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. SCIENCE DIPLOMACY: