Anthro K
1nc Shells
Policy
Humans are putting massive amounts of toxic minerals and chemicals into the ocean, and
the effects are being felt all around the world. No animal is safe.
Bender 3 (Frederic L. Bender is the author of “The Culture of Extinction: Towards the Philosophy of Deep Ecology”, published in 2003, the book from whence this card
came, on pages 55-58. He also holds the following degrees: Professor of Philosophy. BS, Polytechnic University of New York; MA, PhD, Northwestern University. He further teaches at
the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. Need I say more?)
The ocean, covering 70 percent of the planet's surface, absorbs atmospheric gases, including CO2, buffering what would otherwise be drastic
global warming. It also sustains half the planet's biomass. Yet today the ocean must absorb vastly more silt from the land
than before the rise of agriculture. It also must handle the rapid increase in chemically contaminated sewage sludge,
industrial effluent, chemical runoff from agriculture, and other human wastes. Every year, hundreds of tons of new
synthetic chemicals, for which there is no evolutionary history or built-in adaptation, flow down to the seas. Oceanic
mercury contaminations, for example, are now two-and-a-half times their preindustrial levels; manganese four times;
zinc, copper, and lead about twelve times; antimony thirty times; and phosphorus eighty times. 90 We know next to
nothing about these wastes' potential impact upon marine ecosystems, either singly or synergistically. We do know, however,
that they concentrate as they rise upward through marine food chains, with devastating impact on top predators. Since ocean
currents circulate globally, no part of the ocean is exempt from pollution; scientists have found DDT in the fat of
Antarctic penguins, thousands of miles from its nearest point source, and have detected manufactured toxins even in
the deep ocean trenches.91
The alternative is an ethic of biocentrism - A complete rejection of anthropocentrism is
necessary.
King ’97 [1997, Roger King is has a Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics from the University of
Reading in England, where he was on the faculty until resigning He has received multiple
fellowships from Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
“Critical Reflections on Biocentric Environmental Ethics: Is It an Alternative to
Anthropocentrism?” Space, place, and environmental ethic, pg. 215-216]
Without denying that anthropocentrism can become much more environmentally informed and
sophisticated, there are still several reasons for suspicion that motivate biocentric ethics. First, it
might be argued that without a radical shift in attitudes and beliefs about the value of nonhuman
nature, narrowly conceived and short-term human interests will continue to prevail at the
expense of the environment. Our sense of difference from and superiority to nonhuman nature is
so fundamental to our cultural outlook, it might be argued, that nothing short of a shift to a
biocentric standpoint will be sufficient to protect even human needs and interests. From this
standpoint, it is essential to develop and adopt a biocentric environmental ethic even in order to
promote human rights or preference satisfaction. A second argument is that anthropocentrism
simply fails to articulate the experience of many human beings. Just as many men and women
care about their fellow human beings, respect human rights, and hope to minimize human
suffering, so too they care about what happens to domesticated and wild animals, natural
ecosystems, and the planet as a whole. And while some may see their moral concern as entirely
derivative from their concern for human beings, in the Kantian fashion, many others value
nonhuman nature for its own sake and not for the sake of other human beings. The
phenomenological reality of this experience and the potential for expanding it justifies efforts to
articulate an environmental ethic that does not ultimately reduce value to some derivative of
human rights and preferences. A third argument in favor of abandoning anthropocentric ethics is
a practical one. If the goal of public policy is simply the satisfaction of human interests, then the
resolution of policy conflicts reduces to a balancing of human rights and utilities. In such
circumstances, environmental policy may tend to provide less protection both to nature and to
human beings than might have been achieved by a biocentric ethic. Eric Katz and Lauren Oechsli
have suggested that if the intrinsic value of nonhumans is granted by the parties in policy
conflicts, then resolution of the conflicts will also take into account the consequences for nature."
Christopher Stone has defended the idea of granting natural entities legal standing on the grounds
that unless the natural entity is represented in court proceedings, it is unlikely to benefit directly
from damages awarded or reparations imposed by the courts." In sum, the skepticism about
anthropocentrism lies in the concern that the definition of costs and benefits will inevitably skew
moral deliberations in a self-serving, anthropocentric direction unless we can develop a
satisfactory biocentric environmental ethics.
Without this rejection, specieism through the lens of biopolitics becomes inevitable – mass
murdering the non-human other
Wolfe ’13 (Cary Wolfe, University of Chicago Press, 2013, “Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a
Biopolitical Frame”)
We are returned, then, not just to the thanatopolitical site of the camps that takes center stage in Agamben’s work, and not just to the question of
the biopolitical status of Nazism, but also to the central function of race—and by extension, species--in modern biopolitics. As is well
known, Foucault explores this topic in the lectures from 1975-6 collected in “Society Must Be Defended.” Racism,
as Foucault notes, creates “caesuras within the biological continuum addressed by biopower”; it is “a way of
fragmenting the field of the biological that power controls” so that some populations may be killed or allowed to
die—what Foucault bluntly calls “indirect murder.”137 “In a normalizing society,” he writes, “race or racism is the
precondition that makes killing acceptable.”138 And it has a second function, he argues: “the death of the bad race,
of the inferior race (or the degenerate, the abnormal) is something that will make life in general healthier: healthier
and purer.”139 As we have seen, Esposito’s immunitary paradigm seizes upon and develops this realization by Foucault, but the point I want
to emphasize here is Foucault’s recognition that you can’t talk about biopolitics without talking about race, and you can’t talk
about race without talking about species, simply because both categories—as history well shows—are so notoriously
pliable and unstable, constantly bleeding into and out of each other. Exhibit A here, of course, is the analogy
between humans and animals that characterizes much of the literature on the Holocaust. As is well known, the word
means “burnt offering” and was taken from the Greek word holokauston, which referred to the ancient practice of
sacrificing animals.140 And even more well known, perhaps, is that fact that a common refrain of those subjected to
the violence of the camps is that “we were treated like animals.”141 But as Esposito’s bracing analysis of Nazi genocide shows,
the mainspring of this process cannot exactly be said to be the “animalization” pure and simple of the Jews and other victims : More than
“bestializing” man, as is commonly thought, [Nazism] “anthropologized’ the animal, enlarging the definition of
anthropos to the point where it also comprised animals of inferior species. He who was the object of persecution and
extreme violence wasn’t simply an animal (which was indeed respected and protected as such by one of the most
advanced pieces of legislation of the entire world), but was an animal-man. . . . [T]he regime promulgated a circular that
prohibited any kind of cruelty to animals, in particular with reference to cold, to heat, and to the inoculation of pathogenic germs. Considering the
zeal with which the Nazis respected their own laws, this means that if those interned in the extermination camps had been considered to be only
animals, they would have been saved.142 While Esposito overstates his case here (as Singer points out, following Boria Sax’s extensive work on
the topic, the Nazis routinely conducted painful and even brutal experiments on animals such as primates143), his analysis does have the virtue of
complicating our understanding of the relationship between the human/animal distinction and the bios/zoe doublet of biopolitics (a point I’ll
return to in more detail below). And with this more complicated conceptual topography in mind, we can revisit the “animal Holocaust” analogy
that has been widely used to describe our treatment of animals in factory farming and biomedical testing. Jacques Derrida is particularly
forceful on this point in his later work, where he pulls no punches in criticizing “this violence that some would
compare to the worst cases of genocide,” a genocide made even more perverse by the fact that millions of animals
are “exterminated by means of their continued existence or even their overpopulation.” Derrida (an Algerian Jew) is well
aware of the complexities of the analogy here, of course, and he reminds us that “one should neither abuse the figure of genocide nor too quickly
consider it explained away.”144 Indeed, his ending observation—“by means of their continued existence”—points us toward some importance
differences between the two cases that Esposito will explore as well. For example, in the Nazi camps, we find those who had been
citizens, members of the community, now stripped of every legal protection and right by means of the declaration of
a “state of exception,” whereas in the factory farm, we find those who never were members of the community
nevertheless afforded at least some minimal protection (as in humane slaughter laws, for example), even if those
laws are in fact minimally enforced.145 Similarly, the “animal Holocaust” of factory farming does not abide by the
logic of genocide per se, since the minimal conditions of genocide agreed upon by most scholars are that a sovereign
state declares an intention to kill a particular homogeneous group not for economic or political reasons but rather
because of that group’s biological constitution, and that such a project of killing is potentially complete, resulting in
the extermination of all members of the targeted group.146 Indeed, this is part of what makes the “animal Holocaust” not just
horrible but in an important sense perverse—what Derrida calls a “virtually interminable survival, in conditions that previous
generations would have judged monstrous, outside of every presumed norm of a life proper to animals .”147 And this
“interminable survival” leads, in turn, to a massive difference in sheer scale between the two cases, as nearly ten billion animals are
raised for food each year in the US, the vast majority of them in factory farms. In fact, nine hundred million of these
animals each year never even make it to the slaughterhouse for their merciful end, because they die first of stress,
disease, or injury.148 At the same time, it hardly needs pointing out that the practices of modern biopolitics have forged themselves in the
common subjection and management of both human and animal bodies—a fact brought very sharply into focus in scholarship that examines the
analogies between the technological manipulation of life in the factory farm and in the Nazi camps . As one writer notes, “the methods
of the Holocaust exist today in the form of factory farming where billions of innocent, feeling being are taken from
their families, trucked hundreds of miles through all weather extremes, confined in cramped, filthy conditions and
herded to their deaths.”149 As another points out, “American eugenics and assembly-line slaughter crossed the
Atlantic Ocean and found fertile ground in Nazi Germany.”150 In fact, the assembly line processes used to kill Jews
in Nazi Germany derived from production models originally developed by Henry Ford (a notorious anti-Semite),
who in turn reveals in his autobiography that the inspiration for his assembly-line method came from a visit to a
Chicago slaughterhouse and witnessing its mechanized disassembly line for making meat out of animal carcasses.151
From the vantage of a Foucauldian biopolitics, then, we are forced to conclude that current practices of factory farming
and the like – while crucially different from the logic of the holocaust and of genocide in the ways I have just noted
– constitute just some embarrassing sideline of modern life that has nothing to do with politics proper, and which can
be well regulated by an adjacent set of anti-cruely laws that do not intersect with politics as such in any fundamental way. Rather, such
practices must be seen not just as political but as in face consitutively political for biopolitics in its modern form.
Indeed, the practices of maximizing control over life and death, of “making live” in Foucault’s words, through
eugenics, artificial insemination and selective breeding, pharmaceutical enhancement, inoculation, and the like are
on display in the modern factory farm as perhaps nowhere else in biopolitical history. It can hardly be debated, I think, that
“the animal” is, today – and on a scale unprecedented in human history – the site of the very ur-form of that dispositif and the face of its
unchecked, nightmarish effects.
Anthropocentric views exploit resources far enough to push life to extinction
Perrson ‘8 [2008, Erik Persson is a philosophy professor at Lunds University, What is Wrong with Extinction:
The Answer from Anthropocentric Instrumentalism, “Anthropocentric Instrumentalism,”
http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&recordOId=961058&fileOId=975952]
2.3.3. Materials and fuel Many of the materials we use in our daily lives come from living organisms. 43 Most
notably wood that is used in everything from paper towels to houses, but also plenty of other materials. 44 Wood
and other organic products are also important as fuel. 45 More than half of the fuel used in developing countries
comes from wood. In some countries like Tanzania and Uganda, wood comprises four fifths of the fuel. Even in
industrialised countries, wood is an important source of energy. In the relatively densely forested Sweden, it makes
up 17% of the energy consumption.46 Bio fuel is a renewable energy source that many people see as an important
alternative to the present non-renewables. In many respects, the harvesting of other species for material is similar to
harvesting them for food. One difference is that once the material is extracted, it can be used for a longer period of
time. Once food is eaten, it is gone and we need a new harvest. One might think that this makes the pressure on the
supplying species smaller when it comes to material, but unfortunately it is not so. The demand for materials that we
find valuable is often close to insatiable, and our use of material resources is usually very wasteful. Many species
have disappeared and even more are threatened as a result of our “hunger” for materials. The use of wood as fuel,
paper pulp, timber, etc. has e.g. led to the cutting down of a large portion of the world’s forests. The rainforest in
particular. The latter is the world’s riches ecosystem, and many other species have been brought down in the fall.
Cutting down the rain forest, both in order to exploit the trees, and in order to make room for agriculture, might even
be the most important cause of extinction today. Apart from wood, a number of animal and plant species are directly
threatened because we value some material they supply. The use of wild animal products is in fact the primary factor
behind the endangerment of many vertebrate species. 47 Ivory and rhinoceros horns e.g. have been very popular
among human beings. This popularity has nearly caused the extinction of both elephants and rhinoceroses. 48 Some
other species have already disappeared because they have turned out to give us useful materials. 49 Maybe this can
be explained as an effect of irrationality rather than as something that follows from anthropocentric
instrumentalism? We are quite often very irrational in our use of resources, but I am not sure all cases of extinction
due to our utilisation of the species can be explained this way. We discussed this problem briefly in the last subchapter when we talked about food and pointed out that there are probably cases where it is in fact rational from a
strict anthropocentric point of view to use our sources of nutrient in such a way that some species go extinct. This is
probably, at least sometimes, also the case with material and fuel. There is another aspect of the use of other species
as material or fuel that we have to take a closer look at. When discussing food, I mentioned that it might not always
be irrational from an anthropocentric point of view to exploit a species to such a degree that it goes extinct. This
may also be the case when we talk about material and fuel. This conclusion is difficult to establish however. Marian
Radetzki believes that there are some identifiable cases where extinction has had negative economic effects. One
such case is the over-fishing of cod in the north Atlantic. He does not believe that this is always the case however.
50 As we saw, some sources of nutrient can e.g. be substituted by other sources of nutrient. This is also the case with
other resources such as materials of different kinds: One material can often be substituted by another that does the
same job – maybe even better than the original. 51 The possibility of substituting a resource is an important issue in
this discussion. The possibility of substituting one material for another is usually overrated by economists due to the
fact that in economic terms, everything is per definition replaceable by the right amount of anything else. This is of
course not the case in the real world. None the less, materials are constantly replaced by other materials and this is
something that has to be accounted for when we decide whether a certain species is expendable. This argument goes
both ways however: It is also possible to substitute material and fuel from non-living nature with material and fuel
from living organisms.
Kritikal
The aff isolates itself from “nature”, valuing “nature” as separate and above our siblings
and half siblings
KINGSNORTH ed dir of DARK MOUNTAIN & HINE co-founder and managing editor of DARK MOUNTAIN 2k9
Paul- & Dougald; Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto; Summer; http://dark-mountain.net/about/manifesto/
The myth of progress is founded on the myth of nature. The first tells us that we are destined for greatness; the second tells us that
greatness is cost-free. Each
is intimately bound up with the other. Both tell us that we are apart from the world; that we
very
fact that we have a word for ‘nature’ is [5] evidence that we do not regard ourselves as part of it. Indeed, our
separation from it is a myth integral to the triumph of our civilisation. We are, we tell ourselves, the only species
ever to have attacked nature and won. In this, our unique glory is contained. We imagined ourselves isolated from
the source of our existence. The fallout from this imaginative error is all around us : a quarter of the world’s mammals are
began grunting in the primeval swamps, as a humble part of something called ‘nature’, which we have now triumphantly subdued. The
threatened with imminent extinction; an acre and a half of rainforest is felled every second; 75% of the world’s fish stocks are on the verge of
collapse; humanity consumes 25% more of the world’s natural ‘products’ than the Earth can replace — a figure predicted to rise to 80% by midcentury. Even through the deadening lens of statistics, we can glimpse the violence to which our myths have driven us. These are
the facts, or some of them. Yet facts never tell the whole story. (‘Facts’, Conrad wrote, in Lord Jim, ‘as if facts could prove anything.’) The
facts of environmental crisis we hear so much about often conceal as much as they expose. We hear daily about the
impacts of our activities on ‘the environment’ (like ‘nature’, this is an expression which distances us from the reality of
our situation). Daily we hear, too, of the many ‘solutions’ to these problems: solutions which usually involve the
necessity of urgent political agreement and a judicious application of human technological genius. Things may be
changing, runs the narrative, but there is nothing we cannot deal with here , folks. We perhaps need to move faster,
more urgently. Certainly we need to accelerate the pace of research and development. We accept that we must
become more ‘sustainable’. But everything will be fine. There will still be growth, there will still be progress: these
things will continue, because they have to continue, so they cannot do anything but continue. There is nothing to see
here. Everything will be fine. We do not believe that everything will be fine. We are not even sure, based on current definitions of
progress and improvement, that we want it to be. Of all humanity’s delusions of difference, of its separation from and
superiority to the living world which surrounds it, one distinction holds up better than most: we may well be the first
species capable of effectively eliminating life on Earth. This is a hypothesis we seem intent on putting to the test. We are already
responsible for denuding the world of much of its richness, magnificence, beauty, colour and magic, and we show no sign of slowing
down. For a very long time, we imagined that ‘nature’ was something that happened elsewhere. The damage we did
to it might be regrettable, but needed to be weighed against the benefits here and now. And in the worst case
scenario, there would always be some kind of Plan B. Perhaps we would make for the moon, where we could survive in lunar
colonies under giant bubbles as we planned our expansion across the galaxy. But there is no Plan B and the bubble, it turns out, is where we have
been living all the while. The bubble is that delusion of isolation under which we have laboured for so long. The bubble has cut us
off from life on the only planet we have, or are ever likely to have. The bubble is civilisation. We are the first generations
born into a new and unprecedented age — the age of ecocide. To name it thus is not to presume the outcome, but
simply to describe a process which is underway. The ground, the sea, the air, the elemental backdrops to our
existence — all these our economics has taken for granted, to be used as a bottomless tip, endlessly able to dilute and
disperse the tailings of our extraction, production, consumption. The sheer scale of the sky or the weight of a
swollen river makes it hard to imagine that creatures as flimsy as you and I could do that much damage. Philip Larkin
gave voice to this attitude, and the creeping, worrying end of it in his poem Going, Going: Nearly forty years on from Larkin’s words, doubt is
what all of us seem to feel, all of the time. Too much filth has been chucked in the sea and into the soil and into the atmosphere to make any other
feeling sensible. The doubt, and the facts, have paved the way for a worldwide movement of environmental politics,
which aimed, at least in its early, raw form, to challenge the myths of development and progress head-on. But time
has not been kind to the greens. Today’s environmentalists are more likely to be found at corporate conferences
hymning the virtues of ‘sustainability’ and ‘ethical consumption’ than doing anything as naive as questioning the
intrinsic values of civilisation. Capitalism has absorbed the greens, as it absorbs so many challenges to its
ascendancy. A radical challenge to the human machine has been transformed into yet another opportunity for
shopping. Today, humanity is up to its neck in denial about what it has built, what it has become — and what it is in
for. Ecological and economic collapse unfold before us and, if we acknowledge them at all, we act as if this were a
temporary problem, a technical glitch. Centuries of hubris block our ears like wax plugs; we cannot hear the
message which reality is screaming at us. For all our doubts and discontents, we are still wired to an idea of history
in which the future will be an upgraded version of the present. The assumption remains that things must continue in
their current direction: the sense of crisis only smudges the meaning of that ‘must’. No longer a natural inevitability, it becomes an urgent
necessity: we must find a way to go on having supermarkets and superhighways. We cannot contemplate the alternative. And so we
find ourselves, all of us together, poised trembling on the edge of a change so massive that we have no way of
gauging it. None of us knows where to look, but all of us know not to look down. Secretly, we all think we are
doomed: even the politicians think this; even the environmentalists. Some of us deal with it by going shopping. Some deal with it
by hoping it is true. Some give up in despair. Some work frantically to try and fend off the coming storm. Our question is: what
would happen if we looked down? Would it be as bad as we imagine? What might we see? Could it even be good for us? We believe it is
time to look down.
ALT – Reject anthropocentric thinking and replace it with an ecocentric ethic that values
all life.
Deckha ’10 – Maneesha Deckha – University of Victoria—“It’s time to abandon the idea of
human rights:—December 10, 2010
That the human/subhuman binary continues to inhabit so much of western experience raises the question of the
continuing relevance of anthropocentric concepts (such as “human rights” and “human dignity”) for effective
theories of justice, policy and social movements. Instead of fighting dehumanization with humanization, a better
strategy may be to minimize the human/nonhuman boundary altogether. The human specialness claim is a
hierarchical one and relies on the figure of an Other – the subhuman and nonhuman – to be intelligible. The latter
groups are beings, by definition, who do not qualify as “human” and thus are denied the benefits that being “human”
is meant to compel. More to the point, however, a dignity claim staked on species difference, and reliant on
dehumanizing Others to establish the moral worth of human beings, will always be vulnerable to the subhuman
figure it creates. This figure is easily deployed in inter-human violent conflict implicating race, gender and cultural
identities as we have seen in the context of military and police camps, contemporary slavery and slavery-like
practices, and the laws of war – used in these situations to promote violence against marginalized human groups. A
new discourse of cultural and legal protections is required to address violence against vulnerable humans in a
manner that does not privilege humanity or humans, nor permit a subhuman figure to circulate as the mark of
inferior beings on whom the perpetration of violence is legitimate. We need to find an alternative discourse to
theorize and mobilize around vulnerabilities for “subhuman” humans. This move, in addressing violence and
vulnerabilities, should be productive not only for humans made vulnerable by their dehumanization, but nonhumans
as well.
Without this rejection, speciesm through the lens of biopolitics becomes inevitable – mass
murdering the non-human other
Wolfe ’13 (Cary Wolfe, University of Chicago Press, 2013, “Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a
Biopolitical Frame”)
We are returned, then, not just to the thanatopolitical site of the camps that takes center stage in Agamben’s work, and not just to the question of
the biopolitical status of Nazism, but also to the central function of race—and by extension, species--in modern biopolitics. As is well
known, Foucault explores this topic in the lectures from 1975-6 collected in “Society Must Be Defended.” Racism,
as Foucault notes, creates “caesuras within the biological continuum addressed by biopower”; it is “a way of
fragmenting the field of the biological that power controls” so that some populations may be killed or allowed to
die—what Foucault bluntly calls “indirect murder.”137 “In a normalizing society,” he writes, “race or racism is the
precondition that makes killing acceptable.”138 And it has a second function, he argues: “the death of the bad race,
of the inferior race (or the degenerate, the abnormal) is something that will make life in general healthier: healthier
and purer.”139 As we have seen, Esposito’s immunitary paradigm seizes upon and develops this realization by Foucault, but the point I want
to emphasize here is Foucault’s recognition that you can’t talk about biopolitics without talking about race, and you can’t talk
about race without talking about species, simply because both categories—as history well shows—are so notoriously
pliable and unstable, constantly bleeding into and out of each other. Exhibit A here, of course, is the analogy
between humans and animals that characterizes much of the literature on the Holocaust. As is well known, the word
means “burnt offering” and was taken from the Greek word holokauston, which referred to the ancient practice of
sacrificing animals.140 And even more well known, perhaps, is that fact that a common refrain of those subjected to
the violence of the camps is that “we were treated like animals.”141 But as Esposito’s bracing analysis of Nazi genocide shows,
the mainspring of this process cannot exactly be said to be the “animalization” pure and simple of the Jews and other victims: More than
“bestializing” man, as is commonly thought, [Nazism] “anthropologized’ the animal, enlarging the definition of
anthropos to the point where it also comprised animals of inferior species. He who was the object of persecution and
extreme violence wasn’t simply an animal (which was indeed respected and protected as such by one of the most
advanced pieces of legislation of the entire world), but was an animal-man. . . . [T]he regime promulgated a circular that
prohibited any kind of cruelty to animals, in particular with reference to cold, to heat, and to the inoculation of pathogenic germs. Considering the
zeal with which the Nazis respected their own laws, this means that if those interned in the extermination camps had been considered to be only
animals, they would have been saved.142 While Esposito overstates his case here (as Singer points out, following Boria Sax’s extensive work on
the topic, the Nazis routinely conducted painful and even brutal experiments on animals such as primates143), his analysis does have the virtue of
complicating our understanding of the relationship between the human/animal distinction and the bios/zoe doublet of biopolitics (a point I’ll
return to in more detail below). And with this more complicated conceptual topography in mind, we can revisit the “animal Holocaust” analogy
that has been widely used to describe our treatment of animals in factory farming and biomedical testing . Jacques Derrida is particularly
forceful on this point in his later work, where he pulls no punches in criticizing “this violence that some would
compare to the worst cases of genocide,” a genocide made even more perverse by the fact that millions of animals
are “exterminated by means of their continued existence or even their overpopulation.” Derrida (an Algerian Jew) is well
aware of the complexities of the analogy here, of course, and he reminds us that “one should neither abuse the figure of genocide nor too quickly
consider it explained away.”144 Indeed, his ending observation—“by means of their continued existence”—points us toward some importance
differences between the two cases that Esposito will explore as well. For example, in the Nazi camps, we find those who had been
citizens, members of the community, now stripped of every legal protection and right by means of the declaration of
a “state of exception,” whereas in the factory farm, we find those who never were members of the community
nevertheless afforded at least some minimal protection (as in humane slaughter laws, for example), even if those
laws are in fact minimally enforced.145 Similarly, the “animal Holocaust” of factory farming does not abide by the
logic of genocide per se, since the minimal conditions of genocide agreed upon by most scholars are that a sovereign
state declares an intention to kill a particular homogeneous group not for economic or political reasons but rather
because of that group’s biological constitution, and that such a project of killing is potentially complete, resulting in
the extermination of all members of the targeted group.146 Indeed, this is part of what makes the “animal Holocaust” not just
horrible but in an important sense perverse—what Derrida calls a “virtually interminable survival, in conditions that previous
generations would have judged monstrous, outside of every presumed norm of a life proper to animals .”147 And this
“interminable survival” leads, in turn, to a massive difference in sheer scale between the two cases, as nearly ten billion animals are
raised for food each year in the US, the vast majority of them in factory farms. In fact, nine hundred million of these
animals each year never even make it to the slaughterhouse for their merciful end, because they die first of stress,
disease, or injury.148 At the same time, it hardly needs pointing out that the practices of modern biopolitics have forged themselves in the
common subjection and management of both human and animal bodies—a fact brought very sharply into focus in scholarship that examines the
analogies between the technological manipulation of life in the factory farm and in the Nazi camps . As one writer notes, “the methods
of the Holocaust exist today in the form of factory farming where billions of innocent, feeling being are taken from
their families, trucked hundreds of miles through all weather extremes, confined in cramped, filthy conditions and
herded to their deaths.”149 As another points out, “American eugenics and assembly-line slaughter crossed the
Atlantic Ocean and found fertile ground in Nazi Germany.”150 In fact, the assembly line processes used to kill Jews
in Nazi Germany derived from production models originally developed by Henry Ford (a notorious anti-Semite),
who in turn reveals in his autobiography that the inspiration for his assembly-line method came from a visit to a
Chicago slaughterhouse and witnessing its mechanized disassembly line for making meat out of animal carcasses .151
From the vantage of a Foucauldian biopolitics, then, we are forced to conclude that current practices of factory farming
and the like – while crucially different from the logic of the holocaust and of genocide in the ways I have just noted
– constitute just some embarrassing sideline of modern life that has nothing to do with politics proper, and which can
be well regulated by an adjacent set of anti-cruely laws that do not intersect with politics as such in any fundamental way. Rather, such
practices must be seen not just as political but as in face consitutively political for biopolitics in its modern form.
Indeed, the practices of maximizing control over life and death, of “making live” in Foucault’s words, through
eugenics, artificial insemination and selective breeding, pharmaceutical enhancement, inoculation, and the like are
on display in the modern factory farm as perhaps nowhere else in biopolitical history. It can hardly be debated, I think, that
“the animal” is, today – and on a scale unprecedented in human history – the site of the very ur-form of that dispositif and the face of its
unchecked, nightmarish effects.
Speciesism leads to debaticide and loss of knowledge production – turns the aff.
Rossini 06 (Manuela Rossini, Executive Director of the Institute of Advanced Study in the Humanities and the
Social Sciences, PhD in English lit, MA in critical and cultural theory, “To the Dogs: Companion speciesism and the
new feminist materialism”, http://intertheory.org/rossini, September 2006)
What is equally sobering, however, is the fact that the most radical metaposthumanists (and the humanities more broadly) do not quite
manage to make an epistemological break with liberal humanism, insofar as their writing is also marked by an
unquestioned “speciesism”; i.e., in the definition of ethicist Peter Singer who popularised the term three decades ago in his book Animal
Liberation, “a prejudice or attitude of bias in favour of the interests of members of one’s own species and against those
of members of other species.”[17] Both postcolonial, feminist and queer theories and discussion of subjectivity, identity, and difference as
well as the claims on the right to freedom by new social movements have recourse to an Enlightenment concept of the subject whose conditio
sine qua non is the absolute control of that subject over the life of nonhuman others/objects. The rhetorical strategy of radically separating nonwhite, non-male and non-heterosexual human beings from animals in order to have the subject status of these members of the human species
recognised was and is successful and also legitimate – given that the racist, sexist and homophobic discourse of animality or an animalistic
„nature“ has hitherto served to exclude most individuals of those groups of people from many privileges – but the speciesist logic of the
dominance of human animals over nonhuman animals has remained in place. If we fight racism and (hetero)sexism
because we declare discrimination on the basis of specific and identifiable characteristics – such as “black“,
“woman” or “lesbian“ to be wrong and unjust, then we should also vehemently oppose the exploitation, imprisoning,
killing and eating of nonhuman animals on the basis of their species identity. Moreover, if our research and teaching
as cultural critics endeavours to do justice to the diversity of human experience and life styles and feel responsible
towards marginalised others, should we then not seriously think about Cary Wolfe’s question „how must our work
itself change when the other to which it tries to do justice is no longer human?“[18] Wolfe is not making a claim for animal
rights here – at least not primarily. This is also why his book puns on “rites/rights“: Animal Rites is the intervention of the antispeciesist cultural critic who scrutinizes the rituals that human beings form around the figures of animals, including
the literary and cinematic enactments of cannibalism, monstrosity and normativity. Wolfe subsumes all of these
stagings under the heading the discourse of species, with “discourse“ understood in the sense of Michel Foucault as
not only a rhetoric but above all as the condition for the production and ordering of meaning and knowledge in institutions
like medicine, the law, the church, the family or universities. In addition, Wolfe wants to sharpen our awareness that a speciesist
metaphysics has also a deadly impact on human animals, especially because speciesism is grounded in the juridical
state apparatus: “the full transcendence of the ‘human‘ requires the sacrifice of the ‘animal‘ and the animalistic, which in turn makes possible
a symbolic economy in which we engage in what Derrida [calls] a ‚non-criminal putting to death‘ of other humans as well by marking them as
animal.“
Neg Backlines
FrameWork
It is the role of an intellectual to speak out passionately about the right thing. Empirically,
stances of passivism lead to Nazi attitudes. The choice to not speak out will have
consequences and influence others.
Ketels ’96 (Violet Ketels is a well-known intellectual, who currently teaches at Temple University and has an
award at the Intelligence Heritage Program named after her. The article from whence this card came, “Havel to the
Castle! The Power of Word” was published in November 1996).
Intellectuals are not customarily thought of as men and women of action. Our circumstances are ambiguous, our credibility
precarious. While our sense of past and future is "radically linguistic,' we scarcely have a common human language
anymore, and our fashionable linguistic skepticism elevates the denying of verities to an article of faith, out of which
we build academic careers of nay-saying. We use the written word as the primary political medium for gaining
attention. We are "writing people," who traffic in words and thus carry an unavoidable accountability for what we
say with them.5° Havel defines intellectuals as people who devote their lives "to thinking in general terms about the
affairs of this world and the broader context of things . . . professionally,' for their occupation. If we aspire to be
distinguished from mere scribblers, history demands that we choose between being "the apologist for rulers [and] an
advisor to the people; the tragedy of the twentieth century is that these two functions have ceased to exist independently of one another, and intellectuals like Sartre who thought they were fulfilling one role were inevitably
drawn to play both." Alternatively, we can choose with Richard Rorty, echoing Max Weber, to stay out of politics, "where
passionate commitment and sterile excitation are out of place," keeping "politics in the hands of charismatic leaders and
trained officials." We can choose to pursue "[our] own private perfection.' That particular stance, however expedient, did not work
well in Germany. In Czechoslovakia, it produced wartime Nazi collaborator Gustave Husak, the "President of
Forgetting," who sought to perfect totalitarianism by systematically purging "the Party and state, the arts, the
universities, and the media of everyone who dare [d] to speak critically, independently, or even intelligently about what the
regime define[d] as politics.' It produced Tudjman and Milogevie in Yugoslavia. Intellectuals can choose their roles,
but cannot not choose, nor can we evade the full weight of the consequences attendant on our choices. "It is always the
intellectuals, however we may shrink from the chilling sound of that word . . . who must bear the full weight of moral
responsibility."'
Debate has become an empty shell of competition, seen as a means of arguing and trolling
one’s way to trophies. The idea that debate is an institution to apply argumentation into the
real world is gone, and now, debate is seen as purely simulational. No more are the days
when one would advocate true change. The real world implications should be evaluated
over hyped scenarios of war
Mitchell 98 (Gordon R. Mitchell is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication at the University of Pittsburgh, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where
he has worked since 1995 (from 1985-1994 he debated and coached at Northwestern, Wake Forest and Louisville). His research program focuses on public argument, rhetoric of
science, and social movements, while his feet gravitate toward salsa dancing, stone skipping, and sweep rowing on Pittsburgh's resplendent three rivers.)
"Many scholars and educators term academic debate a laboratory for
testing and developing approaches to argumentation" (Hill and Leeman 1997, p. 6). This explanation of academic debate squares
with descriptions of the study of argumentation that highlight debate training as preparation for citizenship . As a safe space that permits
the controlled "testing" of approaches to argumentation, the academic laboratory, on this account, constitutes a
training ground for "future" citizens and leaders to hone their critical thinking and advocacy skills. While an isolated
academic space that affords students an opportunity to learn in a protected environment has significant pedagogical
value (see e.g. Coverstone 1995, p. 8-9), the notion of the academic debate tournament as a sterile laboratory carries with it
some disturbing implications, when the metaphor is extended to its limit. To the extent that the academic space
begins to take on characteristics of a laboratory, the barriers demarcating such a space from other spheres of
deliberation beyond the school grow taller and less permeable. When such barriers reach insurmountable
dimensions, argumentation in the academic setting unfolds on a purely simulated plane, with students
practicing critical thinking and advocacy skills in strictly hypothetical thought-spaces. Although they may
As two prominent teachers of argumentation point out,
track public argument as it unfolds outside the confines of the laboratory for research purposes, in this approach,
students witness argumentation beyond the walls of the academy as spectators, with little or no apparent recourse
to directly participate or alter the course of events (see Mitchell 1995; 1998). The sense of detachment associated with the
spectator posture is highlighted during episodes of alienation in which debaters cheer news of human suffering or
misfortune. Instead of focusing on the visceral negative responses to news accounts of human death and misery,
debaters overcome with the competitive zeal of contest round competition show a tendency to concentrate on the meanings that
such evidence might hold for the strength of their academic debate arguments. For example, news reports of mass starvation might tidy up
the "uniqueness of a disadvantage" or bolster the "inherency of an affirmative case" (in the technical parlance of debatespeak). Murchland categorizes cultivation of this "spectator" mentality as one of the most politically debilitating failures of
contemporary education: "Educational institutions have failed even more grievously to provide the kind of civic forums we need. In fact,
one could easily conclude that the principle purposes of our schools is to deprive successor generations of their civic
voice, to turn them into mute and uncomprehending spectators in the drama of political life" (1991, p. 8). Complete
reliance on the laboratory metaphor to guide pedagogical practice can result in the unfortunate foreclosure of crucial
learning opportunities. These opportunities, which will be discussed in more detail in the later sections of this piece, center around the
process of argumentative engagement with wider public spheres of deliberation. In the strictly preparatory model of argument pedagogy,
research and
such direct engagement is an activity that is appropriately pursued following the completion of academic debate training (see e.g. Coverstone
1995, p. 8). Preparatory study of argumentation, undertaken in the confines of the academic laboratory, is conducted
on the plane of simulation and is designed to pave the way for eventual application of critical thinking and oral
advocacy skills in "realworld" contexts. Such a preparatory pedagogy has a tendency to defer reflection and
theorization on the political dynamics of academic debate itself. For example, many textbooks introduce students to the
importance of argumentation as the basis for citizenship in the opening chapter, move on to discussion of
specific skills in the intervening chapters, and never return to the obvious broader question of how specific
skills can be utilized to support efforts of participatory citizenship and democratic empowerment. Insofar as the
argumentation curriculum does not forthrightly thematize the connection between skill-based learning and democratic
empowerment, the prospect that students will fully develop strong senses of transformative political agency grows
increasingly remote.
Link wall
Generic
The aff isolates itself from “nature” in the status quo, valuing “nature” as separate and
above our siblings and half siblings
Kingsnorth and Hine ‘9[KINGSNORTH ed dir of DARK MOUNTAIN & HINE co-founder and managing
editor of DARK MOUNTAIN 2k9
Paul- & Dougald; Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto; Summer; http://dark-mountain.net/about/manifesto/]
The myth of progress is founded on the myth of nature. The first tells us that we are destined for greatness; the second tells us that
greatness is cost-free. Each
is intimately bound up with the other. Both tell us that we are apart from the world; that we
very
fact that we have a word for ‘nature’ is [5] evidence that we do not regard ourselves as part of it. Indeed, our
separation from it is a myth integral to the triumph of our civilisation. We are, we tell ourselves, the only species
ever to have attacked nature and won. In this, our unique glory is contained. We imagined ourselves isolated from
the source of our existence. The fallout from this imaginative error is all around us: a quarter of the world’s mammals are
began grunting in the primeval swamps, as a humble part of something called ‘nature’, which we have now triumphantly subdued. The
threatened with imminent extinction; an acre and a half of rainforest is felled every second; 75% of the world’s fish stocks are on the verge of
collapse; humanity consumes 25% more of the world’s natural ‘products’ than the Earth can replace — a figure predicted to rise to 80% by midcentury. Even through the deadening lens of statistics, we can glimpse the violence to which our myths have driven us. These are
the facts, or some of them. Yet facts never tell the whole story. (‘Facts’, Conrad wrote, in Lord Jim, ‘as if facts could prove anything.’) The
facts of environmental crisis we hear so much about often conceal as much as they expose. We hear daily about the
impacts of our activities on ‘the environment’ (like ‘nature’, this is an expression which distances us from the reality of
our situation). Daily we hear, too, of the many ‘solutions’ to these problems: solutions which usually involve the
necessity of urgent political agreement and a judicious application of human technological genius. Things may be
changing, runs the narrative, but there is nothing we cannot deal with here , folks. We perhaps need to move faster,
more urgently. Certainly we need to accelerate the pace of research and development. We accept that we must
become more ‘sustainable’. But everything will be fine. There will still be growth, there will still be progress: these
things will continue, because they have to continue, so they cannot do anything but continue. There is nothing to see
here. Everything will be fine. We do not believe that everything will be fine. We are not even sure, based on current definitions of
progress and improvement, that we want it to be. Of all humanity’s delusions of difference, of its separation from and
superiority to the living world which surrounds it, one distinction holds up better than most: we may well be the first
species capable of effectively eliminating life on Earth. This is a hypothesis we seem intent on putting to the test. We are already
responsible for denuding the world of much of its richness, magnificence, beauty, colour and magic, and we show no sign of slowing
down. For a very long time, we imagined that ‘nature’ was something that happened elsewhere. The damage we did
to it might be regrettable, but needed to be weighed against the benefits here and now. And in the worst case
scenario, there would always be some kind of Plan B. Perhaps we would make for the moon, where we could survive in lunar
colonies under giant bubbles as we planned our expansion across the galaxy. But there is no Plan B and the bubble, it turns out, is where we have
been living all the while. The bubble is that delusion of isolation under which we have laboured for so long. The bubble has cut us
off from life on the only planet we have, or are ever likely to have. The bubble is civilisation. We are the first generations
born into a new and unprecedented age — the age of ecocide. To name it thus is not to presume the outcome, but
simply to describe a process which is underway. The ground, the sea, the air, the elemental backdrops to our
existence — all these our economics has taken for granted, to be used as a bottomless tip, endlessly able to dilute and
disperse the tailings of our extraction, production, consumption. The sheer scale of the sky or the weight of a
swollen river makes it hard to imagine that creatures as flimsy as you and I could do that much damage. Philip Larkin
gave voice to this attitude, and the creeping, worrying end of it in his poem Going, Going: Nearly forty years on from Larkin’s words, doubt is
what all of us seem to feel, all of the time. Too much filth has been chucked in the sea and into the soil and into the atmosphere to make any other
feeling sensible. The doubt, and the facts, have paved the way for a worldwide movement of environmental politics,
which aimed, at least in its early, raw form, to challenge the myths of development and progress head-on. But time
has not been kind to the greens. Today’s environmentalists are more likely to be found at corporate conferences
hymning the virtues of ‘sustainability’ and ‘ethical consumption’ than doing anything as naive as questioning the
intrinsic values of civilisation. Capitalism has absorbed the greens, as it absorbs so many challenges to its
ascendancy. A radical challenge to the human machine has been transformed into yet another opportunity for
shopping. Today, humanity is up to its neck in denial about what it has built, what it has become — and what it is in
for. Ecological and economic collapse unfold before us and, if we acknowledge them at all, we act as if this were a
temporary problem, a technical glitch. Centuries of hubris block our ears like wax plugs; we cannot hear the
message which reality is screaming at us. For all our doubts and discontents, we are still wired to an idea of history
in which the future will be an upgraded version of the present. The assumption remains that things must continue in
their current direction: the sense of crisis only smudges the meaning of that ‘must’. No longer a natural inevitability, it becomes an urgent
necessity: we must find a way to go on having supermarkets and superhighways. We cannot contemplate the alternative. And so we
find ourselves, all of us together, poised trembling on the edge of a change so massive that we have no way of
gauging it. None of us knows where to look, but all of us know not to look down. Secretly, we all think we are
doomed: even the politicians think this; even the environmentalists. Some of us deal with it by going shopping. Some deal with it
by hoping it is true. Some give up in despair. Some work frantically to try and fend off the coming storm. Our question is: what
would happen if we looked down? Would it be as bad as we imagine? What might we see? Could it even be good for us? We believe it is
time to look down.
Our ways of “helping” the environment is rooted in anthropocentric ideas, that they will
serve use for humans in the future.
Fox 95 (Warwick Fox, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University of Central Lancashire. published widely in
environmental philosophy, “toward a transpersonal Ecology”, State University of New York Press, 1995,
http://www.sunypress.edu/p-2271-toward-a-transpersonal-ecology.aspx)
Moving on to illustrate the assumption of human self-importance in the larger scheme of things, we can see that this assumption shows
through, for example, in those prescientific views that saw humans as dwelling at the center of the universe, as made in
the image of God, and as occupying a position well above the “beasts” and just a little lower than the angels on the Great Chain
of Being. And while the development of modern science, especially the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions, swerved to sweep
these views aside – or at least those aspects that were open to empirical refutation – it did no such thing to the humancentered assumptions that underlay these views. Francis Bacon for example, saw science as “enlarging the bounds of
Human Empire”; Descartes likewise saw it as rendering us the “masters and possessors of nature.” Approximately three
and a half centuries later, Neil Armstrong’s moon walk – the culmination of a massive, politically directed, scientific and
technological development effort – epitomized both the literal acting out of this vision of “enlarging the bounds of
Human Empire” and the literal expression of its anthropocentric spirit: Armstrong’s moon walk was, in his own words at
the time, a “small step for him but a “giant leap for Mankind.” Back here on earth, we find that even those philosophical,
social, and political movements of modern times most concerned with exposing discriminatory assumptions have
typically confined their interests to the human realm, that is, to issues to do with imperialism, race, socioeconomic
class, and gender. When attention is finally turned to the exploitation by humans of the nonhuman world, our
arguments for the conservation and preservation of the nonhuman world continue to betray anthropocentric
assumptions. We argue that nonhuman world should be conserved or preserved because of its use value to humans
(e.g., its scientific, recreational, or aesthetic value) rather than for its own sake or for its use value to nonhuman
beings. It cannot be emphasized enough that the vast majority of environmental discussion – whether in the context of
public meetings, newspapers, popular magazines, reports by international conservation organizations, reports by government instrumentalities, or
even reports by environmental groups – is couched with these anthropocentric terms of reference. Thus even many of those
who deal most directly with environmental issues continue to perpetuate , however unwittingly, the arrogant assumption
that we humans are central to the cosmic drama; that, essentially, the world is made for us. John Seed, a prominent
nonanthropocentric ecological activist, sums up the situation quite simply when he writes, “the idea that humans are the crown of
creation, the source of all value, the measure of all things, is deeply embedded in our culture and consciousness.”
DnG/Pirates
Much of Deleuze and guattarian theory is based on the ideals of making animals. This act is
inherently wrong as it constrains us into the anthropological machine and human-nature
delineation.
Iveson 13 (Richard Iveson, University of Queensland Postdoctoral Research Fellow Centre for Critical and Cultural
Studies, Continental philosophy, “Deeply Ecological Deleuze and Guattari: Humanism’s Becoming-Animal,”
http://www.depauw.edu/humanimalia/issue%2008/iveson.html, Spring 2013,
Moreover, we can see that what have been thus divided are not “actual” nonhuman animals. The
categories denote, that is to say,
neither a zoological classification nor even what for Deleuze and Guattari constitutes the reality of nonhuman
animals, as we shall see. Rather, the three categories represent the three possible ways in which nonhuman animals
might be treated [traité], that is, in which they might be constituted in relation to humans: a dog can be treated as a
pack, a panther can be treated as a “pet” or as a model. In short, Oedipal, State, and demonic are not three ways of
being-animal, but rather three ways in which humans may produce other animals . We are thus contained within an
(actual or virtual) human domain, constrained within the anthro-tropo-logical machine of human recognition and of the
proper and improper ways of re-presenting a nonhuman being. Whether that is as a “pet” or as a “pack,” this exceptional tropological function,
this uniquely human capacity to constitute something as something, is itself symptomatic of an all too familiar
human-animal discontinuity founded upon the possession of language being awarded to human animals alone .
Psychoanalysis
The method of psychoanalysis excludes animals from its discussion. This exclusion
reentrenches the idea that humans are dominant over nature.
Beaulieu 11( Alain Beaulieu, Alain Beaulieu is Professor in the Department of Literature at the Faculty of Letters
and Human Sciences of the Université Laval, “The Status of Animality in Deleuze’s Thought”, Journal of Critical
Animal Studies, http://www.criticalanimalstudies.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/5.-Beaulieu-A-2011-Issue-1-2TheStatus-of-Animality-pp-69-88.pdf)
It is no surprise then if psychoanalysis and its familialo-humanistic approach become some of the main targets of Deleuze and Guattari‘s
conception of animality. Before going any further, let us first recall Freud‘s analysis of the Wolf Man‘s neurotic
childhood dreams, the Rat Man‘s obsessive thoughts, and Little Hans‘ phobic relations to horses. For Freud, wolves,
rats, and horses all have a familial and personal symbolic value as he identifies them with family members, the
primal scene, and personal sexual drive. Furthermore, Freud is convinced that the recognition of these animal figures as familial
characters is the first step towards accomplishing the goal of resolving OEdipal conflicts. A similar devaluation of the animal
character can befound in the writings of Jacques Lacan, who, in a very classical and traditional way, defines the animal by its lack
of language thus impeding its experience of the mirror stage, the subject of signifier, etc. (Lacan, 2007: 75-81 and 671-702). In sum, for Freud
and Lacan, the animal must sit on the floor, not lie on the psychoanalyst‘s couch. The animal in psychoanalysis has an
inferior status. Even for Jung, who partially de-oedipianized it, the animal remains an occurrence in the imagination (dream, fantasies, etc.)
that does not reach concrete reality (Deleuze & Guattari, 2005: 235-238). Thus, psychoanalysis fails in truly conceiving of
animality or of maintaining an ―animal relationship with animals ‖ that would allow the specificity of animality to be recognized.
Instead, it favors a de-hierarchization of the connections between the realms of the living and sees this as a condition necessary for experiencing
the becomings-animal.
Sovereignty
Sovereignty creates a split between humanity and nature
Smith 11 (1) (Mick Smith, Department of Environmental Studies and Department of Philosophy, 2011, “Against
Ecological Sovereignty”)
This contest is political because human dominion over the Earth is not, as so many assume, just a theological idea(l)
justified by biblical exegesis or a secular ideology unquestioningly assumed by (supposedly self-critical) Western
philosophical systems. It is also should be understood both in Bruno Latour’s (1993; 2004, 239) “broader metaphysical sense,” as the
explicit (but never fully achievable) modernist division of the world into two realms—the human and the nonhuman, subjects and
objects, evaluatively driven politics and the supposedly apolitical, value-free, natural sciences, and so on—and
constitutionally in the narrower political sense: the modern principle of national sovereignty, for example, presumes ecological
sovereignty over a specific territory (Kuehls 1996). Ecologically speaking, competing claims to territorial sovereignty, such as
those concerning an Arctic seabed now increasingly bereft of its protective ice cap, are all about which state gets to
decide how and when these “natural resources” are exploited . Of course, states may also employ ecological rhetoric
in staking their claims to be responsible stewards of nature. But making such decisions, even if they occasionally
involve distinguishing between natural resources and nature reserves, is the defining mark of ecological sovereignty,
and these decisions are premised on, and expressions of, the modernist metaphysical distinction between the
decisionistic politics associated with (at least some) “properly human subjects ” and the objectification of nonhuman
nature as a resource. The modern constitution and its overseer, the principle of ecological sovereignty, exemplify what Agamben (2004)
refers to as the “anthropological machine”—the historically variable but constantly recurring manufacture of
metaphysical distinctions to separate and elevate the properly human from the less-than-fully-human and the natural
world. Contesting ecological sovereignty requires that we trace connections between such metaphysical distinctions and
political decisions. It requires (to employ a somewhat hackneyed phrase) yet another Copernican revolution—a decentering,
weakening, and overturning of the idea/ideology of human exceptionalism. We might say that any critique of
political sovereignty failing to attend to these metaphysical distinctions will be ecologically blind, whereas any
ecological critique of humanist metaphysics in political isolation will be empty. For example, past environmental critiques of
human dominion and debates about the merits of Earthly stewardship (White 1967; Black 1970; Passmore 1974) may have been vital catalysts for
the emergence of radical ecology, but they rarely of sovereignty intact, then we automatically and continually give shelter to the notion of
ecological sovereignty, and all talk of changed ecological relations is ultimately hollow. Of course, few ecologists are going to protest
if a sovereign nation decides to set aside an area as a nature reserve! But the point is that this decision, which divides and rules
the world for ostensibly different purposes, is plausible only if the overarching authority to make (and adapt and reverse) such all-encompassing
decisions is already presumed. It presumes human dominion and assumes that the natural world is already, before any
decision is even made, fundamentally a human resource. This is, after all, both the contemporary condition that
nature is being reserved (and yet not released) from, and the original condition of that mythic prepolitical “state of
nature” (epitomized in Locke’s work) where a presumptive ecological sovereignty serves as the foundational
premise for an emergent political sovereignty (see chapter 3). How paradoxical, then, that the decision to (p)reserve
some aspects of ecology, to maintain it in what is deemed to be its natural state, has today associated with (at least
some) “properly human subjects ” and the objectification of nonhuman nature as a resource. Either way, one might say,
everywhere sovereignty declares nature free, it is already in chains. And metaphysically, ecologically, and politically
speaking, the claims and chains of sovereignty are all encompassing: they encircle the world . In this sense, sovereignty is
an antiecological and not, as its accompanying rhetoric and its modern environmental proponents (see chapter 7) sometimes suggest, a potentially
ecological principle—at least if we understand ecology as something more than, and irreducible to, a human resource, and this is radical
ecology’s (but certainly not only radical ecology’s) understanding. Another way of putting this, and one that fits with the analysis of sovereignty
provided by thinkers as politically diverse as Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, and Giorgio Agamben, is to say that the nature reserve is the
exception that decisively proves the rule—in the sense of both making tangible the dominant ideological norm a
resource, freed from human domination, only by being already and always included within the remit of human
domination. And according to Agamben (2004, 37), this troubling figure of exclusion/inclusion, this “zone of
indeterminacy,” typifies the operation of both sovereignty and the anthropological machine .
Queer Theory
Queer Theory fails to include the ‘non-human’ within their advocacy for social change.
They ignore the conditions of factory life that causes bare life for the nonhuman animal
subgroup.
Wuthmann 11 (Tyler Wuthmann, Departmental Honors in the Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies, AnimalAttentive Queer Theories, Pg 6-7, Program
http://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1644&context=etd_hon_theses)
Discussions surrounding what should be cared about and what can be considered living and worthy of moral
attention are centered around the debates of animal ethics, rights, and community formation. This thesis begins to
illuminate the borders and walls that exist between disciplines (e.g. the natural sciences, queer theories, feminist
ethics-of-care, and animal studies) that mirror the boundaries humans construct between our lives and our deaths.
While some would argue that nonhuman animals are merely animate machines that respond to stimuli, others would
argue against such a view as cold and rational, favoring instead a more inclusive and less rigid circle of moral value.
Humans have expanded the discussions and writings of death by exploring its ramifications in the ways that we
grieve. Language is limited and oppressive in its inability to grasp the realities of the intra-connections of human life
within a larger world formation. Practices such as factory farming, animal testing, and animal exhibition rely upon
the non- or misrepresentation of animal suffering and experience. The anthropocentrism and speciesism within
certain ethics of representation, especially queer theories, leads to the objectification and disavowal rather than the
inclusion of animal others as individuals in relation to each other and within a community. Rather than rely upon a
sado-humanist framework of subjectivity, rights, and becoming, we can move outside of purely rationalist accounts
that fail to describe and take account of animal lives and work to improve the lives of animals and others around us.
Critical Pedagogy
Feminism ignores the structural delineations between humans and nature.
Bell and Russell 2k (Anne Bell and Constance Russell, Bell is Faculty of environmental studies at York
University, Russell is grad. Student at the university of Toronto for education, http://www.cssescee.ca/CJE/Articles/FullText/CJE25-3/CJE25-3-bell.pdf, “Beyond Human, Beyond Words: Anthropocentrism,
Critical Pedagogy, and the Poststructuralist Turn”, Canadian Journal of Education)
It would be an all-too-common mistake to construe the task at hand as one of interest only to environmentalists. We
believe, rather, that disrupting the social scripts that structure and legitimize the human domination of nonhuman
nature is fundamental not only to dealing with environmental issues, but also to examining and challenging
oppressive social arrangements\. The exploitation of nature is not separate from the exploitation of human groups.
Ecofeminists and activists for environmental justice have shown that forms of domination are often intimately
connected and mutually reinforcing (Bullard, 1993; Gaard, 1997; Lahar, 1993; Sturgeon, 1997). Thus, if critical
educators wish to resist various oppressions, part of their project must entail calling into question, among other
things, the instrumental exploitive gaze through which we humans distance ourselves from the rest of nature
(Carlson, 1995). For this reason, the various movements against oppression need to be aware of and supportive of
each other. In critical pedagogy, however, the exploration of questions of race, gender, class, and sexuality has
proceeded so far with little acknowledgement of the systemic links between human oppressions and the domination
of nature. The more-than-human world and human relationships to it have been ignored, as if the suffering and
exploitation of other beings and the global ecological crisis were somehow irrelevant. Despite the call for attention
to voices historically absent from traditional canons and narratives (Sadovnik, 1995, p. 316), nonhuman beings are
shrouded in silence. This silence characterizes even the work of writers who call for a rethinking of all culturally
positioned essentialisms.
Human ocean pollution
Humans are putting massive amounts of toxic minerals and chemicals into the ocean, and
the effects are being felt all around the world. No animal is safe. Bender 3 (Frederic L. Bender is the author of
“The Culture of Extinction: Towards the Philosophy of Deep Ecology”, published in 2003, the book from whence this card came, on pages 55-58. He also holds the following degrees: Professor
of Philosophy. BS, Polytechnic University of New York; MA, PhD, Northwestern University. He further teaches at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. Need I say more?)
The ocean, covering 70 percent of the planet's surface, absorbs atmospheric gases, including CO2, buffering what would otherwise be drastic
global warming. It also sustains half the planet's biomass. Yet today the ocean must absorb vastly more silt from the land
than before the rise of agriculture. It also must handle the rapid increase in chemically contaminated sewage sludge,
industrial effluent, chemical runoff from agriculture, and other human wastes. Every year, hundreds of tons of new
synthetic chemicals, for which there is no evolutionary history or built-in adaptation, flow down to the seas. Oceanic
mercury contaminations, for example, are now two-and-a-half times their preindustrial levels; manganese four times;
zinc, copper, and lead about twelve times; antimony thirty times; and phosphorus eighty times. 90 We know next to
nothing about these wastes' potential impact upon marine ecosystems, either singly or synergistically. We do know, however,
that they concentrate as they rise upward through marine food chains, with devastating impact on top predators. Since ocean
currents circulate globally, no part of the ocean is exempt from pollution; scientists have found DDT in the fat of
Antarctic penguins, thousands of miles from its nearest point source, and have detected manufactured toxins even in
the deep ocean trenches.91
Oil
The never-ending search for oil makes spills inevitable— we will keep trying to solve.
Irvine 09 (Leslie Irvine is an associate professor at the University of Colorado Boulder where she teaches
sociology and how it relates to animals and gender roles, “Filling the Ark: Animal Welfare in Disaster”, 5/28/2009)
Because we all use oil and other petroleum products, we all share the blame for making birds and marine animals
vulnerable to oil spills. It is easy to point at the oil companies. But they are merely extracting and delivering a
product we all demand in greater amounts, and at prices we deem affordable. Accidental spills will inevitably occur,
and some of these will be on a major scale. In a spill, we face a moral imperative to remedy the damage for which
we are responsible. How to remedy the damage without causing more-intentionally or otherwise-is the next big
question. We make birds and animals vulnerable by moving petroleum across the globe. The least we can do is
ensure that our efforts to save them do not also put them at risk.
Race/Gender
The 1ac’s attention is on exposing discriminatory assumptions but the attention needs to be
towards the exploitation of the nonhuman world.
Fox 95 (Warwick Fox, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University of Central Lancashire. published widely in
environmental philosophy, “toward a transpersonal Ecology”, State University of New York Press, 1995,
http://www.sunypress.edu/p-2271-toward-a-transpersonal-ecology.aspx)
Moving on to illustrate the assumption of human self-importance in the larger scheme of things, we can see that this assumption shows
through, for example, in those prescientific views that saw humans as dwelling at the center of the universe, as made in
the image of God, and as occupying a position well above the “beasts” and just a little lower than the angels on the Great Chain
of Being. And while the development of modern science, especially the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions, swerved to sweep
these views aside – or at least those aspects that were open to empirical refutation – it did no such thing to the humancentered assumptions that underlay these views. Francis Bacon for example, saw science as “enlarging the bounds of
Human Empire”; Descartes likewise saw it as rendering us the “masters and possessors of nature.” Approximately three
and a half centuries later, Neil Armstrong’s moon walk – the culmination of a massive, politically directed, scientific and
technological development effort – epitomized both the literal acting out of this vision of “enlarging the bounds of
Human Empire” and the literal expression of its anthropocentric spirit: Armstrong’s moon walk was, in his own words at
the time, a “small step for him but a “giant leap for Mankind.” Back here on earth, we find that even those philosophical,
social, and political movements of modern times most concerned with exposing discriminatory assumptions have
typically confined their interests to the human realm, that is, to issues to do with imperialism, race, socioeconomic
class, and gender. When attention is finally turned to the exploitation by humans of the nonhuman world, our
arguments for the conservation and preservation of the nonhuman world continue to betray anthropocentric
assumptions. We argue that nonhuman world should be conserved or preserved because of its use value to humans
(e.g., its scientific, recreational, or aesthetic value) rather than for its own sake or for its use value to nonhuman
beings. It cannot be emphasized enough that the vast majority of environmental discussion – whether in the context of
public meetings, newspapers, popular magazines, reports by international conservation organizations, reports by government instrumentalities, or
even reports by environmental groups – is couched with these anthropocentric terms of reference . Thus even many of those
who deal most directly with environmental issues continue to perpetuate, however unwittingly, the arrogant assumption
that we humans are central to the cosmic drama; that, essentially, the world is made for us. John Seed, a prominent
nonanthropocentric ecological activist, sums up the situation quite simply when he writes, “the idea that humans are the crown of
creation, the source of all value, the measure of all things, is deeply embedded in our culture and consciousness.”
Biodiversity and Disease Pandemics
Biodiversity is key to preventing pathogens from morphing to humans
Perrson ‘8 [2008, Erik Persson is a philosophy professor at Lunds University, What is Wrong with Extinction:
The Answer from Anthropocentric Instrumentalism, “Anthropocentric Instrumentalism,”
http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&recordOId=961058&fileOId=975952]
2.3.2. Medicine Medical benefits are sometimes put forth as an important reason for preservation of species. 37 Many of the medical drugs we
use today originate from plants. 38 In the future, these numbers are believed to increase. Most plants have never been checked for medically
useful substances, 39 and we will probably find many new medical drugs among wild species. 40 Can this account for at least part of why it is
seen as morally problematic to contribute to the extinction of species? The situation seems to be very similar to the
one we just discussed regarding food, and most of the aspects discussed in relation to food are also applicable here.
One difference is that even though the human demand for medicine is large, it is probably not as large as the demand for food, which means that
both the pros and the cons of referring to medical value are smaller in scope compared to when we refer to the value of species as sources of food
as an explanation for why the causing of extinction is morally problematic from an anthropocentric instrumental
point of view. Another difference is that even though many medical drugs originate in wild plants, the plants are in general not utilised in the
manufacturing of drugs. 41 This diminishes some aspects, but not others. The domestication and competition aspects as well as the depletion
aspect that we brought up in the previous sub-section are much less of a problem when we talk about medicine. Wild species are said to be at
least as important as future sources of medical drugs as they are as future sources of food. This means that protecting the basis of future evolution
will also be at least as important in the medical case as in the food case. I pointed out in the introduction that our intuitions tell us that it is prima
facie wrong to contribute to extermination all things considered. This leaves room for saying that there may be cases when it is acceptable or even
required to contribute to extermination. This is most salient when we deal with species that carry human diseases, like for instance the black rat
(Rattus rattus), the malaria carrying mosquito (Anopheles maculipennis and other species in the Anopheles genus), and of course the malaria
parasites themselves (a number of species of the genus Plasmodium) – not to mention several kinds of bacteria. On the other hand, according to
the Millennium report, a larger diversity of wildlife probably decreases the spread of many wildlife pathogens to human
beings. 42 If this is correct, it means that even though the battle against diseases can in some circumstances be an
argument in favour of exterminating certain species, it can also be an argument in favour of preserving a generally
high level of biodiversity
Rational Autonomous Human Subject of the Enlightenment
The Western ideal the aff uses is the real threat for ecological problems and means the aff
can’t solve for any of the K’s impacts
Goodman 11 (Benny Goodman – Professor of Sociology, Plymouth University -- Transformation for health and
sustainability: “consumption is killing us” – 2011)
Yagelski calls this "the problem of the self," “My argument here is that the prevailing Western sense of the self as
an autonomous, thinking being that exists separately from the natural or physical world is really at the heart of the
life-threatening environmental problems we face”. Further, this view of a separate self supports a world view that
places this self at the center of the search for truth and the at the center of the universe, it is anthropocentric.
Impact wall
Extinction – Generic
A switch to non-anthropocentrism is the only way to prevent the extinction of all species
including humans.
Seed ’08 [2008, John Seed is an Australian environmentalist and the founder of the Rainforest Information Centre
, Beyond Anthropocentris,m http://www.rainforestinfo.org.au/deep-eco/Anthropo.htm]//AA
"But the time is not a strong prison either. A little scraping of the walls of dishonest contractor's concrete Through a shower of chips and sand
makes freedom. Shake the dust from your hair. This mountain sea-coast is real For it reaches out far into the past and future; It is part of the great
and timeless excellence of things." (1) "Anthropocentrism" or "homocentrism" means human chauvinism. Similar to sexism,
but substitute "human race" for"man" and"all other species" for "woman". Human chauvinism, the idea that humans are the
crown of creation, the source of all value, the measure of all things, is deeply embedded in our culture and consciousness. "And the fear of you
and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth , and upon every fowl of the air, and upon all that moveth on the earth, and upon all
the fishes of the sea; into your hands they are delivered".(2) When humans investigate and see through their layers of
anthropocentric self-cherishing, a most profound change in consciousness begins to take place. Alienation subsides. The
human is no longer an outsider, apart. Your humanness is then recognised as being merely the most recent stage of your existence, and as you
stop identifying exclusively with this chapter, you start to get in touch with yourself as mammal, as vertebrate, as a species only recently emerged
from the rainforest. As the fog of amnesia disperses, there is a transformation in your relationship to other species, and in your commitment to
them. What is described here should not be seen as merely intellectual. The intellect is one entry point to the process outlined, and the easiest one
to communicate. For some people however, this change of perspective follows from actions on behalf of Mother Earth. "I am protecting the
rainforest" develops to "I am part of the rainforest protecting myself. I am that part of the rainforest recently emerged into thinking." What a relief
then! The thousands of years of imagined separation are over and we begin to recall our true nature. That is, the change is a spiritual one,
thinking like a mountain (3), sometimes referred to as "deep ecology". As your memory improves, as the implications of
evolution and ecology are internalised and replace the outmoded anthropocentric structures in your mind, there is an identification with all life,
Then follows the realisation that the distinction between "life" and "lifeless" is a human construct. Every atom in this body existed before organic
life emerged 4000 million years ago. Remember our childhood as minerals, as lava, as rocks? Rocks contain the potentiality to weave themselves
into such stuff as this. We are the rocks dancing. Why do we look down on them with such a condescending air. It is they that are immortal part
of us. (4) If we embark upon such an inner voyage, we may find, upon returning to present day consensus reality, that our actions on behalf of the
environment are purified and strengthened by the experience. We have found here a level of our being that moth, rust, nuclear holocaust or
destruction of the rainforest genepool do not corrupt. The commitment to save the world is not decreased by the new perspective, although the
fear and anxiety which were part of our motivation start to dissipate and are replaced by a certain disinterestedness. We act because life is the
only game in town, but actions from a disinterested, less attached consciousness may be more effective. Activists often don't have much time for
meditation. The disinterested space we find here may be similar to meditation. Some teachers of meditation are embracing deep ecology (5) and
vice versa(6). Of all the species that have existed, it is estimated that less than one in a hundred exist today. The rest are extinct. As environment
changes, any species that is unable to adapt, to change, to evolve, is extinguished. All evolution takes place in this fashion In this way an oxygen
starved fish, ancestor of yours and mine, commenced to colonise the land. Threat of extinction is the potter's hand that molds all the forms of life.
The human species is one of millions threatened by imminent extinction through nuclear war and other
environmental changes. And while it is true that the "human nature" revealed by 12,000 years of written history does
not offer much hope that we can change our warlike, greedy, ignorant ways, the vastly longer fossil history assures
us that we CAN change. We ARE the fish, and the myriad other death-defying feats of flexibility which a study of
evolution reveals to us. A certain confidence ( in spite of our recent "humanity") is warranted. From this point of view, the threat of
extinction appears as the invitation to change, to evolve. After a brief respite from the potter's hand, here we are back on the wheel again. The
change that is required of us is not some new resistance to radiation, but a change in consciousness. Deep ecology is the search for a viable
consciousness. Surely consciousness emerged and evolved according to the same laws as everything else. Molded by environ mental pressures,
the mind of our ancestors must time and again have been forced to transcend itself. To survive our current environmental pressures, we must
consciously remember our evolutionary and ecological inheritance. We must learn to think like a mountain. If we are to be open to evolving a
new consciousness, we must fully face up to our impending extinction (the ultimate environmental pressure). This means acknowledging that part
of us which shies away from the truth, hides in intoxication or busyness from the despair of the human, whose 4000 million year race is run,
whose organic life is a mere hair's breadth from finished.(7) A biocentric perspective, the realisation that rocks WILL dance, and
that roots go deeper that 4000 million years, may give us the courage to face despair and break through to a more
viable consciousness, one that is sustainable and in harmony with life again. "Protecting something as wide as this planet is
still an abstraction for many. Yet I see the day in our own lifetime that reverence for the natural systems - the oceans, the rainforests, the soil , the
grasslands, and all other living things - will be so strong that no narrow ideology based upon politics or economics will overcome it". (8) Jerry
Brown, Governor of California. The term "deep ecology" was coined by the Norwegian professor of Philosophy and eco-activist Arne Naess, and
has been taken up by academics and environmentalists in Europe, the US and Australia. "The essence of deep ecology is to ask deeper
questions... We ask which society, which education, which form of religion is beneficial for all life on the planet as a whole." (9)
Anthropocentric views exploit resources far enough to push life to extinction
Perrson ‘8 [2008, Erik Persson is a philosophy professor at Lunds University, What is Wrong with Extinction:
The Answer from Anthropocentric Instrumentalism, “Anthropocentric Instrumentalism,”
http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&recordOId=961058&fileOId=975952]
2.3.3. Materials and fuel Many of the materials we use in our daily lives come from living organisms. 43 Most
notably wood that is used in everything from paper towels to houses, but also plenty of other materials. 44 Wood
and other organic products are also important as fuel. 45 More than half of the fuel used in developing countries
comes from wood. In some countries like Tanzania and Uganda, wood comprises four fifths of the fuel. Even in
industrialised countries, wood is an important source of energy. In the relatively densely forested Sweden, it makes
up 17% of the energy consumption.46 Bio fuel is a renewable energy source that many people see as an important
alternative to the present non-renewables. In many respects, the harvesting of other species for material is similar to
harvesting them for food. One difference is that once the material is extracted, it can be used for a longer period of
time. Once food is eaten, it is gone and we need a new harvest. One might think that this makes the pressure on the
supplying species smaller when it comes to material, but unfortunately it is not so. The demand for materials that we
find valuable is often close to insatiable, and our use of material resources is usually very wasteful. Many species
have disappeared and even more are threatened as a result of our “hunger” for materials. The use of wood as fuel,
paper pulp, timber, etc. has e.g. led to the cutting down of a large portion of the world’s forests. The rainforest in
particular. The latter is the world’s riches ecosystem, and many other species have been brought down in the fall.
Cutting down the rain forest, both in order to exploit the trees, and in order to make room for agriculture, might even
be the most important cause of extinction today. Apart from wood, a number of animal and plant species are directly
threatened because we value some material they supply. The use of wild animal products is in fact the primary factor
behind the endangerment of many vertebrate species. 47 Ivory and rhinoceros horns e.g. have been very popular
among human beings. This popularity has nearly caused the extinction of both elephants and rhinoceroses. 48 Some
other species have already disappeared because they have turned out to give us useful materials. 49 Maybe this can
be explained as an effect of irrationality rather than as something that follows from anthropocentric
instrumentalism? We are quite often very irrational in our use of resources, but I am not sure all cases of extinction
due to our utilisation of the species can be explained this way. We discussed this problem briefly in the last subchapter when we talked about food and pointed out that there are probably cases where it is in fact rational from a
strict anthropocentric point of view to use our sources of nutrient in such a way that some species go extinct. This is
probably, at least sometimes, also the case with material and fuel. There is another aspect of the use of other species
as material or fuel that we have to take a closer look at. When discussing food, I mentioned that it might not always
be irrational from an anthropocentric point of view to exploit a species to such a degree that it goes extinct. This
may also be the case when we talk about material and fuel. This conclusion is difficult to establish however. Marian
Radetzki believes that there are some identifiable cases where extinction has had negative economic effects. One
such case is the over-fishing of cod in the north Atlantic. He does not believe that this is always the case however.
50 As we saw, some sources of nutrient can e.g. be substituted by other sources of nutrient. This is also the case with
other resources such as materials of different kinds: One material can often be substituted by another that does the
same job – maybe even better than the original. 51 The possibility of substituting a resource is an important issue in
this discussion. The possibility of substituting one material for another is usually overrated by economists due to the
fact that in economic terms, everything is per definition replaceable by the right amount of anything else. This is of
course not the case in the real world. None the less, materials are constantly replaced by other materials and this is
something that has to be accounted for when we decide whether a certain species is expendable. This argument goes
both ways however: It is also possible to substitute material and fuel from non-living nature with material and fuel
from living organisms.
Anthropocentrism leads to Human exploitation
We as humans have placed a binary between us and natures even though the entire world
is contiguous. These power relationships are uniquely bad and cause inhumane actions
towards not only us but nature as well.
Fox and Mclean 8 (Michael Allen Fox has a phd from Toronto and researches in environmental philosophy,
animal ethics, and science of peace. taught a diverse range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses in philosophy
at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada for 39 years. Lesley Mclean is a lecturer of humanities at the
school of New England. “animal subjects: an ethical reader in a posthuman world, Pg 155-156)
Most of us are accustomed to thinking of the world as made up of people and places, that is, of humans and the
venues in which they do things. But this way of looking at things omits some dimensions that are vital to
determining what we are and how we become what we want to be. For starters, the world contains much more than
people and places; it is the biosphere in its seamless totality, including its organic and inorganic ingredients, all the
animals, all the ecosystems in their interdependency. Next, all the “places” of the world are contiguous; we only
separate them artificially (geopolitically, in terms of interests, travel destinations, zones to be avoided, etc) The
world is properly one vast space containing many places, each designated as it is for pragmatic, symbolic,
intellectual or other purposes. Furthermore, some authors demonstrate, the extent to which nonhumans transform
humans and the conditions of their lives, and the reverse is also true, of course. But this is not all, for as Lynn rightly
comments, the “shared contexts of all life-forms…inform our moral understanding and relationship to animals.”
These contexts too are spatial and meaning-giving aspects of the world. The question of who, or what, belongs in the
moral community has always been a vexed one. Membership and non-membership are functions of inclusion and
exclusion respectively, of recognition and non-recognition, validation and denial and so on. As Michel Foucault has
so carefully demonstrated, such choices and decisions are made at the conceptual level and reinforced at the social
and political level; but in either case they are expressions of power relationships. The dominant group determines
who is “in” and who is “out” (or “other”). But for our purposes here, what is interesting to note is that such
determinations have operational significance in the ways they are carried out, that is they become more loaded with
meaning as they are applied in the physical space of the lived world. Thus, Foucault wrote, ghettos, reservations,
affluent suburbs and the like are created and maintained. The same dynamics apply in general in our dealings with
animals. In the mores apparent sense, we have created zoos, laboratories, factory farms, aquariums, circuses, hunting
and fishing zones, wildlife refuges and other forms of confinement and separation; but we have also created natural
history museums in which animals are safe, but dead and statically on display.
Genocide
The anthropocentric mindset allows for the oppression of all life
Heydt 10 (Samantha Heydt is a photographer and journalist who writes about her social advocacy,
“American Abattoirs”, 10/20/2010, http://samheydt.wordpress.com/2010/12/20/224/, Bennett Gilliam)
The conceit of anthropocentrism is rooted in the inability to recognize the role non-humans play in shaping
history. Humanity does not exist, only humans, who “bear within themselves the mark of the inhuman”
(Agamben, 1999: 77). This hybridization obscures fixed notions of civil rights. The modern anthropological
machine differentiates citizen from body, man from human. The justification for cruelty is constructed on the
dismissal of the victim being primitive, barbarian, savage and akin to animals. Yet, the fate of human beings is not
far off from the fate of animals. “In terms of human- animal relations, it is the former that hoard “sovereign
jouissance” for themselves, by virtue of assumed authority and ownership. But when it comes to human-human
relations, the question of “who wears the pants”—in its most nuanced and metaphysical sense—becomes harder
to identify with any certainty” (Pettman 140). Heidegger’s theory of “enframing” buttresses the notion that
human’s relationship with nature influences how we relate to one another (Zimmerman 23). The power apparatus
that allows for human domination over animals emerges from the same violent pathology that subjugates humans
to suffering. Isaac Bashevis Singer argues that “everything the Nazis did to Jews we are today practicing on
animals” (Patterson 221). “The very same mindset that made the Holocaust possible – that we can do anything we
want to those we decide are ‘different or inferior’ – is what allows us to commit atrocities against animals every
single day. The fact is, all animals feel pain, fear and loneliness. We’re asking people to recognize that what Jews
and others went through in the Holocaust is what animals go through every day in factory farms” (Prescott 2003).
In the United States today, we’re all aware (to various degrees) of the brutality that takes place to satisfy our
hunger for cheap meat- yet few call for reform. During WWII the “good Germans” lived in denial of the Holocaust
even as outside the crematoriums ash fell from the sky. The cruel experimentation conducted by Dr. Josef
Mengele on Jewish prisoners was also met with silent indifference. Stripped down to bare life, the victims of these
tests were met with the same disregard as the 50-100 million animals experimented on annually today. It is
significant to mention that Mengele’s father founded the slaughterhouse machinery company,Karl Mengele &
Sons, which may have planted the seed of cruelty exercised first on animals. Also during WWII, lampshades were
made from human skin and sold as highly coveted commodities in Germany. Similarly today, fur coat and alligator
skin are fetishized objects of seduction stripped of the stigma of sporting another specie’s skin. In tracing the
trajectory of exploitation, it is clear that the atrocities inflicted on humans have been rehearsed on animals. We
are surrounded by “an enterprise of degradation, cruelty, and killing which rivals anything the Third Reich was
capable of, indeed dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without end, self-regenerating, bringing rabbits, rats,
poultry, livestock ceaselessly into the world for the purpose of killing them” (Coetzee 21). Descartes’
notion Cognito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) aligns animals with machines- facilitating cruelty sans the sting
of remorse. This perverse perception is applicable to a spectrum of suffering. “The oppression of human over
human has deep roots in the oppression of human over animal” (Best 23). As long as ethical responsibility fails to
embrace all living creatures, these moral limitations are as much a threat to humanity as they are to animals.
The subjugation of animal life justifies genocide
Sanbonmatsu ’11. – John Sanbonmatsu—Professor of Philosophy, Worcester Polytechnic Institue—Critical
Theory and Animal Liberation – 2011
The constantly encountered assertion that savages, blacks, Japanese are like animals, monkeys for example, is the key to
the pogrom. The possibility of pogroms is decided in the moment when the gaze of a fatally wounded animal falls on a
human being. What is crucial to bear in mind, however, as Victoria Johnson points out in her chapter here the very “power of
such animal metaphors depends on a prior cultural understanding of other animals themselves, as beings who are by
nature abject, degraded, and hence worthy of extermination.” The animal, thus, rests at the intersection of race and caste
systems. And nowhere is the link between the human and nonhuman clearer than “in facist ideology” for “no other discourse so completely
authorizes absolute violence in the weak.” In our own contemporary society too, Johnson emphasizes, we find daily life and
meaning based on elaborate rituals intentded to keep us from acknowledging the violence we do to subordinate
classes of beings, above all the animals. So numerous in fact are the parallels—semiotic, ideological,
psychological, historical, cultural, technical and so forth – between the Nazis’ extermination of the Jews and
Roma and the routinized mass murder of nonhuman beings, that Charles patterson’s recent book on the subject despite its
strengths, only manages to scratch the surface of a topic whose true dimensions have yet to be fathomed.
The aff is a Passive Bystander who is aware of genocide, but do nothing about it.
Vetelson 2k (ARNE JOHAN VETLESEN, b. 1960, PhD in philosophy (University of Oslo,
1993); Associate Professor, University of Oslo (1994— ). Most recent book in English:
Close-ness: An Ethics (ed. with Harald Jodalen; Oslo: Scandinavian University Press,
1997); author of eight books on ethics, political philosophy, hermeneutics, and
psychoanalysis. Within this card, Vetelson quotes the 1948 Convention on the Prevention
and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, an international conference. Article published
July 2000)
Most often, in cases of genocide, for every person directly victimized and killed there will be hundreds, thousands,
perhaps even millions, who are neither directly targeted as victims nor directly participating as perpetrators. The
moral issues raised by genocide, taken as the illegal act par excellence, are not confined to the nexus of agent
and victim. Those directly involved in a given instance of genocide will always form a minority, so to speak. The
majority to the event will be formed by the contemporary bystanders. Such bystanders are individuals; in their private and professional lives, they will belong to a vast score of groups and collectives, some informal and closely
knit, others formal and detached as far as personal and emotional involvement are concerned. In the loose sense
intended here, every contemporary citizen cognizant of a specific ongoing instance of genocide, regardless of
where in the world, counts as a bystander.
Bystanders in this loose sense are cognizant, through TV, radio, newspapers, and other publicly available
sources of information, of ongoing genocide somewhere in the world, but they are not — by profession or formal
appointment — involved in it. Theirs is a passive role, that of onlookers, although what starts out as a passive stance
may, upon decision, convert into active engagement in the events at hand. I shall label this category passive
bystanders.
Inaction is the same as accepting, approving, and complying with ongoing genocide
Vetelson 2k (ARNE JOHAN VETLESEN, b. 1960, PhD in philosophy (University of Oslo,
1993); Associate Professor, University of Oslo (1994— ). Most recent book in English:
Close-ness: An Ethics (ed. with Harald Jodalen; Oslo: Scandinavian University Press,
1997); author of eight books on ethics, political philosophy, hermeneutics, and
psychoanalysis. Within this card, Vetelson quotes the 1948 Convention on the Prevention
and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, an international conference. Article published
July 2000)
Ricoeur's proposed extension certainly sounds plausible. Regrettably, his proposal stops halfway. The
vital insight articulated, albeit not
developed, in the passages quoted is that not acting is still acting. Brought to bear on the case of genocide as a reported, ongoing
affair, the inaction making a difference is the inaction of the bystander to unfolding genocide. The failure to act when
confronted with such action, as is involved in accomplishing genocide, is a failure which carries a message to both
the agent and the sufferer: the action may proceed. Knowing, yet still not acting, means granting acceptance to
the action. Such inaction entails 'letting things be done by someone else' —clearly, in the case of acknowledged genocide, 'to the point of
criminality', to invoke one of the quotes from Ricoeur. In short, inaction here means complicity; accordingly, it raises the
question of responsibility, guilt, and shame on the part of the inactive bystander, by which I mean the
bystander who decides to remain inactive.
Biodiversity
Anthropocentric policy instrumentalizes non-human life - Legitimates the destruction of
biodiversity
Perrson ‘8 [2008, Erik Persson is a philosophy professor at Lunds University, What is Wrong with Extinction:
The Answer from Anthropocentric Instrumentalism, “Anthropocentric Instrumentalism,”
http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&recordOId=961058&fileOId=975952]//AA
2.2. The right answer? Sverker Sörlin, who has studied our attitudes towards the environment from a historical perspective, claims that the best
reason to believe that we will establish what he calls “a contract with nature” is that the arrogance we have shown towards
nature will eventually be detrimental also to our own species and our culture . 18 Sörlin thus seems to consider anthropocentric
instrumentalism the correct – and the most instrumentally useful – answer to our question. He is apparently not alone in this. Steven Luper-Foy
and Bryan Norton e.g. believe that anthropocentrism does give us strong reasons for becoming better at protecting nature. 19 Is this judgement
correct, and if so, is it sufficient to account for our moral intuitions concerning extinction? I.e.: To what degree can anthropocentric
instrumentalism account for our moral intuitions against species extinction? The rest of this book will be concerned with this
question. In order to answer it, we have to answer three sub-questions: 1. How important are other species to us human beings? 2. If other species
are important to us, are they important enough in comparison to the values they have to compete with? 3. If so, can this be a complete explanation
of why it is at least in general morally wrong to contribute to the extinction of a species? I will start by trying to answer the first two questions by
discussing different ways in which other species can have instrumental value for human beings, and by looking at some particular forms of
instrumental value that are especially relevant for our investigation. When I have done that, I will approach the third question by investigating
whether our moral intuitions concerning extinction can be completely satisfied with anthropocentric instrumentalism as the sole answer. Let us
however begin with the first of the sub-questions by looking at some ways in which other species can have instrumental value for human beings
2.3. Some kinds of instrumental value of non-human species for human beings. All our nutrients come from other species directly and indirectly.
Most of the species used directly for food are domesticated, but even wild species contribute to our food supply, especially in developing regions
but even the most technologically advanced countries depend in many ways on wild species for their food.20 All our domesticated species today
originate from wild species, and some of today’s wild species will probably be the basis for domesticated species in the future. 21 Since it is
assumed by anthropocentrism that only human beings have moral standing, the fact that we are killing the proximate
source of our nutrients (including killing and eating sentient animals) is not in itself a problem according to anthropocentrism as
long as the species continues to exist and supplies us with new individuals to eat. This will give us a strong incentive for conserving the species
even without involving ethics. Rational selfishness alone is an incentive for conservation. If we also admit the moral responsibility not to deplete
the food sources for other human beings, the argument will be even stronger. It also makes the argument more inclusive since we probably need
more species to supply the whole of humanity with food. A species that is well suited for being farmed/hunted/gathered etc. in Sweden may not
be equally well suited for the same activities in e.g. India. 22 This looks promising, but the case is not as simple as it looks above. That a species
is found suitable as food for human beings has not always been good news from a preservation perspective. We have literally eaten a large
number of species to extinction.23 This is probably quite often a result of imprudence or irrationality rather than as something that
necessarily follows from anthropocentric instrumentalism, but maybe we do not need to save all the sources of a particular nutrient to secure the
supply of that nutrient? Maybe we do not need to save all species that supply us with protein in order to secure our supply of protein e.g.?
Economically, it may well be rational in many cases to replace natural species with bred or cultivated ones that are more productive and easier to
manage (as long as the wild species are not important for other reasons). 24 This means that if we find one species that is a good provider of
different nutrients and is easy to breed etc. we have a tendency to domesticate that species and breed large numbers of it. At the same time other
species that play the same role but less effectively lose their importance. It is also argued from an economic perspective that it can sometimes be
perfectly rational to deplete a non-renewable resource if we know or at least have good reasons to believe that we can replace it with another
resource. It may even be economically required to do so if extensive use of the first resource is necessary to drive the economical and
technological development that is needed for us to develop the means of utilizing the other resource. If this is right, it substantially weakens the
argument that we need to preserve any given species as sources of nutrients for human beings as long as there exist other species that can supply
us with the same nutrients. There is another reason why it might be a problem from a preservation perspective that a species turns out to be a
valuable nutrient source for human beings: If we domesticate a species, we will probably change its genetic make up. The
properties that make it more suitable for human utilization may well make the domesticated form less suited for a
life in nature. If this is combined with the usual human fear of competition, the result can be that other species
including the non-domesticated relatives of the species are eradicated in order to protect or give room for the
domesticated version. This behaviour is quite common and has e.g. resulted in destruction of forests and wetlands to
gain land for different types of agriculture, as well as to fierce eradication campaigns against everything from plants
and animals competing for nutrients, via plants and animals competing for space, to all kinds of predators that see
domesticated animals as easy prey.25 Domesticated forms of different plants, grasses and animals have taken over large areas of the
planet. This has contributed substantially to the extinction of wild species. One illustrative example is when rain forests are cut
down to grow soy used as fodder to cattle in order to provide us with meat and milk.26
Loss of biodiversity causes extinction of humans
Diner ‘94 [David, Ph.D., Planetary Science and Geology, "The Army and the Endangered
Species Act: Who's Endangering Whom?," Military Law Review, 143 Mil. L. Rev.
161]//AA
To accept that the snail darter, harelip sucker, or Dismal Swamp southeastern shrew 74 could save [hu]mankind may be difficult for
some. Many, if not most, species are useless to[hu]man[s] in a direct utilitarian sense. Nonetheless, they may be critical in an
indirect role, because their extirpations could affect a directly useful species negatively.In a closely
interconnected ecosystem, the loss of a species affects other species dependent on it. 75 Moreover, as the
number of species decline, the effect of each new extinction on the remaining species increases dramatically. 4.
Biological Diversity. -- The main premise of species preservation is that diversity is better than simplicity. 77 As the current mass
extinction has progressed, the world's biological diversity generally has decreased. This trend occurs within ecosystems by reducing the
number of species, and within species by reducing the number of individuals. Both trends carry serious future implications. 78 [*173]
Biologically diverse ecosystems are characterized by a large number of specialist species, filling narrow ecological niches. These
ecosystems inherently are more stable than less diverse systems. "The more complex the ecosystem, the more successfully
it can resist a stress. . . . [l]ike a net, in which each knot is connected to others by several strands, such a fabric can resist collapse
better than a simple, unbranched circle of threads -- which if cut anywhere breaks down as a whole." 79 By causing widespread
extinctions, humans have artificially simplified many ecosystems. As biologic simplicity increases, so does the risk of
ecosystem failure. The spreading Sahara Desert in Africa, and the dustbowl conditions of the 1930s in the United States are
relatively mild examples of what might be expected if this trend continues. Theoretically, each new animal or plant
extinction, with all its dimly perceived and intertwined affects,could cause total ecosystem
collapse and human extinction. Each new extinction increases the risk of disaster. Like a mechanic removing, one by
one, the rivets from an aircraft's wings, 80 [hu]mankind may be edging closer to the abyss.
XT: Speciesism
Speciesism leads to debaticide and loss of knowledge production.
Rossini 06 (Manuela Rossini, Executive Director of the Institute of Advanced Study in the Humanities and the
Social Sciences, PhD in English lit, MA in critical and cultural theory, “To the Dogs: Companion speciesism and the
new feminist materialism”, http://intertheory.org/rossini, September 2006)
What is equally sobering, however, is the fact that the most radical metaposthumanists (and the humanities more broadly) do not quite
manage to make an epistemological break with liberal humanism, insofar as their writing is also marked by an
unquestioned “speciesism”; i.e., in the definition of ethicist Peter Singer who popularised the term three decades ago in his book Animal
Liberation, “a prejudice or attitude of bias in favour of the interests of members of one’s own species and against those
of members of other species.”[17] Both postcolonial, feminist and queer theories and discussion of subjectivity, identity, and difference as
well as the claims on the right to freedom by new social movements have recourse to an Enlightenment concept of the subject whose conditio
sine qua non is the absolute control of that subject over the life of nonhuman others/objects. The rhetorical strategy of radically separating nonwhite, non-male and non-heterosexual human beings from animals in order to have the subject status of these members of the human species
recognised was and is successful and also legitimate – given that the racist, sexist and homophobic discourse of animality or an animalistic
„nature“ has hitherto served to exclude most individuals of those groups of people from many privileges – but the speciesist logic of the
dominance of human animals over nonhuman animals has remained in place. If we fight racism and (hetero)sexism
because we declare discrimination on the basis of specific and identifiable characteristics – such as “black“,
“woman” or “lesbian“ to be wrong and unjust, then we should also vehemently oppose the exploitation, imprisoning,
killing and eating of nonhuman animals on the basis of their species identity. Moreover, if our research and teaching
as cultural critics endeavours to do justice to the diversity of human experience and life styles and feel responsible
towards marginalised others, should we then not seriously think about Cary Wolfe’s question „how must our work
itself change when the other to which it tries to do justice is no longer human ?“[18] Wolfe is not making a claim for animal
rights here – at least not primarily. This is also why his book puns on “rites/rights“: Animal Rites is the intervention of the antispeciesist cultural critic who scrutinizes the rituals that human beings form around the figures of animals, including
the literary and cinematic enactments of cannibalism, monstrosity and normativity. Wolfe subsumes all of these
stagings under the heading the discourse of species, with “discourse“ understood in the sense of Michel Foucault as
not only a rhetoric but above all as the condition for the production and ordering of meaning and knowledge in institutions
like medicine, the law, the church, the family or universities. In addition, Wolfe wants to sharpen our awareness that a speciesist
metaphysics has also a deadly impact on human animals, especially because speciesism is grounded in the juridical
state apparatus: “the full transcendence of the ‘human‘ requires the sacrifice of the ‘animal‘ and the animalistic, which in turn makes possible
a symbolic economy in which we engage in what Derrida [calls] a ‚non-criminal putting to death‘ of other humans as well by marking them as
animal.“
AT: Perm
AT: Perm do both
1. The aff is the exact kind of compromised politics that we kritik – they cannot both
reject their anthropocentric discourse when simultaneously doing a plan that takes
nature as a commodity
2. the perm at best is severance which is an independent reason to reject the aff
Cards (insert into analytics if needed)
All the neg has to do is win the link argument – if the aff links that means they are
promoting the anthropocentric mindset, means they can’t solve the K and perm is
impossible.
Papadopoulos 10(Dr. Dimitris Papadopoulos, teaches politics, culture and organization at the School of
Management, University of Leicester. 2010, ephemera, Vol. 10 “Insurgent posthumanism”,
http://www.ephemerajournal.org/contribution/insurgent-posthumanism)
It is true that left politics have largely ignored the complexity and unpredictability of the entanglement between a
deeply divided society and that of a deeply divided nonhuman world. The principle avenue for social transformation, at least in
the main conceptualisations of the political left[3], passes through seizing the centres of social and political power. The dominant
motivation for left politics after the revolutions of 1848 (and definitely since 1871) has been how to conquer
institutional power and the state. Within this matrix of radical left thinking the posthumanist moment becomes invalidated, subsumed to a
strategy focused solely on social power. But here I want to argue that a post-humanist gesture can be found at the heart of
processes of left political mobilisations that create transformative institutions and alternatives. This was the case
even when such moves were distorted at the end, neutralised or finally appropriated into a form of left politics solely
concerned with institutional representation and state power. What such an appropriation conceals is that a significant
part of the everyday realities put to work through radical left struggles have always had a strong posthumanist
character through their concentration on remaking the mundane material conditions of existence beyond and outside
an immediate opposition to the state. In what follows I will try to excavate this posthumanist gesture from the main narratives of radical
left political struggles along the following three fault lines: the first is about the exit from an alienated and highly regulated relation to the
material, biological and technological realms through the making of a self-organised common world – a move from enclosed and separated
worlds governed by labour to the making of ecological commons. A second posthumanist move is one that attacks the practice of
politics as a matter of ideas and institutions and rehabilitates politics as an embodied and everyday practice – an exit
from the representational mind to the embodiment of politics. Finally, the third, involves the decentring of the human
subject as the main actor of history making. History is a human affair but it is not made (only) by certain groups of
humans – a move towards a post-anthropocentric history.
The perm either links or it severs because the affs anthropocentric view dominates how we
view the world and in both senses are a reason to reject the perm.
Goodman 11 (Benny Goodman – Professor of Sociology, Plymouth University -- Transformation for health and
sustainability: “consumption is killing us” – 2011)
It is arguably the case that the anthropocentric view dominates in Western thought, making us incapable of
making the interconnections between the stars, the external cosmos of the myriad galaxies, the internal human physiological
cosmos, the ecosphere, the biosphere, and ourselves. We then delude ourselves when we think that we are separate
entities, that we are able to control for our own benefit that which we are actually a part of. Thus we have triumphed over
nature controlling it for our own ends resulting in the magnificence of cities such as New York, which have become our own natural habitat. This
comes at a cost. We are unable to see systemically, inter-connectedly or interdependently. The separation between
humanity and ecosphere is complete within consumer capitalism in its delivery of the dreams of avarice.
Fiating the plan means adopting a frame of mind. Anthropocentrism cannot be
abolished through the state – only a complete shift without the state can solve
Bonnett 02 [Michael, lecturer at University of Cambridge, He is widely published in the field of philosophy of
education and is currently writing a book on the philosophy of environmental education. He is also exploring the values implicit
in modern information and communications technology and their impact on thinking and understanding , “Sustainability as a
Frame of Mind-and How to Develop It,”
The Trumpeter 18.1, http://trumpeter.athabascau.ca/index.php/trumpet/article/view/115/120]//AA
So, why recommend the move from policy to frame of mind? There are two main reasons. The first has been well rehearsed
elsewhere,2 and refers to arguments that demonstrate that despite its broad appeal (indeed, in many ways because of it) the notion of sustainable
development as a policy is highly problematic, being heavily contested and subject to internal contradictions and severe epistemological
difficulties. The second reason is more positive. At the heart of any notion of education for sustainable development must lie a
certain frame of mind involving some idea of a right relationship with nature, since without this a severely impoverished
notion of human utility would become the criterion of sustainability. Focusing on this “nature-orientated” frame of mind
offers the possibility of both contributing to the clarification of sustainable development as an idea, and of
identifying something which is of great educational importance in its own right , for in many ways our underlying relationship
with nature defines both ourselves and our relationship with the world as a whole. 3 What, then, are the key features of sustainability as a frame of
mind? The following seem central. It involves a genuine (poetic) receptive-responsive openness to, and concern for, nature conceived in its
most general sense as the non-human, self-originary aspects of the world. Of course, nature can be conceived in numerous ways—
such as “the great order of things” (whether it be conceived in biophysical or spiritual terms), as wilderness, as that which is innate, as that which
is wholesome (natural), and so forth—but it seems to me that informing our paradigmatic senses of nature is the notion of that which is other in
the sense of being experienced as somehow self-arising. In this sense nature is construed less as an objective realm than as a dimension of human
awareness—understood as independent of the human will, but not necessarily unaffected by it.4 For example, in the case of our own bodies—
which clearly can be affected by our choices and actions—we maintain our health by working with powers of which we are not the author and
that are beyond our ability to transform. There is a nature, an integrity, recognized as external to our will with which we have to find a harmony.
It is neither purely anthropocentric nor bio-centric in essence. Recognizing that the non-human (as well as the human) only shows up in the
context of human concerns and practices, nature is thus human-related but neither human-authored nor at human disposal. This places humankind
authentically as neither the lord of beings nor as something simply to be subsumed to some greater ecological whole, but as the occasioner of
things and thus bearing certain responsibilities towards them which also constitute an element of our own good. Though it cannot matter in the
slightest to biophysical nature whether humankind survives—some equilibrium will always be established, with or without us—nature only has
significance in that space which is human consciousness, or its equivalent. Thus, there is an important sense in which sustainability as a frame of
mind is not a bolt-on option but an integral element of authentic human awareness. Though now fairly systematically overridden, it is internal to
the very event of being conscious at the human level. For example, it is rooted in the notion of truth and its centrality to human being. Truth—as
our awareness of things disclosing themselves and our sense of the fittingness of the language which both facilitates and expresses this (le mot
juste)—lies at the heart of human consciousness. In constituting a celebration of what is, relatively unsubverted by external instrumental motives,
the pure sustaining nature of consciousness in this mode is also the essence of sustainability as a concern to let things be (as they are in
themselves, including their cultural dimensions)—truly to safeguard, to preserve, to conserve. Clearly, this is quite a different sense of
sustainability to that which seeks to sustain in order to have ready to hand a resource that may be required for some
further development (such as economic growth). Its development will require, above all, a radical re-evaluation and repositioning of the calculative motives and understandings that dominate modern Western consciousness and society. That is to say that it
will require the development of (and partly a retrieval of) a different metaphysics. Otherwise we risk the likelihood of preoccupying pupils with
symptoms masquerading as causes. (For example, measuring pollutant levels and devising scientific remedies rather than addressing the
underlying motives and conceptions embedded in social practices which give rise to pollution.) Only a thorough—if gradual—disruption of
currently prevalent motives can clear a space for a more poetic re-appropriation of nature and of ourselves. Now if such an account is to serve as
a basis for thinking about how to develop sustainability as a frame of mind, certain elements in it require further elaboration and refinement. First,
poetic should not be equated with passive. We appropriate nature and ourselves not only through abstract reflection and aesthetic contemplation,
but in our making and in the intimate details of our sundry daily transactions with our environment. Some aspects of this point will be developed
below in a discussion of the notion of attentiveness, but it also means that while the impact of particular—in a sense, elevated—experiences may
be seminal, poetic response is also constituted by day-to-day practices and action strategies which implicitly reflect the desire to disclose,
conserve, and safeguard things, to respect the intuitions provided by sensuous contact, and to properly acknowledge natural rhythms and
processes. Second, this account takes issue with the notion of seeking a frame of mind that will bring about
sustainability, on the grounds that such an approach makes the frame of mind subservient to some highly contentious
further goal. Rather, it invites us to consider that sustainability can itself be conceived as a frame of mind—and one which is of the essence of
human being and, therefore, of human well-being. Obviously, this opens it to the criticism that we do not know whether the frame of mind
advocated would, in fact, bring about ecological sustainability. But the central point here is that if sustainability as a frame of
mind is essential to human flourishing, its desirability is not ultimately dependent on whether it will lead to ecological
sustainability. (Though given its fundamental motive to reveal and safeguard things in their own nature, it is difficult to think that it would not
at least contribute to this.) Rather, its achievement, in some degree, is what gives point to the achievement of ecological sustainability and, as
such, should define its character. Without it, sustained human life would be so impoverished as to be of little worth—either to itself or in its
revealing of nature. Third, it seems to me that one of the issues that this account raises is the notion of an environmental ethic—its character, its
justification, and its transmission in an educational context. For example, should we be seeking to articulate an ethic towards nature as a whole,
which in some way either parallels or is an extension of, say, the ethic of respect for persons? On the view expressed in this paper, the
character of any such environmental ethic would differ from traditional ethics because it would have a different
metaphysical basis: it would deal with open, many-faceted, mysterious things rather than pre-defined, tightly categorized,
thoroughly knowable objects; that is, it would work in, create, and sustain a world revealed in this way . In a number of
ways, Freya Mathews expresses something of this in her emphasis on a self-realizing “ecocosm” as the ground of human existence,5 and so too,
does Richard Smith (if I understand him rightly) with his focus on the idea of “attentiveness” in human perception. 6 But, in my view, while both
approaches are valuable for what they criticize, they suffer a certain weakness in what they assert: they make unsubstantiated assumptions about
certain key values; that is, their accounts involve a tacit environmental ethic. Taking each in turn, and very briefly, Matthews’ notion of the
“ecological self” which identifies with the rest of the cosmos as a system of nested, self-realizing entities, of which it is a product and by which it
is sustained, advocates a strong, indeed, submersing, sense of interconnectedness with nature and feeling of eros towards it. This is claimed to
be a logical extension of our natural self-love once we recognize “the involvement of wider wholes in our identity,” 7 and thus we are held to
flourish when we live in a way that affirms the eco-system in which we are nested and all others flourish. On my reading of
Smith, he understandably wishes to avoid the mysticism involved in views such as this while retaining something of
the essence of their attitude towards nature. He speaks of “attentiveness” as a mode of relating to things in which the demands of “the
insistent, selfish ego” are put aside and in which we exercise patience and are determined to see things justly—qualities exhibited by the
craftsman who has developed a feel for his material. In such attentiveness, according to Smith, the small contingent details of ordinary life and
the natural world are properly respected—in a certain sense, loved. Such attunement with the world requires no mystical merging of mind with
nature but involves acting in accordance with the internal goods of an activity, that which constitutes the genuine mutual flourishing of self and
nature. Now it seems to me that there are valuable insights in both of these accounts, but that ultimately they succeed only if we subscribe to the
unsubstantiated values that are implicit in them. In my view, in the first case we should not so subscribe, and in the second we should—when
their origins are revealed. The problem with Matthews’ view is that despite the semblance of strong eco-centrism, ironically, it is only
anthropocentric base. The reason for this is simple: There is no state of the ecosystem that favours all its constituents.
The flourishing of some involves the decline of others, and her argument can constrain us only to identify with those
parts of the greater whole which we perceive to support us and not, for example, the malaria bacillus or the HIV virus. Smith’s
plausible on an
more phenomenological view has the problem of showing why “attentiveness” should respond to some simpatico with nature rather than other
“internal goods” of an activity, such as the sense of elegance of battery farming as a solution to the problem of efficient food production. What
is needed here is, I believe, the kind of metaphysical underpinning that the view which started this paper attempts to provide, namely, a
poetic apprehension in which that which is currently withdrawn is allowed to show itself, where the inchoate and the strange (as central
elements of nature as the self-originary) are acknowledged and allowed to stand, and we participate in things in their manysidedness and intrinsic mystery. This contrasts starkly with that attitude of mind in which everything is subjected to the
quest for total (and therefore sightless) transparency through complete objective classification, such that things in their
sheer presencing are constantly turned into mere instances of more general categories. Something of this might be put to us by, say,
Van Gogh’s painting of the rush seat chair. Here we are invited to experience the chair not merely as an instance of something you sit on, or a
chair of a certain sort as in a catalogue, but as this chair in its own immediacy, its unique and vibrant standing there, into which we may be drawn
and in which we may participate. Parallel (and further) points could be made about his sunflowers, the cornfield, the trees outside Saint Remy
Asylum, and others. The environmental ethic we seek must be one in which perception and action become apt to things themselves. An ethic not
of rules but of receptive response, where discernment is given priority over definition. So how might sustainability as a frame of mind best be
developed? Looking at the school curriculum as a whole, Stables and Scott have suggested that it would be a mistake to attempt to erect
sustainability as an additional cross-discipline entity based on some implausible holistic conception of an appropriate frame of mind and its
developmental needs.8 They prefer a more piecemeal, post-modern approach which eschews any such grand narrative in favour of developing
sustainability within the perspectives that existing school disciplines have to offer. Given that we are not in a position to regenerate the education
system (including teachers’ expertise and attitudes) from scratch, this would also seem to be far more realizable in practice. However, in the light
of the points made above, the following two reservations arise. First, is not this within-discipline approach susceptible to an unhelpful
conservatism? Does it take proper account of the danger of motives inherent in a discipline (including its own critical procedur es) which
(remembering that many disciplines were rooted in a cultural milieu whose dominant aspiration was to conquer and exploit the natural world),
may be covertly hostile to nature and therefore set up eco-problems in a way that conceals its own contribution to them. This will hardly be
exposed by reflexive techniques within that discipline. The “primary agenda of the discipline” sometimes may need to be altered. Second, does
not the within-discipline account trade on an ambiguity? Its plausibility as a realistic approach rests in playing to the established loyalties and
strengths of practitioners within the disciplines, but “ examining the various ways in which each discipline construes, and has construed, the
human-nature relationship”9 sounds to have more the character of a meta-disciplinary examination. This is likely to be just as unfamiliar and
uncomfortable for subject-loyal teachers as an external education for sustainability framework. It is, of course, an interesting point as to how far a
particular discipline may incorporate its own meta enquiry, but it is rarely a feature of disciplines as taught at school. To criticize a withindisciplinary approach in this way, however, is not to be committed to some holistic (in the sense of globalizing) alternative, as is perhaps
sometimes assumed, with varying degrees of plausibility, by the idea of cross-curricular themes. (It also carries with it the danger of a certain ecofascism.) It is true that many eco-related (including our understandings of nature) issues occur and must be dealt with in a piecemeal way, there
being no obvious overarching objective logic to link them. From the perspective that I am developing, this is an entirely healthy state of affairs—
genuine openness to situations is not enhanced by seeking to impose all-embracing systematic conceptualizations. Precisely the opposite.
Nonetheless, a certain underlying posture, a certain frame of mind, which can lend such piecemeal understandings and actions a certain
consistency, is required. There is a certain ethical holism in the sense that they can be sensed as somehow fitting and compatible—as, say, might
be involved in feeling anger at both the assault of a young child and the vandalism of an insignificant tree. It may be argued that there is a
converse ethical holism involved in anthropocentrism—exemplified in extreme form by the Nazi goal of dominating both humans and nature. 10
Parallel reservations about conditioning by inherent values can be voiced in relation to the democratic approach to teaching environmental issues
advocated by the Environment and School Initiatives program (ENSI).11 This long-running European project is opposed to teachers
promoting environmentalist attitudes (environmentalism), advocating instead that pupils exercise their own
rationality through practically addressing local environmental issues in collaboration with their local community, thus
developing what can be called action competence. The problem with this is the faith put in rationality, and it arises at two levels. First, can
education afford to be procedurally neutral when so many other powerful influences in modern western society are not? In a social-economicpolitical climate that privileges consumerism and the free market how pure is the rationality of pupils and other agents in local decision-making
likely to be? Indeed, (and this is the second point) are there not motives and values embedded in rationality itself that prejudice the perception and
evaluation of environmental issues and which may actually be a (now invisible) contributor to the environmental problem? In the light of the
critiques of Heidegger and others, many
have come to appreciate that modern rationality is itself not neutral: it expresses certain
aspirations towards the world, notably to classify, explain, predict, assess, control, possess, and exploit it. Arguably, it is
precisely the ascendancy of such rationality that has led to our current environmental predicament . (A rationality, by the
way, that can be perceived to be instantiated in the new global medium for thinking and the broadcast of understanding—networked hypermedia.
But that is a further argument!) The upshot of such points is to cast a shadow over ENSI’s highly democratic strategy. They also invite the further
question of the adequacy of even pure rationality to address environmental issues, which frequently involve
Alt
Ecocentrism
ALT – Reject anthropocentric thinking and replace it with an ecocentric ethic that values
all life.
Deckha ’10 – Maneesha Deckha – University of Victoria—“It’s time to abandon the idea of
human rights—December 10, 2010
That the human/subhuman binary continues to inhabit so much of western experience raises the question of the
continuing relevance of anthropocentric concepts (such as “human rights” and “human dignity”) for effective theories of justice,
policy and social movements. Instead of fighting dehumanization with humanization, a better strategy may be to
minimize the human/nonhuman boundary altogether. The human specialness claim is a hierarchical one and relies on the figure of
an Other – the subhuman and nonhuman – to be intelligible. The latter groups are beings, by definition, who do not qualify as “human” and thus
are denied the benefits that being “human” is meant to compel. More to the point, however , a dignity claim staked on species difference, and
This
figure is easily deployed in inter-human violent conflict implicating race, gender and cultural identities as we have seen in the
reliant on dehumanizing Others to establish the moral worth of human beings, will always be vulnerable to the subhuman figure it creates.
context of military and police camps, contemporary slavery and slavery-like practices, and the laws of war – used in these situations to promote
violence against marginalized human groups. A new discourse of cultural and legal protections is required to address
violence against vulnerable humans in a manner that does not privilege humanity or humans, nor permit a subhuman
figure to circulate as the mark of inferior beings on whom the perpetration of violence is legitimate. We need to find
an alternative discourse to theorize and mobilize around vulnerabilities for “subhuman” humans. This move, in
addressing violence and vulnerabilities, should be productive not only for humans made vulnerable by their
dehumanization, but nonhumans as well.
Reject the Anthro view
Reject the aff due to their anthropocentric dominion of the Ocean – other wise humans
claiming animals as a resource becomes inevitable
Sanbonmatsu ’11. (John Sanbonmatsu—Professor of Philosophy, “Worcester Polytechnic Institue—Critical
Theory and Animal Liberation” – 2011)
Of course, humans seize every opportunity to claim special moral qualities, placing themselves above brutal nature
and the “beasts that populate it. Yet while it is no great intellectual triumph for humans to establish their primacy over nature—they have
done so for millennia—the real question turns on the exact character that primacy assumes as it is historically played out.
In the present context, “dominion” (as spelled out in Genesis and other texts) has meant exploitation and abuse, that is, domination largely bereft
if positive ethical content – although some recent works (for example Matthew Scully’s Dominion) have sought to ground a defense of animal
rights in religion. A different kind of human obligation would point in the direction of stewardship, calling attention to
equity, balance, ecological sustainability, and coexistence between humans and the natural world. So far, however,
human beings have done little to distance themselves from a brutal or Hobbesian state of nature having repeatedly proven themselves the most
destructive and murderous of all creatures. The view of natural relations adopted here derives from Regan’s philosophical work –
namely that all sentient being has inalienable rights to be free of pain and suffering at the hands of humans. For Regan, this line of thinking holds
to several interrelated premises: (1) no moral justification exists for overriding animal interests in order to serve
“higher interests”; (2) what matters is not specific intellectual or communication skills but rather the capacity to
experience pain, suffering and loss; (3) while much of nature is inescapably used by humans as resources to satisfy
material and other needs, this logic should not extend to other sentient beings; (4) humans ought to be stewards of
nature and other species within it to the extent possible; and (5) human and animal interests are closely bound
together within the same social and historical processes.
AT: Anthropocentrism Inevitable
Our ethic is driven by powerful biological imperatives for emapthy across the
species line. Evolutionary forces challenge the inevitability of the anthropocentric
mindset—hold their inevitability claims suspect
Olson 7 (Gary Olson is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science at Moravian College,
10/16/2007, “NEUROSCIENCE AND MORAL POLITICS: Chomsky’s Intellectual Progeny”, Bennett Gilliam)
The nonprofit Edge Foundation recently asked some of the world’s most eminent scientists, “What are you optimistic about?
Why?” In response, the prominent neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni cites the proliferating experimental work into the neural
mechanisms that reveal how humans are “wired for empathy.” Iacoboni’s optimism is grounded in his belief that, with the
popularization of scientific insights, these recent findings in neuroscience will seep into public awareness and “. . . this explicit
level of understanding our empathic nature will at some point dissolve the massive belief systems that dominate our societies and
that threaten to destroy us.” (Iacoboni, 2007, p. 14). While there are reasons to remain skeptical (see below) about the progressive
political implications flowing from this work, a body of impressive empirical evidence reveals that the roots of prosocial
behavior, including moral sentiments such as empathy, precede the evolution of culture . This work sustains Noam
Chomsky’s visionary writing about a human moral instinct, and his assertion that, while the principles of our moral nature have
been poorly understood, “we can hardly doubt their existence or their central role in our intellectual and moral lives.” (Chomsky,
1971, n.p., 1988; 2005, p. 263). The emerging field of the neuroscience of empathy parallels investigations being undertaken in
cognate fields. Some forty years ago the celebrated primatologist Jane Goodall observed and wrote about chimpanzee emotions,
social relationships, and “chimp culture,” but experts remained skeptical. A decade ago, the famed primate scientist Frans B.M.
de Waal (1996) wrote about the antecedents to morality in Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other
Animals, but scientific consensus remained elusive. All that’s changed. As a recent editorial in the journal Nature (2007) put it,
it’s now “unassailable fact” that human minds, including aspects of moral thought, are the product of evolution from
earlier primates. According to de Waal, “You don’t hear any debate now.” In his more recent work, de Waal plausibly argues
that human morality—including our capacity to empathize—is a natural outgrowth or inheritance of behavior from
our closest evolutionary relatives. Studies have shown that empathy is present in very young children, even at eighteen
months of age and possibly younger. In the primate world, Warneken and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute at Leipzig,
Germany, recently found that chimps extend help to unrelated chimps and unfamiliar humans, even when
inconvenienced and regardless of any expectation of reward . This suggests that empathy may lie behind this natural
tendency to help and that it was a factor in the social life of the common ancestor to chimpanzees and humans at the
split some six million years ago (New Scientist, 2007; Warneken and Tomasello, 2006). It’s now indisputable that we share
moral faculties with other species (de Waal, 2006; Trivers, 1971; Katz, 2000; Gintis, 2005; Hauser, 2006; Bekoff, 2007; Pierce,
2007). Pierce notes that there are “countless anecdotal accounts of elephants showing empathy toward sick and dying animals,
both kin and non-kin” (2007, p. 6). And recent research in Kenya has conclusively documented elephant’s open grieving/empathy
for other dead elephants. We know from neuroscientific empathy experiments that the same affective brain circuits are
automatically mobilized upon feeling one’s own pain and the pain of others. Through brain imaging, we also know
that separate neural processing regions then free up the capacity to take action . As Decety notes, empathy then allows
us to “forge connections with people whose lives seem utterly alien from us” (Decety, 2006, p. 2). Where comparable
experience is lacking, this “cognitive empathy” builds on the neural basis and allows one to “actively project oneself
into the shoes of another person” by trying to imagine the other person’s situation (Preston, in press), Preston and de
Waal (2002). Empathy is “other directed,” the recognition of the other’s humanity. Cohen and Rogers, in parsing
Chomsky’s critique of elites, note that “Once an unjust order exists, those benefiting from it have both an interest in maintaining
it and, by virtue of their social advantages, the power to do so.” (Cohen, 1991, p. 17) (For a concise but not uncritical treatment of
Chomsky’s social and ethical views, see Cohen, 1991.) Clearly, the vaunted human capacity for verbal communication
cuts both ways. In the wrong hands, this capacity is often abused by consciously quelling the empathic response .
When de Waal writes, “Animals are no moral philosophers,” I’m left to wonder if he isn’t favoring the former in this comparison.
(de Waal, 1996b, n.p.) Third, for many people the basic incompatibility between global capitalism and the lived expression of
moral sentiments may become obvious for the first time. (Olson, 2006, 2005) For example, the failure to engage this moral
sentiment has radical implications, not the least being consequences for the planet. Within the next 100 years, one-half
of all species now living will be extinct. Great apes, polar bears, tigers and elephants are all on the road to extinction due to
rapacious growth, habitat destruction, and poaching. These human activities, not random extinction, will be the undoing of
millions of years of evolution (Purvis, 2000). As Leakey puts it, “Whatever way you look at it, we’re destroying the Earth
at a rate comparable with the impact of a giant asteroid slamming into the planet. . .” And researchers at McGill
University have shown that economic inequality is linked to high rates of biodiversity loss. The authors suggest that economic
reforms may be the prerequisite to saving the richness of the ecosystem and urge that “. . . if we can learn to share the economic
resources more fairly with fellow members of our own species, it may help to share ecological resources with our fellow
species.” (Mikkelson, 2007, p. 5) While one hesitates imputing too much transformative potential to this emotional
capacity, there is nothing inconsistent about drawing more attention to inter-species empathy and eco-empathy. The
latter may be essential for the protection of biotic communities. Decety and Lamm (2006, p. 4) remind us that “. . . one of
the most striking aspects of human empathy is that it can be felt for virtually any target, even targets of a different
species.” Fourth, equally alarming for elites, awareness of this reality contains the potential to encourage “destabilizing”
but humanity-affirming cosmopolitan attitudes toward the faceless “other,” both here and abroad . In de Waal’s apt
words, “Empathy can override every rule about how to treat others .” (de Waal, 2005, p. 9) Amin (2003), for example,
proposes that the new Europe be reframed by an ethos of empathy and engagement with the stranger as its core value. The
diminution of empathy within the culture reduces pro-social behavior and social cohesiveness. Given the dangerous centrifugal
forces of ethno-nationalism and xenophobia, nothing less than this unifying motif will suffice, while providing space for a yet
undefined Europe, a people to come.
Block
AT: Anthropocentrism Good – Disease
Biodiversity is key to preventing pathogens from morphing to humans
Perrson ‘8 [2008, Erik Persson is a philosophy professor at Lunds University, What is Wrong with Extinction:
The Answer from Anthropocentric Instrumentalism, “Anthropocentric Instrumentalism,”
http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&recordOId=961058&fileOId=975952]
2.3.2. Medicine Medical benefits are sometimes put forth as an important reason for preservation of species. 37 Many of the medical drugs we
use today originate from plants. 38 In the future, these numbers are believed to increase. Most plants have never been checked for medically
useful substances, 39 and we will probably find many new medical drugs among wild species. 40 Can this account for at least part of why it is
seen as morally problematic to contribute to the extinction of species? The situation seems to be very similar to the
one we just discussed regarding food, and most of the aspects discussed in relation to food are also applicable here.
One difference is that even though the human demand for medicine is large, it is probably not as large as the demand for food, which means that
both the pros and the cons of referring to medical value are smaller in scope compared to when we refer to the value of species as sources of food
as an explanation for why the causing of extinction is morally problematic from an anthropocentric instrumental
point of view. Another difference is that even though many medical drugs originate in wild plants, the plants are in general not utilised in the
manufacturing of drugs. 41 This diminishes some aspects, but not others. The domestication and competition aspects as well as the depletion
aspect that we brought up in the previous sub-section are much less of a problem when we talk about medicine. Wild species are said to be at
least as important as future sources of medical drugs as they are as future sources of food. This means that protecting the basis of future evolution
will also be at least as important in the medical case as in the food case. I pointed out in the introduction that our intuitions tell us that it is prima
facie wrong to contribute to extermination all things considered. This leaves room for saying that there may be cases when it is acceptable or even
required to contribute to extermination. This is most salient when we deal with species that carry human diseases, like for instance the black rat
(Rattus rattus), the malaria carrying mosquito (Anopheles maculipennis and other species in the Anopheles genus), and of course the malaria
parasites themselves (a number of species of the genus Plasmodium) – not to mention several kinds of bacteria. On the other hand, according to
the Millennium report, a larger diversity of wildlife probably decreases the spread of many wildlife pathogens to human
beings. 42 If this is correct, it means that even though the battle against diseases can in some circumstances be an
argument in favour of exterminating certain species, it can also be an argument in favour of preserving a generally
high level of biodiversity
AT: We Must Help Animals
The aff representation conforms to the idea that the animal only needs to be “rescued”
when it is convenient for people
Irvine 09 (Leslie Irvine is an associate professor at the University of Colorado Boulder where she teaches
sociology and how it relates to animals and gender roles, “Filling the Ark: Animal Welfare in Disaster”, 5/28/2009)
In addition to the issues of cleaner energy, the discussion of how to reduce the harm to birds and animals through
exposure to oil raises the broader question of what we should do for wildlife in disasters of other kinds. With oil
spills, where we are clearly at fault, some intervention is ethical, provided it follows the guidelines and procedures
developed by professional rehabilitators. In most spills, rescue efforts should focus on endangered or threatened
species: in others, the victims [are] should be euthanized. As I point out in Chapter 3, when large amounts of time,
labor, and money going to saving birds and animals who will soon die despite our efforts-or because of them [our
efforts]-we have to question our motives. The discussion of what to do for afflicted birds and animals often involves
politics and public relations, rather than strictly humanitarian actions. The sea otters in the Exxon Valdez spill are a
case in point. Public outcry forced action, even though no plan was in place for the otters before the spill. Millions
of dollars went into a highly publicized attempt to "rescue" a few hundred animals. Many died while being
"rescued," and many others did not survive long after being released. Had the spill affected a species with a lower
"cuteness" factor, thus lower on the socio-zoologic scale, the pleas would not have been so loud or so frequent.
Moreover, Exxon most likely would not have poured so much money into a species that would not have bolstered its
public image the way the sea otters did.
AT: local environments resilient
Humans are thrashing the environment at incredible levels, the Aleutian Island Ecosystem
is an empiric example. The chain destruction reaction is massive. Empirics prove that
humans destroy even remote ecosystems
Bender 3 (Frederic L. Bender is the author of “The Culture of Extinction: Towards the Philosophy of Deep Ecology”, published in
2003, the book from whence this card came, on pages 55-58. He also holds the following degrees: Professor of Philosophy. BS, Polytechnic
University of New York; MA, PhD, Northwestern University. He further teaches at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.
Need I say more?) I
ndicative of ocean ecosystems' vulnerability is the recent collapse of the Aleutian Island ecosystem, one of the
world's most remote areas." Until recently, this subarctic ecosystem based on vast undersea kelp forests supported immense
numbers of smelt, shrimp, king crabs, sea otters, and sea lions. Suddenly, in the mid-1990s, the marine mammals vanished (ibid.).
Now sharks, pollock, and sea urchins dominate waters once brimming with seals, otters, and king crab. Marine
ecologist Jim Estes, who has studied the Aleutian ecosystem for thirty years, says no one "has ever seen a decline of this
magnitude in such a short period of time over such a large geographic area" (ibid.). In the 1980s as many as one
hundred thousand sea otters inhabited the Aleutians. Yet by the year 2000, only about six thousand remained, according
to aerial surveys—a rate of decline that researchers say is unprecedented for any mammal population in the world. Scientists
could find neither signs of disease, famine, nor reproductive failure. It turned out that the otters had become prey for orcas, with
whom they had previously lived in harmony. All of a sudden, though, the orcas—who normally feed on sea lions and
seals—began preying heavily on otters. The reason was that the population of harbor seals and Steller sea lions—the
world's biggest sea lions—dropped sharply in the late 1980s. By 1992 otters were the only plentiful marine mammals left
in Aleutian waters for orcas to eat. With far fewer otters to prey upon them, sea urchin populations exploded, eating
almost all the kelp. Sea urchins now cover the ocean floor. As late as 1993, the Aleutian kelp forests were twenty feet deep;
today they are found only right by the shoreline, in water too shallow for urchins. When the thick, leafy undersea forests
vanished, so did most of the rockfish, snails, starfish, and other creatures that used the kelp for food, shelter, and breeding
grounds. Local seabirds, notably puffins and kittiwakes, also are hurting from lack of fish (ibid.). For years, scientists
puzzled over the cause of the Aleutian collapse. Now they believe that the key event occurred in 1977, when the average
temperature of the Gulf of Alaska suddenly rose by two degrees Celsius due to global warming. The warmer water
would have caused the plankton at the base of the food chain to disappear, with tiny copepods and krill probably
following soon afterward. Deprived of their food, the shrimp, crab, and smelt fishes , such as capelin and herring, vanished
next. Soon they were replaced by an explosion of the cod and pollock populations. By the mid-1980s, the seal and
sea lion populations collapsed, since to survive the winters, their young needed the smelt , which have high fat content.
Without seals and sea lions, the orca had to shift their diet to sea otters and, since sea otters are much smaller than
seals or sea lions, the orca had to eat them in large numbers to survive. To top it off, as the water warmed, the
salmon population boomed, drawing in sharks, who feed not only on salmon, but on seals. Competition for seals
also forced the orca to shift predation to sea otters. Thus, in less than twenty years, the Aleutian ecosystem, formerly
teeming with life, has collapsed, its marine mammals on the verge of extinction. Opportunistic species such as pollock, sharks, orcas, and Homo colossus thrive on the chaos, at least temporarily. Though once-thriving crab fisheries
collapsed in the late 1970s, the new species attracted large fishing trawlers, which harvest millions of tons of pollock and cod a year (ibid.).
AT: People take precedence
Either an organism is sentient or is not – we cannot be sentient if the animal is not
Kirkwood 97(James K. Kirkwood, june 1997, Universities Federation for Animal Welfare and Humane
Slaughter Association, UK, “The Distribution of the Capacity for Sentience in the Animal Kingdom”)
My view about animal welfare is in line with the sentiment behind the agreement reached by the European Heads of
State at their Amsterdam Summit in June 1997 (see above), though it is not, as I will discuss later, in line with what
it actually says. For me, concern for an animal’s welfare is concern for its feelings – concern for the quality of its
life as it experiences it. (Here and throughout I use ‘feelings’ as shorthand for conscious/subjectively experienced
feelings, likewise by ‘feel’ I mean consciously/subjectively feel.) Thus, it seems to me that welfare is: ‘The balance,
now or through life, of the quality of the complex mix of subjective feelings associated with brain states induced by
various sensory inputs and by cognitive and emotion processes’ (Kirkwood, 2004a). I think it is helpful, in this way,
to reserve the use of the word ‘welfare’ to address feelings rather than using it to include health also. How an animal
feels can be influenced by its state of health and by its environment, so these are of course often central to the
subject of animal welfare, but it seems to me that there is much to be gained and nothing to be lost by keeping the
meanings of the terms health and welfare distinct in this way. To be sentient is to have the capacity to feel (in the
sense defined above) something. Except in deep sleep or some pathological states, the lives of most of us humans
are characterized by many kinds of feelings. Some of these, including sights, sounds, tastes, warmth and cold, and
the various sensations arising from touch, are associated with our external sensors. Others are assoc- iated with
internal sensors that provide our brains with information about the states of our bodies. The latter include general,
non-localized or only vaguely localized feelings such as exhaustion, malaise or ecstasy, and localized feelings such
as aches and pains. In addition, we experience a spectrum of feelings associated with the thoughts and emotions that
may be prompted either by the inputs from these internal and external sensing devices, or (it seems) by the constant
internal conversations – some conscious, some subconscious – of our brains. For example, fear (or, in others,
delight) may be induced by a glimpse of a snake beside one’s unshod foot, and feelings of sorrow or joy may be
evoked by music or by remembering sad or happy events. It is conceivable (though I struggle with the notion) that
the kind of multi- faceted sentience that we experience – symphonic is a good word to describe it – may have sprung
suddenly into existence from non-sentient ancestors. For example, some genetic change may have resulted in a
crucial alteration in the organization, the patterns of communication, among brain modules, which resulted in the
emergence of sentience. If this conferred a significant evolutionary advantage, then it might have spread rapidly
through the descendent population of our ancestors. Such a scenario would be consistent with the views of those
who believe that the current scientific evidence is that sentience is limited to humans only, or to humans and perhaps
a very few other species (see, for example, Kennedy, 1993; Bermond, 1997; Macphail, 1998). The other, and
perhaps more likely pattern of events than this non-sentient to symphonic sentience in one step hypothesis, is that
our kind of symphonic sentience evolved in stages from an earlier, simpler, ‘solo’ version. The first sentient
organism may have been consciously aware of only one sense – one aspect of sight, for example (our conscious
vision is formed from the coordin- ated activity of many distinct and separate brain modules that each handle
specific tasks to do with, for example: colour, recognition of particular objects, position, distance and movement).
This faculty for conscious awareness might then have been commandeered by evolution to enhance (if that is what it
does) other aspects of vision, and then have been further applied to other senses such as hearing and taste, and then
to cognitive and emotional processes also. I am not suggesting that this may actually have been the sequence in
which various senses and neuronal processes came under the spotlight of consciousness – it might have happened in
the reverse order – but only that there may have been a stepwise development in the range of phenomena that could
be accessed within consciousness. As stated above, to be sentient is to have a feeling of something. This implies that
the phenomenon of sentience either exists or it doesn’t: that an organism either is sentient or it isn’t. How could this
discrete presence or absence be consistent with the gradual process of evolution? There is no problem THE
DISTRIBUTION OF THE CAPACITY FOR SENTIENCE 13 envisaging gradation in the intensity of a feeling –
pain can vary from a barely discernible to a very severe sensation – but it is much harder to see how the very
capacity to be aware of pain could be other than either present or absent. You either feel something, no matter how
slightly, or you don’t – it is hard to conceive a halfway stage here. This may well be an important issue – the
explanation of which might prove revealing – but it is not one that can be pursued further in this paper. Brains work
by passage of information among hierarchical assemblages of neurons. Perhaps sentience evolved with a slight
change, by chance, in organization that resulted in a small assemblage of cells ‘recognizing’ patterns of activity of
the previously insentient brain design. Envisaged in this way, sentience may indeed depend upon a specific form of
neuronal organization that either is present or not, but it may have started with changes that involved very few cells
in the first instance. This leads on to the subject of this paper, which is the distribution of the capacity for sentience
in the animal kingdom. It is appropriate to begin this with a brief review of the animal kingdom and of who or what
is and is not currently included within it.
AT: Utilitarianism Good
Utilitarianism cant address the issues of equity and distributive justice
Liu PHD University of Pennsylvania 2000 (Dr. Liu, PHD @ University of Pennsylvania, writes 2000
[Environmental Justice Analysis: theories, methods and practice, 2000 ISBN:1566704030, p.20-21])
However, its strengths are also its weaknesses. Its quantifications techniques are far from being simple,
straightforward, and objective. Indeed, they are often too complicated to be practical. They are also to flexible and
subject to manipulation. They are impersonal and lack compassion. More importantly, they fail to deal the issue of
equity and distributive justice. Seemingly, you cannot get fairer than this. In calculating benefits and costs, each
person is counted as one and only one. IN other words, people are treated equally. For Mill, “justice arises from the
principle of utility”. Utilitarianism in concerted only the aggregate effect, no matter how the aggregate is distributed.
For almost all policies, there is an uneven distribution of benefits and costs. Some people win, while others lose. The
Pareto optimality would is almost nonexistent. A policy’s outcome is Pareto optimal if nobody loses and at least one
person gains.
Utilitarianism policies result in inequality
Liu PHD University of Pennsylvania 2000 (Dr. Liu, PHD @ University of Pennsylvania, writes 2000
[Environmental Justice Analysis: theories, methods and practice, 2000 ISBN:1566704030, p.20-21])
Besides these ridiculous policy implications in the United States and in the world, the logic underlying Summers’
proposal represents “cultural imperialism,” the capitalist mode of production and consumption, and “a particular
kind of political-economic power and its discriminatory practices” (Harvey 1996:368). Except for its beautiful guise
of economic logic, the proposal is nothing new to those familiar with the history. The capitalistic powerhouses in
Europe practiced material and cultural imperialism against countries in Africa, America, and Asia for years. They
did it by raising the banner of trade and welfare enhancement. They did it through guns and powder. Of course, they
had their logic for exporting opium to Canton (Guangzhou) in China through force. Now, we see a new logic. This
time, it is economic logic and globalization. This time, the end is the same, but the means is not through guns and
powder. Instead, it is political-economic power. This example illustrates clearly the danger of using the utilitarian
perspective as the only means for policy analysis. Fundamentally, the utilitarian disregards the distributive justice
issue altogether and espouses the current mode of production and consumption and the political-economic structure,
without any attention to the inequity and inequality in the current system. Even worse and more subtly, it delivers
the philosophy of “it exists, therefore it’s good.” However, “just because it sells, doesn’t mean we have to worship
it” (Peirce 1991).
Their mentality to sacrifice anything and everything to avoid war causes ontological
damnation—the impact is hell on earth
Zimmerman 94, (Professor of Philosophy at Tulane), 1994 (Michael, Contesting the Earth’s Future, p. 104).
Heidegger asserted that human self-assertion, combined with the eclipse of being, threatens the relation between
being and human Dasein.53Loss of this relation would be even more dangerous than a nuclear war that might "bring
about the complete annihilation of humanity and the destruction of the earth."54This controversial claim is
comparable to the Christian teaching that it is better to forfeit the world than to lose one's soul by losing one's
relation to God. Heidegger apparently thought along these lines: it is possible that after a nuclear war, life might
once again emerge, but it is far less likely that there will ever again occur an ontological clearing through which
such life could manifest itself. Further, since modernity's one-dimensional disclosure of entities virtually denies
them any "being" at all, the loss of humanity's openness for being is already occurring.55Modernity's background
mood is horror in the face of nihilism, which is consistent with the aim of providing material "happiness" for
everyone by reducing nature to pure energy.56The unleashing of vast quantities of energy in nuclear war would be
equivalent to modernity's slow-motion destruction of nature: unbounded destruction would equal limitless
consumption. If humanity avoided nuclear war only to survive as contented clever animals, Heidegger believed we
would exist in a state of ontological damnation: hell on earth, masquerading as material paradise. Deep ecologists
might agree that a world of material human comfort purchased at the price of everything wild would not be a world
worth living in, for in killing wild nature, people would be as good as dead. But most of them could not agree that
the loss of humanity's relation to being would be worse than nuclear omnicide, for it is wrong to suppose that the
lives of millions of extinct and unknown species are somehow lessened because they were never "disclosed" by
humanity.
AT: Cede the Political
Environmental revolutions are effective at making change
Best 6 (Steven Best, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas El Paso, 2006, “Revolutionary
Environmentalism: An Emerging New Struggle for Total Liberation”)
Revolutionary environmentalism is based on the realization that politics as usual just won’t cut it anymore. We will
always lose if we play by their rules rather than invent new forms of struggle, new social movements, and new sensibilities. The
defense of the earth requires immediate and decisive: logging roads need to be blocked, driftnets need to be cut, and
cages need to be emptied. But these are defensive actions, and in addition to these tactics, radical movements and alliances must be built from the
perspective total liberation. A new revolutionary politics will build on the achievements of democratic, libertarian socialist, and anarchist traditions. It will incorporate
radical green, feminist, and indigenous struggles. It will merge animal, earth, and human
standpoints in a total liberation struggle against
global capitalism and its omnicidal grow-or-die logic. Radical politics must reverse the growing power of the state,
mass media, and corporations to promote egalitarianism and participatory democratization at all levels of society –
political, cultural, and economic. It must dismantle all asymmetrical power relations and structures of hierarchy,
including that of humans over animals and the earth. Radical politics is impossible without the revitalization of citizenship and the repoliticization of life, which begins with forms of education, communication, culture, and art that anger, awaken,
inspire, and empower people toward action and change
AT: Inevitable
Persistance is key to overcoming the divide between human and nature that some consider
“inevitable”
Kochi and Ordan ‘8 [Tarik Kochi & Noam Ordan, “An Argument for the Global Suicide of Humanity”
borderlands volume 7, number 3, 2008,
https://www.academia.edu/4205491/An_Argument_for_the_Global_Suicide_of_Humanity]
Both liberal and social revolutionary models thus seem to run into the same problems that surround the notion of
progress; each play out a modern discourse of sacrifice in which some forms of life and modes of living are set aside
in favour of the promise of a future good. Caught between social hopes and political myths, the challenge of
responding to environmental destruction confronts, starkly, the core of a discourse of modernity characterised by
reflection, responsibility and action. Given the increasing pressures upon the human habitat, this modern discourse
will either deliver or it will fail. There is little room for an existence in between: either the Enlightenment fulfils its
potentiality or it shows its hand as the bearer of impossibility. If the possibilities of the Enlightenment are to be
fulfilled then this can only happen if the old idea of the progress of the human species, exemplified by Hawking’s
cosmic colonisation, is fundamentally rethought and replaced by a new form of self-comprehension. This selfcomprehension would need to negate and limit the old modern humanism by a radical anti-humanism. The aim,
however, would be to not just accept one side or the other, but to re-think the basis of moral action along the lines of
a dialectical, utopian anti-humanism. Importantly, though, getting past inadequate conceptions of action, historical
time and the futural promise of progress may be dependent upon radically re-comprehending the relationship
between humanity and nature in such a way that the human is no longer viewed as the sole core of the subject, or the
being of highest value. The human would thus need to no longer be thought of as a master that stands over the nonhuman. Rather, the human and the non-human need to be grasped together, with the former bearing dignity only so
long as it understands itself as a part of the latter.
2ac Aff Backlines
Alt
Generic
We are humans and looking down on animals is inevitable this makes the Alt fail
Hayward 97 (Tim Hayward, Professor of Environmental Political Theory; Director of the Just World
Institute; Director MSc International Political Theory; Convenor Fair, “Anthropocentrism: A misunderstood
problem”, pg 56-57, http://timhayward.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/hayward-anthropocentrismmisunderstood-problem.pdf)
But if the project of overcoming speciesism can be pursued with some expectation of success, this is not the case
with the overcoming of anthropocentrism. What makes anthropocentrism unavoidable is a limitation of a quite
different sort, one which cannot be overcome even in principle because it involves a non-contingent limitation on
moral thinking as such. While overcoming speciesism involves a commitment to the pursuit of knowledge of
relevant similarities and differences between humans and other species, the criteria of relevance will always have an
ineliminable element of anthropocentrism about them. Speciesism is the arbitrary refusal to extend moral
consideration to relevantly similar cases; the ineliminable element of anthropocentrism is marked by the
impossibility of giving meaningful moral consideration to cases which bear no similarity to any aspect of human
cases. The emphasis is on the ‘meaningful’ here: for in the abstract one could of course declare that some feature of
the nonhuman world was morally valuable, despite meeting no determinate criterion of value already recognised by
any human, but because the new value is completely unrelated to any existing value it will remain radically
indeterminate as a guide to action. If the ultimate point of an ethic is to yield a determinate guide to human action,
then, the human reference is ineliminable even when extending moral concern to nonhumans. So my argument is
that one cannot know if any judgement is speciesist if one has no benchmark against which to test arbitrariness; and,
more specifically, if we are concerned to avoid speciesism of humans then one must have standards of comparison
between them and others. Thus features of humans remain the benchmark. As long as the valuer is a human, the very
selection of criteria of value will be limited by this fact. It is this fact which precludes the possibility of a radically
nonanthropocentric value scheme, if by that is meant the adoption of a set of values which are supposed to be
completely unrelated to any existing human values. Any attempt to construct a radically non-anthropocentric value
scheme is liable not only to be arbitrary – because founded on no certain knowledge – but also to be more
insidiously anthropocentric in projecting certain values, which as a matter of fact are selected by a human, onto
nonhuman beings without certain warrant for doing so. This, of course, is the error of anthropomorphism, and will
inevitably, I believe, be committed in any attempt to expunge anthropocentrism altogether. But is admitting this
unavoidable element of anthropocentrism not tantamount to admitting the unavoidability of human chauvinism? My
claim is that it isnot. What is unavoidable is that human valuers make use of anthropocentric benchmarks; yet in
doing so, they may find that in all consistency they must, for instance, give priority to vital nonhuman interests over
more trivial human interests. For the human chauvinist, by contrast, interests of humans must always take
precedence over the interests of nonhumans. Human chauvinism does not take human values as a benchmark of
comparison, since it admits no comparison between humans and nonhumans. Human chauvinism ultimately values
humansbecause they are humans. While the human chauvinist may officially claim there are criteria which provide
reasons for preferring humans – such as that they have language, rationality, sociality etc. – no amount of evidence
that other beings fulfil these criteria would satisfy them that they should be afforded a similar moral concern. The
bottom line for the human chauvinist is that being human is a necessary and sufficient condition of moral concern.
What I am pointing out as the ineliminable element of anthropocentrism is an asymmetry between humans and other
species which is not the product of chauvinist prejudice. To sum up, then, what is unavoidable about
anthropocentrism is precisely what makes ethics possible at all. It is a basic feature of the logic of obligation: if an
ethic is a guide to action; and if a particular ethic requires an agent to make others’ ends her ends, then they become
just that – the agent’s ends. This is a noncontingent but substantive limitation on any attempt to construct a
completely nonanthropocentric ethic. Values are always the values of the valuer:3 so as long as the class of valuers
includes human beings, human values are ineliminable. Having argued that this is unavoidable, I also want to argue
that it is no bad thing.
EcoCentrism
A full shift to ecocentrism is not necessary, weak anthropocentrism provides many benefits
– status quo solves
Norton ‘84 [1984, Bryan G. Norton is the head philosophy professor at Georgia Tech, “Anthropocentrism vs.
Nonanthropocentrism,” Environmental Ethics and Weak Anthroprocentrism, pg 327-329]//AA
In the final section of this paper I develop these two sources of value in nature more fully. Even there my goal is not to defend these two bases for
environmental protection as embodying true claims about the value of nature-that, as I said at the outset is a larger and later task. My point is only
that, within the limits set by weak anthropocentrism as here defined, there exists a framework for developing
powerful reasons for protecting nature. Further, these reasons do not resemble the extractive and exploitative reasons
normally associated with strong anthropocentrisrn. And they do not differ from strongly anthropocentric reasons in merely
theoretical ways. Weakly anthropocentric reasoning can affect behavior as can be seen by applying it to last man situations. Suppose that human
beings choose, for rational or religious reasons, to live according to an ideal of maximum harmony with nature. Suppose also that this ideal is
taken seriously and that any- one who impairs that harmony (by destroying an- other species, by polluting air and water, etc.) would be judged
harshly. But such an ideal need not attribute intrinsic value to natural objects, nor need the prohibitions implied by it be justified with
nonanthropocentric reasoning attributing intrinsic value to nonhuman natural objects. Rather, they can be justified as being implied by the ideal of
harmony with nature. This ideal, in turn, can be justified either on religious grounds referring to hu- man spiritual development or as being a
fitting part of a rationally defensible world view. Indeed, there exist examples of well developed world views that exhibit these characteristics.
The Hindus and jains, in proscribing the killing of in- sects, etc., show concern for their own spiritual development rather than for the actual lives
of those insects. Likewise, Henry David Thoreau is careful not to attribute independent, intrinsic value to nature. Rather he believes that nature
expresses a deeper spiritual reality and that humans can learn spiritual values from it. Nor should it be inferred that only
spiritually oriented positions can uphold weakly anthropocentric reasons. In a post-Darwinian world, one could give rational and scientific support for a world view that includes ideals of living in harmony with nature, but which involve no attribu- tions of intrinsic value to nature.
Views such as those just described are weakly anthropocentric because they refer only to human val- ues, but they
are not strongly so because human be- havior is limited by concerns other than those derivable from prohibitions
against interfering with the satisfaction of human felt preferences. And practically speaking, the difference in behavior be- tween
strong anthropocentrists and weak anthro- pocentrists of the sort just described and exemplified is very great. In particular, the reaction of these
weak anthropocentrists to last man situations is un- doubtedly more similar to that of nonanthropocen- trists than to that of strong
anthropocentrists. Ideals such as that of living in harmony with nature imply rules proscribing the wanton destruction of other species or
ecosystems even if the human species faces imminent extinction Nor need weak anthropocentrism collapse into strong anthropocentrism. It
would do so if the dichotomy between preferences and ideals were in- defensible. If all values can, ultimately, be inter- preted as satisfactions of
preferences, then ideals are simply human preferences. The controversy here is reminiscent of that discussed by early utili- tarians. john Stuart
Mill, for example, argued that because higher pleasures ultimately can be seen to provide greater satisfactions, there is thus only a single scale of
values-preference satisfaction.” It is true that weak anthropocentrists must deny that preference satisfaction is the only
measure of hu- man value. They must take human ideals seriously enough so that they can be set against preference satisfactions as a limit
upon them. It is therefore no surprise that weak anthropocentrists reject the reductionistic position popular among utilitarians. Indeed, it is
precisely the rejection of that reduc- tionism that allows them to steer their way between strong antliropocentrism and nonanthropocen- trism. The
rejection of this reduction is, of course, a commitment that weak anthropocentrists share with nonanthropocentrists. Both believe there are
values distinct from human preference satisfaction, rejecting the reduction of ideals to preferences.
Since the hierarchical model forces the higher privilege to provide a standard of change for
those of lower privilege, the only real way of change is to participate in movements against
the preconceptions of anthropocentrism instead of staying in this debate round and
“problematizing” the situation.
Stets and Burke 03 (Jan E. Stets, currently Professor of Sociology and Co-Director of the Social Psychology
Research Laboratory at the University of California, Riverside. Peter Burke, Distinguished Professor of Sociology at
the University of California, Riverside. He is the 2003 winner of the Cooley-Mead Award for career contributions to
social psychology, “A Sociological Approach to Self and Identity.” Pp. 128- 152 in Handbook of Self and Identity,
edited by Mark Leary and June Tangney. New York: Guilford., http://wat2146.ucr.edu/papers/02a.pdf)
This hierarchical model also helps us understand how identities change. Identity standards of lowerlevel control systems are the
outputs of higher-level control systems. In other words, when a higher-level control system behaves, it provides the
reference standard to the control systems just below it. When a higher-level system brings the higher-level perceptions into
alignment with the higher-level standard, it does so by changing its outputs – thereby changing lower-level standards. In this
way the meanings contained in lower-level standards are altered (Burke & Cast, 1997). Further, because the overall perceptual
control system is continuously operating to verify identity perceptions at all levels for identities that are activated, identity change is always going
on, though at a much slower pace than behavior that alters the situation. Nevertheless, when actions cannot change the meanings in the situation
to verify an identity, the identity standard itself will change toward the meanings in the situation.9 For example, Burke and Cast (1997) show that
the birth of a child to a newly married couple provides a new set of meanings in the situation that is difficult to change. The consequence of this is
that the gender identities of the husband and wife both change. Husbands become more masculine in their self-views while their wives become
more feminine. Identity change has also been examined by Kiecolt (1994). She argues that a change occurs when a
stressor such as chronic role strain or a life event disrupts valued role-identities, and among other things, people believe
they can change, they see that the benefits of self-change outweigh the costs, and others provide support for their self-change.
More recently, Kiecolt (2000) argues that involvement in social movements can result in change by changing one’s
salience hierarchy of identities. This can be done in three ways: 1) either adding or discarding an identity, 2)
changing the importance of an identity without changing the ranking of the identity (for example, the “activist”
identity can become more important as one becomes more involved in a social movement, but its importance
relative to other identities does not change), or 2) changing the importance and ranking of an identity. One could also
change the meanings of an identity. Consistent with the idea that higher levels of the perceptual control system change more slowly, Kiecolt
indicates that if social movement participation results in self-concept change, the change is gradual, not sudden.
ALT fails: doesn’t address patriarchy
Maurizi 13(Marco Maurizi has a PhD in Philosophy of History and in this passage he is interviewing John
Sanbonmatsu, a professor of philosophy at Worcester
Polytechnic Institute, 1/13/2013, “ANIMAL
LIBERATION AND CRITICAL THEORY. INTERVIEW WITH JOHN
SANBONMATSU”, http://asinusnovus.net/2013/01/13/animal-liberation-and-critical-theory-interviewwith-john-sanbonmatsu/, Bennett Gilliam)
All of that is to say that while there is surely a place for the kind of moral philosopher Singer and Regan have
developed over the course of their careers, there is only so far we can by focusing exclusively on moral
reasoning. Speciesism is not merely public ignorance, or the absence of proper moral frameworks, but a material
system, a totalizing ideology, and an existential structure—or, to use another term, a mode of production. It is also a
patriarchal system. Feminist critics like Carol Adams and Josephine Donovan have drawn attention to some of the
problems with the masculinist nature of the analytic tradition. Singer, Regan, and others essentially bracket feeling
and empathy, treating the “animal question” as a problem of analytic reasoning alone. This displacement of
compassion and care cannot help but reinforce a patriarchal order that thrives on disconnection and on denigration of
traditionally “unmanly” virtues. Adams has also shown that the domination of animals by human beings is
intimately tied up with the domination of women by men. Etc. Analytical critiques tend to miss these key the social
and affective dimensions of the problem.
Impact
Extinction outweighs, moral evolution will fix speciesism anyway. Cant have value to life if you’re dead
Matheny 07 ( Jason Gaverick Matheny, He previously worked for the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford
University, where his work focused on existential risks, He holds a PhD in Applied Economics from Johns Hopkins
University, an MPH from Johns Hopkins, an MBA from Duke University, and a BA from the University of
Chicago. http://jgmatheny.org/extinctionethics.htm, “Ought we worry about human extinction?”
Moral philosophers have not written much about human extinction. This may be because they underestimate the
potential benefits of human survival and/or the risks of human extinction. If we survive the next few centuries, humanity could
allow Earth-originating life to survive a trillion years or more. If we do not survive, Earth-originating life will probably perish within a billion
years. If prolonging the survival of Earth-originating life is morally important, then there may be nothing more important than reducing the nearterm risks of human extinction. Keywords: extinction, population ethics, intergenerational justice, catastrophic risk, existential risk, risk analysis,
animal welfare, environmental ethics Word count: 3,400 Introduction It was only in the last century, with the invention of nuclear
weapons, that the probability of human extinction could be appreciably affected by human action . Ever since, human
extinction has generally been considered a terrible possibility. It’s surprising, then, that a search of JSTOR and the Philosopher’s Index
suggests contemporary philosophers have written little about the ethics of human extinction. In fact, they seem to
have written more about the extinction of other animals. Maybe this is because they consider human extinction impossible or
inevitable; or maybe human extinction seems inconsequential compared to other moral issues . In this paper I argue that
the possibility of human extinction deserves more attention. While extinction events may be very improbable, their
consequences are grave. Human extinction would not only condemn to non-existence all future human generations,
it would also cut short the existence of all animal life, as natural events will eventually make Earth uninhabitable. The
value of future lives Leslie (1996) suggests philosophers’ nonchalance toward human extinction is due in large part to disagreements in
population ethics. Some people suppose it does not matter if the number of lives lived in the future is small -- at its limit, zero.[2] In contrast, I
assume here that moral value is a function of both the quality and number of lives in a history.[3] This view is consistent with most people’s
intuition about extinction (that it’s bad) and with moral theories under which life is considered a benefit to those who have it, or under which life
is a necessary condition for producing things of value (Broome, 2004; Hare, 1993; Holtug 2001, Ng, 1989; Parfit 1984; Sikora, 1978). For
instance, some moral theories value things like experiences, satisfied preferences, achievements, friendships, or
virtuous acts, which take place only in lives. On this view, an early death is bad (at least in part) because it cuts short
the number of these valuable things. Similarly, on this view, an early extinction is bad (at least in part) because it cuts short the
number of these valuable things. I think this view is plausible and think our best reasons for believing an early death is bad are our best reasons
for believing an early extinction is bad. But such a view is controversial and I will not settle the controversy here. I start from the premise that we
ought to increase moral value by increasing both the quality and number of lives throughout history. I also take it, following Singer (2002), this
maxim applies to all sentient beings capable of positive subjective feelings. Life’s prospects The human population is now 6 billion (6 x 109).
There are perhaps another trillion (1012) sentient animals on Earth, maybe a few orders more, depending on where sentience begins and ends in
the animal kingdom (Gaston, Blackburn, and Goldewijk, 2003; Gaston and Evans, 2004). Animal life has existed on Earth for around
500 million years. Barring a dramatic intervention, all animal life on Earth will die in the next several billion years.
Earth is located in a field of thousands of asteroids and comets. 65 million years ago, an asteroid 10 kilometers in size hit the
Yucatan , creating clouds of dust and smoke that blocked sunlight for months, probably causing the extinction of
90% of animals, including dinosaurs. A 100 km impact, capable of extinguishing all animal life on Earth, is
probable within a billion years (Morrison et al., 2002). If an asteroid does not extinguish all animal life, the Sun will.
In one billion years, the Sun will begin its Red Giant stage, increasing in size and temperature. Within six billion
years, the Sun will have evaporated all of Earth’s water, and terrestrial temperatures will reach 1000 degrees -- much
too hot for amino acid-based life to persist. If, somehow, life were to survive these changes, it will die in 7 billion years when the Sun
forms a planetary nebula that irradiates Earth (Sackmann, Boothroyd, Kraemer, 1993; Ward and Brownlee, 2002). Earth is a dangerous place and
animal life here has dim prospects. If there are 1012 sentient animals on Earth, only 1021 life-years remain. The only hope for terrestrial
sentience surviving well beyond this limit is that some force will deflect large asteroids before they collide with
Earth, giving sentients another billion or more years of life (Gritzner and Kahle, 2004); and/or terrestrial sentients
will colonize other solar systems, giving sentients up to another 100 trillion years of life until all stars begin to stop
shining (Adams and Laughlin, 1997). Life might survive even longer if it exploits non-stellar energy sources. But it is
hard to imagine how life could survive beyond the decay of nuclear matter expected in 1032 to 1041 years (Adams and Laughlin, 1997). This
may be the upper limit on the future of sentience.[4] Deflecting asteroids and colonizing space could delay the extinction of Earth-originating
sentience from 109 to 1041 years. Assuming an average population of one trillion sentients is maintained (which is a conservative assumption
under colonization[5]), these interventions would create between 1021 and 1053 life-years. At present on Earth, only a human civilization would
be remotely capable of carrying out such projects. If humanity survives the next few centuries, it’s likely we will develop technologies needed for
at least one of these projects. We may already possess the technologies needed to deflect asteroids (Gritzner and Kahle, 2004; Urias et al., 1996).
And in the next few centuries, we’re likely to develop technologies that allow colonization. We will be strongly motivated by self-interest to
colonize space, as asteroids and planets have valuable resources to mine, and as our survival ultimately requires relocating to another solar system
(Kargel, 1994; Lewis, 1996). Extinction risks Being capable of preserving sentient life for another 1041 years makes human
survival important. There may be nothing more important. If the human species is extinguished, all known sentience
and certainly all Earth-originating sentience will be extinguished within a few billion years. We ought then pay more
attention to what Bostrom (2002) has called “existential risks” -- risks “where an adverse outcome would either
annihilate Earth-originating intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potentia l.” Such risks include: an
asteroid or comet strikes Earth, creating enough debris to shut down photosynthesis for months; a supervolcano erupts, creating enough debris to
shut down photosynthesis; a nearby supernova unleashes deadly radiation that reaches Earth; greenhouse gasses cause a radical change in
climate; a nuclear holocaust creates enough debris to cause a “nuclear winter,” shutting down photosynthesis; a genetically engineered microbe is
unleashed, by accident or design, killing most or all of humanity; or a high-energy physics experiment goes awry, creating a “true” vacuum or
strangelets, destroying the Earth (Bostrom 2002; Bostrom and Cirkovic 2006; Leslie 1996, Posner 2004, Rees 2003). To me, most of these risks
seem very unlikely. But dishearteningly, in their catalogs of these risks, Britain ’s Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin Rees (2003), gives humanity 5050 odds of surviving the next few centuries, and philosophers John Leslie (1996) and Nick Bostrom (2002) put our chances at 70% and 75%,
respectively. Estimating the probabilities of unprecedented events is subjective, so we should treat these numbers skeptically. Still, even if the
probabilities are orders lower, because the stakes are high, it could be justified to invest in extinction countermeasures. Matheny (2007) found
that, even with traditional social discounting, investing in asteroid detection and mitigation is justified under standard cost-effectiveness analysis.
Ought humanity be saved? Even accepting that future lives have value and that extinction risks can be cost-effectively reduced, there could still
be reasons not to worry about human extinction. For instance, human lives might have negative moral value, in which case human extinction
could be a good thing. This might have been Bertrand Russell’s sentiment when he wrote, “Although it is a gloomy view to suppose that life will
die out, sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation.”[6] In the 20th century, more
people, in absolute numbers, died of war, famine, and pestilence than ever before. But in the same century, more people did not die of war,
famine, and pestilence than ever before. So even if we're especially pessimistic about average human welfare during the last century compared to
others, it would be hard to argue that total welfare decreased. As long as average welfare was greater than zero – that is, the average life was
preferable to suicide – then the century was a success for humanity. We will be capable of even greater moral nightmares in this century than in
the last, but we will also be capable of securing greater welfare for a larger fraction of humanity. I suspect in this century, the average life will
again be worth living, assuming we survive the century to judge. We should be more pessimistic when we review how nonhuman animals have
fared in the last century. At present around 50 billion animals are raised and killed each year to feed humanity. (Many million animals are used
for clothing, product testing, research, and entertainment, but their numbers are insignificant by comparison.) Since World War 2, with the
invention of "factory farming," farm animals’ welfare has significantly deteriorated, as they now live in conditions that frustrate their most basic
instincts (Singer, 2002, chapter 3). At the same time, we’re probably the only animal on Earth that routinely demonstrates
compassion for other species. Such compassion is nearly universal in developed countries but we usually know too little, too late, for
deeply ingrained habits, such as diets, to change. If improvements in other public morals were possible without any significant
biological change in human nature, then the same should be true for our treatment of nonhuman animals , though it will
take some time. Even without any change in public morals, it seems unlikely we will continue to use animals for very long – at least, nowhere
near 50 billion per year. Our most brutal use of animals results not from sadism but from old appetites now satisfied with inefficient technologies
that have not fundamentally changed in 10,000 years. Ours is the first century where newer technologies -- plant or in vitro
meats, or meat from brainless animals -- could satisfy human appetites for meat more efficiently and safely (Edelman
et al, 2005). As these technologies mature and become cheaper, they will likely replace conventional meat. If the use of sentient
animals survives much beyond this century, we should be very surprised. This thought is a cure for misanthropy. As long as
most humans in the future don't use sentient animals, the vast number of good lives we can create would outweigh
any sins humanity has committed or is likely to commit. Even if it takes a century for animal farming to be replaced by
vegetarianism (or in vitro meats or brainless farm animals), the century of factory farming would represent around 1012 miserable life-years. That
is one-billionth of the 1021 animal life-years humanity could save by protecting Earth from asteroids for a billion years. The century of
industrialized animal use would thus be the equivalent of a terrible pain that lasts one second in an otherwise happy 100-year life. To accept
human extinction now would be like committing suicide to end an unpleasant itch. If human life is extinguished, all known
animal life will be extinguished when the Sun enters its Red Giant phase, if not earlier . Despite its current mistreatment of other
animals, humanity is the animal kingdom’s best long-term hope for survival.
Turn the K, rejecting Anthropocentric mindsets won’t cause us to value Animals more but
cause us to devalue more human life.
Schmahmann and Polacheck 95 (Schmahmann is a graduate of Dartmouth College and Cornell Law
School, he practices Law in Boston. Polacheck graduated from University of Michigan, B.A. Law School University
of Chicago, J.D., “THE CASE AGAINST RIGHTS FOR ANIMALS” 22 B.C. Envtl. Aff. L. Rev. 747 (1995),
http://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/ealr/vol22/iss4/3)
In the end, however, it
is the aggregate of these characteristics that does render humans fundamentally, importantly, and
unbridgeably different from animals, even though it is also beyond question that in individual instances – for example,
in the case of vegetative individuals – some animals may indeed have higher cognitive skills than some humans. To
argue on that basis
alone, however, that human institutions are morally flawed because they rest on assumptions regarding the aggregate
of human abilities, needs, and actions is to deny such institutions the capacity to draw any distinctions at all.
Consider the consequences of a theory which does not distinguish between animal and human life for purposes of
identifying and enforcing legal rights. Every individual member of every species would have recognized claims against human beings
and the state, and perhaps other animals as well. As the concept of rights expanded to include the “claims” of all living creatures, the concept
would lose much of its force, and human rights would suffer as a consequence. Long before Singer wrote Animal Liberation, one
philosopher wrote: If it is once observed that there is no difference in principle between the case of dogs, cats, or
horses, or stags, foxes and hares, and that tsetse-flies or tapeworms or the bacteria in our own blood-stream, the
conclusion likely to be drawn is that there is so much wrong that we cannot help doing to the brute creation that it is
best not to trouble ourselves about it any more at all. The ultimate sufferers are likely to be our fellow men, because
the final conclusion is likely to be, not that we ought to treat the brutes like human beings, but that there is no good
reason why we should not treat human beings like brutes. Extension of this principle leads straight to Belsen and
Buchenwald, Dachau and Auschwitz, where the German and the Jew or Pole only took the place of the human being
and the Colorado Beetle.
Perm
All the aff has to do is win the link argument – if the aff doesn’t link that means the perm
solves.
Papadopoulos 10(Dr. Dimitris Papadopoulos, teaches politics, culture and organization at the School of
Management, University of Leicester. 2010, ephemera, Vol. 10 “Insurgent posthumanism”,
http://www.ephemerajournal.org/contribution/insurgent-posthumanism)
It is true that left politics have largely ignored the complexity and unpredictability of the entanglement between a
deeply divided society and that of a deeply divided nonhuman world . The principle avenue for social transformation, at least in
the main conceptualisations of the political left[3], passes through seizing the centres of social and political power. The dominant
motivation for left politics after the revolutions of 1848 (and definitely since 1871) has been how to conquer
institutional power and the state. Within this matrix of radical left thinking the posthumanist moment becomes invalidated, subsumed to a
strategy focused solely on social power. But here I want to argue that a post-humanist gesture can be found at the heart of
processes of left political mobilisations that create transformative institutions and alternatives. This was the case
even when such moves were distorted at the end, neutralised or finally appropriated into a form of left politics solely
concerned with institutional representation and state power. What such an appropriation conceals is that a significant
part of the everyday realities put to work through radical left struggles have always had a strong posthumanist
character through their concentration on remaking the mundane material conditions of existence beyond and outside
an immediate opposition to the state. In what follows I will try to excavate this posthumanist gesture from the main narratives of radical
left political struggles along the following three fault lines: the first is about the exit from an alienated and highly regulated relation to the
material, biological and technological realms through the making of a self-organised common world – a move from enclosed and separated
worlds governed by labour to the making of ecological commons. A second posthumanist move is one that attacks the practice of
politics as a matter of ideas and institutions and rehabilitates politics as an embodied and everyday practice – an exit
from the representational mind to the embodiment of politics. Finally, the third, involves the decentring of the human
subject as the main actor of history making. History is a human affair but it is not made (only) by certain groups of
humans – a move towards a post-anthropocentric history.
Perm solves: There are different levels of anthropocentrism – the permutation functions to
allow humans to see the intrinsic value of other beings while acting in the self-interest of
humans
Murdy ‘75[March 28, 1975, Dr. William H. Murdy was a former Dean of Oxford College, Charles Howard
Candler Professor of Biology at Emory University, “Anthropocentrism: A Modern Version,” pg 1,
http://worldtracker.org/media/library/Science/Science%20Magazine/science%20magazine%2019741975/root/data/Science%201974-1975/pdf/1975_v187_n4182/1739476.pdf]
An anthropocentric attitude toward nature does not require that man be the source of all value, nor does it exclude a
belief that things of nature have intrinsic value. According to Laszlo (11, p. 105): "There is nothing in all the realms
of natural systems which would be value-free when looked at from the vantage point of the systems themselves."
Whitehead (12, p.93) writes: "The element of value, of being valuable, of having value, of being an end in itself, of
being something which is for its own sake, must not be omitted in any account of an event as the most concrete
actual something." I may affirm that every species has intrinsic value, but I will behave as though I value my own
survival and that of my species more highly than the survival of other animals or plants. I may assert that a lettuce
plant has intrinsic value, yet I will eat it before it has reproduced itself because I value my own nutritional wellbeing above the, survival of the lettuce plant. Birch (10) writes: "Man left only with his self-interest, however
enlightened, will not provide sufficient motivation for ecological survival." Even this statement can be interpreted in
terms of instrumental value, that is, man should acknowledge the intrinsic value of things; otherwise he will not
have sufficient motivation for ecological survival, which I assume includes human survival individually and as a
species.
A full shift to biocentrism is not necessary, weak anthropocentrism provides many benefits
Norton ‘84 [1984, Bryan G. Norton is the head philosophy professor at Georgia Tech, “Anthropocentrism vs.
Nonanthropocentrism,” Environmental Ethics and Weak Anthroprocentrism, pg 327-329]//AA
In the final section of this paper I develop these two sources of value in nature more fully. Even there my goal is not to defend these two bases for
environmental protection as embodying true claims about the value of nature-that, as I said at the outset is a larger and later task. My point is only
that, within the limits set by weak anthropocentrism as here defined, there exists a framework for developing
powerful reasons for protecting nature. Further, these reasons do not resemble the extractive and exploitative reasons
normally associated with strong anthropocentrisrn. And they do not differ from strongly anthropocentric reasons in merely
theoretical ways. Weakly anthropocentric reasoning can affect behavior as can be seen by applying it to last man situations. Suppose that human
beings choose, for rational or religious reasons, to live according to an ideal of maximum harmony with nature. Suppose also that this ideal is
taken seriously and that any- one who impairs that harmony (by destroying an- other species, by polluting air and water, etc.) would be judged
harshly. But such an ideal need not attribute intrinsic value to natural objects, nor need the prohibitions implied by it be justified with
nonanthropocentric reasoning attributing intrinsic value to nonhuman natural objects. Rather, they can be justified as being implied by the ideal of
harmony with nature. This ideal, in turn, can be justified either on religious grounds referring to hu- man spiritual development or as being a
fitting part of a rationally defensible world view. Indeed, there exist examples of well developed world views that exhibit these characteristics.
The Hindus and jains, in proscribing the killing of in- sects, etc., show concern for their own spiritual development rather than for the actual lives
of those insects. Likewise, Henry David Thoreau is careful not to attribute independent, intrinsic value to nature. Rather he believes that nature
expresses a deeper spiritual reality and that humans can learn spiritual values from it. Nor should it be inferred that only
spiritually oriented positions can uphold weakly anthropocentric reasons. In a post-Darwinian world, one could give rational and scientific support for a world view that includes ideals of living in harmony with nature, but which involve no attribu- tions of intrinsic value to nature.
Views such as those just described are weakly anthropocentric because they refer only to human val- ues, but they
are not strongly so because human be- havior is limited by concerns other than those derivable from prohibitions
against interfering with the satisfaction of human felt preferences. And practically speaking, the difference in behavior be- tween
strong anthropocentrists and weak anthro- pocentrists of the sort just described and exemplified is very great. In particular, the reaction of these
weak anthropocentrists to last man situations is un- doubtedly more similar to that of nonanthropocen- trists than to that of strong
anthropocentrists. Ideals such as that of living in harmony with nature imply rules proscribing the wanton destruction of other species or
ecosystems even if the human species faces imminent extinction Nor need weak anthropocentrism collapse into strong anthropocentrism. It
would do so if the dichotomy between preferences and ideals were in- defensible. If all values can, ultimately, be inter- preted as satisfactions of
preferences, then ideals are simply human preferences. The controversy here is reminiscent of that discussed by early utili- tarians. john Stuart
Mill, for example, argued that because higher pleasures ultimately can be seen to provide greater satisfactions, there is thus only a single scale of
values-preference satisfaction.” It is true that weak anthropocentrists must deny that preference satisfaction is the only
measure of hu- man value. They must take human ideals seriously enough so that they can be set against preference satisfactions as a limit
upon them. It is therefore no surprise that weak anthropocentrists reject the reductionistic position popular among utilitarians. Indeed, it is
precisely the rejection of that reduc- tionism that allows them to steer their way between strong antliropocentrism and nonanthropocen- trism. The
rejection of this reduction is, of course, a commitment that weak anthropocentrists share with nonanthropocentrists. Both believe there are
values distinct from human preference satisfaction, rejecting the reduction of ideals to preferences.
Perm solves – Embracing Enlightened Anthropocentrism is practically and pragmatically
sufficient
Brennan ‘02
Brennan, Andrew. "Environmental Ethics." Stanford University. Stanford University, 03
June 2002. Web. 5 July 2014. <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-environmental/>.
It should be noted, however, that some theorists working in the field see no need to develop new, non-anthropocentric
theories. Instead, they advocate what may be called enlightened anthropocentrism (or, perhaps more appropriately called,
prudential anthropocentrism). Briefly, this is the view that all the moral duties we have towards the environment are
derived from our direct duties to its human inhabitants. The practical purpose of environmental ethics, they maintain, is
to provide moral grounds for social policies aimed at protecting the earth's environment and remedying
environmental degradation. Enlightened anthropocentrism, they argue, is sufficient for that practical purpose, and perhaps even
more effective in delivering pragmatic outcomes, in terms of policy-making, than non-anthropocentric theories given
the theoretical burden on the latter to provide sound arguments for its more radical view that the nonhuman environment has intrinsic value (cf.
Norton 1991, de Shalit 1994, Light and Katz 1996). Furthermore, some prudential anthropocentrists may hold what might be called cynical
anthropocentrism, which says that we have a higher-level anthropocentric reason to be non-anthropocentric in our day-to-day thinking. Suppose
that a day-to-day non-anthropocentrist tends to act more benignly towards the nonhuman environment on which human well-being depends. This
would provide reason for encouraging non-anthropocentric thinking, even to those who find the idea of non-anthropocentric intrinsic value hard
to swallow. In order for such a strategy to be effective one may need to hide one's cynical anthropocentrism from others and even from oneself.
Alternative of showing oppression is not a fully transformative experience
King ’97 [1997, Roger King is has a Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics from the University of
Reading in England, where he was on the faculty until resigning He has received multiple
fellowships from Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
“Critical Reflections on Biocentric Environmental Ethics: Is It an Alternative to
Anthropocentrism?” Space, place, and environmental ethic, pg. 220-224]//AA
The anthropocentric argument for protecting wild species and places because of their
transformative value is attractive. And the extension of this approach to the domesticated
landscape provides one basis for a defense of open spaces in cities, preservation of historic
districts, and exposure of urban children to rural and farming experiences. Despite the
attractiveness of the concept of transformative value, I wish to suggest that its abstractness
makes the concept epistemologically problematic. First, transformative value does not reside in
objects or places independent of those who experience them. The transformation, and hence the
value of what initiates the transformation, depends as much on what subjects bring to their
experience as it does on what is experienced. Cultural or class differences, for example, might be
expected to lead people to perceive nature differently. If so, the claim that particular places or
things have transformative value would have no clear meaning until contextualized for a
particular group of people at a particular place and time. Marti Kheel exemplifies this difficulty
when she proposes that those who see nothing wrong with eating meat should visit a
slaughterhouse. She appears to think that this experience will provide the emotional jolt
necessary to unsettle those who use abstract moral reasoning to justify the consumption of meat.
But some people visit slaughterhouses and are unmoved. Some people will be transformed by
their visit to the slaughterhouse and others will not since the slaughterhouse experience does not
have transformative value for everyone. The same point can be made about attitudes toward
wilderness. Wild places do not in themselves bring about the experiential transformations Norton
hoped for. After all, some people hate the experience (paradigmatically, early European colonists
thought the wilderness was the domain of Satan). A second objection derives from the
multiplicity of things that have transformative value. Norton used the concept to argue that wild
nature has value independent of merely felt preferences, because the experience of wild nature
can transform careless and irresponsible attitudes to nature into insightful and caring action.
Transformative values can transform an irrational worldview based on consumption and
unlimited economic growth into a rational worldview of environmental responsibility. However,
it is also true that the experience of city life can transform the outlook of a person who comes
from the country. And contact with American commercialism rarely leaves Third World or
indigenous people untransformed. All these experiences would have a transformative value, yet
surely there are some transformations we should not encourage. Thus, it remains to be explained
why transformations in favor of wilderness protection or farmland preservation are to be valued
as stages on the way to a more rational worldview, while transformations that industrialize and
Westernize indigenous people are unacceptable. Ultimately, Norton appears to have presupposed
criteria of judgment other than the transformative effect of what he values. And for the
biocentrist, one plausible conclusion is that those transformative experiences that favor
wilderness protection are valuable because wild things after all do have intrinsic value.
Cede the political
The rejection of humanist values places us closer to extinction by making us unable to act,
cedes the political.
Ketels 96(Violet-THE HOLOCAUST: REMEMBERING FOR THE FUTURE: "Havel to the Castle!" The Power of the Word; THE
ANNALS OF AMERICAN ACADEMY OF POLITICAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCE, November; 548 Annals 45;)
THE political bestiality of our age is abetted by our willingness to tolerate the deconstructing of humanist values.
The process begins with the cynical manipulation of language. It often ends in stupefying murderousness before
which the world stands silent, frozen in impotent "attentism"--a wait-and-see stance as unsuited to the human plight
as a paci-fier is to stopping up the hunger of a starving child.
In the Germany of the 1930s, a demonic idea was born in a demented brain; the word went forth; orders were giv-en, repeated, widely broadcast; and men, women,
We had become inured to the reality
of human suffering. We could no longer hear what the words meant or did not credit them or not enough of us joined
the chorus. Shrieking victims per-ished in the cold blankness of inhumane silence.
We were deaf to the apocalyptic urgency in Solzhenitsyn's declaration from the Gulag that we must check the disas-trous course of history. We
were heedless of the lesson of his experience that only the unbending strength of the human spirit, fully taking its stand on
the shifting frontier of encroaching vio-lence and declaring "not one step further," though death may be the end of it-only this unwavering firmness offers any genuine defense of peace for the individual, of genuine peace for mankind
at large. n2
In past human crises, writers and thinkers strained language to the breaking point to keep alive the memory of the
unimaginable, to keep the human conscience from forgetting. In the current context, however, intellectuals seem
more devoted to abstract assaults on values than to thoughtful probing of the moral dimensions of human
experience.
"Heirs of the ancient possessions of higher knowledge and literacy skills," n3 we seem to have lost our nerve, and not
only because of Holocaust history and its tragic aftermath. We feel insecure before the empirical absolutes of hard science. We are
intimidated by the "high modernist rage against mimesis and content," n4 monstrous progeny of the union between
Nietzsche and philosophical formalism, the grim proposal we have bought into that there is no truth, no objectivity,
and no disinterested knowledge. n5 Less certain about the power of language, that "oldest flame of the [*47] humanist
soul," n6 to frame a credo to live by or criteria to judge by, we are vulnerable even to the discredited Paul de Man's
indecent hint that "wars and revo-lutions are not empirical events . . . but 'texts' masquerading as facts." n7 Truth and
reality seem more elusive than they ever were in the past; values are pronounced to be mere fictions of ruling elites
to retain power. We are embarrassed by virtue. Truth and reality seem more elusive than they ever were in the past; values
are pronounced to be mere fictions of ruling elites to retain power. We are embarrassed by virtue.
Words collide and crack under these new skeptical strains, dissolving into banalities the colossal enormity of what must be expressed lest we
and children were herded into death camps. Their offshore signals, cries for help, did not summon us to rescue.
forget. Remembering for the future has become doubly dispiriting by our having to remember for the present, too, our having to register and confront what is wrong
here and now.
The reality to be fixed in memory shifts as we seek words for it; the memory we set down is flawed by our subjec-tivities. It is selective, deceptive, partial, unreliable, and amoral. It plays tricks and can be invented. It
stops up its ears to shut out what it does not dare to face. n8
Lodged in our brains, such axioms, certified by science and statistics, tempt us to concede the final irrelevance of words and memory. We have to get on with our lives. Besides, memories reconstructed in words, even
when they are documented by evidence, have not often changed the world or fended off the powerful seductions to silence, forgetting, or denying.
Especially denying, which, in the case of the Holocaust, has become an obscene industry competing in the open market of ideas for control of our sense of the past. It is said that the Holocaust never happened. Revisionist history with a vengeance is purveyed in
words; something in words must be set against it. Yet what? How do we nerve to the task when we are increasingly disposed to cast both words and memory in a condition of cryogenic dubiety?
Not only before but also since 1945, the criminality of governments, paraded as politics and fattening on linguistic manipulation and deliberately reimplanted memory of past real or imagined grievance, has spread calamity across
the planet. "The cancer that has eaten at the entrails of Yugoslavia since Tito's death [has] Kosovo for its locus," but not merely as a piece of land. The country's rogue adventurers use the word "Kosovo" to reinvoke as sacred the land where Serbs were defeated by Turks in 1389! n9 Memory of bloody massacres in 1389, sloganized and distorted in 1989, de-mands the bloody
revenge of new massacres and returns civilization not to its past glory but to its gory tribal wars. As Matija Beckovic, the bard of Serb nationalism, writes, "It is as if the Serbian people waged only one battle--by widening the Kosovo charnel-house, by adding wailing upon wailing, by counting new martyrs to the martyrs of Kosovo. . . . Ko-sovo is the Serbianized [*48] history of the
Flood--the Serbian New Testament." n10
A cover of Suddeutsche Zeitung in 1994 was printed with blood donated by refugee women from Bosnia in an eeri-ly perverse afterbirth of violence revisited. n11
We stand benumbed before multiplying horrors. As Vaclav Havel warned more than a decade ago, regimes that generate them "are the avant garde of a global crisis in civilization." The depersonalization of power in "system, ideolo-gy and
," pathological suspicions about human motives and meanings, the loosening of individual responsibility, the
swiftness by which disastrous events follow one upon another "have deprived us of our conscience, of our common
sense and natural speech and thereby, of our actual humanity." n12 Nothing less than the transformation of human
con-sciousness is likely to rescue us.
apparat
General
Anthro Inevitable
Anthropocentrism inevitable – no guarantee humans will care at all
Freeman 07(tim freeman, “environmental ethics”,
http://www2.hawaii.edu/~freeman/courses/phil394/03.%20Anthropocentrism.pdf)
all of these philosophers share an anthropocentric viewpoint one of the great questions we shall ponder is whether an
environmental ethics requires abandoning the anthropocentic viewpoint in the last selection in this chapter Wilfred
Beckerman (an economist) and Joanna Pasek (a philosopher) argue that anthropocentrism is inevitable they argue
that it is possible to argue for the “intrinsic value” of nature from an anthropocentric position this may seem counterintuitive and it is not surprising that much of the development of environmental ethics begins with a critique of
anthropocentrism Beckerman & Pasek argue that an anthropocentric, or “subjectivist” argument for the “intrinsic
value” of nature is actually the stronger argument than an “objectivist” or nonanthropocentric argument an
“objectivist” argument is that something has “intrinsic value” because it has value in-itself, independently of any
human valuations the “subjective” argument is that “values cannot exist without a valuer” (84) it is thus naive to talk
of “objective” values values simply are “subjective” but one can value something for how it can serve one’s own use
or one can value it for its “intrinsic value” I can value the rose for the way it pleases my love or I can appreciate the
beauty of the rose and still think it has value regardless of how it serves my interests I love watching and listening to
the apapane outside my window and I can also regard them as having value apart from my interests but I recognize
that the source of the values are subjective the authors acknowledge that the common objection to the subjectivist
position is that it can slip into moral relativism if values are merely subjective then they can very from culture to
culture or individual to individual and thus there would be no firm ground upon which to criticize an individual or
culture that does not recognize “intrinsic” values in nature there is no guarantee that future humans will value the
environment at all
Anthropocentrism is inevitable even in a world where humans are not the dominant species
Murdy ‘75[March 28, 1975, Dr. William H. Murdy was a former Dean of Oxford College, Charles Howard
Candler Professor of Biology at Emory University, “Anthropocentrism: A Modern Version,” pg 1,
http://worldtracker.org/media/library/Science/Science%20Magazine/science%20magazine%2019741975/root/data/Science%201974-1975/pdf/1975_v187_n4182/1739476.pdf]
To be anthropocentric is to affirm that mankind is to be valued more highly than other things in nature-by man. By
the same logic, spiders are to be valued more highly than other things in nature-by spiders. It is proper for men to be
anthropocentric and for spiders to be arachnocentric. This goes for all other living species. The following statement
by Simpson (6) expresses the modern version of anthropocentrism: Man is the highest animal. The fact that he alone
is capable of making such judgment is in itself part of the evidence that this decision is correct. And even if he were
the lowest animal, the anthropocentric point of view would still be manifestly the only proper one to adopt for
consideration of his place in the scheme of things and when seeking a guide on which to base his actions and his
evaluations of them. Anthropocentrism is a pejorative in many of the articles which deal with the so-called
"ecological crisis." Lynn White (7), in his widely quoted article, "The historical roots of our ecological crisis,"
upbraids Christianity for being the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen: Christianity, in absolute
contrast to ancient paganism and Asia's religions (except perhaps Zoroastrianism), not only established a dualism of
man and nature but also insisted that it is God's will that man exploit nature for his proper ends. White is right to
remind us of how tragically myopic has been our exploitation of nature. However, he is wrong to infer that it is
somehow wrong for man to exploit nature for "his proper ends." We must exploit nature to live. The problem lies in
our difficulty to distinguish between "proper ends," which are progressive and promote human values, and
"improper ends," which are retrogressive and destructive of human values. Another attitude toward nature that
eschews anthropocentrism is the "Franciscan" belief in the fundamental equality of all life. In this view, man is
merely one of several million different species comprising a "democracy of all God's creatures" (7). Jordan (8)
states: "The time will come when civilized man will feel that the rights of all living creatures on earth are as sacred
as his own." Julian Huxley (9) expresses a similar opinion: "In ethical terms, the golden rule applies to man's
relations with nature as well as to relations between human beings." If we affirm that all species have "equal rights,"
or, that the rights of man are not of greater value than the rights of other species, how should it affect our behavior
toward nature? The golden rule, "As ye would that men should do to you, do ye to them like-wise," is a moral axiom
which requires reciprocity among ethicizing beings. How does such a principle apply to nonethicizing forms of life
which cannot reciprocate? The callous, wanton destruction of life is surely not a proper end for man, but what about
our destruction of pathogenic bacteria, in order that we might remain healthy, or our destruction of plant and animal
life, in order that we might be nourished? To affirm that men, dogs, and cats have more rights than plants, in-sects,
and bacteria is a belief that species do not have equal rights. If, however, we believe in the equality of all species,
none should be genetically manipulated or killed for the exclusive benefit of another. To ascribe value to things of
nature as they benefit man is to regard them as instruments to man's survival or well-being. This is an
anthropocentric point of view. As knowledge of our dependent relationships with nature grows, we place
instrumental value on an ever greater variety of things.
Stewardship Good
The alternative is an ethic of biocentrism - A complete rejection of
anthropocentrism is necessary. Reject the aff due to their anthropocentric dominion of
the Ocean – other wise humans claiming animals as a resource becomes inevitable
Sanbonmatsu ’11. (John Sanbonmatsu—Professor of Philosophy, Worcester Polytechnic Institue—“Critical
Theory and Animal Liberation” – 2011)
Of course, humans seize every opportunity to claim special moral qualities, placing themselves above brutal nature
and the “beasts that populate it. Yet while it is no great intellectual triumph for humans to establish their primacy over nature—they have
done so for millennia—the real question turns on the exact character that primacy assumes as it is historically played out.
In the present context, “dominion” (as spelled out in Genesis and other texts) has meant exploitation and abuse, that is, domination largely bereft
if positive ethical content – although some recent works (for example Matthew Scully’s Dominion) have sought to ground a defense of animal
rights in religion. A different kind of human obligation would point in the direction of stewardship, calling attention to
equity, balance, ecological sustainability, and coexistence between humans and the natural world. So far, however,
human beings have done little to distance themselves from a brutal or Hobbesian state of nature having repeatedly proven themselves the most
destructive and murderous of all creatures. The view of natural relations adopted here derives from Regan’s philosophical work –
namely that all sentient being has inalienable rights to be free of pain and suffering at the hands of humans. For Regan, this line of thinking holds
to several interrelated premises: (1) no moral justification exists for overriding animal interests in order to serve
“higher interests”; (2) what matters is not specific intellectual or communication skills but rather the capacity to
experience pain, suffering and loss; (3) while much of nature is inescapably used by humans as resources to satisfy
material and other needs, this logic should not extend to other sentient beings; (4) humans ought to be stewards of
nature and other species within it to the extent possible; and (5) human and animal interests are closely bound
together within the same social and historical processes.