not bring
to perfection.”
ALTERNATIVE – reject the Instrumentalization of the ocean and environment by
rejecting the affirmative.
Peters 14
Water Worlds: Human Geographies of the Ocean, ed, Peters and Anderson
Senior Lecturer in Human Geography, Cardiff University
Dr Kimberley Peters Lecturer in Human Geography BSc (hons) Human Geography and Planning
(Cardiff University) MA Cultural Geography (Royal Holloway, University of London) PhD (Royal
Holloway, University of London)
Moreover, these processes are distinct at sea, where water (and its physical composition) is
concerned. Whatmore notes that the contribution of more-thanhuman approaches is to 'reanimate the missing ‘matter' of landscape, focusing [our] attention on bodily
involvements in the world in which landscapes are co-fabricated between more-than-human
bodies and a lively earth' (2006: 603). However, these ‘involvements’ with the world around
us have focused largely on the ‘matter’ of the terrestrial or ‘earthy’ sphere, rather than the
materialism of the watery world (as indicated and enforced by the use of language:
'landscape' as opposed to ‘seascape’ for example). Yet the sea is not the land, its morethanhuman nature, is fluid. Thus the when considering water worlds, alternative
cocompositions between the physical and social arise. Indeed, the maintenance of the pirate
radio enterprise, a human, sociocultural and political endeavour, relied, oddly, on the ship being
immobile, staying securely anchored in one place. This meant countering the forces of a
distinctly fluid nature. Yet as the vignette demonstrated, the physical motion the forcefulness of
the ocean - driven by the assembled forcefulness of the wind and gravitational pull - made this
maintenance problematic. The ship was never still: even when anchored, it moved. In the worst
cases, the ship would be cast adrift.9 Life onboard the ship was intrinsically shaped by this fluid
nature. As I have noted elsewhere (2012: 1252-3) ‘[h]umans cannot force power back on to the
sea; shaping nature ... they can but harness its qualities, or manipulate [it] to best effect’. In
other words, human life is always subject to the force of the sea. even as we try to lessen those
forces. Unlike other more-than-human natures, when co-composed with human life, the sea
sparks particular outcomes , which alter the relational balance between the social and the
physical. Whereas humans might have greater agency over nature on land, this dynamic alters
with the alternative material composition of the sea (Peters 2012). and accordingly humans are
uniquely affected by it. As the vignette demonstrated, the sea evokes actions and reactions
which shapes human interactions with the water world. The natural environment at sea,
resulted in particular socio-cultural formations for the crew as they struggled to survive. The
sea as a material, more-than-human nature, must therefore be at the forefront of our
understandings as we grapple to understand human engagements with it. More-than-Human
Geographies of the Sea In this chapter I have followed recent lines of enquiry, driven by a
‘return’ towards a world of 'matter' - the very substance of the world around us - (Whatmore
2006: 603) to consider how more-than-human material natures are co-fabricated with human
existence. Of late, geographers have become increasingly interested in this co-composition of
human and more-than-human worlds (see for example social and cultural geographies of
climate change. Brace and Geoghegan 2010 and responses to natural disasters. Clark 2011). This
has followed a recognition that we need to consider a range of more-than-human or physical
attributes which characterize our socio-cultural world, the groundedness of the earth, animals,
plant life, and 'things’ we humans make (from trainers, to motor cars, to buildings) in order to
move away from the bias on understanding human agency as the dominant agency in the world
in which we live (see Whatmore 2006: 603). As Bennett puts it there are ‘things' in our world
which contain their own power, without humans assigning that power or significance to them
(2004:48). As she deftly puts it: 'there is an existence peculiar to a thing that is irreducible to the
thing's imbrication with human subjectivity’ (Bennett 2004: 348). In other words, the morethan-human approach demands we consider the power of material things; objects, natures,
and so on. to avoid the ‘ [ojveremphasis on human agency’ in composing the world in which
we live (Lambert et al. 2006: 482). For Bennett (2004), Whatmore (2002) and others (Bear and
Eden 2008. Clark 2011, Hitchings 2003, Jones 2011 and Philo and Wilbert 2000) this marks a
shift in social and political thought which considers carefully the vibrancy of the planet
- that there is, in Bennett's words, a world of‘powerful things’ which have dynamism or force
without human's assigning them such qualities (2004: 348). This , as Thrift argues, opens up ‘a
different kind of intelligence about the world' (2004: 60). Such a project (fosters)
greater recognition of the agential powers of natural., things , greater awareness of the
dense web of their connections with each other and with human bodies. (Bennett 2004: 349)
Such an awareness or 'recognition' of the powers of nature, demands that we.
(humans), [t]read lightly upon the earth, both because things are alive and have value as
such and because we should be cautious around things that have the power to do us harm.
(2004: 365-6) The natural more-than-human world, Bennett reminds us, must be acknowledged.
It has an agency, or power, which is often beyond our control. It can impact and shape our lives
(as much as, or more than, we can impose power upon it, see Hitchings 2003. Peters 2012.
Whatmore 2006). However, it is the power dynamics of more-than-human natures which
is called into question when we consider the fluid materiality of the sea, compared to
the earthy solidity' of land. As I have argued elsewhere (Peters 2012) the specific material
and elemental quality- of the sea itself, its composition of particles, its relation to wider
forces of power, means that it becomes a distinct space for human engagement; one we can
move on, in and through; one which itself moves, and one which shifts states (solid, liquid to
air). Human life does not play out in water worlds in the same way it does on landed worlds
(Peters 2012: 1252). As such, looking to the sea . and the corporeal experiences and
sensibilities which are made possible in these spaces, enables us to grasp new knowledge
about the world. I have considered the sea itself as a more-than-human nature ; a material
entity' through which force operates and human affects are elicited. Through the case study
vignette, I have filled the liquid void in geographies of the seas with the water itself thinking
seriously about its composition and the impacts of force on its structure, which relate to and are
co-fabricated with the human worlds on board pirate radio vessels. Thinking about the events of
November 1975 in a more-than-human framework allows ‘greater recognition of the agential
power of natural... things’ (Bennett 2004: 34). It has made possible an examination of how the
physical and socio-cultural world interrelate, to unpack the particular sociospatial outcomes
which result when humans engage with the fluid nature of water. Conclusions In the foreword
to this book, Philip Steinberg subverted the 70% statistic often used to justify' sea-based studies.
However, he interestingly noted that one reason this is such a ‘compelling figure' (Steinberg, this
collection) is because 70% of the human body is also water. The much cited 70% then, has
significance in both the human and natural world, and shows a synergy between both
human and water worlds. We are, in the words of Margulis and Sagan, ‘ walking, talking
minerals’; walking, talking liquids (1995: 49, in Bennett 2004: 360). It makes logical sense then,
that studies of the water are not marginal to those of human being and accordingly, one
way to think about human geographies of the water worlds is to take the water itself seriously,
and moreover, to think about those water worlds fluidly, as open, permeable and subject to
change; co-constituted and co-fabricated through broader relational elemental and human
assemblages. In this chapter I have explored how the hydrological and human come together
and the affects borne from these forceful combinations through focusing on the sea itself as a
lively; relational, more-than-human materiality. I have demonstrated that extending morethan-human geographies from the shore, is one way in which human geographers may
begin to take seriously the agency and productivity of the dominant natural feature in
world and its importance in the making of human experience: the water. However, such a move
has depended upon shifts in the discipline which have been directed towards the ‘processes and
excesses of ‘livingness’ in a more than human world' (Whatmore 2006: 604). In other words, to
echo Steinberg in the Foreword of this book, scholars are now in a unique position to examine
water worlds because we have the conceptual and theoretical tools, such as more-thanhuman approaches, to do so. Yet arguably, as this chapter has shown, we still need to take
these tools to sea . More-than-human approaches have remained focused on the nexus
between landscapes and bodies rather than seascapes and bodies (Whatmore 2006). The
language of the more-than-human then, has been ‘landed', rather than fluid. In the introduction
to this volume, Jon Anderson and I argued for the need to develop a language which can make
fluid worlds comprehensible and ‘known'; a language which might also be applied more broadly;
a fluid ontology for which the water world frames a wider world of flux , change, rhythm,
movement and flow. However, whilst we may now have the tools available (such as more-thanhuman approaches) to enable us to start from the water and look outwards, we are still tasked
with doing so. This task ultimately requires us to unearth our language. In this collection, we
have set sail on such task, envisioning a fluid world in which water is an equally
important part of a wider geographical, elemental and corporeal assemblage of land, air,
human and more-than-human life, which is in a constant state of becoming.
Ocean exploration is the CONCEPTUAL and HISTORICAL root of modernity’s
DOMINATION of nature
Batra and Messier 10
(Nandita Batra,Professor at University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez, Vartan P. Messier President of
the College English Association's Caribbean Chapter, “This Watery World: Humans and the Sea”
Pg. 4-8, http://www.academia.edu/1145933/The_Multitudinous_Seas_Matter_and_Metaphor
Batra, Nandita, and Vartan P. Messier, eds. "This Watery World: Humans and the Sea." (2010).
Small wonder then that Roland Barthes claimed that the sea “bears no message,” not merely because of its power to reflect rather than contain a gamut of different meanings but
because of its seeming absence of evidence. In his discussion of semiology as a science that examines the messages contained in the signs shaping our socio-cultural landscape, he
finds the sea to be void of a signifying field. In a single day, how many really non-signifying fields do we cross? Very few, sometimes none. Here I am before the sea; it is true that
it bears no message. But on the beach, what material for semiology! Flags, slogans, signals, sign-boards, clothes, suntan even, which are so many messages for me! ( Mythologies
112, fn2) Barthes seems to suggest that the sea denotes nothingness not only because it seems a reflection of the individual psyche but because it bears no material manifestation of
human passage or cultural history in contrast to the land, which seems to bear much more evidence of human actions. The apparent signlessness of the sea notwithstanding, water
for Gaston Bachelard is equated with introspection, not merely as metaphor but materially as well: it is “substantive nothingness.” The matter of water is the same matter from
which dreams and reveries are derived, and thus to meditate on water becomes a meditation on the self as in a mirror. But it is the depth of the mirror that draws in the viewer, like
Narcissus, to gaze upon and into one self, seeing terror as well as transcendence. And so it seems that to some extent the sea’s reflection of our own sense of being is echoed in
Jacques Lacan’s second consideration of his “mirror stage” as that which institutes a libidinal relationship with our own image. In this purely constructionist view, the sea does not
have its own distinct ontology; it is rather a reflection of our own, its existential relevance bound to human experience. While the land/water opposition was taken up by Barthes as
we have seen earlier, Bachelard extends the antithetical relationship not merely to that between water and land, but to fresh water/sea water as well. Bachelard distinguishes
between the human response to fresh water and sea water: “La mer donne des contes avant de donner des rêves” (206) [the sea generates stories before generating dreams
(translation ours)], noting that the first experience of the sea is in the shape of a story: “la premièreexpérience de la mer est de l’ordre du récit ” (emphasis his, 206).Bachelard’s
the timelessness and signlessness that humans have seen in the sea have
produced the desire to order and temporize it, and thus to establish a sense of order
and sequence. In anextended sense, he sees this desire borne out of the ways in which our understanding of human existence is mediated by narrative as it
observation suggests that
systemizesand orders our experiences of the world both spatially and temporally. Juxtaposed against the sea’s vast cultural void, the advent of seafaring produced not only new
territories but an entire culture, claimed MichelFoucault, one exemplified by “heterotopia,” which “juxtapos[e] in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are
themselves incompatible. “Heterotopias are not utopias but “real emplacements” that “simultaneously represent, contest and reverse...all the other real emplacements in their
environment,” and for him “the ship is the heterotopia par excellence”(178-81). Meanwhile, W.H Auden suggests that domination of the seamarks not merely the beginning of
biological life but the beginning of civilization, observing that “the sea, in fact, is that state of barbaric vagueness and disorder out of which civilization emerged”
(6).
Domination of the sea thus encapsulates the ordering of nature by human s and, as Philip de Souza points
out, was “crucial to both the best and the worst aspects of civilisation” (cover blurb). Although the first boats were probably created for rivers and lakes rather than for the sea (de
seafaring has produced the world as we now know it through the “ discovery and
exploitation of new territories, new peoples and new ideas,” which led the way to the
expansion of the world’s history, its cultures and religions, and to economic
globalization as we now have it. In addition, as Bernhard Klein has shown, it is the early modern era that produced “permanent maritime links and trade routes
Souza 7),
across vast oceanic spaces” in contrast to earlier “great seafaring empires” (such as the Roman, Carthaginian, Viking and Ming), which lacked the “technical means” to effect a
permanent expansion of their borders on other shores.In contrast, the history-making voyages of Vasco da Gama, Magellan andColumbus, among others, paved the way for
imperialism. Klein therefore places the imperial project of the sixteenth century as marking the “true beginning of globalisation” (Klein, “Historicizing”). Nevertheless whilethese
fifteenth- and sixteenth-century oceanic voyages might have changedhistory, the most famous theoretic argument for the Free Sea was producedin the early years of the
seventeenth century in Hugo Grotius’ 1604 Mare Liberum (or Freedom of the Sea), which argued (on behalf of the DutchEast India Company) for freedom of not only the oceans
and coastalwaters but of seafaring, trade and fishing on the grounds that the law of theland (private property) could not be applied to the boundless sea. Initially,it was opposed by
the British: John Selden’s 1635 Mare Clausum arguedthat the sea could indeed be possessed. Eventually Mare Liberum wassuperceded by Cornelius Bunkeshoek’s De domino
’ The tension between this
human imposition of a limit on the apparent limitlessness of the sea echoes the idea
mentioned above of the human desire to order the sea along spatio-temporal coordinates and
hence, for Hegel , ocean-going activated Western history . The geographical op- portunity for ocean exploration
was the condition of possibility for Western Europe’s entry into world history: The sea gives us the idea of the indefinite, the
unlimited, and the infinite; and in feeling his own infinite in that Infinite, man is stimulated and emboldened to stretch
beyond the limited: the sea invites man to conquest, and to piratical plunder, but also to honest
gain and to commerce. The land, the mere valley-plain attaches him to the soil; it involves him in an infinite multitude of dependencies, but the sea carries
him out beyond these limited circles of thought and action. (90) Without a doubt, the broader human outlook on
maris (1702), which set cannon range as the limit of maritime control and was eventually adopted at the ‘three-mile limit.
the sea seems to have changed in the past few centuries with the advent of seafaring technology that permitted long-range exploration, commerce, conquest, and colonization,
particularly by Western European and Euro-American civilizations. 3 This change of attitude runs parallel to historical shifts in the cultural trends of the so-called “old continent”
and the coming of age of “humanism”; Enlightenment ideas transformed European society and in the modern era the development of empiricism in the sciences was perceived as a
means to attain absolute knowledge about what constitutes human existence. In parallel, dominion of the sea was asserted by similar advances in the field of technology and the
increased opportunity for transoceanic voyages, which in turn gave way to a reconsideration of the relationship between humans and the sea. This reconsideration towards the sea
has been attributed to largely material causes by Alain Corbin inhis informative book The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside inthe Western World 1750-1840 . Once
considered a sinister, threatening power that was home to monsters, the sea has shifted its cultural signification in the West since the eighteenth century. He shows howattitudes to
the sea altered with the Enlightenment and concurrent changes in art and literature, so that bathing in the sea became viewed astherapeutic and regenerative rather than unhealthy.
This change becamereflected at all levels, from the political in the exploration that resulte dfrom an increased interest in travel, to the economic in the rise of seatowns, and to the
cultural level in artistic and literary production .It is therefore not hard to see why sea voyage literature reached its apogee in European and American literature in the nineteenth
century. In fact, according to Margaret Cohen, maritime fiction (also known as “nautical fiction” or “ le roman maritime ”) was crucial to the cultural construction of nationbuilding. Positing that “it was invented by James Fenimore Cooper with The Pilot ” (1823), she draws attention to the ways in which “Cooper took the codes of historical fiction,
pioneered by Walter Scott, to map the boundaries and identity of the nation, and translated them to the supranational space of the open sea” (483). In a wider cultural context, sea
crossing encapsulates not merely the construction of national and cultural identity but their dissolution as well. The infamous Middle Passage from Africa to the New World and
the jahaji bhai or “ship brotherhood” of the caste-prohibited “Kala Pani” (literally “Black Water”)sea-crossing that transported indentured workers from India to South Africa and
to the Caribbean are illustrations of this dissolution. This brief attempt to retrace an archaeology of marine discourse— albeit its emphasis on the “ petits récits ” rather than the
“grand narrative”—seems to reinforce a constructionist view of this watery world, a view that raises several questions. If the sea is, then, a construction, how has it been
constructed? If it is valued so ubiquitously as a cleansing and purifying agent, why have humans wreaked such havoc on what was and perhaps still is considered the source of life?
it is the notion of the sea as infinity that has led to its pollution.
Contemporary ecological perspectives might be an indication that we still view the human relationship with the sea as
one of dominance, but that our view has shifted from Human as Dominator of the sea toHuman as Steward of the Sea. 4 This recognition has nonetheless come
Perhaps, as KimberleyPatton has noted,
at a price. While civilization has often been seen as the process of dominating the sea and other forces of nature, recent natural disasters—such asHurricane Katrina in 2005 and the
Asian Tsunami of 2004—have reminded us that
our domination of the sea is, at best, fragile, at worst,
illusionary.
Current climate change discourse ABSTRACTS the watery and material world.
Only a discourse that situates climate within a RELATIONAL MATERIAL ontology
can spur ACTION instead of the consumption fo affect
Niemanas and Walker 13
Neimanis, A. and Walker, R. L. (2014), Weathering: Climate Change and the “Thick Time” of
Transcorporeality. Hypatia, 29: 558–575. doi: 10.1111/hypa.12064
Affiliated Researcher, Posthumanities Hub (TEMA Gender), Linkoping University, SE. My
research interests include posthuman feminisms, experimental writing methods, nature/culture,
water, climate change, environmental humanities, environmental justice, embodiment,
(bio)coloniality, biotechnologies and feminist STS. I am particularly interested in the common
and queer intersections of these things
In the dominant “climate change” imaginary, this phenomenon is distant and
abstracted from our experiences of weather and the environment in the privileged West.
Moreover, climate change discourse is saturated mostly in either neoliberal progress
narratives of controlling the future or sustainability narratives of saving the past. Both
largely obfuscate our implication therein. This paper proposes a different climate change
imaginary. We draw on feminist new materialist theories—in particular those of Stacy
Alaimo, Claire Colebrook, and Karen Barad—to describe our relationship to climate change as
one of “weathering.” We propose the temporal frame of “thick time”—a transcorporeal
stretching between present, future, and past—in order to reimagine our bodies as archives of
climate and as making future climates possible. In doing so, we can rethink the temporal
narratives of climate change discourse and develop a feminist ethos of responsivity toward
climatic phenomena. This project reminds us that we are not masters of the climate, nor
are we just spatially “in” it. As weather-bodies, we are thick with climatic intra-actions; we
are makers of climate-time. Together we are weathering the world. Grand Manan Island, New
Brunswick. August. Spruce trees at Swallowtail, root-toes curled around the rocky outcrop in a
resigned sort of precarity. Made to coexist with the credence of the Fundy weather, these
timbered lives are permanently swayed, their strong backbones constantly giving way to the
wind. The weather-archive of their multiply ringed existences has stories to tell: of a hurricane's
landfall, or the eye of a maritime gale; of coastal droughts, and semidiurnal tides, and the
Atlantic sun filtered through sea smoke and autumn fog and the clear-eyed blue of nothing at
all. How has the hot breath of the earth, the battering of its rain, the reprieve of its gentle snows
shaped my own sinews, my gait, the ebb and flow of my own bodily humors? Duration, spread
across my skin with the slow sweep of the seasons. Like these trees, we are all, each of us,
weathering. Although framed in a language of urgency and impending crisis, “climate
change” has taken on an abstract quality in contemporary Western societies. Melting ice
caps and rising sea levels are “perceived as spatially and temporally distant” (Slocum 2004, 1)
from our everyday lives. This distance is related to the time scale and global reach of the
problem, but also stems from scientific discourses that “produce vast quantities of
sometimes contradictory, abstract statistics and data” (Duxbury 2010, 295). Commentators
repeatedly note that climate change has become “difficult to comprehend or connect with in an
appreciable way” (294). Claire Colebrook has argued that we suffer from a “hyper-hypoaffective disorder” (Colebrook 2011, 45) whereby despite being surrounded by warnings of
resource depletion, predictions of changing weather patterns, and a growing cinematic
imaginary of the world's end, “there is neither panic nor any apparent affective comportment
that would indicate that anyone really feels or fears [this threat]” (53). She describes this
imaginary as one invested in the consumption of affect (transfixing news coverage of a
“natural” disaster; the rush of an apocalyptic movie) without intensity —without any
mobilization of responsivity or sense that our bodies and our time are mutually implicated in
environmental changes. It is within this context that we recognize the need for a different
kind of ethos in relation to climate change, one that would mobilize the responsivity and
intensity of which Colebrook writes. We need to rethink the “spacetimematter” of climate
change and our implication therein. Like other climate change theorists and activists, we
propose to bridge the distance of abstraction by bringing climate change home. As described in
many climate change appeals, this home is a Western, urban, and domesticated home that
more often than not seeks to extract itself from the weather-world. But we recall, too, that
oikos is both “home” and another way of saying “eco.” In this paper we thus also invite our
readers to be interpellated into the ecological spacetime of a much more expansive home, at
once as distant as that melting icecap, and as close as our own skin. This home is a
transcorporeal one, “where human corporeality… is inseparable from ‘nature’ or ‘environment’”
(Alaimo 2008, 238). To bring climate change home, in this context, entails reconfiguring our
spatial and temporal relations to the weather-world and cultivating an imaginary where our
bodies are makers, transfer points, and sensors of the “climate change” from which we
might otherwise feel too distant, or that may seem to us too abstract to get a bodily grip on. We
propose that if we can reimagine “climate change ” and the fleshy, damp immediacy of our
own embodied existences as intimately imbricated , and begin to understand that the
weather and the climate are not phenomena “in” which we live at all—where climate would be
some natural backdrop to our separate human dramas—but are rather of us, in us, through us,
we might ignite the intensity that Colebrook calls for. To build this project, we draw on
feminist new materialist and posthumanist approaches that help us to understand climate
change and human bodies as partaking in a common space, a conjoined time, a mutual worlding
that we call weathering. We maintain that this sort of concept-creation can help gestate the
new imaginary we call for. Like the more immediately embodied interventions by eco-artists
such as Kirsten Justesen, Basia Irland, or Roni Horn that have the ability to frame climate change
in powerful and personally felt ways (Alaimo 2009; Duxbury 2010), we argue, along with
Elizabeth Grosz, that philosophical interventions can also “move [us] beyond the horizon of the
present” (Grosz 2012, 15): concepts can supply us with “the provocation to think otherwise, to
become otherwise” (22). Weathering is one such provocation. In creating this concept, we
draw on Stacy Alaimo's conception of transcorporeality to counter the fallacy of a
bifurcated understanding of “nature” and “culture”—or of weather and humans—and
propose instead an understanding of ourselves as weather bodies. The ebb and flow of
meteorological life transits through us, just as the actions, matters, and meanings of our own
bodies return to the climate in myriad ways. In order to better explicate the mechanics of these
transactions, and the ontology they evidence, we also draw on Karen Barad's theory of intraaction. Barad's understanding of things as perpetually worlding—that is, as materializing from
the intra-actions of always emergent things-in-phenomena—suggests to us the concept of
weathering. With Barad, we recognize that relata do not precede relations (Barad 2007,
136): neither humans (replete with tools, products, and prostheses) nor the meteorological
milieu of weather patterns, phases, and events can be understood as a priori relata.
Instead, it is through weathering—the intra-active process of a mutual becoming—that humans
and climate change come to matter.Weathering, then, is a logic, a way of being/becoming, or a
mode of affecting and differentiating that brings humans into relation with more-than-human
weather. We can grasp the transcorporeality of weathering as a spatial overlap of human bodies
and weathery nature. Rain might extend into our arthritic joints, sun might literally color our
skin, and the chill of the wind might echo through the hidden hallways of our eardrums. But not
coincidentally, the idea of weathering also invokes a certain perdurance—a getting on with, a
getting by, a getting through. If transcorporeality is to be a meaningful theory for understanding
climate change, then more careful attention to the temporalities that are an inextricable part of
these relations is required. In part, we make this call because climate change as both
phenomenon and discourse is thoroughly temporal: changing weather patterns, time-lines
of the earth's rising temperatures, and charts mapping its slowly mutating climatic cycles remind
us that weather and climate are far from static events. At the same time, neoliberal “progress
narratives” of human-directed salvation jockey for position in the dominant climate change
imaginary with environmental “ sustainability narratives” of holding onto or even reverting
to a pristine almost-past (the incompatibility of these temporal orientations most often going
unremarked). Our proposal to reimagine climate change as a transcorporeal, intra-active
phenomenon , then, is one that pays specific attention to the temporality of weather bodies—
both human and more-than-human. This intervention in our cultural imaginary of climate
change would enable us to think the relationship between human bodies and climate
according to what we call “thick time,” a transcorporeal stretching between present, future,
and past, that foregrounds a nonchronological durationality. This project shifts away from the
dominant temporality of climate change discourse, where progress and sustainability narratives
meld in the anticipatory mode of “what should we do to stop climate change?” and instead
asks “how is climate change me?” We seek to cultivate a sensibility that attunes us not only to
the “now” of the weather, but toward ourselves and the world as weather bodies, mutually
caught up in the whirlwind of a weather-world, in the thickness of climate-time. In short, as
weathering. Importantly, this shift away from the “stop climate change” temporal narrative is
not for us a weakening of possibilities for ethico-political engagement, but rather an
opening up of a different sort of political and ethical orientation toward these questions:
a politics of possibility and an ethics of responsivity. Whereas a politics of possibility rejects
the idea that climate change can be stopped or solved according to predetermined
actions, an ethics of responsivity recognizes that the dream of solution must give way to a
ongoing engagement with a weather-world in flux : an engagement that must necessarily
extend beyond our individualized “home” to the larger transcorporeal one that we share.
The discourse of PROBLEM-SOLUTION and IMPACT for climate change
precludes a RELATIONAL ETHICS in which we are materially PART of climate –
turns the case
Niemanas and Walker 13
Neimanis, A. and Walker, R. L. (2014), Weathering: Climate Change and the “Thick Time” of
Transcorporeality. Hypatia, 29: 558–575. doi: 10.1111/hypa.12064
Affiliated Researcher, Posthumanities Hub (TEMA Gender), Linkoping University, SE. My
research interests include posthuman feminisms, experimental writing methods, nature/culture,
water, climate change, environmental humanities, environmental justice, embodiment,
(bio)coloniality, biotechnologies and feminist STS. I am particularly interested in the common
and queer intersections of these things
When we hold onto the belief that we can separate our human bodies from climate
(close our doors, resist the winds), we maintain a worldview of relating to the earth,
rather than worlding with it. As Colebrook has argued, our attempts to externalize climate
deny the fact that we are already entangled in its forces and flows: “As long as we think of
climate in its traditional sense—as our specific milieu—we will perhaps lose sight of climate
change, or the degree to which human life is now implicated in timelines and rhythms beyond
that of its own borders” (Colebrook 2012, 36).3 There is no escaping climate change, for our
bodies are both the products and the vehicles of its iteration. Consequently, our ecological and
environmental knowledges are already constructed around a politics of temporality.
“ Sustainability” calls for the maintenance of a particular present , or as the United Nations
indicates, sustainability is a form of development that “meets the needs of the present without
compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (as quoted in Alaimo
2012, 562), whereas the language of “climate change” indicates that our future climatic
conditions will be unlike those of the past. Although both of these paradigms have been
troubled by feminist and other scholars (Cuomo 2011; Alaimo 2012; Markley 2012), their
uptake in contemporary climate change discourse continues to call for present actions
that will temper the coming future, human interventions into a global timeline. In our
foregrounding of a transcorporeal temporality, we aim to further challenge this humanist
linearity. Although valuable work is accomplished by thinking about what effects present
actions will have on future landscapes, such narratives rely on a linear earth time where past,
present, and future make up a time-line of human progression , a chronos of self-actualization.
Colebrook's call for an “alteration of what we take climate to be” (Colebrook 2012, 36) stems
from a critique of the assumption that we are outside of climate, an assumption that she
describes elsewhere as relying on neoliberal languages of “mitigation, sustainability, cap
and trade, renewable resources,” all of which “relate to the globe as the milieu for
[human] survival” (Colebrook 2010, 61). Just as a climate change imaginary supported by
neoliberalism enforces a “global view”—the distanced perspective from the everywhere-andnowhere of globalism—Colebrook also notes that neoliberalism's time is that of a subject “for
whom time is the passage towards complete actualization” (Colebrook 2009, 11)—an expression
of human exceptionalism as it braves on against the chaos of nature. The abstraction of climate
change from the felt immediacy of our bodies is echoed in the temporality of this abstraction:
something we stand outside of, or pass through, or control. We can see this temporality within
conservative governments who dismiss “climate change theories” as myth (as though climate is
not always already changing?), as well as those sustainable development projects that belie the
sustainability of the status quo, therefore gauging themselves in terms of human need (Alaimo
2012, 562).4 In each case, past, present, and future constitute progressive steps toward a better
world, a set future that we can achieve through human perseverance. Think about familiar
proclamations that “planet Earth, creation, the world in which civilization developed, the world
with climate patterns that we know and stable shorelines, is in imminent peril” (Hansen 2009,
ix). Certainly, we should be alarmed about global warming, but apocalyptic apparatuses
of the impending future do little more than reinforce a spatialization of time that has
permeated not only scientific and environmental perspectives but also a long history of Western
philosophy. Aristotle famously defined time as the counting of moments, a proposition that
linked temporality with regularity, an absolute, exterior measure (see Aristotle 1983). For Kant,
time (and space) are conditions of possibility for the apprehension of the world, and for
Newton, likely the most influential of all, time is an absolute linearity, “represented by the
relations between points on a straight line” (Grosz 1995, 95). The consequence of time's
exteriorization is that, we, as bodies, are conceived as only ever in time, subject to
forces that carry on beyond and outside of us. The weather/environment serves only
as background, thus making for a particular mode of relating to the earth, as though human
beings are somehow separate from the natural elementss noted above, phenomenologists of
climate might also uphold this spatializing move. Knebusch, for example, although helpfully
insisting on climate as a thoroughly temporal phenomenon, still reads climate as something in
which humans find themselves, and whose temporal passing we note as outside observers:
“Experiencing a climate (through a season, for example), I take place in time, weather, and my
life. Consciously or not, I do locate myself in time. Therefore, it is possible to state that
subjectively the climate experience corresponds to an experience of a net of time. What would
happen if I could no longer lean on time? if I could no longer rest in and on seasons?” (Knebusch
n.d., 5, italics in original). Knebusch answers his own questions by suggesting that climate—as
pattern in time—would be unintelligible without a sense of time's passing. This spatialized sense
of being in weather, or in a climate, that passes or changes over time, may be unavoidable; we
do locate our bodies in particular spaces and environments: a hot California beach; a frosty
November morning. Likewise, when thinking about the impacts of climatic changes on
particular nonhuman animals or plant populations, we cannot separate the force of these
concerns from a linearity that understands that there was once a time when there were X
species of bees in the world and now there are Y. The very force of extinction, thus, is its finality:
we cannot go back in time to undo the loss of plant and animal populations; we need the
traction of claims that global temperatures have progressively risen over time and will likely
continue to do so in the future, in order to demonstrate the need for interventions and
alternative ecological practices. We are not arguing that such climate change-related
extinctions (and the immediate hardships that may accompany their processes) are not to be
mourned. Nor do we suggest that such extinction is “simply” inevitable, or unconnected to
human ignorance and arrogance. The feminist ethos of responsivity we discuss below in fact
demands more careful attunement to the ways in which we ourselves weather these losses.
At the same time, the body's material memory indicates that there is more to these familiar
narratives of shifting populations and changing climates. The felt degrees of hotness and
coldness, of speeds and slownesses, saturate this temporality with a sense of the material
duration, or the thick time, of that weather or climate. A human body's shiver contracts warmbloodedness and a gust of cold air; a frosted windowpane contracts cold air and the residual
heat of the glass. At this point we are no longer outside observers, able to examine, log data,
and calculate a future,but right in the thick of things . Such imbrications also demonstrate that
we, as in the human, cannot go back to an original position, a before of climate change, for the
“initial conditions have been changed by the process” (Williams 2011, 4). Concurrently, and in
relation to our earlier discussion of “sustainability,” these spatialized constructions of a
pure, original past also reach for a future where temperatures are maintained or
population numbers stand still.
Inherency/Solvency
Notes: Okay, first of all this is dumb. They have ONE card for inherency and they use the same
card for their solvency but whatever… The card is talking about how we need to take care of the
ocean because we need to use the resources from it such as food, minerals, petroleum reserves,
inexpensive transportation, it’s rich biodiversity could possibly hold new medicines and an
insurance policy in the future, significant oil reservoirs, etc. so basically this aff is the definition
of turning the ocean into a standing reserve which is why the K links.
Read this:
NOAA Fails
NRC 03
Committee on Exploration of the Seas, National Research Council ISBN: 0-309-08927-1, 228 pages, 7 x 10, (2003)
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Office of Ocean Exploration,
which was established in 2000, does not have the wherewithal to undertake the
interdisciplinary, global ocean exploration program proposed in this report. At the time of
publication Congressional support and international cooperative efforts are uncertain. The
scientific community does not see the program as a significant resource of funding for
sustained exploration programs.
Also on this advantage cross-apply the Jacques 12 from the kritik because this card
specifically states that we need the ocean to give us resources such as minerals and
food and inexpensive transportation and all of this commodification results in
ecological collapse because we aren’t looking at the ocean as anything but something
there for our profit and we are unable to see the ocean as its own being.
Advantage- Biodiversity
Notes: This advantage is saying that we need to start collecting more data and stuff to help
prevent biodiversity impacts. Also, all of their cards are assertions; none of their cards actually
say how exploration leads to solving biodiversity impacts.
Read this:
TURN:
Exploration of the ocean leads to biodiversity loss
Worm 13 Science 314, 787 (2006); DOI: 10.1126/science.1132294
Changes in marine biodiversity are directly caused by exploitation, pollution, and habitat destruction, or
indirectly through climate change and related perturbations of ocean biogeochemistry. Although marine extinctions are
only slowly uncovered at the global scale, regional ecosystems such as estuaries, coral reefs, and coastal and oceanic fish communities are rapidly
losing populations, species, or entire functional groups.
The use of calculative thought ensures the failure of environmental
movements, only questioning can solve
Kevin Michael DeLuca, Associate Professor of Speech Communication and adjunct in the
Institute of Ecology at the University of Georgia, author of Image Politics: The New Rhetoric of
Environmental Activism and numerous articles exploring humanity-nature relations and
technology, 2005, “Thinking with Heidegger Rethinking Environmental Theory and Practice”, in
Ethics & the Environment 10.1 p. 67-87,
In addition to meditating on media and public relations practices, a careful
reading of Heidegger
would compel environmentalism to meditate on its relations to technology and to
images. To address the issue of technology first, environmental groups often rely on
modern technology while writing off such use as a necessary cost of 'doing business' in a modern,
mass media public sphere. That may be true, but Heidegger's writings caution us against
gliding over the writing off. What are the costs of using modern technology? Besides relying on
the technological infrastructure of the communication industry (computers, telephones, video
camcorders, etc....) to appear on TV, issue press releases, maintain web sites, lobby politicians, and
raise money, environmentalists in the course of working and living rely on cars, planes, air
conditioning, highways, microwaves, electricity, and a plethora of plastic products. In short,
environmentalists are implicated and imbricated in the technosphere.¶ Now
Heidegger's meditation on the essence of technology and the essence of
humanity's relation to technology serves to displace the conventional questions
concerning technology. Heidegger refuses the question of whether technology is good or bad or
neutral. As he puts it, "Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology,
whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the
worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral; for this conception of
it, to which today we particularly like to do homage, makes us utterly blind to the
essence of technology" (1993, 311–12). Instead, Heidegger is asking after the essence of
technology, which, he famously declares, "is by no means anything technological" (1993, 311).
Rejecting the understanding of technology as a "mere means" that humans can master, what he terms
the merely correct but not true "instrumental and anthropological definition of technology" (1993, 312),
Heidegger proposes technology as "a way of revealing" (1993, 318). ¶ Avoiding the romanticism of a
return to the Pleistocene or the utopianism of embracing a Star Trek futurism, from a Heideggerian
perspective the question becomes, "What sort of revealing does a particular regime of technology make
possible?" More prosaically, what sort of relationships [End Page 78] to the earth and world does a
technology enable? To this question, Heidegger provides a stinging critique of modern technology
[albeit, admittedly, tempered by an ontological hope (see 1993, 333–41)]. The way of revealing of
modern technology is Gestell or enframing: "The revealing that rules throughout modern technology
has the character of a setting-upon, in the sense of a challenging-forth. . . . a challenging, which puts to
nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such" (1993,
321, 320). Nature, then, is reduced to a "standing-reserve... a calculable coherence
of forces" (1993, 322, 326),6 so that "nature reports itself in some way or other that
is identifiable through calculation and that it remains orderable as a system of
information" (1993, 328).7 Heidegger gives examples from the fields of agriculture and energy that
ring even more true today (see 1993, 320–21).¶ Of farming, Heidegger writes:¶ The work of the peasant
does not challenge the soil of the field. In sowing grain it places seed in the keeping of the forces of
growth and watches over its increase. But meanwhile even the cultivation of the field has come under
the grip of another kind of setting-in-order, which sets upon nature. It sets upon it in the sense of
challenging it. Agriculture is now the mechanized food industry. ¶ (1993, 320)¶ Of course, the all-tooimmediate reaction to such an example is to charge Heidegger with a dangerous romanticism. With the
benefit of a few decades experience around the world with the products of the mechanized food
industry, from tasteless food, soil erosion, and ubiquitous pesticides to emptied communities, alienated
consumers, and green imperialism, in retrospect Heidegger's critique seems understated. More
significantly, though, the question is not a moral one of good or bad but an
exploration of what possible ways of relating to nature are opened and foreclosed
with different practices of revealing. Heidegger himself dismisses the possibility of
romanticism in response to the giganticism and the progress of science, "whose onset can neither be
hindered nor even held up in any way, by any romantic remembering of what was earlier and different"
(1999, 108). Indeed, Heidegger's fundamental critique of modern technology is not directed at the world
it reveals but the world it erases:¶ Where this ordering holds sway, it drives out every other possibility of
revealing. Above all, enframing conceals that revealing which, in the [End Page 79] sense of poiesis,
lets what presences come forth into appearance. As compared with that other revealing, the setting-upon
that challenges forth thrusts man into a relation to whatever is that is at once antithetical and rigorously
ordered. Where enframing holds sway, regulating and securing of the standing-reserve mark all
revealing.
Advantage- Climate Change
Notes: The card is pretty self-explanatory... but this advantage is one card long and it says that
we need to solve the issue of climate change through technology and this card like whams that
so it’s all good.
Read this:
Technological solutions to global warming only ensure further environmental destruction and are destined to
fail
Joronen, 2k10
(Mikko, Dept of Geography and Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, U of Turku, The Age of Planetary Space: On Heidegger, Being, and Metaphysics of Globalization,
pg 224-5)
Perhaps one of the most striking examples of the need for non-violent resistance and power-free
following of the abyssal earth is the contemporary event of global warming. While this
devastating change is affecting all parts of the earth, even the atmosphere, some of the most vulgar
solutions, especially the geo-engineering proposals, aim at intentional, even global scale, climate
modification either by reducing the incoming radiation from the sun – for instance, by using the refractive screens or
sunshade of autonomous spacecrafts installed in space (Angel 2006), and by spraying cooling sulphate particle concentrations in the stratosphere (Crutzen 2006) – or by
removing CO2 from the atmosphere – for instance, by increasing carbon sequestration with iron fertilization pumped at
oceans (Buesseler&Boyd 2003). These various potential geoengineering implementations seem to do nothing
but follow the baseline of the gigantic machination, the subjugation of things into orderable
reserve commanded to stand by so that they may be manipulated by the operations of
calculation. Even though such geo-engineering may eventually mitigate the negative
consequences of climate change, it offers a calculative moulding of even more complex systems
of orderings as a solution to the problem of global warming, which is by itself subordinate to, as well as an
outcome of, this manipulative and calculative subjugation of earth, the logic of circular selfovercoming in the ever greater modalities of exploitative power. As Malpas writes, although it is evident
that more complex systems of orderings also increase the possibilities of their failure,
machination always presents itself as a source for continuous improvements by simply viewing
these failures as an indication of a further need for technological perfection (2006:298). In other words,
machination does not implicate an achievement of total ordering, but a drive toward total ordering where this drive itself is never under suspicion.
Nevertheless, as contemporary climate change indicates, earth never allows itself to become captured,
completely controlled, or emptied into unfolding that frames it in terms of orderable and exploitable standing-reserve. Earth rather
resists all attempts to capture it: it resists by pointing out the lack that leads to the failure of all
systems of orderings. It is precisely this lack, the line of failure that has always already started to
flee the perfect rationalization and total capture of things, which presents the earth aspect of Heidegger. Instead of the
calculative engineering of technical solutions, the non-violent resistance allows the earth to
become a source of abyssal being, a source of self-emerging things that always retains a hidden
element since the earth never allows itself to become completely secured though particular
world-disclosures (see Harrison 2007:628; Peters&Irwin 2002:8). In other words, instead of mere calculative manipulation, we can resist the manipulative
machination of earth and thus let the living earth become a source of abyssal being, an earth-site for our dwelling.
Science Diplomacy
Notes: So this advantage is just saying that if the US takes the initiative with this whole
exploration thing then the rest of the world will also follow which is dumb because their second
card is specifically stating that all the countries will come together… but the US needs to be in
charge; we can frame this to make it look like the US doesn’t care about biodiversity or climate
change or helping the world or anything, we just want to look like we’re the best so we’re
INSTRUMENTALIZING the environment to make the US look good, there ya go, another link to
the K.
Read this:
Science Diplomacy fails because the US government doesn’t know how to
handle it
Dickson 09
David Dickson is the director of Sci Dev, which is the world’s leading source of reliable and authoritative news, views and analysis on information about science and technology for global development
science and politics make an uneasy alliance. Both need the other. Politicians need science to achieve their goals,
they also occupy different
universes. Politics is, at root, about exercising power by one means or another. Science is — or should be — about pursuing robust knowledge that can be put to useful
The truth is that
whether social, economic or — unfortunately — military; scientists need political support to fund their research. But
purposes. A strategy for promoting science diplomacy that respects these differences deserves support. Particularly so if it focuses on ways to leverage political and financial
a commitment to science
diplomacy that ignores the differences — acting for example as if science can substitute politics (or perhaps more worryingly, vice
versa), is dangerous. The Obama administration's commitment to "soft power" is already
faltering. It faces challenges ranging from North Korea's nuclear weapons test to domestic opposition to limits on oil consumption. A taste of reality may be no bad thing.
backing for science's more humanitarian goals, such as tackling climate change or reducing world poverty. But
Their laundry list card says that the US has always been ahead in everything but that isn’t true, The US has proven over the years that it is just good at using other countries and
taking ideas and not giving credit to the original producers, for example, the US dropped a bomb on Japan, everyone knows that, but the reason we dropped the bomb was because
we wanted to test the bomb, not because Japan was a threat since we’d already gotten revenge on them for Pearl Harbor. Also, the idea of a democracy originated in ancient Greece
and then was taken by Britain but then the US stole it and made it their own, The US being the example for the rest of the world is a terrible idea since the US doesn’t actually care
about the wellbeing of the rest of the world.
STEM
Notes: Yay! Last advantage! Anyway, so this advantage is saying that we’re behind on STEM
education in the world and that if we start exploring the ocean BOOM the US rank in STEM
education will go up, well this is dumb because first of all it is not at all clear what exploration
has to do with STEM in their evidence and also, they say that STEM is a controlling factor in
economic leadership which is basically saying we don’t care at all about the actual benefits of
STEM, we just want to be on top and we’ll do anything we have to do to get there… including
INSTRUMENTALIZATION OF THE ENVIRONMENT.
Read this:
Movements for STEM are already taking place in the Status Quo
The US Dept. of Education 10 The United States Department of Education (ED or DoED), also referred to as the ED for (the) Education Department, is a Cabinet-level
department of the United States government.
The Committee on STEM Education (CoSTEM), comprised of 13 partner agencies—including all of the mission science agencies and the Department of
Education—will facilitate a cohesive national strategy, with new and repurposed funds, to reorganize STEM
education programs and increase the impact of federal investments in five areas: P-12 STEM
instruction; increasing and sustaining public and youth engagement with STEM; improving the STEM experience of undergraduate students; better serving groups historically
Coordinated efforts to improve
STEM education are outlined in the Federal 5-year Strategic Plan for STEM Education and will
concentrate on improving the delivery, impact, and visibility of STEM efforts. The Department of Education, the National
Science Foundation, and the Smithsonian Institution will lead efforts to implement
initiatives in the four core reform areas, with CoSTEM—as a whole—leading efforts to improve outcomes for
traditionally underrepresented groups. The administration will coordinate and streamline federal efforts
to improve STEM education.
underrepresented in STEM fields; and designing graduate education for tomorrow's STEM workforce.
2NC/1NR EXTENSIONS
Kritik:
KRITIK OVERVIEW:
The story of the kritik is very simple. The thing that the negative team is kritiking is the fact that
the affirmative team believes the ocean I just another resource. The negative team is presenting
the idea that we need to understand and approach the ocean as its own being and view the
ocean as something to be commodified. The alternative that the negative team provides is to
reject the Instrumentalization of the ocean by rejecting the affirmative and the reason why the
affirmative plan links so soundly to this kritik is because of their solvency evidence. Their
solvency evidence states VERY SPECIFICALLYMWORD FOR WORD IN THE CARD that The ocean
feeds us, processes waste, holds vast stores of mineral and petroleum reserves, and
provides inexpensive transportation of goods and people. Its rich biodiversity is a
potential source for new medicines and an insurance policy for our future. And this
line from their solvency evidence shows the affirmative plan wants nothing to do with
the ocean but exploit the resources from it.
Now onto the line-by-line… (btw this is when you do your line-by-line)
Links
climate change
The discourse of PROBLEM-SOLUTION and IMPACT for climate change
precludes a RELATIONAL ETHICS in which we are materially PART of climate –
turns the case
Niemanas and Walker 13
Neimanis, A. and Walker, R. L. (2014), Weathering: Climate Change and the “Thick Time” of
Transcorporeality. Hypatia, 29: 558–575. doi: 10.1111/hypa.12064
Affiliated Researcher, Posthumanities Hub (TEMA Gender), Linkoping University, SE. My
research interests include posthuman feminisms, experimental writing methods, nature/culture,
water, climate change, environmental humanities, environmental justice, embodiment,
(bio)coloniality, biotechnologies and feminist STS. I am particularly interested in the common
and queer intersections of these things
When we hold onto the belief that we can separate our human bodies from climate
(close our doors, resist the winds), we maintain a worldview of relating to the earth,
rather than worlding with it. As Colebrook has argued, our attempts to externalize climate
deny the fact that we are already entangled in its forces and flows: “As long as we think of
climate in its traditional sense—as our specific milieu—we will perhaps lose sight of climate
change, or the degree to which human life is now implicated in timelines and rhythms beyond
that of its own borders” (Colebrook 2012, 36).3 There is no escaping climate change, for our
bodies are both the products and the vehicles of its iteration. Consequently, our ecological and
environmental knowledges are already constructed around a politics of temporality.
“ Sustainability” calls for the maintenance of a particular present , or as the United Nations
indicates, sustainability is a form of development that “meets the needs of the present without
compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (as quoted in Alaimo
2012, 562), whereas the language of “climate change” indicates that our future climatic
conditions will be unlike those of the past. Although both of these paradigms have been
troubled by feminist and other scholars (Cuomo 2011; Alaimo 2012; Markley 2012), their
uptake in contemporary climate change discourse continues to call for present actions
that will temper the coming future, human interventions into a global timeline. In our
foregrounding of a transcorporeal temporality, we aim to further challenge this humanist
linearity. Although valuable work is accomplished by thinking about what effects present
actions will have on future landscapes, such narratives rely on a linear earth time where past,
present, and future make up a time-line of human progression , a chronos of self-actualization.
Colebrook's call for an “alteration of what we take climate to be” (Colebrook 2012, 36) stems
from a critique of the assumption that we are outside of climate, an assumption that she
describes elsewhere as relying on neoliberal languages of “mitigation, sustainability, cap
and trade, renewable resources,” all of which “relate to the globe as the milieu for
[human] survival” (Colebrook 2010, 61). Just as a climate change imaginary supported by
neoliberalism enforces a “global view”—the distanced perspective from the everywhere-and-
nowhere of globalism—Colebrook also notes that neoliberalism's time is that of a subject “for
whom time is the passage towards complete actualization” (Colebrook 2009, 11)—an expression
of human exceptionalism as it braves on against the chaos of nature. The abstraction of climate
change from the felt immediacy of our bodies is echoed in the temporality of this abstraction:
something we stand outside of, or pass through, or control. We can see this temporality within
conservative governments who dismiss “climate change theories” as myth (as though climate is
not always already changing?), as well as those sustainable development projects that belie the
sustainability of the status quo, therefore gauging themselves in terms of human need (Alaimo
2012, 562).4 In each case, past, present, and future constitute progressive steps toward a better
world, a set future that we can achieve through human perseverance. Think about familiar
proclamations that “planet Earth, creation, the world in which civilization developed, the world
with climate patterns that we know and stable shorelines, is in imminent peril” (Hansen 2009,
ix). Certainly, we should be alarmed about global warming, but apocalyptic apparatuses
of the impending future do little more than reinforce a spatialization of time that has
permeated not only scientific and environmental perspectives but also a long history of Western
philosophy. Aristotle famously defined time as the counting of moments, a proposition that
linked temporality with regularity, an absolute, exterior measure (see Aristotle 1983). For Kant,
time (and space) are conditions of possibility for the apprehension of the world, and for
Newton, likely the most influential of all, time is an absolute linearity, “represented by the
relations between points on a straight line” (Grosz 1995, 95). The consequence of time's
exteriorization is that, we, as bodies, are conceived as only ever in time, subject to
forces that carry on beyond and outside of us. The weather/environment serves only
as background, thus making for a particular mode of relating to the earth, as though human
beings are somehow separate from the natural elements. noted above, phenomenologists of
climate might also uphold this spatializing move. Knebusch, for example, although helpfully
insisting on climate as a thoroughly temporal phenomenon, still reads climate as something in
which humans find themselves, and whose temporal passing we note as outside observers:
“Experiencing a climate (through a season, for example), I take place in time, weather, and my
life. Consciously or not, I do locate myself in time. Therefore, it is possible to state that
subjectively the climate experience corresponds to an experience of a net of time. What would
happen if I could no longer lean on time? if I could no longer rest in and on seasons?” (Knebusch
n.d., 5, italics in original). Knebusch answers his own questions by suggesting that climate—as
pattern in time—would be unintelligible without a sense of time's passing. This spatialized sense
of being in weather, or in a climate, that passes or changes over time, may be unavoidable; we
do locate our bodies in particular spaces and environments: a hot California beach; a frosty
November morning. Likewise, when thinking about the impacts of climatic changes on
particular nonhuman animals or plant populations, we cannot separate the force of these
concerns from a linearity that understands that there was once a time when there were X
species of bees in the world and now there are Y. The very force of extinction, thus, is its finality:
we cannot go back in time to undo the loss of plant and animal populations; we need the
traction of claims that global temperatures have progressively risen over time and will likely
continue to do so in the future, in order to demonstrate the need for interventions and
alternative ecological practices. We are not arguing that such climate change-related
extinctions (and the immediate hardships that may accompany their processes) are not to be
mourned. Nor do we suggest that such extinction is “simply” inevitable, or unconnected to
human ignorance and arrogance. The feminist ethos of responsivity we discuss below in fact
demands more careful attunement to the ways in which we ourselves weather these losses.
At the same time, the body's material memory indicates that there is more to these familiar
narratives of shifting populations and changing climates. The felt degrees of hotness and
coldness, of speeds and slownesses, saturate this temporality with a sense of the material
duration, or the thick time, of that weather or climate. A human body's shiver contracts warmbloodedness and a gust of cold air; a frosted windowpane contracts cold air and the residual
heat of the glass. At this point we are no longer outside observers, able to examine, log data,
and calculate a future,but right in the thick of things . Such imbrications also demonstrate that
we, as in the human, cannot go back to an original position, a before of climate change, for the
“initial conditions have been changed by the process” (Williams 2011, 4). Concurrently, and in
relation to our earlier discussion of “sustainability,” these spatialized constructions of a
pure, original past also reach for a future where temperatures are maintained or
population numbers stand still.
Discourse on climate change must move from FIXING and SOLVING to beingwith in a relation mode
Niemanas and Walker 13
Neimanis, A. and Walker, R. L. (2014), Weathering: Climate Change and the “Thick Time” of
Transcorporeality. Hypatia, 29: 558–575. doi: 10.1111/hypa.12064
Affiliated Researcher, Posthumanities Hub (TEMA Gender), Linkoping University, SE. My
research interests include posthuman feminisms, experimental writing methods, nature/culture,
water, climate change, environmental humanities, environmental justice, embodiment,
(bio)coloniality, biotechnologies and feminist STS. I am particularly interested in the common
and queer intersections of these things
Alaimo argues that adopting a transcorporeal consciousness is not only a theoretical exercise;
transcorporeality can also engender ethical responsivity and a political orientation
toward questions of climate change— but not of the usual kind . The thick time of
transcorporeality opens many possibilities for our discussions of climate change, but most
important, it illustrates that those discourses that hinge on what we humans can do now
to fix the future may require tempering. An ethic of fixing, making-up-for, and even
sustaining cannot recognize that all actions are forever contracted in lines-of-flight whose
effects will continue to be made and unmade in many futures to come. Climate time , when
assumed to be something we are “in,” or as part of a neoliberal progress narrative that we
will either push forward or stave off , thus disables ways of thinking and doing ecology
that stretch around and through our imbrications with climate. A new climate change
imaginary —one of transcorporeal temporality—can engender what Barad refers to as a
“politics of possibilities,” that is, “ways of responsibly imagining and intervening in” the
entanglements of which we are a part (Barad 2007, 246). In the context of climate change, a
politics of possibilities eschews the myth that our climate is teleologically directed and
that known human actions, somehow independent of the weather , can stop its change .
Possibilities do not, in Barad's terms, “represent a fixed event horizon” or a “homogeneous,
fixed, uniform container of choices” (246). And, although we need to think climate time in
different ways, this rethinking itself opens to a political space of engagement. As Grosz writes,
“concepts”—like the notion of weathering we propose—“do not solve problems that events
generate for us,” but “they enable us to surround ourselves with possibilities for being
otherwise.” They are “modes of address, modes of connection: they are ‘movable bridges’
between those forces that relentlessly impinge on us from the outside to form a problem and
those that we can muster within ourselves to address such problems” (Grosz 2012, 14). The
reimagination of ourselves as weather bodies, with their insistence on recognizing the
“connectivity of phenomena at different scales” (Barad 2007, 246), is already a politics. Such a
politics pushes us beyond practices of “pointing out similarities [or differences] between one
place or event and another” (this hot spell is the same temperature as one in 1935, therefore
we have nothing to worry about) to understanding “how those places or events are made
through one another” (246). A climate change imaginary of “thick time” pushes us to
hold together the phenomena of a weather pattern, a heat-absorbent ocean, the pleasure
of a late-fall swim, and the turn of a key in the ignition as the interconnected temporalities we
call “climate change.” It is this recognition of mutual imbrication that can generate a
relation of intensity toward climate change as called for by Colebrook. Yet intensity for
Colebrook must also be a mobilization of responsivity, or what Barad calls “responsibly
intervening.” Although this reimagination of climate-time and weather-bodies is necessary for
what Grosz calls “surrounding ourselves with possibilities for being otherwise,” a politics of
possibility, steeped in thick time, also requires a feminist ethos of responsivity. By bringing
climate change home to our weather-bodies, we realize that even as we must be humble and
curious in the face of ecological bodies that we cannot (and should not) control, we must also
be accountable for our actions and the ways in which they direct our intra-actions
with the climate and the many human and more-than-human bodies affected. Responsivity, as
noted above, is closely tied to the idea of posthuman agency. Although all bodies are always at
some level responding and weathering, as specifically human agents in a posthuman context we
have the capacity to direct this responsivity in particular ways. Our call is thus at the same time
for those of us living in privileged, high-consumption situations to direct our
responsivity more consciously, in a way more closely attuned to that which we are affecting.
In thick time, we “cannot absolve ourselves selectively of the past” (Williams 2011, 18) for just
as the rings of the tree are a material record of years of soil conditions, patterns of rain and
drought, our bodies are records of the pharmaceuticals we pump into our waterways; increases
in skin cancer are contractions of our carbon emissions. These records, memories, and
intensities are indications of our “insurgent vulnerabilities”: we are responsive to the weather,
as it is to us. And, if we understand ourselves as weathering, intra-actively made and unmade by
the chill of a too-cold winter, the discomfort of a too-hot sun, then we can also attune ourselves
to the pasts that are contracted in changing temperatures, rising sea levels, increasingly
desiccated earths. We attune ourselves to the singularities of its intra-actions, recognizing the
multitude of bodies (including our own) that are all co-emerging in the making of these weathertimes. We recognize our own implications in the climatic conditions around us, thick
with co-labored temporalities that we are also making possible.
Framework ext
Discussions of water – the topic – UNIQUELY demand the possibility for
DISSENT – reject frameworks that DISALLOW our ability to DISSENT from the
topic question itself
Chen MacLeod Neimanis 13
Thinking with Water edited by Cecilia Chen, Janine MacLeod, Astrida Neimanis
Astrida Neimanis (BA McGill, MSc London School of Economics, PhD York) Chair of the Editorial
Board of PhaenEx: Journal of Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture, Affiliated
Researcher, Posthumanities Hub (TEMA Gender), Linkoping University, SE.
Cecilia Chen is an architect and a doctoral candidate in communications at Concordia University
Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, Faculté des études environnementales
Co-organiser, Thinking With Water Project (with Chen and Neimanis) / Coorganisatrice, Projet
penser avec l’eau (avec Chen et Neimanis) Janine MacLeod is a PhD student in the Faculty of
Environmental Studies at York University.
Water-related concerns are not the only sites where greater attention to such interconnection is
needed. However, as a substance essential for life and for the generation of wealth and wellbeing, water is a crucial term in struggles for environmental justice. As Donald Worster
argues, water has a particularly intimate relationship with political and social power. In
many cases, the achievement of domination over watercourses (however temporary)
coincides with an intensification of social domination.8 The construction of the Sardar
Sarovar mega-dam in India's Narmada Valley, for example, has displaced and disenfranchised
approximately half a million people.9 It has done so in order to provide water to large-scale
growers of sugar and other cash crops, as well as to numerous politically powerful urban centres
and industrial interests. In spite of discourses promising a fair distribution of benefits, the
imposition of managerial control over the Narmada River has brought more water (and,
therefore, economic wealth) to already-privileged constituencies, while radically disposessing
the mostly tribal populations of the region.10 In contexts like these, efforts to protect and
restore the integrity of rivers become inseparable from efforts to bring about conditions of
social justice and diffused political power. Even as water joins us in a political commons, it
hardly follows that the political stakes are evenly distributed across this wide community. As
outlined in more detail below, each body is oriented toward water and other watery bodies in
specific ways - ways specific to our species, our biome, our watershed, our culture, our singular
desires, and our fears. In such a political community, we are both common and different. We
are called to the difficult but necessary work of holding tensions - even of cultivating
dissent rather than ceding to the impulse toward neat resolution. This is equally true in
negotiating the concepts and frameworks of ecopolitics itself. We debate : Can ethics apply to
the more-thanhuman world? Can political agency be attributed to the work of are both common
and different. We are called to the difficult but necessary work of holding tensions - even of
cultivating dissent rather than ceding to the impulse toward neat resolution. This is equally true
in negotiating the concepts and frameworks of ecopolitics itself. We debate: Can ethics apply
to the more-thanhuman world? Can political agency be attributed to the work of water?
Upon what exclusions might the right to water be based? Attention to water as a matter of
concern shared across our differences might invite more humility and careful listening - while
annulling neither solidarity nor decisive action.
WATER relationality is MARGINALIZED in mainstream discourse – we must
resist this decentering of hydro-relationality through the sedimineted
conventions of discourse rules
Strang 13
“Conceptual Relations: Water, Ideologies, and Theoretical Subversions” in Edited by Cecilia
Chen, Janine MacLeod and Astrida Neimanis IAS Fellow at St John's College, Durham University
(October - December 2009)
Professor Veronica Strang is an environmental anthropologist at the University of Auckland,
whose work focuses on the social and cultural aspects of human-environmental interactions.
Her doctoral research at Oxford University was concerned with conflicts between land and
water users along the Mitchell River in northern Queensland. The ensuing ethnographic text,
Uncommon Ground: cultural landscapes and environmental values (Berg1997), is now well
known as a leading comparative study, described by American Anthropologist as contributing
‘absorbing, original theory' and by the Australian Review of Books as ‘pioneering this field'.
Conclusion
There is an obvious resonance between a separation of culture from nature and the
literal and metaphorical abstraction of water from its social and ecological location. This
parallel suggests an important correlation between dualistic and boundaried notions of humanenvironmental relationships and exploitative productivism. What I want to point to here is a
recursive connection between conceptual models and ideology , whereby ways of
understanding the world encourage or discourage particular values and practices.
On the one hand, cosmological understandings in which humankind is held within “nature”
appear to support a relational ethic whose aim is to sustain collective social and ecological
well-being. In these terms, water is necessarily a common good. With a more disconnected
view, which deems humanity or “culture” to be somehow separate from the material world, it
is possible to act more competitively, treating nature in adversarial terms, and asserting the
primacy of human agency7. With this view comes the privatization of resources and their use,
and the extemalization of costs to other people, species, and ecosystems.
Along the rivers of the world, groups are increasingly competing for water. They are also
involved in a critical competition about whose concepts, ideologies, and values prevail.
A conceptual reconciliation between culture and nature would require a sea change in
ideological direction. Though such a reorientation would undoubtedly be embraced by some
groups, it is likely to be deeply unwelcome to elites currently empowered by their ownership
and control of water and by their perception of nature as “other.” In public discourses and
mainstream practices , as illustrated by events in the Murray-Darling Basin, a boundaried ,
primarily economic view of water resources continues to dominate policy and decisionmaking , while more fluid and inclusive perspectives are consistently marginalized . In
the academy, this conceptual dualism is manifested in structural terms: the “ hard” (masculine)
sciences are clearly separated from the “ soft ” (feminine) social sciences, and the flow of
funding to those comfortable with an instrumental techno-managerial view of water is a
torrent compared to the trickle diverted to social and cultural issues . This reality both
affirms dualistic visions of culture and nature, and discourages the alternative perspectives
that envision connective flows between human beings and the hypersea.
In thinking with water, the theoretical debate is thus also a political one , in which more fluid
theories are regularly dammed. The implication is that social scientists must also be
social activists, committed to resisting intellectual impoundment and breaking through the
boundaries in public debates on water issues. We must continue to lay charges at the base
of the dam.
at “alt doesn’t do anything”
The demand that the alternative DO something is itself an ANDROCENTRIC
argument – this demand for action divides the world into feminine passive and
masculine active do-ers
Chandler and Niemanis 13
Thinking With Water
Mielle Chandler, Professor At York University, Humanities.
Her collaboration here with Neimanis also demonstrates how thinking with water can bring
together innovative contributions that arise from divergent yet complementary perspectives-a
key scholarly objective of the workshop.
Astrida Neimanis (BA McGill, MSc London School of Economics, PhD York) Chair of the Editorial
Board of PhaenEx: Journal of Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture, Affiliated
Researcher, Posthumanities Hub (TEMA Gender), Linkoping University, SE.
A leading thinker in this field, Bruno Latour, makes the case for a radically revised civilization in
which both human and non-human “actants” - entities that modify other entities - are
integrated as legitimated agents in an expanded political collective.6 Latour's actor-network
theory interrogates and dismantles the “person/thing” distinction on ontological,
epistemological, and ethical grounds, illustrating that conventional separations between
“person” and “thing” - subject and object, being and its material preconditions, citizen and
property, active agent and passive matter - are provisional and shifting. In contesting
democracy’s denial of agency, and thus political legitimacy, to non-human entities, Latour opens
up for critical analysis the ways in which current capitalist processes are predicated on
maintaining the very subject-object structure we find so abhorrent, and which we term
“slavery” when it is human beings that are relegated to object status.7 Yet, while Latour’s
scholarship disrupts the ontological paradigm of Western anthropocentrism in
important and exciting ways, it also simultaneously underlines the tenacity of these same
ontological paradigms. In other words, his challenge to anthropocentrism retains central
tenets of Western androcentrism. Even as Latour's project expands the realm of a political
sphere once reserved for male citizens and property owners to a potentially limitless number of
entities, by retaining one of Western philosophy's central ontological tenets - that it is
the active, rather than the facilitative, capacity of the entity that renders it worthy of
political voice - this iteration of political entities nonetheless retains a vestige of a troubling
pedigree.8 We are concerned that an overreliance on action might unwittingly perpetuate
an age-old chauvinism denigrating the “passivity” previously attributed to nature,
women, and inanimate objects, thereby upholding the deep structure of the very
androcentric and anthropocentric binaristic ontologies that these theories aim to subvert. I
very androcentric and anthropocentric binaristic ontologies that these theories aim to subvert.
It is perhaps not surprising that Latour's model for a posthumanist democracy brings the morethanhuman world under the purview of human Western social, political, and economic
institutional structures, magnanimously extending politics to the material world. Our aim is to
break free from this lingering anthropocentrism, to search instead for something
morethan-human (even as this “something” is the stuff of human bodies, too) upon which to
ground a posthumanist mode of responsiveness. We seek to articulate a new conceptual
starting point - one that flows beneath the human as its condition of possibility.
at “this can’t be realized in practice”
Actual blueprints of non-european watery gestatioanlity exist – aboriginal
societies
Strang 13
“Conceptual Relations: Water, Ideologies, and Theoretical Subversions” in Edited by Cecilia
Chen, Janine MacLeod and Astrida Neimanis IAS Fellow at St John's College, Durham University
(October - December 2009)
Professor Veronica Strang is an environmental anthropologist at the University of Auckland,
whose work focuses on the social and cultural aspects of human-environmental interactions.
Her doctoral research at Oxford University was concerned with conflicts between land and
water users along the Mitchell River in northern Queensland. The ensuing ethnographic text,
Uncommon Ground: cultural landscapes and environmental values (Berg1997), is now well
known as a leading comparative study, described by American Anthropologist as contributing
‘absorbing, original theory' and by the Australian Review of Books as ‘pioneering this field'.
Water in Australian Aboriginal cosmology- is presented as a form of creative potential
that clearly expresses the notions of “ gestationality” and “futurity. ”— It plays a central role
in conceptualizing human-environmental relationships over time. All things - ancestral
beings, their human descendants, and other species - emerge from the Rainbow Serpent. As the
elders in Cape York say, “we all come from the Rainbow.”13 The elders' vision presents human
being as part of the whole stream of life generated by water and the hydrological cycle.— Thus,
“ the Law” can be seen as an intensely localized hydrotheology in which spirit is embodied
in the material substance of water (as with the cosmological ideas expressed by Rita Wong and
Dorothy Christian in this volume). The rising of ancestral beings from the earth, their ability to
manifest everything in the visible dimension of the world, and their return to an invisible
spiritual domain within the land is simultaneously a story about the cyclical movement of water
through the environment; its essentiality to all ecological and human processes of generation
and reproduction; and its capacity to contain past, present, and future. Thus, it also
encapsulates temporal change, being a wellspring of memory31 and “uniquely capable of
symbolizing multi-generational time.”— Aboriginal thinking with water is further illustrated
through ideas about individual spiritual and social genesis. According to the Law, water in the
land provides pools of ancestral force from which spirit children “jump up” to provide the vital
spark of life to the foetus in a woman’s womb. Individuals rise to “become visible,” like their
totemic ancestors, from water sources held within the land. The emergence of their spirit from a
“home” in dan land, assures their identity as a member of the dan, defines their rights to land
and resources, and provides the basis for dose and affective ties to place.33 People are keenly
aware that they are composed of water and spirit, which is temporarily made corporeal through
combination with the material substances they consume from their dan estates, which “grow
them up.” Human lives are believed to echo the hydrological/ancestral cycle, the
objective being to relive ancestral lives, drawing upon environmental resources, and
reciprocally nurturing these for future generations. As people age, they draw doser to the
ancestral beings. When they die, their spirit has to be sung ritually back to their home place, so
that they can be reunited with their totemic “mate” and so re-enter the pool of ancestral forces
and the regenerative power of the Rainbow. Aboriginal Law therefore provides a sense of the
fluid and processual nature of all domains of human and non-human activity, underlining the
reality that these are continuously connecting and mingling. In this smallscale, localized, and
beautifully precise cosmology, it is not difficult to see how water, and metaphors of water,
move freely across ecological, social, imaginative, and corporeal domains, bringing
them together in a flow of human and environmental changes over time and space. It is
equally clear that water and notions of flow are ways of conceptualizing time in cyclical terms,
describing how collective human and non-human actions circulate into and out of the material
world and, on an individual scale, portraying the nascence, progress, dissolution, and
regeneration of individual lives.
a/t “queerness/ futurity bad”
Centering WATER ontologically transcends humanism and heteronormativity,
which lies at the root of the ecocrisis
Chandler and Niemanis 13
Thinking With Water
Mielle Chandler, Professor At York University, Humanities.
Her collaboration here with Neimanis also demonstrates how thinking with water can bring
together innovative contributions that arise from divergent yet complementary perspectives-a
key scholarly objective of the workshop.
Astrida Neimanis (BA McGill, MSc London School of Economics, PhD York) Chair of the Editorial
Board of PhaenEx: Journal of Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture, Affiliated
Researcher, Posthumanities Hub (TEMA Gender), Linkoping University, SE.
The connection we draw between a corporeal logic of gestation and ethics is not new in
Western philosophy, and it enjoys prominence in feminist embodied phenomenological
thought. Luce Irigaray, while she does not use the precise term “gestationality,” develops
concepts of the maternal, the placental, and the intrauterine to underline the feminine
materiality that allows another to be.2 Similarly, the ecnture feminine of Helene Cixous and
Catherine Clement describes the giving, diffuse, and overflowing feminine body as evidencing a
challenge to phallogocentrism. Irigaray and Cixous and Clement all invoke the material amniotic
waters of the maternal body to speak for corporeal sensibility as a source of ethical relation.3
Our aim is to contribute to such articulations of facilitative and relational modes of being, and
our own understanding of gestationality is indebted to these feminist accounts. At the same
time, we insist on untying a gestational mode of being from human , female, reprosexual
experience. Taking the lineaments of gestation as paradigmatic need not be a
“biologically essentialist” or heteronormative move.4 All living bodies of water owe
their corporeal existence to gestation in a watery milieu, which is evidenced in a plurality
of processes that extend beyond human wombs. Making this claim requires challenging the
notions that ethics originates and ends with the human. Our project is to recuperate the
gestational aspect of water in order to articulate a posthumanist account of gestationality. By
taking water's facilitative properties as our epistemic point of departure we move beyond
biological essentialism and heteronormativity, and suggest a more inclusive understanding of
gestationality. Our normative aim: to endorse the proliferation of gestational modes of
engagement and response within all humans, irrespective of their biological proclivities.
Our posthumanist conceptualization of gestationality thus seeks to unsettle, in a
feminist orientation, the denigration of facilitative modes of being . We see this denigration
of facilitation all around us, in the trampling of generosity by greed and exchange, in the
usurpation of hospitality by imperialism, and in the exploitation of those who care for
others. Our motivation is further fuelled by the urgent and precarious state of our planetary
bodies of water . A concept of gestationality that decentres the human is also our response
to water-related environmental crisis, the concomitant harm to life-in-the-plural to
which this crisis contributes, and our human disregard for more-than-human bodies as
worthy of our gestational efforts and care. Here, we join scholars in Science and Technology
Studies and the area of scholarship referred to as the post-humanities and “new” or “critical
materialisms,”5 who call into question the long and entrenched history of privileging the
human (unencumbered, monadic, rational, and so on) in Western modes of thought and
action.
at “essentialism”
Our material reading anti-essentialist – water is material, but the category of
woman and gestationality overflows gender divides
Niemanis 12
Future Concepts, Bodies and Subjectivities
in Feminist Thought and Practice, eds. Henriette Gunkel, Chrysanthi Nigianni and Fanny
Söderbäck. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Astrida Neimanis (BA McGill, MSc London School of Economics, PhD York) Chair of the Editorial
Board of PhaenEx: Journal of Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture, Affiliated
Researcher, Posthumanities Hub (TEMA Gender), Linkoping University, SE.
Thinking about embodiment in ways that challenge the phallogocentric Enlightenment vision of
discrete, atomized, and self-sufficient, Man has been a long-standing concern for feminist
thinkers. Particularly within the French feminist tradition of écriture feminine, the fluid body
of woman is invoked as a means of interrupting a philosophical tradition that both
valorizes a male (morphological, psychological, symbolic, philosophical) norm, and elides the
specificity of �woman.� At the same time, accounts such as Hélène Cixous�s, Luce Irigaray�s,
and Trinh T. Minhha �s have been criticized by other feminist thinkers for their purported
incarceration of women within a biologically essentialist female and normatively reproductive
morphology . Cixous and Clément�s �Sorties,� for instance, connects the female body to the
sea, in that both are gestators of life. Irigaray, in her love letter to Friedrich Nietzsche,
continuously admonishes him for forgetting the watery habitat that birthed him, and to which
he owes a great debt.13 Both Minh-ha in Women, Native, Other and Cixous in �The Laugh of the
Medusa� invoke the �mother�s milk�14 or the �white ink,�15 which seems to reductively
connect the woman writer to a lactating female body. Is not, then, the �fluid woman� just
another way of invoking the phallogocentric fantasy of �woman as womb�? The last century of
(primarily Western) feminist thought has cultivated the view that to reduce a woman to her
(reproductive) biology is problematic, first, because of the troubling symbolic meanings�passive,
empty vessel, hysterical, contaminating�that persistently imbue this biology. Moreover, within
the social, political, and economic contexts in which this thought has circulated, compulsory
reproduction has generally foreclosed rather than facilitated meaningful participation of women
outside of the domestic sphere. But why should this history predetermine any appeal to
biological matter as necessarily antifeminist or reductionist? The desire of water to
morph, shape-shift, and facilitate the new persistently overflows any attempt at capture. Is
not �woman� similarly uncontainable? After all, �woman�s� beings/becomings in these texts
are not determined in advance�even as she may be, like water, temporarily dammed by
dominant representations and discourse . As watery, woman is hardly (statically,
unchangeably) �essentialist.� She too becomes the very matter of transmutation.
Wateriness is gendered but not gender – the universality of water undermines
essentialist binaries
Niemanis 12
Future Concepts, Bodies and Subjectivities
in Feminist Thought and Practice, eds. Henriette Gunkel, Chrysanthi Nigianni and Fanny
Söderbäck. New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Astrida Neimanis (BA McGill, MSc London School of Economics, PhD York) Chair of the Editorial
Board of PhaenEx: Journal of Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture, Affiliated
Researcher, Posthumanities Hub (TEMA Gender), Linkoping University, SE.
In an effort to circumvent the trap of biological essentialism, the texts of Irigaray, Cixous,
and Minh-ha have also been read as merely metaphores of gestation: women�s fluidity births
new ways of thinking, writing, being.16 But surely, the watery body is no mere metaphor.
The intelligibility of any aqueous metaphor depends entirely upon the real waters that sustain
not only material bodies, but material language, too.17 And are we not all bodies of water?
In Marine Lover, while Irigaray�s descriptions highlight woman�s aqueous embodiment, she
posits no clear separation of the man�s body from the amniotic waters he too readily forgets.
Irigaray�s male interlocutor in this text is birthed in and by a watery body�yet this water is also
an integral part of his own flesh: �Where have you drawn what flows out of you?�18 And, while
what her lover thinks he fears is drowning in the mother/sea, Irigaray subtly reminds him that
what he should really fear is desiccation, drought, thirst. No body can come into being,
thrive, or survive without water to buoy its flesh. Similarly, Minh-ha suggests that
woman�s writing draws from the wellspring of her reproductively oriented fluid forces
(menstruation, lactation)�yet all bodies have reservoirs to be tapped.19 We might ask: if
the fluids of otherwise gendered bodies were acknowledged rather than effaced, how might
such attentiveness amplify the creative�and even ethical and political�potential of these
bodies? Rather than alerting us to some �essentialist� difference between masculine and
feminine (or normatively reprosexual and nonreprosexual) embodiment, such aqueous bodywriting might invite all bodies to attend to the water that facilitates their existence, and
embeds them within ongoing overlapping cycles of aqueous fecundity. The fluid body is not
specific to woman, but watery embodiment is still a feminist question; thinking as a
watery body has the potential to bathe new feminist concepts and practices into existence.
What if a reorientation of our lived embodiment as watery could move us, for example, beyond
the longstanding debate among feminisms whereby commonality (connection, identification)
and difference (alterity, unknowability) are posited as an either/or proposition? Inspired by
Irigaray, we will still affirm that the rhythms of the fluid woman belong to what Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak has called �the species of alterity�20 (for this alterity also safeguards
plurality). But Irigaray also reminds us that no body is self-sufficient in its fluvial corporeality; we
have all come from the various seas that have gestated us, both evolutionarily and
maternally.21 Water, in other words, flows through and across difference. Water does not
ask us to confirm either the irreducibility of alterity or material connection. Water flows
between, as both: a new hydro-logic. What sort of ethics and politics could I cultivate if I were to
acknowledge that the unknowability of the other nonetheless courses through me�just as I do
through her? To say that we harbor waters, that our bodies� gestation, sustenance, and
interpermeation with other bodies are facilitated by our bodily waters, and that these waters
are both singular and shared, is far more literal than we might at first think. Neither
essentialist nor purely discursive, this watery feminism is critically materialist.
AT “cede the political”
A relational ethic of water is the ONLY way to maintain DEMCORATICALLY
elected institutions
Strang 13
“Conceptual Relations: Water, Ideologies, and Theoretical Subversions” in Edited by Cecilia
Chen, Janine MacLeod and Astrida Neimanis IAS Fellow at St John's College, Durham University
(October - December 2009)
Professor Veronica Strang is an environmental anthropologist at the University of Auckland,
whose work focuses on the social and cultural aspects of human-environmental interactions.
Her doctoral research at Oxford University was concerned with conflicts between land and
water users along the Mitchell River in northern Queensland. The ensuing ethnographic text,
Uncommon Ground: cultural landscapes and environmental values (Berg1997), is now well
known as a leading comparative study, described by American Anthropologist as contributing
‘absorbing, original theory' and by the Australian Review of Books as ‘pioneering this field'.
This picture of inequity reminds us that water both represents and constitutes power. As
Karl Wittfogel made dear fifty7 years ago,— people’s ability to own and control water is
fundamental to their political enfranchisement and their indusion in collective
dedsion-maldng; in other words, the control of water reflects the extent to which individuals
and groups have social and political agency7. As illustrated by Aboriginal Law, egalitarian
political arrangements depend on the collective and inalienable ownership of land and
water. Water privatization in Australia underlines widening social, economic, and political
disparity, empowering ever-smaller numbers of people, reducing the role and authority of
democratically elected institutions , and disenfranchising the majority from real participation in
processes of governance. Along Queensland’s rivers, commercial water users are either
swimming successfully or drowning in the mainstream, with a commitment to productivism that
demands constant growth and intensification of their activities. Yet, even within more successful
groups, there are undercurrents of doubt about the wisdom of this direction. And such doubts
are more keenly felt among other water users. The emerging crisis over water has brought
to the surface real differences in ideological values, between those dedicated to (or
pressured to conform to) uber-economic rationalism and the control of nature, and those
concerned to uphold a wider set of priorities and to acknowledge a more relational ethic.
at “perm”
Obscuring water’s materiality destroys its political potential – perm can’t solve
Chen MacLeod Neimanis 13
Thinking with Water edited by Cecilia Chen, Janine MacLeod, Astrida Neimanis
Astrida Neimanis (BA McGill, MSc London School of Economics, PhD York) Chair of the Editorial
Board of PhaenEx: Journal of Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture, Affiliated
Researcher, Posthumanities Hub (TEMA Gender), Linkoping University, SE.
Cecilia Chen is an architect and a doctoral candidate in communications at Concordia University
Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, Faculté des études environnementales
Co-organiser, Thinking With Water Project (with Chen and Neimanis) / Coorganisatrice, Projet
penser avec l’eau (avec Chen et Neimanis) Janine MacLeod is a PhD student in the Faculty of
Environmental Studies at York University.
Different ways of situating water may serve to acknowledge or deny our participation
in and our obligations to the communities enabled by these same waters. For
example, many urbanites forget (or little recognize) how the health of a city and its
inhabitants is premised upon the well-being of the surrounding waters - a situation that
parallels that of the mayfly. Indeed, the way we choose to build our cities can severely
limit our understanding of water and may even encourage its forgetting. Urban water
infrastructures channel our watery relations through taps and plumbing, chlorinated
pools and drinking fountains, and the tightly controlled shores of harbours or
waterside parks. The ways in which we situate water have the potential to alter its
presence and change its discursive representations in cultural and political contexts. If we
are to be responsible to water - if we are to respond to its unknowability, its
articulations of kinship, and its radical importance in the places we inhabit - then we
are obliged to recognize, and to deliberately iterate and reiterate, the diverse
situations of water. Given that water is a transformative and transforming element, its
situation can only be understood dynamically - as a materially complex intersection
with a participant-observer in space and time. In articulating the situations of water,
we shape the relations between our watery selves and our watery others.
at “you hate humans”
Relational hydro-ethics necessarily account for the impact on humans
Niemanas 13
Neimanis, Astrida. "Feminist subjectivity, watered." Feminist Review 103.1 (2013): 23-41.
Astrida Neimanis (BA McGill, MSc London School of Economics, PhD York) Chair of the Editorial
Board of PhaenEx: Journal of Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture, Affiliated
Researcher, Posthumanities Hub (TEMA Gender), Linkoping University, SE.
Weather events, water scarcity, pollution and contamination are interconnected. But
more to the point, they are never ‘only’ about the environment. Human and wildlife health
are also at stake. As Alanna Mitchell points out in her book-length diagnosis of the health of
the oceans, changes in ocean chemistry are massively impacting the health of plankton—and
plankton produce the oxygen necessary for every second breath inhaled by humans
(Mitchell, 2009: 12). But the connections reach further still. Military tensions, particularly in
drought-prone regions such as the Middle East, all have their eye on freshwater access.
New ways to colonise human and other ecological bodies are also constantly emerging. Rights to
water are bought and sold, ancient aquifer resources are commodified, and major investments
are diverted to fund complex technological schemes to address the problem by increasing
supply. The transcorporeal transit of toxins through watercourses and weather patterns
exhibits, moreover, a specific biopolitics, where pollutions generated for the profits of
corporations are most devastating to already marginalised communities—the Canadian
tar sands project mentioned above is just one example. Meanwhile, new biocolonial territory is
staked in expanding markets in bodily fluids such as semen and blood, and their amniotic rental
within colonised uteruses, in the context of gestational and other biotourisms. In these ways
and others, the means by which profits and power can be siphoned from water's myriad
ecobodily forms complexify and proliferate.
at “you hate science”
Hydrorelationality is scientifically derived, not anti-science
Niemanas 13
Neimanis, Astrida. "Feminist subjectivity, watered." Feminist Review 103.1 (2013): 23-41.
Astrida Neimanis (BA McGill, MSc London School of Economics, PhD York) Chair of the Editorial
Board of PhaenEx: Journal of Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture, Affiliated
Researcher, Posthumanities Hub (TEMA Gender), Linkoping University, SE.
Critical materialist approaches engage scientific information as part of ‘syncretic
assemblages’ (Di Chiro, 2004: 129) of knowledge that can help us understand how
materiality matters in ways not limited to scientific discourse. This holds for scientific
understandings of watery matter as well, where a deep and detailed attention to the
material capacities, or the specific logics, of water can inspire us to reimagine how we
emerge as subjects. Like the myriad other bodies of water with which we coexist, we humans
live according to these logics. Such logics can be understood as the specific capacities of certain
bodies to affect other bodies. They are ways of being—movements or modes of relationality,
sociality, endurance, becoming. We might describe water's logics as hydro-logics. While to
place a human-rendered taxonomy upon such movements is an epistemological containment of
water that will always exceed my human understanding, I nonetheless propose that hydro-logics
can be described in a schematised way: gestation, dissolution, communication, differentiation,
archive, unknowability. Such a schematisation helps us grasp the multivalent ways in which
watery bodies are more than just ‘fluid’.
Not our feminism: at “[some other] fem bad”
Not our feminism – hydrorelationality derives its value from its MATERIAL
SPECIFICITIY
Niemanas 13
Neimanis, Astrida. "Feminist subjectivity, watered." Feminist Review 103.1 (2013): 23-41.
Astrida Neimanis (BA McGill, MSc London School of Economics, PhD York) Chair of the Editorial
Board of PhaenEx: Journal of Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture, Affiliated
Researcher, Posthumanities Hub (TEMA Gender), Linkoping University, SE.
The body of water as feminist figuration is thus firmly embedded in the urgent but diverse
water-related concerns of our twenty-first century. While resonant with other feminist terms
(such as companion species and transcorporeality), its critical force comes from retaining
this specificity , and a debt to the actual (widely imperilled) waters from which it sources
its figurative power. The body of water is not simply the ‘fluid’ subject , and indeed, we
should be wary of the ubiquity of fluid metaphors within contemporary theory, and ask
constantly after their motivations and effects.3 We do not have to care about fluidity as a
conceptual trope, and invocations of fluidity can be indifferent to water. Fluidity is an
abstracted quality, but water is a living substance that sustains this earth, to which we
have obligations. It belongs to specific places, and transforms in specific ways across various
membranes. Water has phase states (only one of which is dominantly fluid), a specific chemistry
and physical rules that apply to it uniquely. Water is vulnerable in specific ways to
anthropogenic assault, but can still wipe out hundreds of thousands of humans with a single
rogue wave. For these reasons, ‘water’ and ‘fluidity’ are not simply interchangeable terms. It is
such specificity to which I now turn to examine in more detail. Close attention to the
scientifically informed logics of water reveals a series of ways, beyond the abstractly ‘fluid’, in
which thinking with water can open possibilities for thinking about —and embodying—
feminist subjectivity.
at “other thing OW”
Hydro-relationality ENCOMPASSES their problems – it’s a vantage point from
which to conceive all problems generally as a framing question
Niemanas 13
Neimanis, Astrida. "Feminist subjectivity, watered." Feminist Review 103.1 (2013): 23-41.
Astrida Neimanis (BA McGill, MSc London School of Economics, PhD York) Chair of the Editorial
Board of PhaenEx: Journal of Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture, Affiliated
Researcher, Posthumanities Hub (TEMA Gender), Linkoping University, SE.
Current feminisms have their own ecotones, where the �objects� of feminist thought
extend rhizomatically into areas one might never have considered �feminist.� To follow
our bodies of water along their rivulets and tributaries is to journey beyond the cleaving and
coupling of sexually differentiated human bodies: we find ourselves tangled in intricate
choreographies of bodies and flows of all kinds�not only human bodies, but also other animal,
vegetable, geophysical, meteorological, and technological ones; not only watery flows, but also
flows of power, culture, politics, and economics. So if projects that move us to think about
animal ethics, or environmental degradation, or neocolonialist capitalist incursions are
still �feminist,� it is not because such questions are analogous to sexual oppression; it
is rather because a feminist exploration of the inextricable materiality/semioticity that
circulates through all of these bodies pushes at the borders of feminism, and expands it . By
venturing to feminism�s ecotones, and leaping in, we can discover that feminism dives far
deeper than human sexual difference, and outswims any attempts to limit it thus . Here is
gestation, here is proliferation, here is danger, here is risk. Here is an unknowable future, always
already folded into our own watery flesh. Here is hydrofeminism . At least this is what
becoming a body of water has taught me.
CASE
CASE OVERVIEW:
At this point in the debate round, the affirmative team does not have an aff to defend since we
have taken out the entirety of the aff. Their aff has no solvency because NOAA is unable to
complete the exploration project, our NRC 03 card specifically states that NOAA doesn’t have
the approval of congress or the scientific community which means the plan wont happen
anyway however even if you decide to grant them solvency that’s a really bad idea because of
the turn on the biodiversity flow. The turn is saying that negative changes in the biodiversity of
the ocean is caused by the studying and observation of the ocean using technology, which is
exactly what the plan is doing, and that is our Worm 13 card. Their aff has no solvency and the
only thing the aff will accomplish is more biodiversity loss so you have no option left but to vote
negative.
MARINE BIODIVERSITY
UNDER THE AFFS MARINE BIODIVERSITY ADVANTAGE THE AFFIRMATIVE READS
A CARD TAGGED TO SAY THAT BY EXPLORING WE CAN REVERSE THE TRENDS OF
OUR PREVOUS EXPLOITATION, THIS IS THE COSTEAU 12, OUR OPPONENTS
MISTAGGED THIS CARD, THE CARD IS WORD FOR WORD SAYING THAT A new era
of ocean exploration can yield discoveries that will help inform everything from critical
medical advances to sustainable forms of energy SO THIS CARD PROVES THAT THE
AFFIRMATIVE’S ONLY GOING TO EXPLORE THE OCEAN TO FIND THINGS TO
BENEFIT THE HUMANS AND THIS CARD IS ALSO ANOTHER REASON WHY THE
PERM TO THE K WILL NEVER WORK BECAUSE THE SINCE THE AFF ONLY WANTS
TO GO AND EXPPLORE THE OCEAN TO MAKE NEW DISCOVERIES TO BENEFIT
HUMANS, THAT MEANS THAT THE OCEAN WILL NEVER BE LOOKED AT AS ITS
OWN BEING, AS JUST THE OCEAN AND WILL REMAIN A STANDING RESERVE IF
YOU HAPPEN TO VOTE AFF, WHICH YOU WONT.
Marine ecosystems are resilient — no system collapse
Kennedy 2 — Victor Kennedy, PhD Environmental Science and Dir. Cooperative Oxford Lab
(“Coastal and Marine Ecosystems and Global Climate Change,” Pew Center on Global Climate
Change, Available Online: http://www.c2es.org/docUploads/marine_ecosystems.pdf, Accessed:
09/02/2013)
There is evidence that marine organisms and ecosystems are resilient to environmental
change. Steele (1991) hypothesized that the biological components of marine systems are
tightly coupled to physical factors, allowing them to respond quickly to rapid
environmental change and thus rendering them ecologically adaptable . Some species
also have wide genetic variability throughout their range, which may allow for
adaptation to climate change.
No impact --- humans and the environment are adaptable
Doremus, 2000 – Professor of Law at UC Davis
(Holly, Washington & Lee Law Review, “The Rhetoric and Reality of Nature Protection: Toward a
New Discourse,” Winter 2000, 57 Wash & Lee L. Rev. 11, JMP)
In recent years, this discourse frequently has taken the form of the ecological horror
story. That too is no mystery. The ecological horror story is unquestionably an attention-getter,
especially in the hands of skilled writers [*46] like Carson and the Ehrlichs. The image of the
airplane earth, its wings wobbling as rivet after rivet is carelessly popped out, is difficult to
ignore. The apocalyptic depiction of an impending crisis of potentially dire proportions
is designed to spur the political community to quick action . Furthermore, this story
suggests a goal that appeals to many nature lovers: that virtually everything must be protected.
To reinforce this suggestion, tellers of the ecological horror story often imply that the relative
importance of various rivets to the ecological plane cannot be determined. They offer reams of
data and dozens of anecdotes demonstrating the unexpected value of apparently useless parts
of nature. The moth that saved Australia from prickly pear invasion, the scrubby Pacific yew, and
the downright unattractive leech are among the uncharismatic flora and fauna who star in these
anecdotes. n211 The moral is obvious: because we cannot be sure which rivets are
holding the plane together, saving them all is the only sensible course.
Notwithstanding its attractions, the material discourse in general, and the ecological horror
story in particular, are not likely to generate policies that will satisfy nature lovers. The
ecological horror story implies that there is no reason to protect nature until catastrophe looms.
The Ehrlichs' rivet-popper account, for example, presents species simply as the (fungible)
hardware holding together the ecosystem. If we could be reasonably certain that a particular
rivet was not needed to prevent a crash, the rivet-popper story suggests that we would lose very
little by pulling it out. Many environmentalists, though, would disagree. n212
Reluctant to concede such losses, tellers of the ecological horror story highlight how close a
catastrophe might be, and how little we know about what actions might trigger one. But the
apocalyptic vision is less credible today than it seemed in the 1970s. Although it is
clear that the earth is experiencing a mass wave of extinctions, n213 the complete
elimination of life on earth seems unlikely . n214 Life is remarkably robust. Nor is human
extinction probable any time soon. Homo sapiens is adaptable to nearly any
environment. Even if the world of the future includes far fewer species, it likely will
hold people. n215
One response to this credibility problem tones the story down a bit, arguing not that humans
will go extinct but that ecological disruption will bring economies, and consequently civilizations,
to their knees. n216 But this too may be overstating the case. Most ecosystem functions are
performed by multiple species. This functional redundancy means that a high
proportion of species can be lost without precipitating a collapse . n217
Aff ev is too alarmist --- overhyping the problem decreases support to address it
Kareiva, 10 --- chief scientist at The Nature Conservancy and has worked at the NOAA
(11/29/2010, Peter, “Why Do We Keep Hearing Global Fisheries Are Collapsing?”
http://blog.nature.org/conservancy/2010/11/29/fisheries-apocalypse-ocean-fish-stock-peterkareiva-ray-hilborn/, JMP)
I have been quantitatively analyzing environmental data for 30 years in a wide variety
of arenas (biotechnology, endangered species, agriculture, fisheries , etc). I am sad to
report that, on average, the conservation and environmental community errs on the
side of being unduly alarmist and apocalyptic in interpreting the data we have, to the
detriment of being solution-oriented.
Nowhere was this more apparent to me than when I worked for NOAA’s fisheries
division and got to learn up close how committed and rigorous NOAA’s scientists were
about finding ways to protect the nation’s fisheries. Yes, there is coastal degradation in
the United States and there are fisheries that have collapsed. But there are also wellmanaged fisheries — something you almost never hear about. And it is these success
stories that can tell us what we need to do to reverse our failures.
I am no Pollyanna — the public’s growing disconnect from climate issues troubles me deeply.
But when scientists analyze and extrapolate data using methods that are open to
debate and then firmly conclude with statements such as, “Our analyses suggest that
business-as-usual would foreshadow serious threats to global food security, coastal
water quality, and ecosystem stability, affecting current and future generations,” I
wonder what is being accomplished? Have we not learned that scaring people paralyzes
them instead of motivating them to act?
For The Conservancy’s science magazine, Science Chronicles, the world renowned fisheries
biologist Ray Hilborn just wrote a fascinating essay examining the doom-and-gloom rhetoric
surrounding the state of marine fisheries. For sure, there is another side to the story, and there
are scientists who would disagree with Ray. But it is important that the conservation
community and the public learn to think skeptically about messages of a forthcoming
apocalypse as well as about messages of “everything is wonderful.” Our marine fisheries
are too important to the world’s economy and food supply to waste energy on emotional
rhetoric — our oceans demand cool-headed analyses and data-based solutions that work. Ray’s
essay (reprinted below) about why all the world’s fisheries are not collapsing is a good place to
start.
No impact to biodiversity
Sagoff 97 Mark, Senior Research Scholar – Institute for Philosophy and Public policy in School
of Public Affairs – U. Maryland, William and Mary Law Review, “INSTITUTE OF BILL OF RIGHTS
LAW SYMPOSIUM DEFINING TAKINGS: PRIVATE PROPERTY AND THE FUTURE OF GOVERNMENT
REGULATION: MUDDLE OR MUDDLE THROUGH? TAKINGS JURISPRUDENCE MEETS THE
ENDANGERED SPECIES ACT”, 38 Wm and Mary L. Rev. 825, March, L/N
Note – Colin Tudge - Research Fellow at the Centre for Philosophy at the London School of
Economics. Frmr Zoological Society of London: Scientific Fellow and tons of other positions. PhD.
Read zoology at Cambridge.
Simon Levin = Moffet Professor of Biology, Princeton. 2007 American Institute of Biological
Sciences Distinguished Scientist Award 2008 Istituto Veneto di Scienze Lettere ed Arti 2009
Honorary Doctorate of Science, Michigan State University 2010 Eminent Ecologist Award,
Ecological Society of America 2010 Margalef Prize in Ecology, etc… PhD
Although one may agree with ecologists such as Ehrlich and Raven that the earth stands on the
brink of an episode of massive extinction, it may not follow from this grim fact that human
beings will suffer as a result. On the contrary, skeptics such as science writer Colin Tudge have
challenged biologists to explain why we need more than a tenth of the 10 to
100 million species that grace the earth. Noting that "cultivated systems often
out-produce wild systems by 100-fold or more," Tudge declared that "the
argument that humans need the variety of other species is, when you think about
it, a theological one." n343 Tudge observed that "the elimination of all but a tiny
minority of our fellow creatures does not affect the material well-being of
humans one iota." n344 This skeptic challenged ecologists to list more than 10,000 species (other than
unthreatened microbes) that are essential to ecosystem productivity or functioning. n345 "The human species
could survive just as well if 99.9% of our fellow creatures went extinct, provided
only that we retained the appropriate 0.1% that we need." n346
[*906] The
monumental Global Biodiversity Assessment ("the Assessment") identified two positions with respect to redundancy
of species. "At one extreme is the idea that each species is unique and important, such that its removal or loss will have
demonstrable consequences to the functioning of the community or ecosystem." n347 The authors of the Assessment,
a panel of eminent ecologists, endorsed this position, saying it is "unlikely that there is much, if any, ecological
redundancy in communities over time scales of decades to centuries, the time period over which environmental policy
should operate." n348 These eminent ecologists rejected the opposing view, "the notion that species overlap in
function to a sufficient degree that removal or loss of a species will be compensated by others, with negligible overall
consequences to the community or ecosystem." n349 Other biologists believe, however, that species
are so fabulously redundant in the ecological functions they perform that the
life-support systems and processes of the planet and ecological processes in general will function
perfectly well with fewer of them, certainly fewer than the millions and
millions we can expect to remain even if every threatened organism becomes
extinct. n350 Even the kind of sparse and miserable world depicted in the movie Blade Runner could provide a
"sustainable" context for the human economy as long as people forgot their aesthetic and moral commitment to the
glory and beauty of the natural world. n351 The Assessment makes this point. "Although any ecosystem contains
hundreds to thousands of species interacting among themselves and their physical environment, the emerging
consensus is that the system is driven by a small number of . . . biotic variables on whose interactions the balance of
species are, in a sense, carried along." n352 [*907] To make up your mind on the question of the functional
redundancy of species, consider an endangered species of bird, plant, or insect and ask how the ecosystem would fare
in its absence. The fact that the creature is endangered suggests an answer: it is already in limbo as far as ecosystem
processes are concerned. What crucial ecological services does the black-capped
vireo, for example, serve? Are any of the species threatened with
extinction necessary to the provision of any ecosystem service on which
humans depend? If so, which ones are they? Ecosystems and the species that compose
them have changed, dramatically, continually, and totally in virtually every part of the United States. There is
little ecological similarity, for example, between New England today and
the land where the Pilgrims died. n353 In view of the constant
reconfiguration of the biota, one may wonder why Americans have not
suffered more as a result of ecological catastrophes . The cast of species in nearly every
environment changes constantly-local extinction is commonplace in nature-but the crops still grow. Somehow, it
seems, property values keep going up on Martha's Vineyard in spite of the tragic disappearance of the heath hen. One
might argue that the sheer number and variety of creatures available to any
ecosystem buffers that system against stress. Accordingly, we should be concerned if the
"library" of creatures ready, willing, and able to colonize ecosystems gets too small. (Advances in genetic engineering
may well permit us to write a large number of additions to that "library.") In the United States as in
many other parts of the world, however, the number of species has been
increasing dramatically , not decreasing, as a result of human activity. This
is because the hordes of exotic species coming into ecosystems in the
United States far exceed the number of species that are becoming extinct.
Indeed, introductions may outnumber extinctions by more than ten to one, so that the United States is becoming more
and more species-rich all the time largely as a result of human action. n354 [*908] Peter Vitousek and colleagues
estimate that over 1000 non-native plants grow in California alone; in Hawaii there are 861; in Florida, 1210. n355 In
Florida more than 1000 non-native insects, 23 species of mammals, and about 11 exotic birds have established
themselves. n356 Anyone who waters a lawn or hoes a garden knows how many weeds desire to grow there, how many
birds and bugs visit the yard, and how many fungi, creepy-crawlies, and other odd life forms show forth when it rains.
All belong to nature, from wherever they might hail, but not many homeowners would claim that there are too few of
them. Now, not all exotic species provide ecosystem services; indeed, some may be disruptive or have no instrumental
value. n357 This also may be true, of course, of native species as well, especially because all exotics are native
somewhere. Certain exotic species, however, such as Kentucky blue grass, establish an area's sense of identity and
place; others, such as the green crabs showing up around Martha's Vineyard, are nuisances. n358 Consider an analogy
[*909] with human migration. Everyone knows that after a generation or two, immigrants to this country are hard to
distinguish from everyone else. The vast majority of Americans did not evolve here, as it were, from hominids; most of
us "came over" at one time or another. This is true of many of our fellow species as well, and they may fit in here just
as well as we do. It is possible to distinguish exotic species from native ones for a period of time, just as we can
distinguish immigrants from native-born Americans, but as the centuries roll by, species, like people, fit into the
landscape or the society, changing and often enriching it. Shall we have a rule that a species had to come over on the
Mayflower, as so many did, to count as "truly" American? Plainly not. When, then, is the cutoff date? Insofar as we are
concerned with the absolute numbers of "rivets" holding ecosystems together, extinction seems not to pose a general
problem because a far greater number of kinds of mammals, insects, fish, plants, and other creatures thrive on land
and in water in America today than in prelapsarian times. n359 The Ecological Society of America
has urged managers to maintain biological diversity as a critical
component in strengthening ecosystems against disturbance. n360 Yet as
Simon Levin observed, "much of the detail about species composition will be
irrelevant in terms of influences on ecosystem properties." n361 [*910] He added:
"For net primary productivity, as is likely to be the case for any system property, biodiversity
matters only
up to a point; above a certain level, increasing biodiversity is likely to make
little difference." n362 What about the use of plants and animals in
agriculture? There is no scarcity foreseeable. "Of an estimated 80,000
types of plants [we] know to be edible," a U.S. Department of the Interior document says,
"only about 150 are extensively cultivated." n363 About twenty species, not one of which is
endangered, provide ninety percent of the food the world takes from plants. n364 Any new food has to take "shelf
space" or "market share" from one that is now produced. Corporations also find it difficult to create demand for a new
product; for example, people are not inclined to eat paw-paws, even though they are delicious. It is hard enough to get
people to eat their broccoli and lima beans. It is harder still to develop consumer demand for new foods. This may be
the reason the Kraft Corporation does not prospect in remote places for rare and unusual plants and animals to add to
the world's diet. Of the roughly 235,000 flowering plants and 325,000 nonflowering plants (including mosses, lichens,
and seaweeds) available, farmers ignore virtually all of them in favor of a very few that are profitable. n365 To be sure,
any of the more than 600,000 species of plants could have an application in agriculture, but would they be preferable
to the species that are now dominant? Has anyone found any consumer demand for any
of these half-million or more plants to replace rice or wheat in the human
diet? There are reasons that farmers cultivate rice, wheat, and corn rather than, say, Furbish's lousewort. There are
many kinds of louseworts, so named because these weeds were thought to cause lice in sheep. How many does
agriculture really require? [*911] The species on which agriculture relies are
domesticated, not naturally occurring; they are developed by artificial not
natural selection; they might not be able to survive in the wild. n366 This
argument is not intended to deny the religious, aesthetic, cultural, and moral reasons that command us to respect and
protect the natural world. These spiritual and ethical values should evoke action, of course, but we should also
recognize that they are spiritual and ethical values. We should recognize that ecosystems and all that dwell therein
compel our moral respect, our aesthetic appreciation, and our spiritual veneration; we should clearly seek to achieve
the goals of the ESA. There is no reason to assume, however, that these goals have anything to do with human wellbeing or welfare as economists understand that term. These are ethical goals, in other words, not economic ones.
Protecting the marsh may be the right thing to do for moral, cultural, and spiritual reasons. We should do it-but
someone will have to pay the costs. In the narrow sense of promoting human welfare, protecting nature
often represents a net "cost," not a net "benefit." It is largely for moral,
not economic, reasons-ethical, not prudential, reasons- that we care
about all our fellow creatures. They are valuable as objects of love not as objects of use. What is
good for [*912] the marsh may be good in itself even if it is not, in the economic sense, good for mankind.
The
most valuable things are quite useless .
No impact to biodiversity – previous mass extinctions prove
National Geographic no date (“Mass Extinctions, What Causes Animal Die Offs?,” National
Geographic, Date Provided by the Wayback Machine, 2010, science.nationalgeographic.com,
Available Online: https://science.nationalgeographic.com/prehistoric-world/mass-extinction,
Accessed: 09/02/2013)
More than 90 percent of all organisms that have ever lived on Earth are extinct . As
new species evolve to fit ever changing ecological niches, older species fade away. But
the rate of extinction is far from constant. At least a handful of times in the last 500
million years, 50 to more than 90 percent of all species on Earth have disappeared in a
geological blink of the eye. Though these mass extinctions are deadly events, they open up
the planet for new life-forms to emerge. Dinosaurs appeared after one of the biggest
mass extinction events on Earth, the Permian-Triassic extinction about 250 million years ago.
The most studied mass extinction, between the Cretaceous and Paleogene periods about 65
million years ago, killed off the dinosaurs and made room for mammals to rapidly
diversify and evolve.
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