MSP neg
1NC
T
“Increase” means to become larger or greater in quantity
Encarta 6 – Encarta Online Dictionary. 2006. ("Increase"
http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/features/dictionary/DictionaryResults.aspx?refid=1861620741)
in·crease [ in kr
ss ]
transitive and intransitive verb (past and past participle in·creased, present participle in·creas·ing, 3rd person present singular
in·creas·es)Definition: make or become larger or greater: to
become, or make something become, larger in number,
quantity, or degree
noun (plural in·creas·es)
“Ocean development” is utilization of ocean resources, spaces, and energy
JIN 98– Japan Institute of Navigation, “Ocean Engineering Research Committee”, http://members.j-navigation.org/e-committee/Ocean.htm
2. Aim of Ocean Engineering Committee
Discussions of "Ocean Engineering" are inseparable from "Ocean Development." What is ocean development? Professor Kiyomitsu Fujii of the
In the light
of its significance and meaning, the term "Ocean Development" is not necessarily a new term. Ocean
development is broadly classified into three aspects: (1) Utilization of ocean resources, (2) Utilization of
ocean spaces, and (3) Utilization of ocean energy. Among these, development of marine resources has
long been established as fishery science and technology, and shipping, naval architecture and
port/harbour construction are covered by the category of using ocean spaces, which have grown into industries in
University of Tokyo defines ocean development in his book as using oceans for mankind, while preserving the beauty of nature.
Japan. When the Committee initiated its activities, however, the real concept that caught attention was a new type of ocean development, which was outside the
coverage that conventional terms had implied.
Violation---the plan doesn’t develop ocean resources, use space or energy – Just
creates a form of framework
Voting issue--Ground---resource-focus provides a stable and predictable direction for the topic and
creates a balanced set of arguments for each side---depth of literature on energy
resources, fishing, conservation, etc. is strong and creates high-quality debates
Limits---other interpretations make all ocean activity topical – at best the aff is
effectually topical – framework is a prerequisite to development
Owen 3 – (Daniel Owen, Consultant to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, “Legal And Institutional Aspects Of Management
Arrangements For Shared Stocks With Reference To Small Pelagics In Northwest Africa”, FAO Fisheries Circular No. 988,
http://www.fao.org/docrep/006/y4698b/y4698b04.htm)
.2 The legal regime for management of shared stocksFor a stock shared between two or more neighbouring coastal States and not ranging onto
the high seas, the regime of Art 63(1) LOSC is appropriate. It states that:Where the same stock or stocks of associated species occur within the
exclusive economic zones of two or more coastal States, these States shall seek, either directly or through appropriate subregional or regional
organizations, to agree upon the measures necessary to coordinate and ensure the conservation and development of such stocks without
prejudice to the other provisions of this Part.
Regarding the term “development”, Nandan, Rosenne and Grandy[4] state that:
The reference to “development”... relates to the development of those stocks as fishery resources. This
includes increased exploitation of little-used stocks, as well as improvements in the management of
heavily-fished stocks for more effective exploitation. Combined with the requirement in article 61 of not
endangering a given stock by overexploitation, this envisages a long-term strategy of maintaining the
stock as a viable resource.
Military CP
Counterplan Text: The Department of Defense should establish a national coordinated
coastal and marine spatial planning system for the ocean.
Only the Navy’s participation in CMSP will be able to solve for conflict
Schregardus 14 (Donald R. Schregardus, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy, winter 2014, Currents, “Ocean Stewardship through
Marine Spatial Planning”, http://greenfleet.dodlive.mil/files/2014/03/Win14_DASNE_Outlook.pdf, LM)
Marine Spatial Planning represents a new and unique opportunity for the Navy to engage with our
communities, states, and regions and other ocean stakeholders early in this voluntary planning process. By
increasing communications and focusing on identifying complementary and sustainable uses for these
areas, we avoid conflicts, improve regulatory efficiencies, and increase ocean productivity/ benefits.
While there have been effective programs addressing these activities in some parts of the country, the National Ocean Policy
represents a first attempt to conduct comprehensive, integrated planning that includes the federal family,
states, tribes, and other stakeholders. Our country is struggling with escalating costs, duplicative activities, and conflicting priorities on
ocean use. A comprehensive planning process, working with all stakeholders, provides an important venue for the
Navy to protect national security equities while jointly working with of our federal, tribal, state, municipal, and
neighborhood partners to responsibly utilize, manage and protect our ocean and Great Lakes resources. 4 DON
represents the Department of Defense (DoD) on the National Ocean Council. We have established a formal executive steering group within DoD
and the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) comprised of senior executives and flag officers to ensure that DoD leadership is kept abreast of
developments and contributes to national ocean policy implementation. Our
primary objective is to ensure that operational,
training, research and development, test and evaluation, environmental compliance, and
homeland/national security equities are considered in developing national ocean policy and throughout
the marine spatial planning process. The DoD, with special emphasis on the Navy and the unique role of the Army Corps of
Engineers within the DoD, has interests in each of the nine Regional Planning Bodies (RPB). Accordingly, we have formally
designated representatives for both the DoD and Joint Chiefs for each of the RPBs. These RPB representatives participate in
planning activities and.coordinate activities internally to ensure consistency throughout the DoD. DoD
and Navy leadership strongly support regional planning in the coastal and marine systems to both
reduce spatial and temporal conflicts and to promote healthier and more resilient coasts and oceans.
Additionally, the Navy has offered to serve as the federal co-lead for both the South Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico RPBs given the level of
Navy and other military service activities in the region. Together, these two RPBs largely coincide with the Area of Responsibility for our
Southeast Regional Commander.
Ptx
Republicans will win the Senate now – they’re winning the mobilization race
Jim Malone, 7-3-14, http://www.voanews.com/content/political-forecast-moregridlock/1950498.html
Given that the chances for agreement on substantial legislation in Congress are now fleeting, both sides
are ramping up their arguments for midterm voters. Democrats start with a huge disadvantage. A lot of
their folks are much less inclined to turn out in midterm congressional elections than they are for a
presidential contest. Obama and other Democrats are now heavily focused on encouraging core
Democratic supporters, especially what they like to call the “rising electorate”, to get off their rumps
and out to the polls in November. That rising electorate includes younger voters, especially unmarried
women, as well as Hispanic and Asian-American voters. In fact, many Democrats see motivating
younger unmarried women as the key to boosting turnout enough that it could save their majority in the
U.S. Senate. There is general consensus among political analysts and pundit-types that Republicans
appear to have a big advantage in holding on to their majority in the House of Representatives. In fact,
by some estimates, they could add seats. The real battle is for control of the Senate, where 36 of the
100 seats are at stake. Republicans need to gain six Democratic seats to reclaim a majority. That would
normally be a tall order in any election year but this year there are far more Democratic seats at stake
than Republican, and many of the Democratic seats are in states where Republicans have an advantage.
New policy is key to boost Democratic votes. No risk of a link turn – the Republican
base is already mobilized
Sargent 7/9 [Greg Sargent, Washington Post writer, “Morning Plum: Obama to set off bomb in middle
of midterms”, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2014/07/09/morning-plumobama-to-set-off-bomb-in-middle-of-midterm-elections/, 7/9/14]
Now that Republicans have made it clear that they will not participate on any level in basic problem
solving when it comes to our immigration crisis, it is now on Obama to determine just how far he can go
unilaterally, particularly when it comes to easing the pace of deportations. This is going to be one of the
most consequential decisions of his presidency in substantive, moral, and legal terms, and politically, it
could set off a bomb this fall, in the middle of the midterm elections. I’m told there are currently internal discussions
underway among Democrats over whether ambitious action by Obama could be politically harmful in tough races. According to two sources
familiar with internal discussions, some top Dems have wondered aloud whether Obama going big would further inflame the GOP base, with
little payoff for Dems in red states where Latinos might not be a key factor. I don’t want to overstate this: These are merely discussions, not
necessarily worries. Indeed, some Dems are making the opposite case, and that argument is described well in a new Politico piece out this
morning. The story notes that Obama has privately told immigration advocates demanding ambitious action that they might not get what they
advocates still hope for aggressive
action and believe Dems see it as in their own political interests: Adding to the elevated hopes about
what Obama will do is the feeling among Democratic strategists that immigration reform is a clear
political winner: The people who will be opposed to reform or to the president taking action on his own
are already likely prime Republican base voters. But voters whom Obama might be able to activate, both
among immigrant communities and progressives overall who see this issue as a touchstone, are exactly
the ones that Democrats are hoping will be there to counter a midterm year in which the map and
historical trends favor GOP turnout.
want, telling them: “We need to right-size expectations.” And yet, according to Politico, some
Ocean regulation is empirically popular with the democratic base
Hotakainen 11
ROB HOTAKAINEN, 4 October 2011, Congress spars over 'ocean zoning',
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/10/04/126154/congress-spars-over-ocean-zoning.html
WASHINGTON — House members clashed Tuesday over a White House plan that essentially calls for zoning
the oceans, with Republicans charging that it already has created more job-killing bureaucracy and
Democrats saying it could give Americans more certainty on how they can use busy public waters. "It has
the potential to stunt economic growth and the jobs associated with that growth," said Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash., chairman of the House
Natural Resources Committee. Rep.
Ed Markey of Massachusetts, the top-ranked Democrat on the panel, likened
the idea — formally known as marine spatial planning — to making plans for air space. "Opposing ocean
planning is like opposing air-traffic control," he said.
GOP win  immigration reform
May, 5-22 (Caroline May, 22 May 2014, IMMIGRATION MAY COME BACK WITH A VENGEANCE IN
2015, http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/05/22/Immigration-May-Come-Back-With-AVengeance-In-2015)
Republicans are already in the beginning stages of planning their legislative agenda if they take control
of the Senate in November, and many say immigration reform would be a top priority, even while
President Obama's trustworthiness as a legislative partner remains in doubt. “I don’t know anyone who
thinks the immigration system is working the way it should, so we’re gonna have some ideas and we’re
going to move them across the floor in smaller consensus — on a consensus basis. And not the sort of
divisive, all-or-nothing, pig-in-the-python sort of method,” Senate Minority Whip John Cornyn told
Breitbart News last week when asked about the prospect of a GOP-controlled Senate pushing its own
immigration reform agenda. Days earlier, Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio said Republicans would
“absolutely” try to pass better immigration reform legislation if the GOP wins the Senate in November.
Even some noted anti-amnesty hawks sounded relatively optimistic. “I think there is a better prospect
that we would go forward with some immigration initiative if the Republicans control the Senate, but we
still have the problem of trusting the president. But I think we’d be in a better position to try and
enforce the law if we have both the House and the Senate,” Texas Republican Lamar Smith told
Breitbart Tuesday. House Republicans are quick to point out the lack of confidence many have in the
Obama administration’s willingness to fully implement what Congress passes. South Carolina Republican
Rep. Trey Gowdy noted that the GOP has controlled the Senate before without passing immigration
reform and alluded to concerns about Obama’s lack of enforcement of immigration law.
Immigration reform key to the economy
Kelley and Wollgin, 11 (Angela Maria Kelley, Vice President for Immigration Policy at American
Progression, and Philip Wolgin, Senior Policy Analyst on the Immigration Policy team at American
Progress, 9-29-11 “10 Reasons Why Immigration Reform Is Important to Our Fiscal Health,”
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/immigration/news/2011/09/29/10375/10-reasons-whyimmigration-reform-is-important-to-our-fiscal-health/-- WH)
Here are the top 10 reasons why immigration reform, or the lack thereof, affects our economy.¶
Additions to the U.S. economy¶ 1. $1.5 trillion—The amount of money that would be added to
America’s cumulative gross domestic product—the largest measure of economic growth—over 10 years
with a comprehensive immigration reform plan that includes legalization for all undocumented
immigrants currently living in the United States.¶ 2. 3.4 percent—The potential GDP growth rate over
the past two years if comprehensive immigration reform had gone into effect two years ago, in mid2009. (see Figure 1)¶ figure 1¶ 3. 309,000—The number of jobs that would have been gained if
comprehensive immigration reform had gone into effect two years ago, in mid-2009. A GDP growth rate
of 0.2 percent above the actual growth rate translates into, based on the relationship between
economic growth and unemployment, a decrease in unemployment by 0.1 percent, or 154,400 jobs, per
year.¶ 4. $4.5 billion to $5.4 billion—The amount of additional net tax revenue that would accrue to the
federal government over three years if all undocumented immigrants currently living in the United
States were legalized.¶ Revenue generated by immigrants¶ 5. $4.2 trillion—The amount of revenue
generated by Fortune 500 companies founded by immigrants and their children, representing 40
percent of all Fortune 500 companies.¶ 6. $67 billion—The amount of money that immigrant business
owners generated in the 2000 census, 12 percent of all business income. In addition, engineering and
technology companies with at least one key immigrant founder generated $52 billion between 1995 and
2005 and created roughly 450,000 jobs.¶ Taxes generated by immigrants¶ 7. $11.2 billion—The amount
of tax revenue that states alone collected from undocumented immigrants in 2010.¶ Negative
consequences of mass deportation¶ 8. $2.6 trillion—The amount of money that would evaporate from
cumulative U.S. GDP over 10 years if all undocumented immigrants in the country were deported.¶ 9.
618,000—The number of jobs that would have been lost had a program of mass deportation gone into
effect two years ago, in mid-2009. A mass deportation program would have caused GDP to decrease by
0.5 percent per year, which, based on the relationship between economic growth and unemployment,
translates to an increase in unemployment by 0.2 percent, or 309,000 jobs, per year.¶ 10. $285 billion—
The amount of money it would cost to deport all undocumented immigrants in the United States over
five years.¶ The upshot¶ Most Americans and their elected representatives in Congress would be
pleasantly surprised to learn about the substantial benefits of comprehensive immigration reform to our
nation’s broad-based economic growth and prosperity, and thus our ability to reduce our federal budget
deficit over the next 10 years. Given how difficult a challenge the super committee faces, we cannot
afford to ignore any viable options for strengthening our economy. We hope the super committee takes
these top 10 economic reasons into account as they move forward with their deliberations.
Bio-D
MSP poorly represents fisheries and other stakeholders
Jentoft and Knol 14(Svein and Maakie, work at the Norwegian College of Fishery Science Faculty of
Biosciences, Fishereies and Economics University of Trosmo, “Marine spatial planning:risk or
opportunity for fisheries in the north sea”, January 8th
online:http://www.maritimestudiesjournal.com/content/13/1/1)
As Toonen and Mol (2013) illustrate in their article about the Dutch North Sea plaice fishery, being able
to table good maps is crucial in many cases. Stakeholders who are unable to do so are more likely to be
pushed aside by those who can and are more powerful. If fishers cannot provide a credible map that
exemplifies their fishing grounds and spatial needs, they are more likely to be displaced when, for
instance, a location for wind parks is being researched (Smith and Brennan 2012). A problem for fishers
is that their geographical focus is less static than the focus of most other users. This also explains some
of their resistance toward mapping in MSP. They fear that their much needed mobility will be reduced
as they might become bound by their own maps. In the same way that maps might fence other usergroups out, they may also fence user groups such as fishers in. Thus a map is not just neutral
representation of land-or seascape features and uses. They have economic, social and political
consequences that raise issue of social justice. As observed by Nietschmann (1997): “Maps are power.
Either you will map or you will be mapped. Still there is a need to be cautious. MSP may not appear to
be a win-win. On the contrary, for the least powerful stakeholders, those who are poorly represented
and who have few resources to back up their claims, they risk being ignored in the planning process. For
them MSP may add further pressure and result in a loss. As illustrated in this paper, there is reason to
assume that fishers and their communities may be within this group of stakeholders. MSP is a
governance mechanism that may provide a more secure tenure but it also involves the risk of losing it,
for instance as a result of spatial mapping. They have therefore reason to be ambivalent regarding this
new tool and how it works from a fisheries governance perspective.¶ Leaving stakeholders to fight for
space on their own is a recipe for social and ecological failure. It would also have implications regarding
social justice as some user-groups do not only have more urgent needs and stakes than others, but their
powers to protect their interests, define the problems, and shape the planning process are not equally
distributed. Fisheries have large stakes but relative to other users such as the oil or shipping industry,
they are a small player risking to be displaced. Therefore, spatial ordering through zoning is necessary
also as a protective measure, but territorial boundaries cannot always be impenetrable, especially for
fishers who need to remain mobile.
Ocean biodiversity is getting better now– disproves their impact
Panetta 13 (Leon Panetta , former US secretary of state, co-chaired the Pew Ocean Commission and founded the Panetta Institute at
California State University, Monterey Bay, “Panetta: Don't take oceans for granted,” http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/17/opinion/panettaoceans/index.html, 7/17/13, 7/23/14, MEM)
Our oceans are a tremendous economic engine, providing jobs for millions of Americans, directly and
indirectly, and a source of food and recreation for countless more. Yet, for much of U.S. history, the
health of America's oceans has been taken for granted, assuming its bounty was limitless and capacity to
absorb waste without end. This is far from the truth. The situation the commission found in 2001 was
grim. Many of our nation's commercial fisheries were being depleted and fishing families and
communities were hurting. More than 60% of our coastal rivers and bays were degraded by nutrient
runoff from farmland, cities and suburbs. Government policies and practices, a patchwork of inadequate
laws and regulations at various levels, in many cases made matters worse. Our nation needed a wake-up
call. The situation, on many fronts, is dramatically different today because of a combination of
leadership initiatives from the White House and old-fashioned bipartisan cooperation on Capitol Hill.
Perhaps the most dramatic example can be seen in the effort to end overfishing in U.S. waters. In 2005,
President George W. Bush worked with congressional leaders to strengthen America's primary fisheries
management law, the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act. This included
establishment of science-based catch limits to guide decisions in rebuilding depleted species. These
reforms enacted by Congress are paying off. In fact, an important milestone was reached last June when
the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced it had established annual, sciencebased catch limits for all U.S. ocean fish populations. We now have some of the best managed fisheries
in the world. Progress also is evident in improved overall ocean governance and better safeguards for
ecologically sensitive marine areas. In 2010, President Barack Obama issued a historic executive order
establishing a national ocean policy directing federal agencies to coordinate efforts to protect and
restore the health of marine ecosystems. President George W. Bush set aside new U.S. marine sanctuary
areas from 2006 through 2009. Today, the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument, one of
several marine monuments created by the Bush administration, provides protection for some of the
most biologically diverse waters in the Pacific.
Tons of environmental improvements now --- not on the brink of collapse
Mandell 12 (Erik Mandell is an intern for Global Envision and a current graduate student at Portland State University. He
graduated from Middlebury College in Vermont and has traveled extensively to numerous countries and six of the seven
continent, Global Envision, DON'T PANIC, ENVIRONMENTALISTS: A RICHER WORLD CAN BE A BETTER ONE,
http://www.globalenvision.org/2012/09/11/dont-panic-environmentalists-richer-world-can-be-better-one, 9/11/12, 7/23/14,
MEM)
3. Certain threatening
pollution trends have halted. Specific pollutants, including DDT, lead, mercury and
pesticides, which were predicted to spike in the report, “haven’t gotten more deadly, and the risk of death from air
pollution is predicted to continue to drop” due to environmental regulations, Lomborg says.¶ The second problem
with “Limits to Growth,” Lomborg argues, is that while its three primary predicted drivers of collapse have proven
incorrect, it shaped how people think about environmental policy and behavior in a way that led to responses that actually do little to help,
and in fact exacerbate problems by focusing away from economic growth.¶ Supposed solutions are often just “feel-good
gestures that provide little environmental benefit at a significant cost,” writes Lomborg. Recycling paper cuts demand
for tree farming, he says, tree farming which replants trees because it's profitable to do so. Without that demand, those forests are more likely
to be turned into slash-and-burn farming tracts. Organic farming is less efficient and so drives up agricultural costs, which lowers consumption
of healthy produce for those who can't afford it.¶ What should we have chosen to focus on for well-being instead? Lomborg puts it in simple
terms, writing that “poverty is one of the greatest of all killers, and economic growth is one of the best ways to prevent it.” Painting growth as
the antithesis of improved well-being, as he argues that “Limits to Growth” did, caused people to see growth as the core problem, rather than
an important part of the solution.¶ Alarmism, he said, creates a lot of attention but makes realistic policy solutions hard to achieve. For
example, “Limits to Growth” and other publications directed significant attention to specific pesticides like DDT, but led to little action on the
broader issue of air pollution. He
compares the alarmism triggered by “Limits to Growth” to crying wolf: real, dangerous wolves
exist, but they are often overlooked due to false cries. For much of the world, the wolf at the door isn't environmental
cataclysm—it's old-fashioned poverty.
Changes in biodiversity are inevitable – the impact can be managed
Ellis 13 (Erle C. Ellis, Associate professor of geography and environmental systems, University of Maryland, PhD at Cornell University, Jon
Moen;editor, Umea University, Sweden, “All Is Not Loss: Plant Biodiversity in the Anthropocene”, PLOS ONE is an international, peer-reviewed,
open-access, online publication and welcomes reports on primary research from any scientific discipline,
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0030535, 1/17/13, 7/23/14, MEM)
In the Anthropocene, anthropogenic changes in biodiversity are neither temporary nor fully avoidable:
they are the inevitable, predictable and potentially manageable consequences of sustained human
residence and use of land together with the interactive effects of global climate change [2], [4], [7], [22],
[23]. This study presents the first spatially explicit integrated assessment of the anthropogenic global
patterns of vascular plant species richness created by the sustained actions of human populations and
their use of land at regional landscape scale [24]. To accomplish this, a set of basic global models and
estimates of anthropogenic species gains and losses were used to predict contemporary global patterns
of plant species richness within regional landscapes, which we define here by stratifying Earth's ice-free
land surface into equal-area hexagonal grid cells of 7800 km2, a spatial scale well within the size range of
the regional landscape units generally used to characterize regional and subregional patterns in
biodiversity at the global scale [24]. We then use these modeled and estimated richness data to explore
what these can tell us about the global patterns of plant species richness created by human populations
and their use of land across biomes, anthromes, biogeographic realms, and biodiversity hotspots.
Overfishing
Fish stocks are high now- ecosystems are resilient
Lindsay 12 (Jay Lindsay, Content Strategist and Writer at CXO Communication, “U.S. Fish Stocks Rebound, Report Says”,
http://www.weather.com/news/fish-stocks-rebound-20120515, 5/15/12, MEM)
BOSTON -- A record number of fish populations have been rebuilt in U.S waters, even as problems
continue to threaten the future of the high-profile New England fishing industry, according to a federal
report. Six species considered overfished have rebuilt to optimal population levels in waters from the
Bering Sea to the Atlantic Coast, according to the annual report to Congress by the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration's fisheries arm. The report also said just 45 of 219 fish populations (21
percent) were considered overfished in 2011. Still, 13 of those stocks are in New England. That's the
most, by far, of any geographic region. Emily Menashes, acting director of NOAA's sustainable fisheries
office said, overall, the report shows, "We are turning the corner on ending overfishing." Gulf of Maine
haddock are also among the six fish species now considered rebuilt. But New England is defying the
positive trends and it's unclear how that can change, said NOAA's Galen Tromble. "It's a challenging
situation and there aren't any easy solutions," he said. The report looks at fish populations on both
coasts and off Alaska and Hawaii, using the most recent data, generally two to three years old,
Menashes said. The six fish species now considered rebuilt include Bering Sea snow crab, Atlantic coast
summer flounder, Gulf of Maine haddock, northern California coast Chinook salmon, Washington coast
coho salmon and Pacific coast widow rockfish. In the last 11 years, 27 U.S. marine fish populations have
been rebuilt, according to the report. Tromble said that reflects years of effort by fishery managers and
sacrifice by fishermen to follow rebuilding plans started 10 or 15 years ago. "We're starting to see the
results of those," Tromble said.
Marine ecosystems are resilient
Kennedy 02 (Victor, PhD Environmental Science and Director of the Cooperative Oxford Lab, 2002,
“Coastal and Marine Ecosystems and Global Climate Change,” Pew,
http://www.c2es.org/docUploads/marine_ecosystems.pdf, CH)
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.
New federal ACL’s mean overfishing stopped in the squo
NOAA 12 (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, paper was written in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Commerce
and the National Marine Fisheries Service,“Turning the Corner on Ending Overfishing U.S. Fisheries Reaches Historic Milestone in 2012”
http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/stories/2012/01/docs/Annual%20Catch%20Limits%20Fact%20Sheet%20Final.pdf, 2012, 7/22/14, MEM)
In 2006 Congress
made the bold decision to end overfishing once and for all by amending the
Magnuson Stevens Fisheries Conservation and Management Act to require annual catch limits (ACLs) and associated accountability
measures to be implemented for all federally managed fisheries in fishing year 2011. Through the commitment and tireless efforts of our
fishermen, fishery management councils, scientists and managers, the U.S.
is poised to achieve this historic milestone
in natural resource management. As of December 31, 2011, 40 of the 46 fishery management plans
had ACLs and corresponding accountability measures in place. The remaining six management plans will have ACLs in
place that are affective in the 2012 fishing season. Full implementation of ACLs establishes a robust process
of science-based management that monitors and responds to the needs of the resource to sustain its
long-term use and the economies that rely on our fisheries. With the investment in stock assessments, cooperative
research and innovation, and science-based management, the U.S. model of fisheries management has become an international hallmark for
addressing the ecological and economic sustainability challenges facing global fisheries.
No impact to overfishing—its exaggerated hype
Baker 6/22 (Michael Van Baker, publisher and editor in chief for the sunbreak,“Is the Overfishing
Crisis Oversold?”, The SunBreak, 6/22/12,http://thesunbreak.com/2012/06/22/is-the-overfishing-crisisoversold, 6/22/12, 7/22/14, MEM)
HAS “THE INCREASINGLY ENERGETIC AND SOPHISTICATED FISHING INDUSTRY HAS LEFT THE
WORLD’S OCEANS A SHAMBLES?” ASKS THE NEW YORK TIMES AT THE OUTSET OF ITS REVIEW OF OVERFISHING: WHAT EVERYONE NEEDS TO KNOW. AS IT TURNS
OUT, THAT’S NOT A PARTICULARLY GREAT WAY OF FRAMING THE QUESTION, BECAUSE YOU CAN GET PAGES AND PAGES
OF LEARNED AND CONTRADICTORY DEBATE ON HOW THE “WORLD’S” FISHERIES ARE DOING.¶ THE PRAGMATIC QUESTION IS, CAN WE AVOID
SHAMBLING OCEANS? AND THIS BOOK ARGUES: YES, WE CAN.¶ NOW, IF YOU’RE NOT UP TO EVEN A SLIM BOOK ON OVERFISHING, ITS
AUTHOR, DR. RAY HILBORN, GOT TO MAKE SOME OF ITS POINTS IN AN APRIL OP-ED IN THE TIMES, “LET US EAT FISH“–ORIGINALLY LESS IMPERATIVELY TITLED “THE UNHERALDED REVIVAL OF AMERICA’S FISH STOCK.”¶ THAT
UNUSED TITLE IS IMPORTANT, BECAUSE WHEN HILBORN SAYS IN HIS ARTICLE THAT “THE OVERALL RECORD OF AMERICAN FISHERIES MANAGEMENT SINCE THE MID-1990S IS ONE OF IMPROVEMENT, NOT OF DECLINE,” THAT’S NOT
BUT IT IS TO SUGGEST THAT THE U.S. MAY HAVE FOUND A WAY
TO BREAK OUT OF THE VICIOUS CIRCLE THAT LEADS INVARIABLY TO COLLAPSE. (NOR IS IT JUST THE U.S.; IN HIS BOOK,
HILBORN REFERENCES OTHER FISHERIES THAT HAVE FOUND “GOOD ENOUGH” MANAGEMENT METHODS, WHILE ACKNOWLEDGING THERE ARE PLENTY OF SPECTACULAR FAILURES OUT THERE.)¶ YOU COULD
SAY THAT HILBORN IS “TALKING BACK” TO THE RHETORIC OF APOCALYPSE USED BY
ENVIRONMENTAL GROUPS PUSHING FOR CLOSING AREAS TO FISHING ENTIRELY. THEIR MESSAGE IS THAT
EVERYTHING WE HAVE TRIED HAS FAILED, SO IT’S TIME FOR DESPERATE MEASURES. TO QUOTE OCEANA: “85 PERCENT OF THE WORLD’S
FISHERIES ARE NOW EITHER OVEREXPLOITED, FULLY EXPLOITED, SIGNIFICANTLY DEPLETED OR
RECOVERING FROM OVEREXPLOITATION. NO MATTER WHICH CATEGORY IS CONSIDERED, THERE IS NO GOOD NEWS.”¶ BUT IT’S EQUALLY
IMPORTANT TO STRESS THAT THERE IS SUCH A THING AS SUSTAINABLE FISHING BECAUSE AN
ABSENCE OF BETTER OPTIONS HASN’T, HISTORICALLY, LED TO PEOPLE ADOPTING STRICT
CONSERVATION SO MUCH AS IT HAS RESULTED IN A GENERAL SHRUG AS THE LAST WHATEVER IS USED UP.¶ FOR OVERFISHING, HILBORN, WHO ALSO WRITES PAPERS WITH TITLES LIKE “BAYESIAN
TO GIVE THE WORLD’S FISHERIES A COATTAIL A+ IN MANAGEMENT.¶
HIERARCHICAL META-ANALYSIS OF DENSITY-DEPENDENT BODY GROWTH IN HADDOCK,” HAS TAKEN UP A MORE GENERAL-INTEREST TONE (THAT MAY BE THE GIFT OF HIS CO-WRITER ULRIKE HILBORN). IT’S INFORMATIONAL,
MUCH DEPENDS UPON CONTEXT.
HILBORN’S CONCERN IS NOT TO MAINTAIN A “NATURAL” STATE–WHATEVER THAT IS–BUT IS
WITH “HARVESTING” AND “YIELDS.” SO YIELD OVERFISHING IS WHEN YOU TAKE MORE FISH
THAN YOU SHOULD IF YOU WANT TO GET THE BEST HARVEST. IT DOESN’T MEAN EXTINCTION,
STRUCTURED FOR EASY REFERENCE, WITH QUESTIONS AS SUBHEADS, BEGINNING WITH THE BIG ONE: WHAT IS OVERFISHING?¶
THOUGH IT CAN, IF PURSUED–BUT THE WEAKENED POPULATION SIMPLY DOESN’T PRODUCE AS MANY FISH AS IT WOULD OTHERWISE.¶ THEN THERE’S ECONOMIC OVERFISHING, WHEN YOU OVERSHOOT THE ECONOMIC RETURN,
AND MAY BEGIN A RACE TO THE BOTTOM, WITH EACH PARTICIPANT EARNING LESS THE MORE FISH THEY TAKE. HILBORN SINGLES OUT ICELAND, NEW ZEALAND, AND NORWAY FOR THEIR STEWARDSHIP OF THE ECONOMIC
COMMONS, AS WELL AS FOR AVOIDING YIELD OVERFISHING.¶ OFTEN, THESE TWO MODES OF OVERFISHING JOIN FORCES TO ALMOST ERADICATE A FISH POPULATION. AND IT’S NOT A NEW CONCEPT: HILBORN LOCATES AN 1877
REFERENCE TO “OVERFISHING” IN NATURE. BUT THIS WOULD ALSO BE A GOOD MOMENT TO POINT OUT THAT FISH POPULATIONS CAN FLUCTUATE DRAMATICALLY, AND THAT IS ALSO NATURAL. IF YOU COMPARE YEAR-OVER-
WHAT IS IMPORTANT IS TO KEEP
THE PERCENTAGE OF FISH TAKEN IN LINE WITH THE ACTUAL NUMBER OF FISH OUT THERE, WHICH IS
EASIER SAID THAN DONE.¶ ONE IMPORTANT FACTOR IN DEVELOPING A FISHING MANAGEMENT STRATEGY, HILBORN NOTES, IS TO REALIZE THAT FISH
REPRODUCE ON DIFFERENT TIMELINES (WHALES, BEING MAMMALS, ARE PARTICULARLY VULNERABLE TO OVERHUNTING). YOU CAN MORE OR LESS DRAW UP FORMULAS FOR
TAKING SUSTAINABLE PERCENTAGES, BASED ON REPRODUCTION RATES AND GROWTH RATES. THE OPTIMAL TIME TO TAKE A FISH IS AFTER IT HAS
REPRODUCED AND HAS REACHED ITS MATURE SIZE. IF YOU KNOW THAT, AND THE NUMBER OF
FISH, IT’S JUST MATH.¶ UNFORTUNATELY, THERE’S AN OCEAN IN THE WAY THAT MAKES IT A CHALLENGE TO COUNT FISH PRECISELY. AND THAT OCEAN CONTAINS DIFFERENT ECOSYSTEMS IN WHICH
YEAR FISH POPULATIONS, YOU MAY SEE A LOT OF VOLATILITY, BUT THAT DOESN’T ALWAYS HAVE TO DO WITH THE NUMBER OF FISH TAKEN.
FISH REACT DIFFERENTLY TO DIFFERENT PRESSURES. HILBORN DISCUSSES THE COLLAPSE OF THE NEWFOUNDLAND COD FISHERY, BUT ALSO CONTRASTS THAT WITH AMERICAN AND EUROPEAN COD FISHERIES THAT STABILIZED AT
A THEME THAT EMERGES IS SUCCESSFUL FISHERY
MANAGEMENT WILL DEPEND UPON WHAT’S KNOWN IN SOFTWARE CIRCLES AS LOCALIZATION.
YOU CAN’T ROLL OUT A ONE-SIZE-FITS-ALL PROGRAM DUE TO DIFFERENCES IN FISH AND FISHERPEOPLE HABITATS. WHAT WORKS IN THE U.S. BECAUSE OF
LEGISLATION AND INFRASTRUCTURE MAY NOT WORK ELSEWHERE. (CONVERSELY, THE PERVERSE ECONOMIC INCENTIVES THAT EXIST IN
A LOWER ABUNDANCE, AND THE BARENTS SEA AND ICELANDIC COD STOCKS, THAT NEVER COLLAPSED.¶
THE U.S.–CREATING A “RACE FOR FISH,” WHERE EACH BOAT TRIES TO HOOVER UP THE MAXIMUM–MAY NOT EXIST ELSEWHERE.)¶ CHILEAN CALETAS, FOR INSTANCE, USE A MORE “LOCAL-MOTION” ETHOS TO MANAGE FISHERY
CATCHES–EACH HAS BEEN GRANTED THE RESPONSIBILITY TO EXCLUDE OTHERS FROM FISHING THEIR PATCH. WITH A LOCAL GROUP OF STAKEHOLDERS MANAGING THEIR WATERS, THINGS HAVE IMPROVED WITHOUT CENTRAL
GOVERNMENTAL ENFORCEMENT. (THOUGH, AGAIN, NATURAL VARIABILITY IN FISH ABUNDANCE MAKES IT DIFFICULT–FISHING BOATS WILL ALMOST ALWAYS GO IN SEARCH OF “MISSING” FISH.)¶ HILBORN TACKLES RECREATIONAL
FISHING (IS IT NEXT TO GODLINESS?), TRAWLING (IS IT PURE EVIL?), AND MARINE PROTECTED AREAS (HOW PROTECTIVE ARE THEY?). IF THIS IS YOUR FIRST REAL DIVE INTO THE TOPIC, YOU’LL BECOME INTIMATELY ACQUAINTED
WITH COMPLEX THE ISSUES ARE.¶ IN CONCLUDING, HILBORN IS CAREFUL TO STEER AWAY FROM POLLYANNA PREDICTION; WHILE HE’S IMPRESSED WITH THE REBOUND HE’S SEEN IN FISHERIES WITH GOOD MANAGEMENT, THE
WORLD IS STILL WEIGHTED TOWARD OVERFISHING. IF NOT CRITICALLY IN ALL CASES, CERTAINLY IN TERMS OF GETTING THE BEST YIELD FROM THE FISH POPULATIONS IN WHATEVER ABUNDANCE THERE ARE: “AT PRESENT ABOUT
TWO-THIRDS OF STOCKS ARE BELOW THE ABUNDANCE LEVEL THAT WOULD PRODUCE MAXIMUM SUSTAINABLE YIELD.Ӧ FOLLOWERS OF EUROZONE TROUBLES WILL NOT BE SURPRISED TO HEAR THAT, WITH EUROPEAN
THE SUBJECT OF OVERFISHING IS A
SUBJECT THAT ENGENDERS LIVELY DEBATE, AND HILBORN, WHILE WELL-KNOWN AND -RESPECTED, IS NOT
THE LAST WORD, ESPECIALLY WHEN IT COMES TO HOW THE WORLD’S FISHERIES ARE
ACTUALLY BEING MANAGED. BUT IF YOU’VE BEEN STARING AT YOUR GUIDE TO FISH THAT ARE OKAY TO EAT AND WONDERING WHETHER IT’S NOT EASIER TO GIVE UP FISH ENTIRELY, THIS
FISHERIES, PART OF THE PROBLEM IS THE MANY DISPARATE STAKEHOLDERS WHOSE INTERESTS NEED TO BE HARMONIZED.¶ AS MENTIONED,
BOOK HAS INSIGHTS THAT YOU DO NEED TO KNOW.
Solvency
1. We can never fully understand the ecosystem because it is too complex
Shucksmith and Kelly 5/0 (Rachel J. Shucksmith and Christina Kelly, Marine Spatial Planning Manager at NAFC Marine Centre
“Data collection and mapping – Principles, processes and application in marine spatial planning”, published by Elvesier Marine Policy Journal,
http://ac.els-cdn.com/S0308597X14001365/1-s2.0-S0308597X14001365-main.pdf?_tid=ff1d312a-0bb9-11e4-bacd00000aab0f6c&acdnat=1405385600_e0d187308a2cf5e87a7dee268613a084)
Our incomplete understanding of the marine environment can be manifested in data sets which do
not fully reflect all spatial and temporal elements of the uses and values associated with marine
features. Data sets may be out of date or may not detail the effects of competition or co-dependency
of outside actors [25,39]. Whilst data and mapping outputs can offer a useful baseline for further
investigation it is important that the data's limitations and accuracy are fully recognized before it is
used as a decision support tool in the MSP process or by third parties. In some cases data sets may only
be suitable as baseline information and should not replace marine planner's or user's obligation to
consult with stakeholders or preclude the need to collect new or more detailed data. An example of this
complexity is examined by the authors in [25], who examine the drivers causing fisheries utilization.
Changes in fishing patterns can be linked to regulation including spatial and non-spatial measures
such as catch limits, rolling closures, zoning and MPAs [38]. They could also be linked to technological
changes or advancements. The socio-economic benefits derived from fisheries locations at sea will be
linked to an onshore community [25]. Whilst efforts can be made to map activities such as fishing
grounds through participatory mapping, as external factors shape user choices data sets be subject to
frequent temporal and spatial changes. Biophysical ecosystem features may also show temporal and
spatial fluctuations caused by user–environment impacts, climate change and natural fluctuations (e.g.,
[40]). Historical records can be used as a baseline to guide further surveying [41]. Due to the complexity
of the marine environment and temporal fluctuations it is unlikely that our understanding of the
marine environment will ever be complete, regardless of the level of resource allocated to data
collection, mapping and modelling. This incomplete understanding may limit the potential detail of
future planning. Where data sets are limited strategic decision making will be limited to high level
decision making. At a regional level it may be easier to collect more detailed data to provide fine scale
guidance, however it is perhaps unrealistic and unnecessary for this level of detail to be collected at a
national level. Where our knowledge or understanding of some uses is stronger than others, mapping
outputs have the potential to create or reinforce bias towards certain types of use. Where there are
significant data gaps and/or the data is out of date then the confidence of any mapping output is
reduced. Projecting an incomplete understanding of the complexity of ecosystems and services into a
2-D map requires a number of assumptions and simplifications [39]. Robust strategies for dealing with
complexity are therefore especially import for marine planners [3]. Inadequacies in the mapping
process have the potential to further exclude certain groups or types of use from the MSP process.
This may be of particular relevance to cultural ecosystem services which can be under-represented in
mapping [25]. Therefore, whilst mapping can be an important tool for the management of the marine
environment care should be taken in its use as a decision-support tool
Many Obstacles to developing MSP
Collier 13 (Briana W. Collier studied environmental law and policy at Vermont Law School and now works as an
Environmental Protection Specialist with the National Park Service, “Orchestrating Our Oceans: Effectively Implementing
Coastal and Marine Spatial Planning in the U.S.”, http://nsglc.olemiss.edu/sglpj/vol6no1/5-Collier.pdf, 2013, 7/22/14, MEM)
Regions with little to no CMSP development face a number of obstacles including concern over increased
bureaucracy where CMSP goals overlap with fisheries council or coastal zone management goals, concern over
increased and perhaps overreaching federal authority and regulation in areas of state jurisdiction, and
“planning fatigue.” Some CMSP proponents attribute these “marketing” problems to the uniqueness of the
CMSP concept and the lack of understanding that still exists in the ocean and coastal policy-making
community.312 Others note that industry is opposed to efforts that will bring more regulation, as can occur with zoning, because of the costs of compliance
and uncertainty of when the rules will change.313 This uncertainty can interfere with industry’s investment-backed
expectations, especially with fixed-point commerce such as oil rigs.314 In addition to general problems managers face in
marketing CMSP to constituent groups, some major logistical hurdles remain in the way of CMSP progress. Many regions need more data collection to fill gaps,
more ability to share and integrate data, and better collaboration vertically and horizontally across government agencies and levels of government. Lack of funding
streams and staffing infrastructure to take on new tasks are also impediments to CMSP progress. The
lack of funding is an important issue,
especially considering recent tightening of the federal budget. NOAA continues to ask for funding to support CMSP efforts in its
budget requests each year, and members of Congress continue to propose amendments to eliminate that funding stream. Funding will become an increasing
importantly factor for regions as they continue to hire staff, form regional planning bodies, and attempt to craft CMS plans.
Bio-D
Rest of bio-D cards
Numerous alt causes
- coastal development, ocean acidification, warming
Panetta 13 (Leon Panetta, former US secretary of state, co-chaired the Pew Ocean Commission and founded the Panetta Institute at
California State University, Monterey Bay, “Panetta: Don't take oceans for granted,” http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/17/opinion/panettaoceans/index.html, 7/17/13, 7/23/14, MEM)
Despite the strides made in the 10 years since the Pew Oceans Commission issued its report, challenges
remain. Coastal development continues, largely unchecked, and wetlands and marshes continue to
shrink. That exposes more than half of the Americans who live along the coasts to the physical and
economic damage caused by increasingly high-intensity storms such as Hurricane Katrina and
Superstorm Sandy. On top of that, major challenges that the commission could not see as clearly in
2003, including ocean acidification and rising ocean temperatures, further threaten some of our most
valuable fisheries. The United States must pursue a broader, ecosystem-based approach to build
resilience in our oceans and respond to future threats.
Alternative causes to biodiversity lossInvasive Species
Craig 12 (Robin Kundis Craig, S.J. Quinney College of Law, University of Utah, “Marine Biodiversity, Climate Change, and
Governance of the Oceans”, lifeadrift.info/media/3483/martin_and_gregory_s_pnas.pdf, 5/18/12, 7/23/14, MEM)
invasive species, which can opportunistically exploit coastal ecosystems that are
already degraded and destroyed as well as causing new and independent stresses. As has been
A third existing stressor is
demonstrated repeatedly, from jellyfish in the Black Sea to zebra mussels in the Great Lakes, non-native species can quite successfully travel to new coasts in ships’
as many as 7,000 marine species may be transported in ballast water
every day, including marine-facilitated human diseases such as cholera [12]. Invasive species also
escape from aquariums or are intentionally introduced into new marine ecosystems [12]. Once
introduced into new environments, invasive species can alter marine ecosystem function and ecosystem
services and can reduce native biodiversity [2,12]. In some circumstances, the invader simply takes over the new ecosystem. As one
ballast water [12]. According to estimates,
extreme example, in the 1980s the comb jelly Mnemiopsis was introduced into the Black Sea through ballast water, where it bloomed prodigiously and devoured
the base of the Black Sea food chain, devastating the anchovy population and most of the rest of the food web [13].
Marine pollution
Craig 12 (Robin Kundis Craig, S.J. Quinney College of Law, University of Utah, “Marine Biodiversity, Climate Change, and
Governance of the Oceans”, lifeadrift.info/media/3483/martin_and_gregory_s_pnas.pdf, 5/18/12, 7/23/14, MEM)
A variety of sources of marine pollution affect marine biodiversity. In many parts of the world, for example, sewage
discharges remain an important source of coastal pollution [14]. Nutrient pollution from on-land activities,
such as runoff from farms that includes fertilizer or atmospheric deposition from power plants, can
contribute to harmful algal blooms and marine hypoxic, or “dead,” zones [15]. Harmful algal blooms directly impact
marine biodiversity by toxifying marine organisms, especially shellfish [15], while dead zones drive oxygen-dependent life away [15]. The number of dead zones in
the ocean has doubled every decade since 1960, and a 2008 study identified more than 400 dead zones throughout the world [16].Diversity 2012, 4 228 Toxic
pollution is also a substantial impairment to marine biodiversity. As the MEA noted, “the estimated 313,000 containers of low-intermediate emission radioactive
waste dumped in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans since the 1970s pose a significant threat to deep-sea ecosystems should the containers leak, which seems likely
over the long term” [4] (p. 483). Moreover, toxic
chemicals continue to reach the oceans through a variety of industrial
processes discharging wastes into upstream waterways and through various forms of dispersed water
pollution, such as atmospheric deposition and runoff. Several of these chemicals bioaccumulate in ocean organisms. For example,
methyl mercury, the organic form of mercury, becomes more concentrated the further up the food web a species resides [17]. High-level marine
predators such as tuna, swordfish, shark, and mackerel can end up with mercury concentrations in their
bodies that are 10,000 times or more the ambient concentration of mercury in the water [18]. Indeed, mercury
contamination is already prevalent in food fish [19–22]. Other toxic pollutants such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) also
bioaccumulate and are considered a cause of increased mortality to marine mammals such as the
beluga whales in the St. Lawrence River [23,24] and orcas off the west coast of the United States [25]. Plastic pollution
also affects marine biodiversity. Floating plastic waste accounts for 80 percent or more of marine debris
[25]. Various marine animals can become physically entangled in larger forms of plastic debris, leading to injury, dismemberment, and death [26,27]. Many marine
species also consume plastic trash; plastic bags, it turns out, look a lot like jellyfish, which is a food item for sea turtles and other species, and other marine animals
intentionally or accidentally consume plastic trash [26,27]. Once swallowed, the plastic can both inhibit adequate nutrition by taking up space in the digestive
system and directly cause death by choking or through internal damage [28]. A 2011 study reported that at least 9.2 percent of fish in and below the Great Pacific
Garbage Patch—a concentrated gyre of plastic pollution in the northern Pacific Ocean—had plastic debris in their stomachs, and the researchers estimated that fish
in the North Pacific are ingesting 12,000 to 24,000 tons of plastic every year [29].
Investment in protecting biodiversity now
IUCN 13 (IUCN, International Union for Conservation of Nature, “France and IUCN Enhance Their Efforts To Protect Global Diversity”,
icun.org, http://www.iucn.org/?uNewsID=13119, 6/13/13, 7/23/14, MEM)
Yesterday IUCN signed a new partnership agreement with France, which aims to support the Union's
global biodiversity conservation work, focusing on sub-Saharan Africa, oceans and global governance of
natural resources. Delphine Batho, Minister of Ecology, Sustainable Development and Energy, Victorin
Lurel, Minister of Overseas France, Pascal Canfin, Deputy Minister for Development and Anne Paugam,
CEO of the French Development Agency signed the agreement with IUCN, represented by Julia MartonLefèvre, its Director General. The partnership aims to bring significant progress in biodiversity
conservation that is expected to be achieved by 2016. Initially signed in 2005 and renewed in 2009, the
partnership agreement between France and IUCN has thus been extended for another four years,
thereby strengthening France's commitment to protecting biodiversity, in accordance with its
international engagements regarding the Convention for Biological Diversity (CBD). France will invest
almost 8 million Euros in order to support actions in three major areas aimed at protecting global
biodiversity: The conservation of biodiversity and the sustainable management of natural resources in
sub-Saharan Africa; The governance of the Oceans and the protection of the marine, coastal and insular
ecosystems, the EU overseas entities; Global biodiversity governance.
No impact – previous mass extinctions prove
NatGeo, ’12 (National Geographic, “Mass Extinctions, What Causes Animal Die Offs?”,
science.nationalgeographic.com, https://science.nationalgeographic.com/prehistoric-world/massextinction, 2012, 7/23/14, MEM)
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.
Conservation groups solve for biodiversity and environment.
Tryon 13(Brett Tyron, coordinator of Blue Flag in Canada, “The Blue Flag and Biodiversity – Keeping Canada au Naturel!”,
Envoirnmentdefense.ca, inspiring environmental change, http://environmentaldefence.ca/blog/blue-flag-and-biodiversity%E2%80%93-keeping-canada-au-naturel, 6/13/13, 7/23/14, MEM)
With such diversity of landscapes, habitats and ecosystems here in Canada, it is no wonder communities
are so willing to work to preserve Canada, au naturel, through the Blue Flag program. In fact,
environmental management is a core tenant of the Blue Flag program. Dedicated management
committees are set up at Blue Flag sites to conduct environmental audits and to ensure that local
habitats and sensitive natural areas are protected and managed sustainably. Programs like Blue Flag are
critical to protecting and preserving Canada’s natural landscapes, coastal ecosystems, biodiversity,
culture and heritage, and recreational areas. Personally, I’m proud and in awe of Canada’s natural
diversity. With the help of the Blue Flag program, I think we can work to make sure that the True North
strong and free, stays au naturel as well!
Overfishing
Rest of Overfishing cards
Collapse of oceanic systems are exaggerated
Scoop 06 (Science- technology news, “ Imminent collapse of ocean ecosystems refuted”,
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/SC0612/S00038/imminent-collapse-of-ocean-ecosystems-refuted.htm, 12/15/06, 7/22/14,
MEM)
Friday 15 December 2006, Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC), Noumea – Research conducted by
an international team of scientists, including SPC’s Oceanic Fisheries Programme Manager, Dr John
Hampton, and reported in a paper published this week in Science, refutes claims that ocean ecosystems
are on the brink of collapse. Although the new research finds significant decreases in abundance of
some large pelagic (oceanic) fish stocks resulting from increased fishing, the picture is not nearly as
gloomy as has been previously reported. The paper, entitled “Biomass, size and trophic status of toplevel predators in the Pacific Ocean”, is co-authored by Dr Hampton and three other well-known
fisheries scientists: John Sibert of the University of Hawaii, Pierre Kleiber of NOAA Fisheries in Honolulu,
and Mark Maunder of the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission (IATTC). Unlike the previous
studies, which have made exaggerated claims concerning the impacts of fishing, this study analysed all
available data assembled by SPC and IATTC for Pacific tuna fisheries from 1950 to 2004, to estimate the
impact that fishing has had on Pacific fish populations in the past 50 years. The analysis finds that the
situation of different types of top predators, such as tuna and sharks, varies considerably. “Recent
claims of catastrophic reduction in the biomass of top-level predators and the collapse of oceanic food
chains have attracted widespread attention and provoked alarm among the lay public,” reports the
paper. Dr Hampton notes, “Alarmist and exaggerated claims of stock collapses based on inadequate
analyses and data have attracted a lot of attention, but the situation is more complex than that. These
reports are dangerous not only because they are wrong, but also because they detract attention from
the real management problems facing pelagic fisheries in the Pacific.”
No overfishing
Economist 9 (Economist, offers authoritative insight on international news, politics, business, finance, science and technology, “Plenty
More Fish in the Sea?”, 2009, 7/22/14, MEM)
AN even gloomier ASSESSMENT CAME in an article by 14 academics in Science IN 2006. The accelerating EROSION OF
BIODIVERSITY, OFTEN ASSOCIATED WITH OVERFISHING, presaged a "global collapse" to the point, in 2048, where all species
currently fished would be gone, they said. Even MANY SCIENTISTS WHO ARE ALARMED BY THE EVIDENCE OF
OVERFISHING FIND SUCH CONCLUSIONS CONTROVERSIAL. MOST NON-SCIENTISTS ARE
UNMOVED. For a start, FISH APPEARS TO BE IN PLENTIFUL SUPPLY. Even cod is available; over 7m tonnes of cod-family
(Gadidae) fish are caught each year. Sushi bars have spread across the world. To cater for the aversion to red meat, and a new-found need for omega-3 fatty acids,
SUPERMARKETS AND RESTAURANTS BOAST OF "SUSTAINABLE"
SUPPLIES, and sandwiches are reassuringly labelled "dolphin-friendly", however threatened the tuna within them may be. Best of all, for the ethical
consumer, fish are now farmed (see box below). SALMON HAS BECOME so PLENTIFUL that people weary of its delicate taste. Moreover,
FISHERMEN themselves SEEM SKEPTICAL OF ANY LONG-TERM SCARCITY. They clamour for bigger quotas and fewer
fish dishes are on every menu, even in steak houses.
restrictions (except on foreign competitors), and complain that the scientists are either ignorant or one step behind the new reality. Those with long memories can
PREVIOUS COLLAPSES that HAVE BEEN FOLLOWED BY RECOVERIES. AND, in truth, NOT ALL
COLLAPSES ARE DUE solely TO OVERFISHING: the sudden crash of California's sardine industry 60 years ago is now thought to have been
partly caused by a natural change in the sea temperature. PLENTY OF FIGURES seem to SUPPORT THE OPTIMISTS. Despite the
exploitation round its coasts, BRITAIN, for instance, STILL LANDED 750,000 TONNES OF ATLANTIC FISH IN 2006, twocite
thirds of what it caught in 1951; even cod is still being hauled from the north-east Atlantic, mostly by Norwegians and Russians. Some British fishing communities—
Fraserburgh, for example—are in a sorry state, but others still prosper: the value of wet fish landed in Shetland, for example,
£54m ($33m-99m) in 2006.
ROSE FROM £21m in 1996 to
EARNINGS FROM FISHING IN ALASKA, in whose waters about half of America's catch is taken, rose from less
2002 TO
2007
than $800m in
nearly $1.5 billion in
. And for the world as a whole, the catch in 2006 was over 93m tonnes, according to the UN's Food and
Agriculture Organisation, compared with just 19m in 1950 (see chart on next page). Its value was almost $90 billion.
Alternative causalities1. Subsidies
Oceana 08 (Oceana.org, Over 80 percent of fisheries overfished: Report”,
http://oceana.org/sites/default/files/o/fileadmin/oceana/uploads/Oceana_in_the_News/05.27.08.AFP.pdf, 2008, 7/22/14,
MEM)
GENEVA (AFP) — More than 80 percent of the world's fisheries are at risk from over-fishing and the
World Trade Organisation must act urgently to scrap unsustainable subsidies, lobby group Oceana said
Monday. "The world's fishing fleets can no longer expect to find new sources of fish," said Courtney
Sakai, senior campaign director at Oceana. "If the countries of the world want healthy and abundant
fishery resources, they must improve management and decrease the political and economic pressures
that lead to overfishing." Based on data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation,
the report found that only 17 percent of the world's known fish stocks are under-exploited or
moderately exploited. Particularly overfished are stocks in significant parts of the Atlantic Ocean, the
Western Indian Ocean and the Northwest Pacific Ocean. The report said that in the Western Indian
Ocean, for example, over 70 percent of known stocks have been fully exploited, while the remainder
are overexploited, depleted or currently at a stage of recovery. Oceana also notes that emerging
fishing grounds have large numbers of stocks with unknown status, saying that it opens them up to the
risk of overfishing and depletion. The group estimated that current fishing subsidies are worth at least
20 billion dollars annually, or the value of 25 percent of the world's catch, giving strong economic
incentives for overfishing. "The scope and magnitude of these subsidies is so great that reducing them
is the single greatest action that can be taken to protect the world's oceans," according to the group. It
urged countries to push to "reduce and control subsidies" during the current World Trade Organisation
negotiations on fisheries subsidies. The WTO last November proposed the elimination of most
subsidies for the fishing industry in a compromise package.
2. Too many boats
VOA 09 (Voice of America, “Overfished Vietnam Subsidizes More Fishing Boats”,
http://www.voanews.com/content/a-13-2008-05-08-voa15-66819052/374339.html, 10/27/09,
7/22/14, MEM)
There are a 100,000 fishing boats in Vietnam - too many, say conservation experts, who warn of
overfishing in Vietnam's coastal waters. But Vietnamese fishermen are hurting from rising fuel prices.
To help them, the government is offering subsidies to build even more boats. Matt Steinglass reports
from Hanoi. Vietnamese fisherman works on a basket-shaped boat locally called Thuyen Thung at a
fishing village in Danang, Vietnam (File photo) Deputy Agriculture Minister Nguyen Van Thang told
Vietnamese fishermen this week that the government will lend them a hand. Thang says any
fisherman who buys a new boat with an engine of 90 horsepower or more will get a subsidy of about
$3,500 a year. Thang says the subsidies will help fishermen to switch to more powerful boats that can
fish further from shore. He says they will also soften the pain of high fuel prices
Vietnam has nearly a 100,000 fishing boats. That is far too many, according to wildlife
experts like Keith Symington of the international conservation group WWF, who say stocks of fish are
declining. "In 2001, for tuna, on average 25 kilograms of tuna could be caught with 100 hooks on a
long-line tuna boat. And in 2005, on average, that number's gone down to about 15. You have to fish
harder to catch the same amount," said Symington. Overfishing like this could severely damage
Vietnam's fisheries."In scientific terms they call it serial depletion. Which means you'll eventually hit a
.But the new policy seemed to contradict Vietnam's official
strategy of shrinking its fishing fleet.
point where there's no recruitment of baby fish," he added. "And then there's really a crisis
commercially extinct."
. The fishery can become quickly
Solvency
Extra card
MSP is terrible- 10 reasons why
Natural Resources 11 (Committee of Natural Resources, “Top 10 Things to Know About President Obama’s Plan to
Zone the Oceans”, http://naturalresources.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=262435, 9/30/11, 7/22/14,
MEM)
Lacks Congressional Authorization. In four separate Congresses, legislation
has been introduced to implement similar farreaching ocean policies, and to-date NO bill has passed the House or been reported out of a Committee.
Unilateral Action. The Obama Administration has failed to cite any specific statutory authority for the Coastal
and Marine Spatial Planning initiative. Instead, it throws up a smokescreen list of all statutes that impact the oceans and claims that is their
authority. Imposes ‘Ocean Zoning.’ The Coastal and Marine Spatial Planning initiative is entirely new, mandatory
ocean zoning that involves up to 27 Federal agencies and will cost the taxpayers millions, if not billions,
in Federal spending. This initiative could place huge portions of the ocean off limits to all types of recreational and commercial activities. Threatens
American Jobs. ‘Ocean zoning’ has the potential to damage sectors such as agriculture, commercial and
recreational fishing, construction, manufacturing, marine commerce, mining, oil and natural gas,
renewable energy, recreational boating, and waterborne transportation, among others. These industries
support tens of millions of jobs and contribute trillions of dollars to the U.S. economy. Far-Reaching Impacts Not
Limited to the Ocean. This new ‘ocean zoning’ authority would allow Federally-dominated Regional Planning
Bodies to reach as far inland as it deems necessary to protect ocean ecosystem health. It specifically mentions the
Great Lakes and could potentially impact all activities that occur on lands adjacent to rivers, tributaries or watersheds that drain into the ocean. Creates More
Bureaucracy. The
Executive Order creates: 10 National Policies; a 27-member National Ocean Council; an 18member Governance Coordinating Committee; and 9 Regional Planning Bodies. This has led to an
additional: 9 National Priority Objectives; 9 Strategic Action Plans; 7 National Goals for Coastal Marine
Spatial Planning; and 12 Guiding Principles for Coastal Marine Spatial Planning to be created. Tool for Litigation.
The ‘ocean zoning’ initiative involves vague and undefined objectives, goals, and policies that can be
used as fodder for lawsuits to stop or delay Federally-permitted activities. This initiative is poised to
become a litigation nightmare. New Cost to Taxpayers. This new policy will affect already budget-strapped
agencies such as NOAA, Department of Commerce, Department of the Interior, EPA, Department of Transportation, USDA, Homeland Security, and the Army
Corps of Engineers. As Federal budgets are further reduced, it is unclear how much funding the agencies are
taking from existing programs to develop and implement this new initiative. Those Impacted by Regulations Need Not
Apply. The Regional Planning Bodies, created by the ‘ocean zoning’ initiative, will have no representation
by the people, communities and businesses that will actually be impacted by the regulations. These
heavily Federal bodies will create zoning plans without any stakeholders yet all Federal agencies, the
States, and the regulated communities will be bound by the plan. New Regulatory Uncertainty. The impacts of this
new regulatory layer and ‘ocean zoning’ initiative contribute to an uncertain regulatory climate that is
hindering economic activity and job creation. Even the Interagency Task Force recognized this potential in their report stating, “The Task
Force is mindful that these recommendations may create a level of uncertainty and anxiety among those who rely on these resources and may generate questions
about how they align with existing processes, authorities, and budget challenges. The NOC (National Ocean Council) will address questions and specifics as
implementation progresses.” In other words…don’t worry, trust us.
Ptx
Extra Links
The commercial fishing industry hates the plan – excluded from MSP and their effect
on fisheries
Winn 11 (Pete, writer at CNS News, “Fishermen to Congress: Please Scuttle Obama’s National Oceans
Policy,” Published November 17, 2011, http://cnsnews.com/news/article/fishermen-congress-pleasescuttle-obama-s-national-oceans-policy, CH)
(CNSNews.com) – The nation’s commercial fishermen say the Obama administration is trying to impose top-down
bureaucratic regulation on the use of the oceans and the nation’s fisheries, which they say will put fishing
jobs at stake. A group calling itself the Seafood Coalition is calling on Congress to do what it can to scuttle President Obama’s
National Ocean Policy National Ocean Policy, which the president unilaterally imposed by executive order in 2010. In a letter to the House Natural Resources
Committee, the Seafood Coalition said
that the president’s plan adds a needless level of top-down bureaucracy and
regulation on fisheries. “The National Ocean Policy creates a federal ocean zoning regime that will likely
result in substantial new regulations and restrictions on ocean users,” Nils Stolpe, spokesman for the Seafood Coalition, told
CNSNews.com on Monday. The coalition says it is also concerned that the administration is going to take money
away from programs that are currently working well to pay for the new layer of bureaucracy. “What
we’ve asked for in our letter to the chairman was for Congress to use whatever funding capacity they
have to stop this,” Stolpe said. The Seafood Coalition describes itself as a “broad national coalition of
commercial fishing interests, seafood processors, and coastal communities” that includes members from
every region of the U.S. and “accounts for about 85 percent of the fish and shellfish products landed
annually in the U.S.” In July of 2010, President Obama signed the order establishing a National Policy for the Stewardship of the Ocean, Our Coasts, and
the Great Lakes. The order directs all federal agencies to implement the Final Recommendations of the Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force, which was created by
White House Council on Environmental Quality. The National Ocean Policy identifies nine objectives and outlines a “flexible framework” for how bureaucrats will
“effectively address conservation, economic activity, user conflict, and sustainable use of the ocean, our coasts, and the Great Lakes.” One of the key objectives is
called “coastal and marine spatial planning (CMSP)” -- which the executive order defines as “a comprehensive, adaptive, integrated, ecosystem-based,
and transparent spatial planning process, based on sound science, for analyzing current and anticipated uses of ocean, coastal, and Great Lakes areas.” It added: “In
practical terms, coastal and marine spatial planning provides a public policy process for society to better determine how the ocean, our coasts, and Great Lakes are
sustainably used and protected -- now and for future generations.” But Stolpe and the Seafood Coalition said CMSP essentially means
the imposition
of top-down federal planning boards to govern ocean use. “It establishes a number of regional boards that in essence are in charge
of what goes on in the oceans of those particular regions -- from a fishing perspective, from an energy development perspective, from a transportation perspective,
from a recreational use perspective,” Stolpe said. The executive order also creates a National Oceans Council, headed by White House Science Adviser Dr. John
Holdren and Council for Environmental Quality director Nancy Sutley, to oversee overall ocean planning. No
one from the seafood industry will
be part of the council, the coalition said.
Fishermen fear that extremist environmental technocrats will take away their fishing
rights
Jonsson 10 (Patrick, staff writer for CSM, “Fishermen’s fear: Public's 'right to fish' shifting under
Obama?,” Published March 9, 2010, http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2010/0309/Fishermen-s-fearPublic-s-right-to-fish-shifting-under-Obama, CH)
ATLANTA — The Obama administration has proposed using United Nations-guided principles to expand a type of zoning to
coastal and even some inland waters. That’s raising concerns among fishermen that their favorite fishing holes
may soon be off-limits for bait-casting. In the battle of incremental change that epitomizes the American
conservation movement, many weekend anglers fear that the Obama administration’s promise to
“fundamentally change” water management in the US will erode what they call the public’s “right to
fish,” in turn creating economic losses for the $82 billion recreational fishing industry and a further
deterioration of the American outdoorsman’s legacy. Proponents say the Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force established
by President Obama last June will ultimately benefit the fishing public by managing ecosystems in their entirety rather than by individual uses
such as fishing, shipping, or oil exploration. “It’s not an environmentalist manifesto,” says Larry Crowder, a marine biologist at Duke University
in North Carolina. “It’s multiple-use planning for the environment, and making sure various uses … are sustainable.” (Amateur outdoorsmen
have been fighting for their rights for years, as the Monitor reports here.) Faced with the prospect of further industrialization along America's
coasts and the Great Lakes (wind turbines and natural-gas exploration, for example), the task force is charged with putting in place a new
ecosystem management process called marine spatial planning. Marine spatial
planning (MSP), according to the United
Nations, is “a public process of analyzing and allocating the spatial and temporal distribution of human
activities in marine areas to achieve ecological, economic, and social objectives that usually have been
specified through a political process." That kind of government-speak scares Phil Morlock, director of
environmental affairs at the reel-and-rod maker Shimano. Mr. Morlock points to references by the
ocean task force to “one global sea” as evidence that what’s really being proposed are broad changes to
America's user-funded conservation strategy, potentially affecting even inland waters. “I suggest that the task force
recommend our model to the United Nations rather than us adopting the United Nations model,” he says in a phone interview. “The American
model is the best in the world, so our question is: Why seek the lowest common denominator?” Mr. Obama has said he will not override
protections put in place by Presidents Clinton and Bush that established recreational fishermen as a special class. But critics
still worry
about the Obama administration’s ties to environmental groups that espouse “anti-use” policies that
put some habitats out of reach even for rod and reel fishermen, who take only 3 percent of America’s
landed catch every year. “Angling advocates point out that senior policy officials on the task force seem
inclined to ally themselves with preservationists and environmental extremists who want to create ‘no
fishing’ preserves, with no scientific justification,” writes ESPN.com’s Robert Montgomery. On the other hand, nonpartisan
experts say the task force has already made strides in better recognizing various stakeholder groups, including recreational fishermen, and that
it doesn’t intend to undermine the ability of states to manage their natural resources, as many fishermen fear. “There’s been huge progress by
the task force in terms of being more inclusive in thinking about economic, ecological, social, and political concerns,” says Mr. Crowder at Duke.
“The paranoia – and there is paranoia on all sides – is that the process will be captured. My hope is that mutual concern gets people to the
table.” The final report of the task force is expected in late March. Congress will decide its fate, unless Obama issues an executive order
establishing MSP as the law of the water.
Security
1NC Shell
Attempts to gain spatial knowledge are projects of sovereign domination
Steinberg 9 (Phillip E. - Department of Geography at Florida State University,
“Sovereignty, Territory, and the Mapping of Mobility: A View from the Outside”,
Annals of the Association of American Geographer, http://mailer.fsu.edu/~psteinbe/garnetpsteinbe/Annals%20Offprint2.pdf, JS)
A key concept here, as stressed by Sahlins (1989), is¶ that the rise of the territorial state is characterized not¶ simply by the
construction of its bounded territory as¶ a homogenous administrative zone (as Sahlins charges¶ that Allies [1980] and Gottman
[1973] emphasize), but `¶ that the territorial state constructs its space as a differentiated set of points that are
amenable to being plotted¶ (and thus manipulated and rationalized) against an abstract spatial grid (see also T.
Mitchell 1991). Historically, the development of technologies and institutions for performing cadastral
mapping and land surveying stand out as mechanisms through which the state has achieved a “bird’seye” view over territory as a means toward achieving social control over people (Bohannan 1964; Kain and
Baigent 1992; Vandergeest and Peluso 1995; Edney 1997; Scott 1998; Biggs 1999). Thus, Biggs (1999) locates the origins of
the territorial state in national surveying efforts of the seventeenth century. As surveyors mapped royal
domains, they graphically noted each village’s affiliation. What had been thought of as a personal
relationship came to be expressed as a territorial relationship, and, at the same time, surveyors imposed a grid of
¶
¶
¶
¶
abstract space over the domain to¶ facilitate mapping. Eventually, these two phenomena¶ associated with surveying converged
in an example of¶ what Pickles (2003) calls “overcoding”: The abstract, geometric space of the map came to define
the lived in space of the state, and the territorial relationship between land and sovereign came to be
seen as predicating the personal relationship between individual and sovereign. Other scholars have further
illustrated the relationship between the way that we hierarchically map¶ space and the way that we hierarchically organize
social relationships. Knowledge of space is a crucial tool for control, and the technologies of mapping (and the¶
underlying assumptions about society and space that enable modern mapping), joined with hierarchical systems for
drawing lines and assigning names, play a crucial role in constructing instruments of sovereign
domination (Akerman 1984, 1995; Carter 1987; Buisseret 1992; Ryan 1996; Edney 1997; Brotton 1998; Burnett 2000; Craib
¶
¶
¶
2000; Hakli 2001; Harley 2001; Pickles 2003; ¨¶ Jacob 2006).4 In short, these scholars emphasize the key role that ¶ the ordering
of space plays in the construction of state¶ territoriality. This is an important advance over a¶ perspective that simply looks at the
bounding of space,¶ but, as Strandsbjerg (2008) notes, these scholars of the¶ cartographic origins of modern state sovereignty
still¶ tend to analyze the state as an isolated unit. Given that¶ the modern institution of sovereignty necessarily exists¶ within a
system of sovereign units, a study of the modern¶ state (or a story of its origins) that works only from the¶ perspective of the
inward-looking aspect of sovereignty¶ cannot be complete. As Taylor (1995) asserts, the starting point of political
geography (and political history)¶ must be a theory of the states rather than a theory of the state. In a similar
vein, geographies and histories of territoriality (or the ordering of space) must examine not just the
“emptiable” and “fillable” space constructed inside the territories of sovereign states but also the spaces
on the outside that are designated as not being amenable to this organization of space. Otherwise, any study of
¶
¶
state territoriality risks falling into the “territorial trap”¶ wherein states are viewed as internally coherent units,¶ existing
ontologically prior to the overall ordering of¶ the state system, and wherein cross-border processes¶ can be viewed only as
“international relations” among¶ these preexisting states (Agnew 1994; see also Sparke¶ 2005).
Security politics authorizes limitless global destruction.
Der Derian 98 (James, Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, On Security,
Ed. Lipschutz, p. 24-25)
No other concept in international relations packs the metaphysical punch, nor commands the disciplinary
power of "security." In its name, peoples have alienated their fears, rights and powers to gods, emperors, and most
recently, sovereign states, all to protect themselves from the vicissitudes of nature--as well as from other gods,
emperors, and sovereign states. In its name, weapons of mass destruction have been developed which have
transfigured national interest into a security dilemma based on a suicide pact. And, less often noted in
international relations, in its name billions have been made and millions killed while scientific knowledge has been furthered and
intellectual dissent muted. We have inherited an ontotheology of security, that is, an a priori argument
that proves the existence and necessity of only one form of security because there currently happens to
be a widespread, metaphysical belief in it. Indeed, within the concept of security lurks the entire history of
western metaphysics, which was best described by Derrida "as a series of substitutions of center for center" in a perpetual search for
the "transcendental signified." Continues... 7 In this case, Walt cites IR scholar Robert Keohane on the hazards of "reflectivism," to warn off
anyone who by inclination or error might wander into the foreign camp: "As Robert Keohane has noted, until these writers `have delineated . . .
a research program and shown . . . that it can illuminate important issues in world politics, they will remain on the margins of the field.' " 8 By
the end of the essay, one is left with the suspicion that the rapid changes in world politics have triggered a "security crisis" in security studies
that requires extensive theoretical damage control. What
if we leave the desire for mastery to the insecure and
instead imagine a new dialogue of security, not in the pursuit of a utopian end but in recognition of the world as it
is, other than us ? What might such a dialogue sound like? Any attempt at an answer requires a genealogy: to understand the discursive power
of the concept, to remember its forgotten meanings, to assess its economy of use in the present, to reinterpret--and possibly construct through
the reinterpretation--a late modern security comfortable with a plurality of centers, multiple meanings, and fluid identities. The steps I take
here in this direction are tentative and preliminary. I first undertake a brief history of the concept itself. Second, I present the "originary" form
of security that has so dominated our conception of international relations, the Hobbesian episteme of realism. Third, I consider the impact of
two major challenges to the Hobbesian episteme, that of Marx and Nietzsche. And finally, I suggest that Baudrillard provides the best, if most
nullifying, analysis of security in late modernity. In short, I retell the story of realism as an historic encounter of fear and danger with power and
order that produced four realist forms of security: epistemic, social, interpretive, and hyperreal. To preempt a predictable criticism, I wish to
make it clear that I am not in search of an "alternative security." An easy defense is to invoke Heidegger, who declared that
"questioning is the piety of thought." Foucault, however, gives the more powerful reason for a genealogy of security: I am not looking for an
alternative; you can't find the solution of a problem in the solution of another problem raised at another moment by other people. You see,
what I want to do is not the history of solutions, and that's the reason why I don't accept the word alternative. My point is not that everything is
bad, but that everything
is dangerous, then we always have something to do. The hope is that in the interpretation of the
most pressing dangers of late modernity we might be able to construct a form of security based on the
appreciation and articulation rather than the normalization or extirpation of difference. Nietzsche transvalues both
Hobbes's and Marx's interpretations of security through a genealogy of modes of being. His method is not to uncover some deep meaning
or value for security, but to destabilize the intolerable fictional identities of the past which have been created out of fear,
and to affirm the creative differences which might yield new values for the future. Originating in the paradoxical relationship of a
contingent life and a certain death, the history of security reads for Nietzsche as an abnegation, a resentment and, finally, a transcendence of
this paradox. In brief, the history is one of individuals seeking an impossible security from the most radical "other" of life, the
terror of
death which, once generalized and nationalized, triggers a futile cycle of collective identities seeking security from
alien others--who are seeking similarly impossible guarantees. It is a story of differences taking on the
otherness of death, and identities calcifying into a fearful sameness.
Vote neg and Reject the Aff’s security discourse – abandoning the attempt to
eradicate insecurity is a prerequisite to meaningful political engagement.
Neocleous 8 [Mark, Professor of the Critique of Political Economy at Brunel University, Critique of
Security, p. 185-186]
The only way out of such a dilemma, to escape the fetish, is perhaps to eschew the logic of security altogether – to reject
it as so ideologically loaded in favour of the state that any real political thought other than the
authoritarian and reactionary should be pressed to give it up. That is clearly something that can not be achieved within the
limits of bourgeois thought and thus could never even begin to be imagined by the security intellectual. It is also something that the constant
iteration of the refrain ‘this is an insecure world’ and reiteration of one fear, anxiety and insecurity
after another will also make it hard to do. But it is something that the critique of security suggests we
may have to consider if we want a political way out of the impasse of security.¶ This impasse exists because
security has now become so all-encompassing that it marginalises all else, most notably the
constructive conflicts, debates and discussions that animate political life. The constant prioritising of a
mythical security as a political end – as the political end – constitutes a rejection of politics in any
meaningful sense of the term. That is, as a mode of action in which differences can be articulated, in which the conflicts and struggles that arise
from such differences can be fought for and negotiated, in which people might come to believe that another world is possible – that they might transform the world
and in turn be transformed. Security
politics simply removes this; worse, it removes it while purportedly addressing it. In so doing it suppresses all
issues of power and turns political questions into debates about the most efficient way to achieve
‘security’, despite the fact that we are never quite told – never could be told – what might count as having achieved it. Security politics is, in this
sense, an anti-politics,141 dominating political discourse in much the same manner as the security state
tries to dominate human beings, reinforcing security fetishism and the monopolistic character of
security on the political imagination. We therefore need to get beyond security politics, not add yet
more ‘sectors’ to it in a way that simply expands the scope of the state and legitimises state
intervention in yet more and more areas of our lives.¶ Simon Dalby reports a personal communication with Michael Williams, coeditor of the important text Critical Security Studies, in which the latter asks: if you take away security, what do you put in the hole that’s left behind? But I’m
inclined to agree with Dalby: maybe there is no hole.142 The
mistake has been to think that there is a hole and that this
hole needs to be filled with a new vision or revision of security in which it is re-mapped or civilised or
gendered or humanised or expanded or whatever. All of these ultimately remain within the statist
political imaginary, and consequently end up re-affirming the state as the terrain of modern politics,
the grounds of security. The real task is not to fill the supposed hole with yet another vision of
security, but to fight for an alternative political language which takes us beyond the narrow horizon of
bourgeois security and which therefore does not constantly throw us into the arms of the state. That’s
the point of critical politics: to develop a new political language more adequate to the kind of society
we want. Thus while much of what I have said here has been of a negative order, part of the tradition of critical theory is that the
negative may be as significant as the positive in setting thought on new paths.¶ For if security really is
the supreme concept of bourgeois society and the fundamental thematic of liberalism, then to keep
harping on about insecurity and to keep demanding ‘more security’ (while meekly hoping that this increased security
doesn’t damage our liberty) is to blind ourselves to the possibility of building real alternatives to the
authoritarian tendencies in contemporary politics. To situate ourselves against security politics would
allow us to circumvent the debilitating effect achieved through the constant securitising of social and
political issues, debilitating in the sense that ‘security’ helps consolidate the power of the existing
forms of social domination and justifies the short-circuiting of even the most democratic forms. It
would also allow us to forge another kind of politics centred on a different conception of the good. We
need a new way of thinking and talking about social being and politics that moves us beyond security.
This would perhaps be emancipatory in the true sense of the word. What this might mean, precisely, must be open to
debate. But it certainly requires recognising that security is an illusion that has forgotten it is an illusion; it
requires recognising that security is not the same as solidarity; it requires accepting that insecurity is
part of the human condition, and thus giving up the search for the certainty of security and instead
learning to tolerate the uncertainties, ambiguities and ‘insecurities’ that come with being human; it
requires accepting that ‘securitizing’ an issue does not mean dealing with it politically, but bracketing
it out and handing it to the state; it requires us to be brave enough to return the gift.143
Extra links
Mapping destroys intimacy with the ocean and turns renders it as a mere
conceptual device for human purposes.
Anderson and Peters 14
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)
Filling the Watery Void
The second key aim of this volume is to continue challenging the aforementioned and long standing
configuration of the ocean as an empty space, established through processes of industrial and
postindustrial capitalism. Moreover this book seeks to address the use of the sea as a mere
conceptual device for understanding alternative socio-cultural and political phenomena,
instead positioning the sea as a ‘an element of nature itself’ (Steinberg 2001: 167). As such, the chapters
which follow each demonstrate the ways in which ocean is ‘filled’: through its own elemental composition, with morethanhuman life, with floating and sunken materialities, and with a range of human significance. Such an approach takes inspiration
from non-Western perspectives of the water world. If we turn away from our modern, terrestro-centric view, we
can begin to see how ‘other’ cultures conceive of the seas and oceans as practiced, embodied and
lived spaces. For example, anthroplogist Bronislaw Malinowski demonstrates the importance of rituals at sea for societies on the
Trobriand Islands in the Western Pacific region (1922). Here the land functions as a connection point whilst the ocean is encultured as a
significant ritualized space, made meaningful through the ‘Kula’ system of gift-giving. Kula exchanges involve the sea-based exchange of
two types of item (armshells and necklaces) between ‘Kula partners’ (Young 1979: 163). Articles are moved from island to island by seagoing canoes, and as such, seafaring has been integral to the custom, culture, and ceremony of the Trobriand people (Young 1979: 1723). Thus despite
Western culture’s willingness to reduce the water world to an empty space, many
‘indigenous’ cultures refute this essentialism. As Raban notes, drawing on David Lewis’ discussion of Polynesian
mariners, We, the Navigators (1994): the open sea could be as intimately known and as friendly to human
habitation as a familiar stretch of land to those seamen who lived on its surface, as gulls do, wave by wave.... the stars supplied
a grand chain of paths across the known ocean, but there was often little need of these since the
water itself was as legible as acreage farmed for generations. Colour, wind, the flight of birds, and telltale
variations of swell gave the sea direction, shape, character. (Raban 1999: 94) According to Raban, this intimate knowing of
water worlds was supplanted in the West by the advent of modern technology, starting with the use of a
compass and sextant and extending through to twenty-first century exploitation of satellite
telemetry and geographical positioning systems. For Raban, ‘the arrival of the magnetic compass
caused a fundamental rift in the relationship between man [sic] and sea’ (1999: 95). Possession of a
compass, rendered obsolete a great body of inherited, instinctual knowledge, and rendered the sea
itself - in fair weather, at least - as a void, an empty______ rendered obsolete a great body of inherited,
instinctual knowledge, and rendered the sea itself - in fair weather, at least - as a void, an empty
space to be traversed by a numbered thumb line. (1999: 97)
Neo-lib K
The aff’s development/exploration project reproduces neoliberalism in oceanic space
– they commodify ocean ecology and frame human interaction with the sea as selfinterested utility maximization
Mansfield 3
Professor of Geography at OSUhttp://ac.els-cdn.com/S0016718503001155/1-s2.0-S0016718503001155-main.pdf?_tid=466f9680-feea-11e3-923900000aab0f26&acdnat=1403976970_0c59874c8e1a5e3d758a032a84310f4fv
To the extent that neoliberalism, with its calls for letting ‘‘the market’’ address myriad social and
economic woes, has become the dominant model for political economic practice today, it should be
expected that environmental governance, too, would be shaped by the neoliberal imperative to
deregulate, liberalize trade and investment, marketize, and privatize (see Agnew and Corbridge, 1995;
Overbeek, 1993; Peck, 2001), and evidence of neoliberal approaches to the environment is easily found
(e.g. Anderson and Leal, 2001). On the one hand, primary sector industries such as agriculture, forestry,
and fisheries are increasingly shaped by efforts to liberalize international trade through reducing tariffs
and non-tariff ‘‘trade barriers’’ such as domestic subsidies. On the other hand, environmental
governance itself is increasingly oriented toward market-based, rather than state-led, approaches: a
prime example are emissions trading schemes as solutions to pollution, such as those proposed for
reducing greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming. The rationale for this neoliberal turn in
environmental governance is that market mechanisms will harness the profit motive to more innovative
and efficient environmental solutions than those devised, implemented, and enforced by states. In
what ways, then, is neoliberalism and the environment any different from neoliberalism more
generally? Are market-based approaches to the natural environment simply spillover from the larger
trends of deregulation, reductions in social services, free trade, and structural adjustment? Or does the
history of environmental regulation, both in general and in specific arenas, affect the development of
neoliberal environmental governance? In this paper, I address these questions by analyzing the
development of neoliberalism in the oceans, and in particular in ocean fisheries. Examining the ways
that past policy orientations toward fisheries have influenced the development of neoliberal approaches
to ocean governance, I contend that neoliberalism in the oceans centers specifically around concerns
about property and the use of privatization to create markets for governing access to and use of ocean
resources. Within the Euro – American tradition that has shaped international law of the sea, the oceans
(including the water column, seabed, and living and mineral resources) were long treated as common
property––the “common heritage of mankind” (Pardo, 1967)––open to all comers with the means to
create and exploit oceanic opportunities. Although historically there has also been continual tension
between this openness of access and desire for territorialization (especially of coastal waters), treating
the oceans as a commons is consistent with the idea that oceans are spaces of movement and
transportation, which have facilitated mercantilism, exploration, colonial expansion, and cold war
military maneuvering (Steinberg, 2001).1 Oceans have also long been sites for resource extraction, yet it
has not been until recent decades that new economic desires and environmental contradictions have contributed to a pronounced move away from open access
and freedom of the seas.
New technologies for resource extraction combined with regional overexploitation have
contributed to conflicts over resources, to which representatives from academia, politics, and business
have responded by calling for enclosing the oceans within carefully delimited regimes of property rights,
be those regimes of state, individual, or collective control.At the center of this new political economy of
oceans, as it has evolved over the past 50 years, has been concern about “the commons,” and the
extent to which common and open access property regimes contribute to economic and environmental
crises, which include overfishing and overcapitalization. As such, the question of the commons has been
at the center of numerous, seemingly contradictory approaches to ocean governance and fisheries
regulation. Thus, the first argument of the paper is that neoliberal approaches in fisheries cannot be
treated simply as derivative of a larger neoliberal movement that became entrenched starting in the
1980s. Instead, examining trajectories of neoliberalism in fisheries over the past half century reveals
that the emphasis on property and the commons has contributed to a more specific dynamic of
neoliberalism operating in ocean fisheries and, therefore, to distinctive forms of neoliberalism. To be
clear, it is not the emphasis on property in itself that ties this history into neoliberalism, but rather the
particular perspective that links property specifically to market rationality. The underlying assumption of
all the approaches to property discussed in this paper is that market rationality (i.e. profit maximization)
is natural. Given this, property rights harness this rationality to the greater good, while a lack of property
rights inevitably leads to economic and environmental problems. It is this set of assumptions that
underlies the neoliberal emphasis on privatization and marketization. But this assumption of market
rationality is not necessarily a dimension of property in general; property can involve multiple types of
arrangements, with different goals and outcomes (Rose, 1994). For example, to the extent that control
over access to resources and places can be about protecting traditional livelihoods, assigning property
rights can actually challenge purely market-based approaches to resource use. One example relevant to
the case study in this paper is the “Community Development Quota” program for communities of Native
Alaskans in the Bering Sea region of the North Pacific (Holland and Ginter, 2001; Tryon, 1993). This
program guarantees these communities a set percentage of the annual fish catch, with the goal of
providing economic and social benefits. These community development quotas are not divorced from
markets––and native communities do lease these quotas on the open market––yet property in this
context is about providing economic protection for a marginalized group of people. This contrasts to
neoliberal approaches, in which property is the basis for rational decision making and market efficiency,
not economic protection. My claim here, however, is that fisheries scholars and managers have focused
on using property rights specifically to harness supposedly natural market-oriented behavior; in this
sense, the development of property rights in fisheries is tied into the neoliberal focus on markets as the
central form of governance. Thus, privatization and marketization are not the same thing, yet in
neoliberal approaches they are tied together through the presumption that private property rights are
necessary for markets to work, and that markets are necessary for optimal economic and environmental
behavior (see Section 2.1). At the same time, the difficulty of defining property rights in fisheries has
contributed to unique forms of neoliberal privatization and ma
Spatial planning reproduces neoliberalism – the aff’s mapping imposes neoliberal
subjectivity on oceanic actors, reducing them to rational utility-maximizers – that
erases recognition of existing oceanic inequality and prioritizes the zoning priorities of
the socially privileged
Olson 10
(Julia Olson, department member of Northeast Fisheries Science Center, “Seeding nature, ceding
culture: Redefining the boundaries of the marine commons through spatial management and GIS,”
Geoforum, 2010)
These mappings and transformations happen within broader spatial imperatives that are fundamentally
reshaping the ocean. The majority of the world’s fisheries are estimated to be fully exploited,
overexploited or depleted (FAO, 2007). Political conflict over fisheries pit the many fishermen arguing
that fisheries are rebounding against the many fisheries scientists and environmentalists arguing
otherwise; many resource-users have demanded a greater voice in the very process of knowledge
production, and efforts at co-management, cooperative research, and traditional ecological knowledge
point to potential directions such involvement may produce. Yet conventional arguments about the
tragedy of the commons finger the rational, self-interested resource user—economic man of
neoclassical economic theory—operating in a socio-ecological environment of incorrect institutional
norms and economic incentives. With too many fishermen chasing too few fish in an open sea, such
understandings seek privatizing, neoliberal solutions to fisheries dilemmas—solutions many advocates
fear destroy fishing communities and cultures. While this hegemony of bio-economics in fisheries
management has been maintained, as St. Martin (2001) argues, through a geographic imagination that
places the rationalist and self-interested “economic man” in a spatially homogenous commons,2 the
increasing efforts to use area-specific forms of fisheries management signal the potential for a
“paradigm shift” from individuals to communities and ecosystems, in which the “promise of GIS” hinges
especially on the integration of social and biological data ( St. Martin, 2004). Though the actual practice
of ecosystem-based management is still taking shape, its recognition of connections and multiple spatial
scales, as well as its use for local knowledge in time and space, may be a way to involve people as
members of social groups (rather than simply individuals) more integrally in the management process (
St. Martin et al., 2007 and Clay and Olson, 2008). The actual implementation of ecosystem-based
fisheries management, some argue, should happen through a planned system of “ocean zoning” that
replaces the patchwork of ad hoc, uncoordinated regulations whose goals have been decoupled from a
broader notion of the ecosystem that concerns itself as much with sustaining fisheries as “the nonfisheries benefits of marine ecosystems to society” (Babcock et al., 2005, p. 469). As marine biologist
Elliot Norse has written, because the ocean has many competing users—“shipping, defense, energy
production, telecommunications, commercial fishing, sportfishing, recreational diving, whale watching,
pleasure boating, tourism and coastal real estate development”—whose conflicts can lead to resource
degradation, zoning provides a solution for it “is a place-based ecosystem management system that
reduces conflict, uncertainty and costs by separating incompatible uses and specifying how particular
areas may be used” (2002, pp. 53–54). Such a comprehensive system of zoning is envisioned as a more
rational “system of finely specified spatial and temporal property rights” (Wilen, 2004). The 2003 Pew
Report also mentions “implement[ing] ecosystem-based planning” in the same breath as zoning, for
fisheries management, it argues, should more fully consider context: “incompatible” user conflicts that
affect target species (2003, p. 47). Economists who promote zoning as a way to “account for spatial and
intertemporal externalities” picture it reaching its rational equilibrium through the market, rationing
numbers of users in search of a “rent-maximizing equilibrium” (Sanchirico and Wilen, 2005, p. 25), and
ultimately creating property rights (Holland, 2004) and stewardship (US Commission on Ocean Policy,
2004, p. 64). Yet while ocean zoning is seen as something of a new solution for marine conflicts, the
model of terrestrial zoning upon which it is based is hardly without its critics. Proponents of smart
growth, new urbanism, and mixed-use communities have pointed to the myriad problems—including
sprawl, traffic, pollution, loss of farmland, and so on—created by separating the activities of daily life.
The view that zoning will end conflict assumes that such conflicts center only on doing different things in
the same place, while creating zones of “use-priority” areas begs the question of whose values will
dictate a given zone’s “most important” activities. As such, conflict may simply be displaced from the
ocean to places where policies are crafted or where their impacts are lived. Indeed scholars have long
noted how zoning laws are colored by cultural ideas (for example, public versus private/domestic
space) that are distinctly bourgeois, raced and gendered and thus favor certain groups of people
(Ritzdorf, 1994, Perin, 1977 and LiPuma and Meltzoff, 1997). Some economists have also been critical of
marine zoning’s creation of “divided” property rights that do not fully consider “the opportunity costs of
foregone production” that might otherwise “maximize joint wealth” ( Edwards, 2000, p. 4). In other
words, the “economic benefits” of zoning cannot be assumed for “it is an empirical question whether
ocean wealth would be improved” (ibid, p. 7). A focus on aggregate wealth though leaves unanswered
the effect of an initially unequal distribution of wealth on the prices and outcomes in a market-based
economy, as well as the changes in subjectivity and practices that the neoliberalization of resource
economies and identities can engender.
The impact is massive environmental destruction and social inequality – imposition of
neoliberal landscapes on local landscapes produces fast capitalist extraction and
causes displacement and dehumanization
Nixon ‘11
(Rob, Rachel Carson Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Slow Violence and the
Environmentalism of the Poor, pgs. 17-18)
In the global resource wars, the environmentalism of the poor is frequently triggered when an
official landscape is forcibly imposed on a vernacular one." A vernacular landscape is shaped by the
affective, historically textured maps that communities have devised over generations, maps replete
with names and routes, maps alive to significant ecological and surface geological features. A
vernacular landscape, although neither monolithic nor undisputed, is integral to the
socioenvironmental dynamics of community rather than being wholly externalized-treated as out
there, as a separate nonrenewable resource. By contrast, an official landscape-whether
governmental, NGO, corporate, or some combination of those-is typically oblivious to such earlier
maps; instead, it writes the land in a bureaucratic, externalizing, and extraction-driven manner that
is often pitilessly instrumental. Lawrence Summers' scheme to export rich-nation garbage and
toxicity to Africa, for example, stands as a grandiose (though hardly exceptional) instance of a highly
rationalized official landscape that, whether in terms of elite capture of resources or toxic disposal, has often been projected onto ecosystems inhabited by
those whom Annu Jalais, in an Indian context, calls "dispensable citizens.'?" I would argue, then, that the exponential upsurge in indigenous
resource rebellions across the globe during the high age of neoliberalism has resulted largely from a
clash of temporal perspectives between the short-termers who arrive (with their official landscape
maps) to extract, despoil, and depart and the long-termers who must live inside the ecological
aftermath and must therefore weigh wealth differently in time's scales. In the pages that follow, I will highlight and explore resource rebellions against developer-dispossessors
who descend from other time zones to impose on habitable environments unsustainable calculations about what constitutes the duration of human gain. Change is a
cultural constant but the pace of change is not. Hence the temporal contests over how to sustain,
regenerate, exhaust, or obliterate the landscape as resource become critical. More than material
wealth is here at stake: imposed official landscapes typically discount spiritualized vernacular
landscapes, severing webs of accumulated cultural meaning and treating the landscape as if it were uninhabited by the living, the unborn, and the animate deceased. The
ensuing losses are consistent with John Berger's lament over capitalism's disdain for
interdependencies by foreshortening our sense of time, thereby rendering the deceased immaterial:
The living reduce the dead to those who have lived; yet the dead already include the living in their
own great collective. Until the dehumanization of society by capitalism, all the living awaited the
experience of the dead. It was their ultimate future. By themselves the living were incomplete. Thus
living and dead were interdependent. Always. Only a uniquely modern form of egoism has broken
this interdependence. With disastrous results for the living, who now think of the dead as the
eliminated.40 Hence, one should add, our perspective on environmental asset stripping should
include among assets stripped the mingled presence in the landscape of multiple generations, with all the hindsight and foresight that entails. Against this backdrop, I consider in
this book what can be called the temporalities of place. Place is a temporal attainment that must be constantly
renegotiated in the face of changes that arrive from without and within, some benign, others
potentially ruinous. To engage the temporal displacements involved in slow violence against the poor
thus requires that we rethink questions of physical displacement as well. In the chapters that follow, I
track the socioenvironmental fallout from developmental agendas whose primary beneficiaries live
elsewhere; as when, for example, oasis dwellers in the Persian Gulf get trucked off to unknown
destinations so that American petroleum engineers and their sheik collaborators can develop their
"finds." Or when a megadam arises and (whether erected in the name of Some dictatorial edict, the free market, structural adjustment, national development, or far-off urban or
industrial need) displaces and disperses those who had developed through their vernacular landscapes their own adaptable, if always imperfect and vulnerable, relation to riverine
possibility. Paradoxically, those forcibly removed by development include conservation refugees. Too often in the global South, conservation, driven by powerful transnational nature
NGOs, combines an antidevelopmental rhetoric with the development of finite resources for the touristic few, thereby depleting vital resources for long-term residents. (I explore this
paradox more fully in Chapter 6: Stranger in the Eco-village: Race, Tourism, and Environmental Time.) In much of what follows, I address the resistance mounted by impoverished
communities who have been involuntarily moved out of their knowledge; I address as well the powers transnational, national, and local-behind such forced removals. My angle of vision
is largely through writers who have affiliated themselves with social movements that seek to stave off one of two ruinous prospects: either the threatened community capitulates and is
scattered (across refugee camps, placeless "relocation" sites, desperate favelas, and unwelcoming foreign lands), or the community refuses to move but, as its world is undermined,
effectively becomes a community of refugees in place. What I wish to stress here, then, are not just those communities that are involuntarily (and often militarily) relocated to less
I want to propose a more radical notion of
displacement, one that, instead of referring solely to the movement of people from their places of
belonging, refers rather to the loss of the land and resources beneath them, a loss that leaves
communities stranded in a place stripped of the very characteristics that made it inhabitable.
hospitable environs, but also those affected by what I call displacement without moving. In other words,
Alternative text: the judge should vote negative to endorse an ethic of social flesh
An ethic of social flesh foregrounds embodied interdependence, substituting an
ecological view of relationships for the aff’s commodity thinking – only the alternative
can produce ethical institutional decisionmaking
Beasley & Bacchi 7
(Chris, Prof. of Politics @ University of Adelaide, Carol, Prof. Emeritus @ University of Adelaide,
“Envisaging a new politics for an ethical future: Beyond trust, care and generosity -- towards an ethic of
`social flesh'”, Feminist Theory, 2007 8: 279)
The political vocabulary of social flesh has significant implications for democratic visions. Because it
conceptualizes citizens as socially embodied – as interconnected mutually reliant flesh – in a more
thoroughgoing sense than the languages of trust, care, responsibility and generosity, it resists accounts
of political change as making transactions between the ‘less fortunate’ and ‘more privileged’, more
trusting, more caring, more responsible or more generous. Social flesh is political metaphor in which
fleshly sociality is profoundly levelling. As a result, it challenges meliorist reforms that aim to protect the
‘vulnerable’ from the worst effects of social inequality, including the current distribution of wealth. A
political ethic of embodied intersubjectivity requires us to consider fleshly interconnection as the basis
of a democratic sociality, demanding a rather more far-reaching reassessment of national and
international institutional arrangements than political vocabularies that rest upon extending altruism.
Relatedly, it provides a new basis for thinking about the sorts of institutional arrangements necessary to
acknowledge social fleshly existence, opening up ‘the scope of what counts as relevant’ (Shildrick, 2001:
238). For example, it allows a challenge to current conceptualizations that construct attention to the
‘private sphere’ as compensatory rather than as necessary (Beasley and Bacchi, 2000: 350). We intend
to pursue the relationship between social flesh and democratic governance in future papers. Conclusion
In this paper we focus on various vocabularies of social interconnection intended to offer a challenge to
the ethos of atomistic individualism associated with neo-liberalism and develop a new ethical ideal
called ‘social flesh’. Despite significant differences in the several vocabularies canvassed in this paper,
we note that most of the trust and care writers conceive the social reform of atomistic individualism
they claim to address in terms of a presumed moral or ethical deficiency within the disposition of
individuals. Hence, they reinstate the conception of the independent active self in certain ways.
Moreover, there is a disturbing commonality within all these accounts: an ongoing conception of
asymmetrical power relations between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’, ‘carers’ and ‘cared for’, ‘altruistic’ and
‘needy’. While widely used terms like trust and care clearly remain vocabularies around which social
debate may be mobilized, and hence are not to be dismissed (see Pocock, 2006), we suggest that there
are important reasons for questioning their limits and their claims to offer progressive alternative
understandings of social life. In this setting, we offer the concept of social flesh as a way forward in
rethinking the complex nature of the interaction between subjectivity, embodiment, intimacy, social
institutions and social interconnection. Social flesh generalizes the insight that trusting/caring/ altruistic
practices already take place on an ongoing basis to insist that the broad, complex sustenance of life that
characterizes embodied subjectivity and intersubjective existence be acknowledged. As an ethico-
political starting point, ‘social flesh’ highlights human embodied interdependence. By drawing attention
to shared embodied reliance, mutual reliance, of people across the globe on social space, infrastructure
and resources, it offers a decided challenge to neo-liberal conceptions of the autonomous self and
removes the social distance and always already given distinction between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’. There is
no sense here of ‘givers’ and ‘receivers’; rather we are all recognized as receivers of socially generated
goods and services. Social flesh also marks our diversity, challenging the privileging of normative over
‘other’ bodies. Finally, because social flesh necessarily inhabits a specific geographical space,
environmentalist efforts to preserve that space take on increased salience (Macken, 2004: 25). By these
means, the grounds are created for defending a politics beyond assisting the ‘less fortunate’. Social
flesh, therefore, refuses the residues of ‘noblesse oblige’ that still appear to linger in emphasis upon
vulnerability and altruism within the apparently reformist ethical ideals of trust/respect, care,
responsibility and even generosity. In so doing it puts into question the social privilege that produces
inequitable vulnerability and the associated need for ‘altruism’. Vital debates about appropriate
distribution of social goods, environmental politics, professional and institutional power and democratic
processes are reopened.
Neo-lib K link
1nc shell
The aff’s development/exploration project reproduces neoliberalism in
oceanic space – they commodify ocean ecology and frame human interaction
with the sea as self-interested utility maximization
Mansfield 3
Professor of Geography at OSUhttp://ac.els-cdn.com/S0016718503001155/1-s2.0-S0016718503001155-main.pdf?_tid=466f9680-feea-11e3-923900000aab0f26&acdnat=1403976970_0c59874c8e1a5e3d758a032a84310f4fv
To the extent that neoliberalism, with its calls for letting ‘‘the market’’ address myriad social and
economic woes, has become the dominant model for political economic practice today, it should be
expected that environmental governance, too, would be shaped by the neoliberal imperative to
deregulate, liberalize trade and investment, marketize, and privatize (see Agnew and Corbridge,
1995; Overbeek, 1993; Peck, 2001), and evidence of neoliberal approaches to the environment is
easily found (e.g. Anderson and Leal, 2001). On the one hand, primary sector industries such as
agriculture, forestry, and fisheries are increasingly shaped by efforts to liberalize international
trade through reducing tariffs and non-tariff ‘‘trade barriers’’ such as domestic subsidies. On the
other hand, environmental governance itself is increasingly oriented toward market-based, rather
than state-led, approaches: a prime example are emissions trading schemes as solutions to
pollution, such as those proposed for reducing greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming.
The rationale for this neoliberal turn in environmental governance is that market mechanisms will
harness the profit motive to more innovative and efficient environmental solutions than those
devised, implemented, and enforced by states. In what ways, then, is neoliberalism and the
environment any different from neoliberalism more generally? Are market-based approaches to the
natural environment simply spillover from the larger trends of deregulation, reductions in social
services, free trade, and structural adjustment? Or does the history of environmental regulation,
both in general and in specific arenas, affect the development of neoliberal environmental
governance? In this paper, I address these questions by analyzing the development of neoliberalism
in the oceans, and in particular in ocean fisheries. Examining the ways that past policy orientations
toward fisheries have influenced the development of neoliberal approaches to ocean governance, I
contend that neoliberalism in the oceans centers specifically around concerns about property and
the use of privatization to create markets for governing access to and use of ocean resources.
Within the Euro – American tradition that has shaped international law of the sea, the oceans
(including the water column, seabed, and living and mineral resources) were long treated as
common property––the “common heritage of mankind” (Pardo, 1967)––open to all comers with the
means to create and exploit oceanic opportunities. Although historically there has also been
continual tension between this openness of access and desire for territorialization (especially of
coastal waters), treating the oceans as a commons is consistent with the idea that oceans are spaces
of movement and transportation, which have facilitated mercantilism, exploration, colonial
expansion, and cold war military maneuvering (Steinberg, 2001).1 Oceans have also long been sites
for resource extraction, yet it has not been until recent decades that new economic desires and environmental contradictions have contributed
to a pronounced move away from open access and freedom of the seas . New technologies for resource extraction combined
with regional overexploitation have contributed to conflicts over resources, to which
representatives from academia, politics, and business have responded by calling for enclosing the
oceans within carefully delimited regimes of property rights, be those regimes of state, individual,
or collective control.At the center of this new political economy of oceans, as it has evolved over the
past 50 years, has been concern about “the commons,” and the extent to which common and open
access property regimes contribute to economic and environmental crises, which include
overfishing and overcapitalization. As such, the question of the commons has been at the center of
numerous, seemingly contradictory approaches to ocean governance and fisheries regulation. Thus,
the first argument of the paper is that neoliberal approaches in fisheries cannot be treated simply
as derivative of a larger neoliberal movement that became entrenched starting in the 1980s.
Instead, examining trajectories of neoliberalism in fisheries over the past half century reveals that
the emphasis on property and the commons has contributed to a more specific dynamic of
neoliberalism operating in ocean fisheries and, therefore, to distinctive forms of neoliberalism. To
be clear, it is not the emphasis on property in itself that ties this history into neoliberalism, but
rather the particular perspective that links property specifically to market rationality. The
underlying assumption of all the approaches to property discussed in this paper is that market
rationality (i.e. profit maximization) is natural. Given this, property rights harness this rationality to
the greater good, while a lack of property rights inevitably leads to economic and environmental
problems. It is this set of assumptions that underlies the neoliberal emphasis on privatization and
marketization. But this assumption of market rationality is not necessarily a dimension of property
in general; property can involve multiple types of arrangements, with different goals and outcomes
(Rose, 1994). For example, to the extent that control over access to resources and places can be
about protecting traditional livelihoods, assigning property rights can actually challenge purely
market-based approaches to resource use. One example relevant to the case study in this paper is
the “Community Development Quota” program for communities of Native Alaskans in the Bering
Sea region of the North Pacific (Holland and Ginter, 2001; Tryon, 1993). This program guarantees
these communities a set percentage of the annual fish catch, with the goal of providing economic
and social benefits. These community development quotas are not divorced from markets––and
native communities do lease these quotas on the open market––yet property in this context is about
providing economic protection for a marginalized group of people. This contrasts to neoliberal
approaches, in which property is the basis for rational decision making and market efficiency, not
economic protection. My claim here, however, is that fisheries scholars and managers have focused
on using property rights specifically to harness supposedly natural market-oriented behavior; in
this sense, the development of property rights in fisheries is tied into the neoliberal focus on
markets as the central form of governance. Thus, privatization and marketization are not the same
thing, yet in neoliberal approaches they are tied together through the presumption that private
property rights are necessary for markets to work, and that markets are necessary for optimal
economic and environmental behavior (see Section 2.1). At the same time, the difficulty of defining
property rights in fisheries has contributed to unique forms of neoliberal privatization and ma
Spatial planning reproduces neoliberalism – the aff’s mapping imposes
neoliberal subjectivity on oceanic actors, reducing them to rational utilitymaximizers – that erases recognition of existing oceanic inequality and
prioritizes the zoning priorities of the socially privileged
Olson 10
(Julia Olson, department member of Northeast Fisheries Science Center, “Seeding nature, ceding
culture: Redefining the boundaries of the marine commons through spatial management and GIS,”
Geoforum, 2010)
These mappings and transformations happen within broader spatial imperatives that are
fundamentally reshaping the ocean. The majority of the world’s fisheries are estimated to be fully
exploited, overexploited or depleted (FAO, 2007). Political conflict over fisheries pit the many
fishermen arguing that fisheries are rebounding against the many fisheries scientists and
environmentalists arguing otherwise; many resource-users have demanded a greater voice in the
very process of knowledge production, and efforts at co-management, cooperative research, and
traditional ecological knowledge point to potential directions such involvement may produce. Yet
conventional arguments about the tragedy of the commons finger the rational, self-interested
resource user—economic man of neoclassical economic theory—operating in a socio-ecological
environment of incorrect institutional norms and economic incentives. With too many fishermen
chasing too few fish in an open sea, such understandings seek privatizing, neoliberal solutions to
fisheries dilemmas—solutions many advocates fear destroy fishing communities and cultures.
While this hegemony of bio-economics in fisheries management has been maintained, as St. Martin
(2001) argues, through a geographic imagination that places the rationalist and self-interested
“economic man” in a spatially homogenous commons,2 the increasing efforts to use area-specific
forms of fisheries management signal the potential for a “paradigm shift” from individuals to
communities and ecosystems, in which the “promise of GIS” hinges especially on the integration of
social and biological data ( St. Martin, 2004). Though the actual practice of ecosystem-based
management is still taking shape, its recognition of connections and multiple spatial scales, as well
as its use for local knowledge in time and space, may be a way to involve people as members of
social groups (rather than simply individuals) more integrally in the management process ( St.
Martin et al., 2007 and Clay and Olson, 2008). The actual implementation of ecosystem-based
fisheries management, some argue, should happen through a planned system of “ocean zoning” that
replaces the patchwork of ad hoc, uncoordinated regulations whose goals have been decoupled
from a broader notion of the ecosystem that concerns itself as much with sustaining fisheries as
“the non-fisheries benefits of marine ecosystems to society” (Babcock et al., 2005, p. 469). As
marine biologist Elliot Norse has written, because the ocean has many competing users—“shipping,
defense, energy production, telecommunications, commercial fishing, sportfishing, recreational
diving, whale watching, pleasure boating, tourism and coastal real estate development”—whose
conflicts can lead to resource degradation, zoning provides a solution for it “is a place-based
ecosystem management system that reduces conflict, uncertainty and costs by separating
incompatible uses and specifying how particular areas may be used” (2002, pp. 53–54). Such a
comprehensive system of zoning is envisioned as a more rational “system of finely specified spatial
and temporal property rights” (Wilen, 2004). The 2003 Pew Report also mentions
“implement[ing] ecosystem-based planning” in the same breath as zoning, for fisheries
management, it argues, should more fully consider context: “incompatible” user conflicts that affect
target species (2003, p. 47). Economists who promote zoning as a way to “account for spatial and
intertemporal externalities” picture it reaching its rational equilibrium through the market,
rationing numbers of users in search of a “rent-maximizing equilibrium” (Sanchirico and Wilen,
2005, p. 25), and ultimately creating property rights (Holland, 2004) and stewardship (US
Commission on Ocean Policy, 2004, p. 64). Yet while ocean zoning is seen as something of a new
solution for marine conflicts, the model of terrestrial zoning upon which it is based is hardly
without its critics. Proponents of smart growth, new urbanism, and mixed-use communities have
pointed to the myriad problems—including sprawl, traffic, pollution, loss of farmland, and so on—
created by separating the activities of daily life. The view that zoning will end conflict assumes that
such conflicts center only on doing different things in the same place, while creating zones of “usepriority” areas begs the question of whose values will dictate a given zone’s “most important”
activities. As such, conflict may simply be displaced from the ocean to places where policies are
crafted or where their impacts are lived. Indeed scholars have long noted how zoning laws are
colored by cultural ideas (for example, public versus private/domestic space) that are distinctly
bourgeois, raced and gendered and thus favor certain groups of people (Ritzdorf, 1994, Perin,
1977 and LiPuma and Meltzoff, 1997). Some economists have also been critical of marine zoning’s
creation of “divided” property rights that do not fully consider “the opportunity costs of foregone
production” that might otherwise “maximize joint wealth” ( Edwards, 2000, p. 4). In other words,
the “economic benefits” of zoning cannot be assumed for “it is an empirical question whether ocean
wealth would be improved” (ibid, p. 7). A focus on aggregate wealth though leaves unanswered the
effect of an initially unequal distribution of wealth on the prices and outcomes in a marketbased economy, as well as the changes in subjectivity and practices that the neoliberalization of
resource economies and identities can engender.
The impact is massive environmental destruction and social inequality –
imposition of neoliberal landscapes on local landscapes produces fast
capitalist extraction and causes displacement and dehumanization
Nixon ‘11
(Rob, Rachel Carson Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Slow Violence and
the Environmentalism of the Poor, pgs. 17-18)
In the global resource wars, the environmentalism of the poor is frequently triggered when an
official landscape is forcibly imposed on a vernacular one." A vernacular landscape is
shaped by the affective, historically textured maps that communities have devised over
generations, maps replete with names and routes, maps alive to significant ecological and
surface geological features. A vernacular landscape, although neither monolithic nor undisputed,
is integral to the socioenvironmental dynamics of community rather than being wholly
externalized-treated as out there, as a separate nonrenewable resource. By contrast, an official
landscape-whether governmental, NGO, corporate, or some combination of those-is typically
oblivious to such earlier maps; instead, it writes the land in a bureaucratic, externalizing, and
extraction-driven manner that is often pitilessly instrumental. Lawrence Summers' scheme
to export rich-nation garbage and toxicity to Africa, for example, stands as a grandiose (though
hardly exceptional) instance of a highly rationalized official landscape that, whether in terms of elite capture of
resources or toxic disposal, has often been projected onto ecosystems inhabited by those whom Annu Jalais, in an Indian context, calls "dispensable citizens.'?" I would argue,
the exponential upsurge in indigenous resource rebellions across the globe during the high
age of neoliberalism has resulted largely from a clash of temporal perspectives between the
short-termers who arrive (with their official landscape maps) to extract, despoil, and depart
and the long-termers who must live inside the ecological aftermath and must therefore weigh wealth differently in
then, that
time's scales. In the pages that follow, I will highlight and explore resource rebellions against developer-dispossessors who descend from other time zones to impose on
Change is a cultural constant but the
pace of change is not. Hence the temporal contests over how to sustain, regenerate, exhaust, or
obliterate the landscape as resource become critical. More than material wealth is here at stake:
imposed official landscapes typically discount spiritualized vernacular landscapes, severing webs of
accumulated cultural meaning and treating the landscape as if it were uninhabited by the living, the unborn, and the animate deceased. The ensuing losses are
consistent with John Berger's lament over capitalism's disdain for interdependencies by
foreshortening our sense of time, thereby rendering the deceased immaterial: The living reduce
the dead to those who have lived; yet the dead already include the living in their own great
collective. Until the dehumanization of society by capitalism, all the living awaited the
experience of the dead. It was their ultimate future. By themselves the living were incomplete.
Thus living and dead were interdependent. Always. Only a uniquely modern form of egoism has
broken this interdependence. With disastrous results for the living, who now think of the
dead as the eliminated.40 Hence, one should add, our perspective on environmental asset
stripping should include among assets stripped the mingled presence in the landscape of multiple generations, with all the hindsight and foresight that
entails. Against this backdrop, I consider in this book what can be called the temporalities of place. Place is a temporal attainment
that must be constantly renegotiated in the face of changes that arrive from without and within,
some benign, others potentially ruinous. To engage the temporal displacements involved in slow
violence against the poor thus requires that we rethink questions of physical displacement as
well. In the chapters that follow, I track the socioenvironmental fallout from developmental
habitable environments unsustainable calculations about what constitutes the duration of human gain.
agendas whose primary beneficiaries live elsewhere; as when, for example, oasis dwellers in the
Persian Gulf get trucked off to unknown destinations so that American petroleum engineers and
their sheik collaborators can develop their "finds." Or when a megadam arises and (whether erected in the name of Some dictatorial
edict, the free market, structural adjustment, national development, or far-off urban or industrial need) displaces and disperses those who had developed through their
vernacular landscapes their own adaptable, if always imperfect and vulnerable, relation to riverine possibility. Paradoxically, those forcibly removed by development include
conservation refugees. Too often in the global South, conservation, driven by powerful transnational nature NGOs, combines an antidevelopmental rhetoric with the
development of finite resources for the touristic few, thereby depleting vital resources for long-term residents. (I explore this paradox more fully in Chapter 6: Stranger in the
Eco-village: Race, Tourism, and Environmental Time.) In much of what follows, I address the resistance mounted by impoverished communities who have been involuntarily
moved out of their knowledge; I address as well the powers transnational, national, and local-behind such forced removals. My angle of vision is largely through writers who
have affiliated themselves with social movements that seek to stave off one of two ruinous prospects: either the threatened community capitulates and is scattered (across
refugee camps, placeless "relocation" sites, desperate favelas, and unwelcoming foreign lands), or the community refuses to move but, as its world is undermined, effectively
becomes a community of refugees in place. What I wish to stress here, then, are not just those communities that are involuntarily (and often militarily) relocated to less
I want to propose a more radical
notion of displacement, one that, instead of referring solely to the movement of people from
their places of belonging, refers rather to the loss of the land and resources beneath them, a loss
that leaves communities stranded in a place stripped of the very characteristics that made
it inhabitable.
hospitable environs, but also those affected by what I call displacement without moving. In other words,
Alternative text: the judge should vote negative to endorse an ethic of social
flesh
An ethic of social flesh foregrounds embodied interdependence, substituting
an ecological view of relationships for the aff’s commodity thinking – only the
alternative can produce ethical institutional decisionmaking
Beasley & Bacchi 7
(Chris, Prof. of Politics @ University of Adelaide, Carol, Prof. Emeritus @ University of Adelaide,
“Envisaging a new politics for an ethical future: Beyond trust, care and generosity -- towards an
ethic of `social flesh'”, Feminist Theory, 2007 8: 279)
The political vocabulary of social flesh has significant implications for democratic visions. Because
it conceptualizes citizens as socially embodied – as interconnected mutually reliant flesh – in a
more thoroughgoing sense than the languages of trust, care, responsibility and generosity, it resists
accounts of political change as making transactions between the ‘less fortunate’ and ‘more
privileged’, more trusting, more caring, more responsible or more generous. Social flesh is political
metaphor in which fleshly sociality is profoundly levelling. As a result, it challenges meliorist
reforms that aim to protect the ‘vulnerable’ from the worst effects of social inequality, including the
current distribution of wealth. A political ethic of embodied intersubjectivity requires us to
consider fleshly interconnection as the basis of a democratic sociality, demanding a rather more
far-reaching reassessment of national and international institutional arrangements than
political vocabularies that rest upon extending altruism. Relatedly, it provides a new basis for
thinking about the sorts of institutional arrangements necessary to acknowledge social fleshly
existence, opening up ‘the scope of what counts as relevant’ (Shildrick, 2001: 238). For example, it
allows a challenge to current conceptualizations that construct attention to the ‘private sphere’ as
compensatory rather than as necessary (Beasley and Bacchi, 2000: 350). We intend to pursue the
relationship between social flesh and democratic governance in future papers. Conclusion In this
paper we focus on various vocabularies of social interconnection intended to offer a challenge to
the ethos of atomistic individualism associated with neo-liberalism and develop a new ethical ideal
called ‘social flesh’. Despite significant differences in the several vocabularies canvassed in this
paper, we note that most of the trust and care writers conceive the social reform of atomistic
individualism they claim to address in terms of a presumed moral or ethical deficiency within the
disposition of individuals. Hence, they reinstate the conception of the independent active self in
certain ways. Moreover, there is a disturbing commonality within all these accounts: an ongoing
conception of asymmetrical power relations between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’, ‘carers’ and ‘cared for’,
‘altruistic’ and ‘needy’. While widely used terms like trust and care clearly remain vocabularies
around which social debate may be mobilized, and hence are not to be dismissed (see Pocock,
2006), we suggest that there are important reasons for questioning their limits and their claims to
offer progressive alternative understandings of social life. In this setting, we offer the concept of
social flesh as a way forward in rethinking the complex nature of the interaction between
subjectivity, embodiment, intimacy, social institutions and social interconnection. Social flesh
generalizes the insight that trusting/caring/ altruistic practices already take place on an ongoing
basis to insist that the broad, complex sustenance of life that characterizes embodied subjectivity
and intersubjective existence be acknowledged. As an ethico-political starting point, ‘social flesh’
highlights human embodied interdependence. By drawing attention to shared embodied
reliance, mutual reliance, of people across the globe on social space, infrastructure and resources, it
offers a decided challenge to neo-liberal conceptions of the autonomous self and removes the
social distance and always already given distinction between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’. There is no sense
here of ‘givers’ and ‘receivers’; rather we are all recognized as receivers of socially generated goods
and services. Social flesh also marks our diversity, challenging the privileging of normative over
‘other’ bodies. Finally, because social flesh necessarily inhabits a specific geographical space,
environmentalist efforts to preserve that space take on increased salience (Macken, 2004: 25). By
these means, the grounds are created for defending a politics beyond assisting the ‘less fortunate’.
Social flesh, therefore, refuses the residues of ‘noblesse oblige’ that still appear to linger in
emphasis upon vulnerability and altruism within the apparently reformist ethical ideals of
trust/respect, care, responsibility and even generosity. In so doing it puts into question the social
privilege that produces inequitable vulnerability and the associated need for ‘altruism’. Vital
debates about appropriate distribution of social goods, environmental politics, professional and
institutional power and democratic processes are reopened.
Extra links
Ocean mapping reproduces a neoliberal approach towards oceans – the plan’s
spatial mapping commodifies the marine environment, allowing statistical
visualization of hidden ocean life to accelerate consumption
Olson 10
(Julia Olson, department member of Northeast Fisheries Science Center, “Seeding nature, ceding
culture: Redefining the boundaries of the marine commons through spatial management and GIS,”
Geoforum, 2010)
The inability to fix resources in space has been at the heart of many understandings of common
property. Mobile resources such as fish have given rise to particularly intractable common-pool
problems, for their mobility implies a lack of “excludability (or control of access). That is, the
physical nature of the resource is such that controlling access by potential users may be costly and,
in the extreme, virtually impossible” (Feeny et al., 1990, p. 3). Not only do fish move but, at least in
conventional accounts, so do mobile fishermen, ever seeking highest profit in a rationalist
movement through space (e.g. Sanchirico and Wilen, 1999). There are of course fissures in this
story, even for such seemingly mobile resources as fish. While rotational management is argued
particularly appropriate for semi-sedentary species such as scallops (e.g. Hart, 2003), others
similarly contend that locally diverse sub-species, like populations of cod in Norway that follow the
ebb and flow of particular fjords and inlets, necessitate more locally-based science and
management (e.g. Jorde et al., 2007). Fishermen too, while often portrayed as opportunistically
mobile, may have multiple rationalities that inform their fishing practices, including their spatial
decision-making (Olson, 2006). My point here is not to counter movement with an equally mythical
lack of movement, but rather to ask how forms of resource use—here especially, fishing or farming
the ocean—involve culturally constructed subjectivities, networks of social relations, and
spatially grounded knowledge and practice. In the case of contemporary fisheries management,
these subjectivities, relations, and knowledge and practice are now increasingly mediated through
technologies like GIS. While mapping and counter-mapping have become more intertwined with
stories of common property in general, the case of fisheries poses a double sort of enigma, for not
only is there the issue of mobility and excludability in space but there is also the question of
visualization, or lack thereof. In Hardin’s classic account of the tragedy of the commons, for
example, he asked that we “Picture a pasture open to all” (1968: 1244, italics added), where the
herders, herds, and resource degradation are palpable and countable. For fisheries management
however, this has not been such an easy task. The inability to see what is happening has in part
structured the orientation of both fisheries management and biology: stock assessment is a
statistical exercise in estimating hidden populations, while management tries to reconcile its
strategies around fishermen who might cheat without being seen. Fisheries management, however,
has recently begun to take a distinctly visual turn through the use of GIS and other spatial
techniques for understanding and monitoring where different resources are and how they are
used—not only supporting policy analyses from habitat classification and protection of essential
fish habitat, to the social and economic impacts of closed areas ( Meaden, 2000, NOAA, 2004 and St.
Martin, 2004), but also coupled to increasing interest in spatially-based methods of management.
What tends to be missing, however, is an appreciation of arguments raised within geography and
other social sciences that critique the use of GIS as technologically or socially neutral, or which have
conversely grappled with how to use GIS for qualitative and critical approaches to social
knowledge.1 The presumed neutrality and objectivity of GIS in fisheries management has not only
assumed a sense of “space that is broadly taken for granted in Western societies—our naïvely
assumed sense of space as emptiness” (Smith and Katz, 1993, p. 75), but has also tended to
privilege universal understandings. Thus while the fishery management process has begun to
incorporate spatially sensitive analyses into its development of area-based management, such
incorporation has utilized neoliberal constructions of the typical fisherman that are challenged
by more nuanced notions of fishing and resource dependence. New directions in the mapping of
scallops that focus on crucial habitat and life cycle issues, for example, promise changes both in the
science underlying fisheries management and in management itself by better directing fishing
effort to particular places and by better understanding the conditions for resource enhancement
through seeding, which at first glance recalls the warnings from early GIS critics that digital maps
would serve to create or reinforce relations of power through the discovery of new things or
people to exploit (Schuurman, 2000, p. 580). Yet as this reframing of resources from fishing to
farming intersects with an increasing interest in aquaculture (where the idea of farming is
obviously more explicit), it becomes clear that while ideas about property can be more easily
enrolled into neoliberal discourses that commodify resource relations, transformations from fishing
to farming also enable alternative projects through their articulation with cultural practices and
processes. This includes the differential spatial practices of often smaller-scale fishermen as well
as community-based interests in scallop seeding, who have sought—quite literally—to sow the
seeds of community stability and, in the process, resist and redefine the terms of neoliberal market
logic. This paper thus considers the differing worldviews, practices, and spatialities among and
between so-called highliners and small-scale fishermen, fishers and farmers of scallops, different
resource-users and the scientists who map them, and the radically new forms of economic practice
and sustainability that inhere, potentially, in different uses and forms of maps and spatial
knowledge, looking in particular at US Federal management of Sea Scallops, a Canadian example of
a private-state partnership, and community-based seeding efforts in Downeast Maine.
Neoliberal spatial planning ensures error replication because it reduces the
ocean to human representations of it – be suspicious of their impacts because
they reduce ecological relations to commodity relations
Steinberg 13
(Philip E. Steinberg 13 – PhD from Clark University & Professor of Critical Geography at Florida
State University , “Of the seas: metaphors and materialities in maritime regions”, Atlantic Studies:
Global Currents, Volume 10, Number 2, 4/29/2013)
Ocean region studies have their origins in an explicit questioning of the assumption that the landbased region is the appropriate scope for conducting social analysis. In History departments, in
particular, where academic positions are routinely connected with a specific region and a specific
era (e.g. nineteenth-century Latin Americanist), scholars who have sought to define regions by
oceans of interaction rather than continents of settlement and governance have had to directly
challenge the disciplinary establishment.36 And yet, the regionalization of the sea itself is rarely
interrogated. As Martin Lewis demonstrates, the boundaries, definitions, and namings of ocean
regions have been highly variable (and, at times, quite arbitrary).37 Likewise, the lines that divide
ocean regions on a contemporary legal map of the sea defining territorial waters, contiguous zones,
exclusive economic zones, the High Seas, etc. hide as much as they obscure. From the Papal Bull
of 1493 that purportedly divided the ocean between Spain and Portugal to the zones ascribed to the
ocean by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), the history of the ocean is
filled with attempts to mark off its spaces, if not as claimable territory then at least as zones where
certain activities, by certain actors, are permitted and others are prohibited. And yet, even
when the locations of the lines are clear and communicated (which, in fact, is often not the case),
their meanings are worked out only through social practices. In particular, because the ocean is
characterized by overlapping zonations (from the legal regions prescribed by UNCLOS to cultural
understandings of regional seas to zones of geophysical interactivity and animal migrations), efforts
at understanding an ocean event or image by ‘‘locating’’ it in an ocean region are likely to rest on
simplified notions of the relationship between boundaries and events. More often than not,
the definition and boundaries of an ocean region are defined by how it is practiced through the
reproduction of a regional assemblage, and not the other way around.38 In short, just as oceanregion-based studies must take heed of the uniquely fluvial nature of the ocean that lies at the
center of an ocean region, so they must also account for the fluidity of the lines that are drawn
around and within the region. Again, this is not a problem unique to maritime regions; many pages
in geography textbooks have been written that expound on where the boundaries of a specific
region are (or where they should be), while more enlightened scholars have stressed that such
questions cannot be answered objectively. Nonetheless, here too the ocean is an extreme case: lines
drawn in and around ocean regions often take on an out- sized level of authority because they are
so self-evidently divorced from the matter that is experienced by those who actually inhabit the
environment. In the ocean, humans’ ability to physically transform space through line drawing is
exceptionally limited.39 Therefore, lines in the ocean speak not with the authority of a
geophysicality that cannot be fully grasped but with the authority of a juridical system that
conceivably can.40 The danger, then, is that the maritime region, although born out of a critique of
the idea that the world consists of stable, bounded places where ‘‘society’’ is an explanatory
variable, could itself emerge as an organizing trope that, through geographic shorthand, obscures
the contested and dynamic nature of social processes and functions. As an ‘‘inside-out’’ version
of the continental region, such a maritime region, like the faux-heterotopic cruise ship critiqued by
Harvey, would reverse our sense of the elements and highlight some social processes (connections,
migrations) over others (state-formation, settlement), but it would fall short of a fundamental
epistemological revolution. ‘‘And what,’’ to quote Harvey again, ‘‘is the critical, liberatory and
emancipatory point of that?’’41 Geographers have long struggled with this problem: How can the
region be employed as a concept for understanding interactions and processes (within and across
its borders) without assigning it existential, pre-social properties of explana- tion? In their attempts
at finding solutions, geographers have turned to a range of philosophical and mathematical
approaches. Some have emphasized the ways in which space is co-constitutive with time while
others have sought to adopt a topological perspective in which scale (and the attendant property of
spatiality) is always both internal and external to the object being ‘‘located,’’ so that different scales
cannot be ordered in a hierarchical, stable manner.42 There are potentially fruitful overlaps
between this dynamic approach to space (and borders and regions) and the Lagrangian approach to
fluid dynamics outlined in the previous section of this paper. In both instances, scholars abandon
attempts at finding stable metrics that can fix and organize spaces and the activities that transpire
within and instead turn their attention to the processes that are continually constructing spatial
patterns, social institutions, and socio-natural hybrids. As I have 162 P.E. Steinberg Downloaded by
[Harvard Library] at 06:57 15 July 2014 discussed, this approach is particularly pertinent to the
study of ocean regions. By turning to the fluidity of the ocean that lies in the middle of the ocean
region, we can gain new perspectives not just on the space that unites the region but on space itself
and how it is produced (and reproduces itself) within the dynamics of spatial assemblages.
Looking at the world from an ocean-region-based perspective thus becomes a means not just for
highlighting a new series of global processes and connections, but a means for transforming the
way we view the world as a whole.
Link to cap
Kannen et al. 13 (Andreas Kannen, is scientist in the department ‘Human Dimension of Coastal Areas’ in the Institute for Coastal
Research at Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht, Germany “Renewable Energy and Marine Spatial Planning: Scientific and Legal Implications” The
Regulation of Continental Shelf Development: Rethinking International Standards. COLP Series, 2013)
Aside from conflicts with other demands for using sea space, the main consequence of offshore wind farming is that it creates large-scale fixed
structures in an environment that has so far been largely devoid of such structures. it also creates demand for marine spatial planning, which is
increasingly called upon I to allocate sea uses to maximize spatial efficiency, reduce conflicts between sea uses and maintain the ecological
integrity of the environment, which is discussed in the next section of this paper. One
of the underexposed sconsequences of
offshore wind farming is that it is changing the way of thinking about sea space altogether.35 Industrial
uses such as offshore wind farming essentially regard the sea as an extension of the main- land, as
free space that is available for development as long as the technology to do so is available and
affordable. This is in line with the marine spatial planning perspective, which also regards the sea as
space to be allocated and used, I albeit as sustainably, efficiently and conflict-free as possible. This “industrialization of
the sea", however, marks an inescapable turning point in that the formerly ‘empty’ sea is now visibly
built on. This fundamental re-casting of the sea as just another available space forces humans to re-evaluate some of the more traditional
images we hold of the sea such as that of the sea as a largely natural place.“ An important question is how compatible an
industrial perspective such as offshore wind is with these other views of the sea, and how compatible
the rational spatial perspective is with more emotional views of the sea as a place. A recent study from
Scotland has shown that fishermen’s perspective on the sea is distinctly not spatial, but place-based as they report a particular sense of
belonging to the sea and responsibility for it.” A study on the German West coast of Schleswig-Holstein has also shown tht place-based
perspectives play an important role in generating sense of place. Asked about their spontaneous associations with the sea, local residents name
aspects as diverse as the physical environment, wildlife, nature, fishing, recreation, summer sun, sea food, land reclamation, storm surges,
pollution, vastness or a sense of freedom. Aesthetic perspectives, informal recreational benefits derived from being by the sea and symbolic
meanings associated with the sea were found to be particularly important in generating a sense of well-being.
Imperialism K link
Abstract spatiality and mapping is codeterminate with the functioning of the sovereign
and imperial order
Steinberg 09 (Philip E., Ph.D., Professor of Geography at Durham University, “Sovereignty, Territory,
and the Mapping of Mobility: A View from the Outside” Published in June 18, 2009 in Annals of the
Association of American Geographers, Volume 99, Issue 3, pages 467-495,
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00045600902931702#.U8hY2fldV0o, CH)
As Sack (1986) notes, at an advanced stage of territoriality, space is viewed so abstractly that it becomes
“conceptually emptiable” (and fillable) by an authority looking down from above. Combining Sack’s image with
Giddens’s (1985) depiction of the state as a power container, the territorial state can be conceived of as a container that
can be emptied and filled, and the contents of which can be rearranged across its points in space. From this
perspective, places are perceived of as distinct, but relative, points on the global grid that achieve social character as groups of people
transform their local nature. Eventually, these societies evolve into states that are “filled in” and “developed” through the location of
production activities at fixed points within these state-areas (Bohannan 1964; Soja 1971, 1980; Burch 1994; Steinberg and McDowell 2003). A
key concept here, as stressed by Sahlins (1989), is that the
rise of the territorial state is characterized not simply by the
construction of its bounded territory as a homogenous administrative zone (as Sahlins charges that Allies` [1980]
and Gottman [1973] emphasize), but that the territorial state constructs its space as a differentiated set of points
that are amenable to being plotted (and thus manipulated and rationalized) against an abstract spatial
grid (see also T. Mitchell 1991). Historically, the development of technologies and institutions for performing
cadastral mapping and land surveying stand out as mechanisms through which the state has achieved a
“bird’s-eye” view over territory as a means toward achieving social control over people (Bohannan 1964; Kain
and Baigent 1992; Vandergeest and Peluso 1995; Edney 1997; Scott 1998; Biggs 1999). Thus, Biggs (1999) locates the origins of the
territorial state in national surveying efforts of the seventeenth century. As surveyors mapped royal
domains, they graphically noted each village’s affiliation. What had been thought of as a personal
relationship came to be expressed as a territorial relationship, and, at the same time, surveyors imposed
a grid of abstract space over the domain to facilitate mapping. Eventually, these two phenomena
associated with surveying converged in an example of what Pickles (2003) calls “overcoding”: The
abstract, geometric space of the map came to define the lived in space of the state, and the territorial
relationship between land and sovereign came to be seen as predicating the personal relationship
between individual and sovereign. Other scholars have further illustrated the relationship between the
way that we hierarchically map space and the way that we hierarchically organize social relationships.
Knowledge of space is a crucial tool for control, and the technologies of mapping (and the underlying
assumptions about society and space that enable modern mapping), joined with hierarchical systems for
drawing lines and assigning names, play a crucial role in constructing instruments of sovereign
domination (Akerman 1984, 1995; Carter 1987; Buisseret 1992; Ryan 1996; Edney 1997; Brotton 1998; Burnett 2000; Craib 2000; Hakli¨
2001; Harley 2001; Pickles 2003; Jacob 2006).4 In short, these scholars emphasize the key role that the ordering of
space plays in the construction of state territoriality. This is an important advance over a perspective that simply looks at the
bounding of space, but, as Strandsbjerg (2008) notes, these scholars of the cartographic origins of modern state sovereignty still tend to analyze
the state as an isolated unit. Given that the modern institution of sovereignty necessarily exists within a system of sovereign units, a study of
the modern state (or a story of its origins) that works only from the perspective of the inward-looking aspect of sovereignty cannot be
complete. As Taylor (1995) asserts, the starting point of political geography (and political history) must be a theory of the states rather than a
theory of the state. In a similar vein, geographies and histories of territoriality (or the ordering of space) must examine not just the “emptiable”
and “fillable” space constructed inside the territories of sovereign states but also the spaces
ontheoutsidethataredesignatedasnotbeingamenable to this organization of space. Otherwise, any study of state territoriality risks falling into
the “territorial trap” wherein states are viewed as internally coherent units, existing ontologically prior to the overall ordering of the state
system, and wherein cross-border processes can be viewed only as “international relations” among these preexisting states (Agnew 1994; see
also Sparke 2005). I am asserting here that the same “mapping” of space that permits (and is expressed by) the surveying of a national border
to define an inside also defines an outside by making possible the conceptualization of a world of equivalent states existing next to each other
in relative space. Indeed, for Walker (1993) and Bartelson (1995) , the discursive and material division of the world into insides and outsides is
perhaps the fundamental act of sovereignty. The outside is not simply the residual space remaining after declaring an inside. If that is the
prevailing image of the outside, it is an image that is itself constructed in tandem with the construction of a particular image of the inside. For
instance, the discourse of “containment” that prevailed during the Cold War was based on the idea of the state as a container set against a
potentially threatening environment, even though this environment (or outside) was itself the territory of other sovereign states that were
constructing similar discourses about themselves and their neighbors ( Chilton 1996). Similarly, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries,
the dominant image of the ocean as an “outside” beyond the universe of state-civilizations
provided a pretext for banning all social actors operating from this outside space. Yet this representation
of the ocean was itself a construction of, and within, a system: The idealization of the ocean as the
ultimate outside, beyond civilization, bolstered the construction of the rest of the world—the universe
of territorial states—as sovereign insides (Thomson 1994; Steinberg 2001). At the global scale, this division of the
world into “insides” that matter and “outsides” that serve to facilitate development of the “insides”
typically is achieved through reference to geophysical properties. In particular, the division of the world
into fundamental elements—land and sea—is viewed as the originary act of the modern socio-spatial
order (Schmitt 2006b). Connery thus directs attention specifically to changing representations of the sea as a means toward understanding
the political division and appropriation of land: “The triumph of a particular oceanic signification is coterminous with
the universalization of land concepts, a signification that, thanks to the liquid element itself, leaves no
borders, furrows, or markings” (Connery 2001, 177).