Environment

2014 GFCA NOVICE PACKET
Environmental Ontology
Critique
**First Negative Constructive**
1NC Environmental Ontology K (Development)

Development of the ocean (by its very nature) manages and
utilizes the environment in order to develop it into something
else; something for human benefit without consideration for
the non-human other. This approach is the root cause of the
de-naturalization of nature and of the de-humanization of
human
Luke 96 (Timothy W., University Distinguished Professor of Political Science in the College of Liberal Arts and
Human Sciences as well as Program Chair of the Government and International Affairs Program, School of Public and
International Affairs at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, Liberal Society and Cyborg Subjectivity: The Politics of
Environments, Bodies, and Nature, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 21:1, 1996, Sage)
Never entirely convincing, these myths of the natural condition may become utterly surrealistic at this juncture of
history. Right here, right now, as Jameson argues, constitutes a place and time at which the modernization process
we now face the end of Nature,

because, as Merchant claims, we have caused the death of Nature.*4
After two centuries of industrial revolutionization and three decades of
informational revolutionization, nature, as vast expanses of untamed
wildness, has vanished. For the sake of argument here, nature rarely is regarded any longer as Godcreated (theogenic) or self-created (autogenic); instead, human-caused (anthropogenic)
features, tendencies, and events now preoccupy individuals in civil society
as transnational corporate capitalism recontours the planet to generate
the endless growth of commodities. Becoming enmeshed in complex
networks of scientific rationalization and commercial exploitation, nature
becomes denature(d) . The entire planet now is increasingly either a built
environment, a planned habitat, a wilderness preserve, an
economic development, or an ecological disaster. If nature is mostly
now denature, then perhaps one must begin thinking about a state of
denature-a process that becomes helpful, ironically, in understanding the cyborgs that evolve there. So,
too, might the figure of humanity, once seen as the crowning center of
nature, become more rightly regarded as dehumanity, as the death of
the human unfolds along with the death of nature. Dehumanization
coevolves with denaturalization; "dehumanized" beings inhabit the
modernized global ecologies of mechanized, polluted, bioengineered
denature as fragments and fusions of the machinic systems that define
today's environments, bodies, and politics. Here we might jettison the traditional, moralistic
is complete and Nature is gone for good.l3 McKibben agrees,
baggage of anthropocentric regret about "dehumanization," which begins with Rousseau and continues into many
humanistic discourses of the present, by seeing dehumanization, ironically, as an ontological constant rather than a
technological aberration.
And Development approaches, even when couched in terms

of sustainability or renewability, are invariably tied to a
managerial mindset that is the foundation for all forms of
violence
International Affairs at Virginia Polytechnic Institute , Eco-Managerialism: Environmental Studies as a
Power/Knowledge Formation, Aurora Online, 2003, http://aurora.icaap.org/index.php/aurora/article/view/79/91)
each of these wrinkles in the record of eco-managerialism

should give its supporters pause. The more adaptive and collaborative dimensions of ecoSo to conclude,
managerial practice suggest its advocates truly are seeking to develop some post extractive approach to
ecosystem management that might respect the worth and value of the survival of non-human life in its
commitments of ecomanagerialism to sustainability maybe are not that far removed from
older programs for sustained yield, espoused under classical industrial
regimes. Even rehabilitation and restoration managerialism may not be as much post extractive in their
environments, and indeed some are. Nonetheless, it would appear that the
managerial stance, as much as they are instead proving to be a more attractive form of ecological exploitation.
the newer iterations of eco-managerialism may only kick into a new

register, one in which a concern for environmental renewability or
ecological restoration just opens new domains for the eco-managerialists
to operate within. To even construct the problem in this fashion, however,
nature still must be reduced to the encirclement of space and matter in
national as well as global economies - to a system of systems, where flows
of material and energy can be dismantled, redesigned, and assembled
anew to produce resources efficiently, when and where needed, in the
modern marketplace. As an essentially self contained system of biophysical systems, nature seen
this way is energies, materials, in sites that are repositioned by ecomanagerialism as stocks of manageable resources. Human beings, supposedly all
Therefore,
human beings, can realize great material goods for sizeable numbers of people if the eco-managerialists succeed.
eco-managerialism fails miserably with regard to the political.

Instead, its work ensures that greater material and immaterial bads will
also be inflicted upon even larger numbers of other people, who do not
reside in or benefit from the advanced national economies that basically
have monopolized the use of the world's resources. This continues because ecoNonetheless,
managerialism lets those remarkable material benefits accrue at only a handful of highly developed regional
Those who do not benefit, in turn are left living on one

dollar or two dollars a day, not able, of course, at that rate of pay, to pay
for eco-managerialism. So I'll stop there.
municipal and national sites.
And the Alternative is to Reject their approach toward the

environment by negating instead of affirming. Only this allows
us to uncover new environmental ontologies that transform
our relationships with nature and with each other.
McWhorter 09 (Ladelle McWhorter, Heidegger and the Earth: Essays in Environmental Philosophy 2nd,
expanded edition, Guilt as Management Technology: A Call to Heideggerian Reflection, p. 8-9)
Heidegger's work is a call to reflect, to think in some way other than calculatively,
technologically, pragmatically. Once we begin to move with and into Heidegger's
call and begin to see our trying to seize control and solve problems as itself a
problematic approach, if we still believe that thinking's only real purpose is
to function as a prelude to action, in attempting to think we will only twist
within the agonizing grip of paradox, feeling pure frustration, unable to conceive
of ourselves as anything but paralysed. However, as so many peoples before us have known,
paradox is not only a trap; it is also a scattering point and a passageway. Paradox invites examination of
its own constitution (hence of the patterns of thinking within which it occurs) and
thereby breaks a way of thinking open, revealing the configurations of power that
propel it and hold it on track. And thus it sometimes makes possible the dissipation
of that power and the deflection of thinking into new paths and new possibilities. If
we read him seriously and listen genuinely, Heidegger frustrates us. At a time when the stakes are so
very high and decisive action is so loudly and urgently called for, when the ice caps
are melting and the bird flu is spreading and the president is selling off our national
wilderness reserves to private contractors for quick private gain, Heidegger
apparently calls us to do - nothing. When things that matter so much are hanging in the balance, this
frustration quickly turns to anger and disgust and even furor. How dare this man, who might legitimately be
accused of having done nothing right himself at a crucial time in his own nation's history, elevate quietism to a
philosophical principle? Responsible people have to act, surely, and to suggest anything else is to side with the
forces of destruction and short-sighted greed. If we get beyond the revulsion and anger that Heidegger's call may
we may move past the mere

frustration of our moral desires and begin to undergo frustration of another kind, the
philosophical frustration that is attendant on paradox. How is it possible, we ask, to
choose, to will, to do nothing? Heidegger is not consecrating quietism. His call
places in question the bimodal logic of activity and passivity; it points out the
paradoxical nature of our passion for action, our passion for maintaining control.
initially inspire and actually examine the feasibility of response,
What is the origin of that drive? Is that drive itself really under our control? Is it something we choose and will, or it
The call itself suggests that our drive for

acting decisively and forcefully is part of what must be thought through, that the
narrow option of will versus surrender is one of the power configurations of current
thinking that must be allowed to dissipate.
is something whose origins and meanings transcend us?
1NC Environmental Ontology K (Exploration)

The Affs exploration is a callous attempt to master our
knowledge of and our relationship with the natural
environment. The very basis of constantly watching the ocean
is to generate data that can easily be manipulated to suit even
the most violent and exploitative ends.
International Affairs at Virginia Polytechnic Institute , On Environmentality: Geo-Power and Eco-Knowledge in the
Discourses of Contemporary Environmentalism, Cultural Critique 31, Autumn 1995, JSTOR)
the various power/knowledge systems of instituting a Worldwatch

environmentality appear to be a practi-cal materialization of panoptic power . The
Worldwatch Institute continually couches its narratives in visual terms, alluding to its
mission as outlining "an ecologically defined vision" of "how an environmentally
sustainable society would look" in a new "vision of a global economy." As Foucault claims,
Not surprisingly, then,
"whenever one is dealing with a multiplicity of individuals on whom a particular form of behavior must be imposed,
the panoptic schema may be used" (Discipline and Punish 205) because it enables a knowing
center to reorganize the disposition of things and redirect the convenient ends of
individuals in environmentalized spaces . As organisms op-erating in the energy exchanges of
photosynthesis, human beings can become environed on all sides by the cybernetic system of bio-physical systems
Worldwatching, in turn, refixes the moral specification of human roles

and responsibilities in the enclosed spaces and seg-mented places of ecosystemic
niches. And, in generating this knowledge of environmental impact by applying such powers of ecological
observation, the institutions of Worldwatch operate as a green panopticon, enclosing
Nature in rings of centered normaliz-ing super-vision where an eco-knowledge
system identifies Nature as "the environment." The notational calculus of
bioeconomic ac-counting not only can, but in fact must reequilibrate individuals and
species, energy and matter, inefficiencies and inequities in an integrated panel of
globalized observation. The supervisory gaze of normalizing control, embedded in the Worldwatch
Institute's panoptic practices, adduces "the environmental," or enclosed, seg-mented
spaces, "observed at every point, in which the individuals are inserted in a fixed
place, in which the slightest movements are supervised, in which all events are
recorded, in which an uninter-rupted work of writing links the centre and periphery,
in which power is exercised without division, according to a continuous hi-erarchical
figure, in which each individual is constantly located, examined, and distributed
among the living beings, the sick and the dead" (Foucault, Discipline and Punish 197). To save
the planet, it becomes necessary to environmentalize it, enveloping its system of
systems in new disciplinary discourses to regulate population growth, economic
development, and resource exploitation on a global scale with continual managerial
intervention.
composing Nature.
Their managerial approach is the mindset that lays the

foundation for all forms of violence
each of these wrinkles in the record of eco-managerialism

should give its supporters pause. The more adaptive and collaborative dimensions of ecoSo to conclude,
managerial practice suggest its advocates truly are seeking to develop some post extractive approach to
ecosystem management that might respect the worth and value of the survival of non-human life in its
commitments of ecomanagerialism to sustainability maybe are not that far removed from
older programs for sustained yield, espoused under classical industrial
regimes. Even rehabilitation and restoration managerialism may not be as much post extractive in their
environments, and indeed some are. Nonetheless, it would appear that the
managerial stance, as much as they are instead proving to be a more attractive form of ecological exploitation.
the newer iterations of eco-managerialism may only kick into a new

register, one in which a concern for environmental renewability or
ecological restoration just opens new domains for the eco-managerialists
to operate within. To even construct the problem in this fashion, however,
nature still must be reduced to the encirclement of space and matter in
national as well as global economies - to a system of systems, where flows
of material and energy can be dismantled, redesigned, and assembled
anew to produce resources efficiently, when and where needed, in the
modern marketplace. As an essentially self contained system of biophysical systems, nature seen
this way is energies, materials, in sites that are repositioned by ecomanagerialism as stocks of manageable resources. Human beings, supposedly all
Therefore,
human beings, can realize great material goods for sizeable numbers of people if the eco-managerialists succeed.
eco-managerialism fails miserably with regard to the political.

Instead, its work ensures that greater material and immaterial bads will
also be inflicted upon even larger numbers of other people, who do not
reside in or benefit from the advanced national economies that basically
have monopolized the use of the world's resources. This continues because ecoNonetheless,
managerialism lets those remarkable material benefits accrue at only a handful of highly developed regional
Those who do not benefit, in turn are left living on one

dollar or two dollars a day, not able, of course, at that rate of pay, to pay
for eco-managerialism. So I'll stop there.
municipal and national sites.
And the Alternative is to Reject their approach toward the

environment by negating instead of affirming. Only this allows
us to uncover new environmental ontologies that transform
our relationships with nature and with each other.
expanded edition, Guilt as Management Technology: A Call to Heideggerian Reflection, p. 8-9)
Heidegger's work is a call to reflect, to think in some way other than calculatively,
technologically, pragmatically. Once we begin to move with and into Heidegger's
call and begin to see our trying to seize control and solve problems as itself a
problematic approach, if we still believe that thinking's only real purpose is
to function as a prelude to action, in attempting to think we will only twist
within the agonizing grip of paradox, feeling pure frustration, unable to conceive
of ourselves as anything but paralysed. However, as so many peoples before us have known,
paradox is not only a trap; it is also a scattering point and a passageway. Paradox invites examination of
its own constitution (hence of the patterns of thinking within which it occurs) and
thereby breaks a way of thinking open, revealing the configurations of power that
propel it and hold it on track. And thus it sometimes makes possible the dissipation
of that power and the deflection of thinking into new paths and new possibilities. If
we read him seriously and listen genuinely, Heidegger frustrates us. At a time when the stakes are so
very high and decisive action is so loudly and urgently called for, when the ice caps
are melting and the bird flu is spreading and the president is selling off our national
wilderness reserves to private contractors for quick private gain, Heidegger
apparently calls us to do - nothing. When things that matter so much are hanging in the balance, this
frustration quickly turns to anger and disgust and even furor. How dare this man, who might legitimately be
accused of having done nothing right himself at a crucial time in his own nation's history, elevate quietism to a
philosophical principle? Responsible people have to act, surely, and to suggest anything else is to side with the
forces of destruction and short-sighted greed. If we get beyond the revulsion and anger that Heidegger's call may
we may move past the mere

frustration of our moral desires and begin to undergo frustration of another kind, the
philosophical frustration that is attendant on paradox. How is it possible, we ask, to
choose, to will, to do nothing? Heidegger is not consecrating quietism. His call
places in question the bimodal logic of activity and passivity; it points out the
paradoxical nature of our passion for action, our passion for maintaining control.
initially inspire and actually examine the feasibility of response,
What is the origin of that drive? Is that drive itself really under our control? Is it something we choose and will, or it
The call itself suggests that our drive for

acting decisively and forcefully is part of what must be thought through, that the
narrow option of will versus surrender is one of the power configurations of current
thinking that must be allowed to dissipate.
is something whose origins and meanings transcend us?
**Negative Block**
2NC Link Development

The mindset with which they approach the environment
destroys our ability to ethically relate to nature not only is
their approach violent, its also flawed which means you should
be suspect of all of their claims
Beckman 00 (Emeritus Beckman, 2000, Professor of Philosophy at Harvey Mudd
College Martin Heidegger and Environmental Ethics.
http://www2.hmc.edu/~tbeckman/personal/Heidart.html)
The "withdrawal of the gods" is a sign of our pervasive power and our progressive "ego-centrism ."
The human
ego stands at the center of everything and, indeed, sees no other thing or object
with which it must reckon on an equal footing . We have become alone in the universe in the most
profound sense. Looking outward, we see only ourselves in so far as we see only objects standing-in-reserve for our
It is no wonder that we have "ethical problems" with our environment

because the whole concept of the environment has been profoundly transformed. A
major portion of the environment in which modern Westerners live, today, is the
product of human fabrication and this makes it ever more difficult for us to discover
a correct relationship with that portion of the environment that is still given to us. It
is all there to be taken, to be manipulated, to be used and consumed , it seems. But what
dispositions.
in that conception limits us or hinders us from using it in any way that we wish? There is nothing that we can see
today that really hinders us from doing anything with the environment, including if we wish destroying it completely
the challenge of environmental ethics, the challenge of

finding a way to convince ourselves that there are limits of acceptable human action
where the environment is involved. But where can we look for the concepts that we
need to fabricate convincing arguments.
and for all time. This, I take it is
Sustainable development, renewables, and conservation are

the cloaks of modern exploitation
Luke, 03 (Timothy W., University Distinguished Professor of Political Science in the College of Liberal Arts and
Resource managerialism can be read as the essence of today's enviro-mentality .

While voices in favour of conservation can be found in Europe early in the 19th century, there is a self-reflexive
establishment of this stance in the United States in the late 19th century. From the 1880's to the 1920's, one saw
whether one looks at John Muir'spreservationist

programs or Gifford Pinchot's conservationist code, there is a spreading awareness
of modern industry's power to deplete nature's stock of raw materials, which sparks
wide-spread worries about the need to find systems for conserving their supply from
such unchecked exploitation. Consequently, nature's stocks of materials are rendered
down to resources, and the presumptions of resourcification become conceptually
and operationally well entrenched in conservationist philosophies . The fundamental
premises of resource managerialism in many ways have not changed over the past century. At best, this code
of practice has only become more formalized in many governments' applications
and legal interpretations. Working with the managerial vision of the second industrial revolution, which
the closing of the western frontier. And
tended to empower technical experts like engineers or scientists, who had gotten their degrees from agricultural
schools, mining schools, technology schools like the one I work at, Virginia Polytechnic Institute, which prides itself
as they say on producing the worker bees of industry. Or, on the shop floor and professional managers, one found
corporate executives and financial officers in the main office, who are of course trained in business schools. Put
resource managerialism casts corporate administrative frameworks over

nature in order to find the supplies needed to feed the economy and provision
society through national and international markets. As scientific forestry, range management,
together,
and mineral extraction took hold in the U.S. during this era, an ethos of battling scarcity guided professional
the operational agendas of what

was called sustained yield were what directed the resource managerialism of the
20th century. In reviewing the enabling legislation of key federal agencies, one
quickly discovers that the values and practices of resourcification anchor their
institutional missions in a sustained yield philosophy . As Cortner and Moote observe, the
statutory mandates for both the Forest Service, the Multiple Use Sustained Yield Act,
and the National Forest Management Act, and the Bureau of Land Management, the
Federal Land Policy and Management Act, for example, specifically direct these
agencies to employ a multiple use sustained yield approach to resource
management. More often than not, however, these agencies adjusted their multiple use concept to correspond
training, corporate profit making, and government policy. As a result,
to their primary production objective -- timber in the case of the Forest Service, grazing in terms of the Bureau of
Land Management. Although sustained help is not specifically mentioned in the legislated mandate of agencies
such as the National Parks Service or the Bureau of Reclamation, they too have traditionally managed for maximum
sustained yield of a single resource - visitor use in the case of the parks, water supply in the case of water
So the ethos of resourcification imagined nature as a vast input/output

system. The mission statements of sustained yield pushed natural resource
management towards realizing the maximum maintainable output up to or past
even the point where one reached ecological collapse, which in turn of course
caused wide-spread ecological degradation, which leads to the project of
rehabilitation managerialism.
resources.
2NC Link Exploration

Their observation of nature is both flawed and dangerous
managerial assumptions manipulate the means and ends of
the Affs exploration
Luke, 01 (Timothy, University Distinguished Professor of Political Science in the College of Liberal Arts and
International Affairs at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, Education, Environment and Sustainability: what are the
issues, where to intervene, what must be done?, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 33:2, 2001)
There are many different alternatives to what prevails, and changing ways of thought can revolutionise the
the professional technical articulations of

teaching largely focus on resource/risk/recreation managerialism to establish and
enforce `the right disposition of things between humans and their environment
through administering resource use, risk, definition, and recreation loads . When
approached through these categories, the planet Earth does become , if only in terms of
environmental policy s operational assumptions, an immense planetary infrastructure . As the
human races `ecological life-support system, it has `with only occasional localised
failures provided `services upon which human society depends consistently and
without charge (Cairns, 1995). As the foundational infrastructure of brown spaces in society, the Earth
generates `ecosystem services , or those derivative products and functions of
natural systems that human societies perceive as valuable (Westmen, 1978). Human life
will continue only if such survival-sustaining services continue, so this complex
system of systems is what must survive. These outputs include: the generation of
soils, the regeneration of plant nutrients, capture of solar energy, conversion of
solar energy into biomass, accumulation/purification/ distribution of water, control of
pests, provision of a genetic library, maintenance of breathable air, control of micro
and macro climates, pollination of plants, diversi fication of animal species,
development of buffering mechanisms in catastrophes and aesthetic enrichment
(Cairns, 1995). Because it is the terrestrial infrastructure of transnational enterprise, the
planet s ecology requires very skilled and informed leadership to guide its
sustainable use. In turn, environmental experts will monitor, massage and manage
those systems that produce these robust services. Just as the sustained use of any technology
practices of policy. In environmental education,
`requires that it be maintained, updated and changed periodically , so too does the `sustainable use of the planet
require that we not destroy our ecological capital, such as old-growth forests, streams and rivers (with their
Systemic survival of nature s

green zones, then, becomes the central concern of these environmental education
initiatives, while the artificial ecologies of society s brown zones often are ignored.
associated biota), and other natural amenities (Cairns, 1995, p. 6).
2NC Link Hegemony/Leadership/Competitiveness

Justifying our decisions based on vague assertions of
[hegemony/leadership/competitiveness] necessitates
overexploitation of nature and justifies the worst atrocities
everything becomes expendable
International Affairs at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, The (Un)Wise (Ab)Use of Nature: Environmentalism as
Globalized Consumerism?, International Studies Association Meeting, March 18-22, 1997,
http://www.cddc.vt.edu/tim/tims/Tim528.PDF)
Discourses of "geo-economics," as they have been expounded more recently by voices as diverse as
Robert Reich, Lester Thurow, or Edward Luttwak, as well as rearticulations of "geopolitics" in an
ecological register, as they have been developed by President Bill Clinton or Vice President Al Gore, both
express new understandings of the earth's economic and political importance as a
site for the orderly maximization of many material resources .6 Geo-economics, for
example, often transforms through military metaphors and strategic analogies what
hitherto were regarded as purely economic concerns into national security issues of
wise resource use and sovereign property rights. Government manipulation of trade
policy, state support of major corporations, or public aid for retraining labor all become vital
instruments for "the continuation of the ancient rivalry of the nations by new
industrial means."7 The relative success or failure of national economies in head-to-head
global competitions typically are taken by geo-economics as the definitive register of any
one nation-state's waxing or waning international power as well as its rising or falling industrial
competitiveness, technological vitality, and economic prowess. In this context, many believe that
ecological considerations can be ignored, or given at best only meaningless
symbolic responses, in the quest to mobilize as private property as many of the
earth's material resources as possible. This hard-nosed response is the essence of "wise use." In the
on-going struggle over economic competitiveness, environmental resistance even can be recast by "wise use"
advocates as a type of civil disobedience, which endangers national security, expresses unpatriotic sentiments, or
embodies treasonous acts. Geo-economics takes hold in the natural resource crises of the 1970s. Arguing, for
example, that "whoever controls world resources controls the world in a way that mere occupation of territory
cannot match," Barnet in 1979 asked, first, if natural resource scarcities were real and, second, if economic control
over natural resources was changing the global balance of power.8 After surveying the struggles to manipulate
access to geo-powera new geo-economic challenge as nation-states were being forced to satisfy the rising material
expectations of their populations in a much more interdependent world system.9 Ironically, the rhetorical pitch of
Reich, Thurow and Luttwak in the geoeconomics debate of the 1990s mostly adheres to similar terms of analysis.
today's
geoeconomic reading of the earth's political economy constructs the attainment of
national economic growth, security, and prosperity as a zero-sum game. Having
more material wealth or economic growth in one place, like the U.S.A., means not
having it in other places, namely, rival foreign nations. It also assumes material
scarcity is a continual constraint; hence, all resources, everywhere and at any time,
are private property whose productive potentials must be subject ultimately to
economic exploitation. Geo-economics accepts the prevailing form of mass market consumerism as it
Partly a response to global economic competition, and partly a response to global ecological scarcities,
presently exists, defines its many material benefits as the public ends that advanced economies ought to seek, and
then affirms the need for hard discipline in elaborate programs of productivism, only now couched within rhetorics
of highly politicized national competition, as the means for sustaining mass market consumer lifestyles in advanced
nations like the United States.
Creating economic growth, and producing more of it than
other equally aggressive developed and developing countries, is the sine qua non of
"national security" in the 1990s. As Richard Darman, President Bush's chief of OMB declared after Earth
Day in 1990, "Americans did not fight and win the wars of the twentieth century to make the world safe for green
vegetables."10 However, not everyone sees environmentalism in this age of geo-economics as tantamount to
subversion of an entire way of life tied to using increased levels of natural resources to accelerate economic growth.
geo-economic readings also have sparked new discourses of social

responsibility into life, such as the green geopolitics of the Clinton administration with
These
its intriguing codes of ecological reflexivity. The presidential pledge to deploy American power as an environmental
protection agency has waxed and waned over the past quarter century, but in 1995 President Clinton made this
green geo-politics an integral part of his global doctrine of "engagement." "To reassert America's leadership in the
post-Cold War world," and in moving "from the industrial to the information age, from the Cold War world to the
Clinton asserted "we know that abroad we have the responsibility

to advance freedom and democracy--to advance prosperity and the preservation of
our planet....in a world where the dividing line between domestic and foreign policy is increasingly
blurred....Our personal, family, and nationalfuture is affected by our policies on the
environment at home and abroad. The common good at home is simply not
separate from our efforts to advance the common good around the world . They must be
global village," President
one in the same if we are to be truly secure in the world of the 21st century."11
2NC Link State

Their approach pre-supposes the natural world must be
managed and controlled by the State this relegates all
natural beings to the status of standing reserve
International Affairs at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, The (Un)Wise (Ab)Use of Nature: Environmentalism as
Globalized Consumerism?, International Studies Association Meeting, March 18-22, 1997,
http://www.cddc.vt.edu/tim/tims/Tim528.PDF)
Environments are spaces under police supervision, expert management, risk

avoidance, or technocratic control. By bringing environmentalistic agendas into the
heart of corporate and government policy, one finds the ultimate meaning of a police
state fulfilled. If police, as they bound and observed space, were empowered to watch over
religion, morals, health, supplies, roads, town buildings, public safety, liberal arts,
trade, factories, labor supplies, and the poor, then why not add ecology--or the
totality of all interactions between organisms and their surroundings--to the police
zones of the state? The conduct of any person's environmental conduct becomes the
initial limit on other's ecological enjoyments, so too does the conduct of the social
body's conduct necessitate that the state always be an effective "environmental
protection agency." The ecological domain is the ultimate domain of unifying together all of the most critical
forms of life that states must now produce, protect, and police in eliciting bio-power: it is the center of their envirodiscipline, eco-knowledge, geo-power.120 Few sites in the system of objects unify these forces as thoroughly as the
Mobilizing biological power, then, accelerates

exponentially after 1970 along with global fast capitalism . Ecology becomes one more
purchase of objects from the system of purchases.
formalized disciplinary mode of paying systematic "attention to the processes of life....to invest life through and
through"121 in order to transform all living things into biological populations to develop transnational commerce.
The tremendous explosion of global economic prosperity, albeit in highly skewed spatial distributions, after the
1973/1974 energy crises would not have been possible without ecology to guide "the controlled insertion of bodies
into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes."122
An anantamo-politics for all of Earth's plants and animals now emerges out of
ecology as strategic plans for terraformative management through which
environmentalizing resource managerialists acquire "the methods of power capable
of optimizing forces, aptitudes, and life in general without at the same time making
them more difficult to govern."123
2NC Implication General

Their technological gaze makes nuclear violence and
environmental catastrophe inevitable
Shrader-Frechette, 97 (O'Neill Chair in Philosophy and is also Concurrent
Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of Notre Dame,
https://wesfiles.wesleyan.edu/home/jrouse/Heidegger%Science
%20%26%20Naturalism.pdf)
Heidegger's Ontological Approach to Technology As his thinking develops, however, Heidegger does not deny these
are serious problems, but he comes to the surprising and provocative conclusion that focusing on loss and
All attempts to reckon existing reality ... in terms of decline

and loss, in terms of fate, catastrophe, and destruction, are merely technological
behavior.' Heidegger on Gaining a Free Relation to Technology 43 Seeing our situation as posing a problem that
destruction is still technological.
must be solved by appropriate action turns out to be technological too: lithe instrumental conception of technology
The will to mastery

becomes all the more urgent the more technology threatens to slip from human
control.' Heidegger is clear this approach cannot work. No single man, no group of
men, no commission of prominent statesmen, scientists. and technicians, no
conference of leaders of commerce and industry can break or direct the progress of
history in the atomic age.' His view is both darker and more hopeful He thinks there
is a more dangerous situation facing modern man than the technological
destruction of nature and civilization, yet a situation about which something am be
doneat least indirectly. The threat is not a problem for which there can be a solution but an ontological condition
from which we can be saved. Heidegger's concern is the human distress caused by the
technological understanding of being, rather than the destruction caused by specific
technologies. Consequently, Heidegger distinguishes the current problems caused by
technologyecological destruction, nuclear danger, consumerism, etc.-from the
devastation that would result if technology solved all our problems . What threatens man in
conditions every attempt to bring man into the right relation to technology....
his very nature is the...view that man by the peaceful release, transformation, storage, and channeling of the
energies of physical nature, could render the human condition . . . tolerable for everybody and happy in all
The "greatest danger" is that the approaching tide of technological

revolution in the atomic age could so captivate, bewitch, dazzle, and beguile man
that calculative thinking may someday come to be accepted and practiced as the
only way to thinking.
respects.
2NC Implication Serial Policy Failure

Its not just about the Affs insignificant political change its
about the manner in which they think about and approach the
environment. Their way of thinking about the world locks us
into cycles of intervention that perpetuate and exacerbate all
of their harms
expanded edition, Guilt as Management Technology: A Call to Heideggerian Reflection, p. 7)
Thinking today must concern itself with the earth. Wherever we turn on
newsstands, on the airwaves, and even in the most casual of conversations
everywhere we are inundated with predictions of ecological catastrophe and
omnicidal doom. And many of these predictions bear themselves out in our own experience. We see the
expanding muddy landscapes and contracting glaciers at the extremities of our inhabited planet. We see the horrific
damage that increasingly powerful hurricanes do to tropical and temperate coastlines whose wetlands and dunes
have given way to high-rise condominiums and oil and natural gas refineries. We know there is a dead zone in the
Gulf of Mexico the size of a New England state, the result of poisons draining into the sea along with the topsoil
from Midwestern factory farms. We see and hear and pay the medical bills for the millions of children with asthma
whose lungs are scarred or underdeveloped as a consequence of the regular inhalation of toxic industrial and
We live every day with the ugly, painful, and impoverishing

consequences of decades of technological innovation and expansion without
restraint, of at least a century of disastrous 'natural resource management' policies,
and of more than two centuries of virtually unchecked industrial pollution
consequences that include the fact that millions of us on any given day are
suffering, many of us dying of diseases and malnutrition that are the results of
humanly produced ecological devastation; with the fact that thousands of
species now in existence will no longer exist on this planet five years from now; with
the fact that our entire planet's climate has been altered, probably irreversibly, by
the carbon dioxide and chlorofluorocarbons we have heedlessly poured into our
atmosphere; and with the mind-boggling fact though few minds take the time to
boggle in fact anymore that it may now be within humanity's power to destroy all
life on this globe. Our usual response to dire reports and prophecies of doom is to
ignore them or, when we cannot do that when they really are in our own backyards
to scramble to find some way to manage our problems and make them go
away, some quick and preferably inexpensive solution, some technological
fix. But over and over again new resource-management techniques, new solutions, and
new technologies disrupt delicate systems even further, doing still more damage to
a planet whose normally self-regulating systems are already dangerously out of
balance. Our ceaseless interventions seem only to make things worse, to
perpetuate a cycle of human activity followed by ecological disaster
followed by human intervention followed by a new disaster of another
kind. In fact, it would appear that our trying to do things, change things, fix
things, cannot be the solution, because it is part of the problem itself . But
vehicular effluent.
where does that leave us? If we cannot act to solve our problems, what should we do?
Their argument pre-supposes the importance of policy action

and assumes all problems are submissable to human
management. This way of thinking blackmails ontological
criticism and prevents any productive break with the statusquo
McWhorter, 92 (Ladelle, Prof of Philosophy and Women, Gender & Sexuality
studies @ Univ. of Richmond, Guilt as Management Technology: A Call to
Heideggerian Reflection Heidegger and the Earth, pg. 7-9)
Those configurations of forces will resist this thinking. Their resistance will occur in many forms. However,
one
of the most common ways that modern calculative selfhood will attempt to
reinstate itself in the face of Heideggers paradoxical call to think the earth is by employing a strategy
that has worked so well so many times before: it will feel guilty. Those of us who are white know this
strategy very well. Confronted with our racism, we respond not by working to
dismantle the structures that perpetuate racism but rather by feeling guilty. Our
energy goes into self-rebuke, and the problems pointed out to us become so painful
for us to contemplate that we keep our distance from them. Through guilt we paralyze ourselves. Thus
guilt is a marvelous strategy for maintaining the white racist self. Those of us who are women have sometimes
watched this strategy employed by the caring, liberal-minded men in our lives. When we have exposed sexism,
pressed our criticisms and our claims, we have seen such men the good men, by far the most responsive
seldom have we seen honest attempts at

change. Instead we have seen guilt deployed as a cry for mercy or pity on the
status quo; and when pity is not forthcoming we have seen guilt turn to rage , and
we have heard men ask, Why are you punishing us? The primary issue then becomes the need
to attend to the feelings of those criticized rather than to their oppressive
institutions and behaviors. Guilt thus protects the guilty. Guilt is a facet of power; it is not a
men deflate, apologize, and ask us to forgive. But
reordering of power or a signal of oppressions end. Guilt is one of the modern managerial selfs maneuvers of
self-defense. Of course guilt does not feel that way. It feels like something unchosen, something we undergo. It
feels much more like self-abuse than self-defense. But we are shaped, informed, produced in our very selves by
whenever we
are confronted with the unacceptability of what is foundational for our lives, those
foundations exert force to protect themselves. The exertion, which occurs as and in the midst
the same forces of history that have created calculative, technological revealing. Inevitably,
of very real pain, is not a conscious choice; but that does not lessen in fact it strengthens its power as a
strategy of self-defense. Calculative, technological thinking struggles to defend and maintain itself through us
and as us. Some men feel guilty about sexism; many white people feel guilty shout racism; most of us feel guilty
about all sorts of habits and idiosyncracies that we tell ourselves we firmly believe should be changed. For many
guilt is
familiar, and, though somewhat uncomfortable at times, it comes to feel almost safe. It is no
surprise, then, that whenever caring people think hard about how to live with/in/on
the earth, we find ourselves growing anxious and , usually, feeling guilty about the
way we conduct ourselves in relation to the natural world . Guilt is a standard defense
of us guilt is a constant constraint upon our lives, a seemingly permanent state. As a result,
against the call for change as it takes root within us. But, if we are to think with Heidegger, if we are to heed his
we must not respond to it simply by deploring our decadent life-styles

and indulging ourselves in a fit of remorse . Heideggers call is not a moral
condemnation, nor is it a call to take up some politically correct position or some privileged ethical stance.
When we respond to Heideggers call as if it were a moral condemnation, we reinstate a
call to reflect,
discourse in which active agency and its projects and responsibilities take precedence over any other way of
being with the earth. In other words, we insist on remaining within the discourses, the power configurations, of
the modern managerial self. Guilt is a concept whose heritage and meaning occur within the ethical tradition of
the Western world. But the history of ethical theory in the West (and it could be argued that ethical theory only
The revelation of things as tobe-managed and the imperative to be in control work themselves out in the
history of ethics just as surely as they work themselves out in the history of the natural and human
occurs in the West) is one with the history of technological thought.
sciences. It is probably quite true that in many different cultures, times, and places human beings have asked
in the West, and in relatively modern times, we have

reformulated that question so as to ask: How shall I conduct myself ? How shall I
behave? How shall I manage my actions, my relationships, my desires? And how shall I make sure my
neighbors do the same? Alongside technologies of the earth have grown up
technologies of the soul, theories of human behavioral control of which current ethical theories are a
the question: How shall I best live my life? But
significant subset. Ethics in the modern world at least very frequently functions as just another field of scientific
when we react to problems like

ecological crises by retreating into the familiar discomfort of our Western sense of
guilt, we are not placing ourselves in opposition to technological thinking and its
ugly consequences. On the contrary, we are simply reasserting our technological dream of
perfect managerial control. How so? Our guilt professes our enduring faith in the
managerial dream by insisting that problems problems like oil spills, acid rain,
groundwater pollution, the extinction of whales , the destruction of the ozone, the rain forests,
the wetlands lie simply in mismanagement or in a failure to manage (to manage
ourselves in this case) and by reaffirming to ourselves that if we had used our power to
manage our behavior better in the first place we could have avoided this mess. In other
words, when we respond to Heideggers call by indulging in feelings of guilt about how we
have been treating the object earth, we are really just telling ourselves how truly powerful
we, as agents, are. We are telling ourselves that we really could have done differently; we had the power
to make things work, if only we had stuck closer to the principles of good management. And in so saying we
are in yet a new and more stubborn way refusing to hear the real message , the
message that human beings are not, never have been, and never can be in complete
control, that the dream of that sort of managerial omnipotence is itself the very danger of which Heidegger
study yielding just another set of engineering goals. Therefore,
warns. Thus guilt as affirmation of human agential power over against passive matter is just another way
of covering over the mystery. Thus guilt is just another way of refusing to face the fact that we human beings
are finite and that we must begin to live with the earth instead of trying to maintain total control. Guilt is part
and parcel of a managerial approach to the world. Thinking along Heideggers paths means
resisting the power of guilt, resisting the desire to close ourselves off from the possibility of being with our own
means finding the courage to make the truth of our own presuppositions
and the realm of our own goals into the things that most deserve to be called in
question. It means holding ourselves resolutely open for the shattering power of
the event of thinking, even if what is shattered eventually is ourselves.
finitude. It
2NC Alternative
Endorsing the need for a different approach based on
understanding our ethical relationship with nature is critical to
solve both our criticism and the Aff
Luke 12 - Timothy W. Luke is University Distinguished Professor of Political Science in the College of Liberal
Arts and Human Sciences as well as Program Chair of the Government and International Affairs Program, School of
Public and International Affairs at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Timothy W., Greening the
Academy: Ecopedagogy Through the Liberal Arts, Greening the Political pg. 47, Sense Publishers, ISBN: 978-946209-101-6 // SM)
While these rich traditions must be acknowledged, they should not be the anchor lines for ascertaining the depth of
greening in today's academy. With today's widespread and intense worries about the Earth's ecology, the processes
of greening the academy in light of the modem environmental movement are accelerating. In political science, one
can turn to the newer thematics, like those of green citizenship, environmental justice, green statism, natural
capitalism, green urbanism, climate change, or green globalism. There certainly are strains of environmental
political analysis that still cling to older texts like William Ophuls" Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity (1977) or Jared
Diamonds Collapse (2005), whose neo-Malthusian and neo-Hobbesian visions of politics find some environmental
during the more hopeful

times of the 1950s-1960s, or even 1980s-1990s, many political thinkers have reimagined
Nature in less harsh, essentialist or naturalistic terms. Important figures, like Murray
followers whether it is during the hard times of the 1970s or the 2000s. However,
Bookchin Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971), Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature? Women, Ecology, and The
Scientific Revolution (1980), Neil Smith, Uneven Development (1984), or even Christopher Manes, Green Rage
saw todays economy and society as very human constructs whose

inequalities, irrationalities, and inconsistencies could be remade in better ways with
the right green theories and practices. The promise of Earth Day in 1970 was based
on rethinking humanitys relations with the environment after the whole world saw it
from space during the Apollo moon missions from 1968 to 1973 as a verdant and vital
sphere of life. Driven by this image, many thinkers have sought to develop
public policies and political practices tied to protecting and preserving of
Earths abundance to benefit all forms of life rather than following hard
naturalistic dictates driven by accepting and accommodating humans to the
strictures of scarcity. The changing qualities of the ecological crisis in the twentieth and twenty -first
(1990), all
centuries are probably nowhere as pressing as with various articulations of environmental thinking across the
With the swelling anxieties about the risks of global

warming, climate change, widespread drought, water shortages, and dangerous
pollution (Beck. 1992; Diamond. 2005). The Earths ecologies have become central preoccupations for different
cultural, economic, political, and scientific interests. Efforts to interpret, evaluate, and then
act effectively on the basis of deepening worries about human
depredations of the environment frequently are linked to their analysis by
political scientists in policy studies, political theory or bureaucratic
responses, especially given their perceived importance to assuring the survival
and well-being of the Earth (Dryzek, 2000; Bam and Eckersley. 2005; Dobson and Bell, 2006; O'Neill.
general field of political science.
2000).
AT: Permutation
The 1ACs fundamental assumptions and justifications rest on
the idea that nature can be known, explored, developed,
managed, and exploited. Any attempt to combine their Aff
with our approach severs out of the entire basis for their
Affirmative. Severance is a voting issue it makes the Aff a
moving target and allows them to evade Negative link
arguments
And The Alternative is Mutually Exclusive our entire
argument is that their approach and mindset must be refused
and rejected. Including the Alt, means you vote negative our
Alt text says Vote Negative and a necessary part of our
Alternative is radical negation in order to open space for
ontological investigation
And The perm destroys our Alternative its impossible to
reject fundamental assumptions while simultaneously acting
upon them
Kinsella, 07 (Kinsella, "Heidegger and Being at the Hanford Reservation:
Standing Reserve, Enframing, and Environmental Communication Theory."
Enviormental Communication 1.2 (2007): 194-217. Print.
All beings (das Seiendes) share the characteristic of being (das Sein), but only human beings exhibit the
particular mode of being that Heidegger calls Dasein. The cumbersome expression human-beingin-the-world captures a key feature of Dasein, namely, an ongoing, practical engagement with
the world that entails thrownness (embeddedness in pre-existing conditions) and
projection (perception and action oriented toward practical projects and goals ). Human
beings meet, encounter, confront, respond to, take a stance toward, and operate upon the
world, and in doing so both change and are changed by the world . Here again
Heideggers phenomenology is consistent with a bounded constitutive model of communication. While
oriented to our projects, these encounters with otherness are also constrained by the recalcitrant,
obdurate, ontic characteristics of the entities with which we are thrown into contact. Heideggers concept of Dasein
human being is a product of interactions with the world, even as it acts

upon that world. Thus Dasein is not a static, unchanging phenomenon; rather, it
evolves over time, recursively, as a result of its continuing practical engagement.
stresses that
And All of our link arguments are Disads to the permutation

and prove that any combination would be distorted,
manipulated, and co-opted to the worst possible ends
AT: Vague Alternatives Illegitimate

Our alternative is not vague the judge should vote negative
to reject the Affs approach toward the ocean. Rejection is not
vague; its the only logical alternative. When confronted with
managerial approaches towards the ocean, individuals should
always refuse them.
Vagueness equally applies to their plan text their plan
doesnt specify which part of the federal government, which
part of the ocean, how the plan is enacted, and/or how the
plan is funded
This argument links to our entire criticism the attempt to
demand a linear, material understanding of our alternative
misses the point. We must first refuse technical and
managerial approaches toward nature, which then opens space
for us to reconceptualize our relationship with the
environment. The Affs attempt to manage our alternative with
a theoretical rules violation is the form of violence we are
criticizing
At worst, reject the alternative even without it, our criticism
still proves the Affs approach toward the world does more
harm than good
AT: Conditionality Illegitimate

Conditionality is Good
Key to Strategic Flexibility its critical to test the Aff from
multiple angles
Enhances Critical Thinking forces both teams to make
strategic decisions hard debate is good debate
Key to Topic Learning there are so many political and
philosophical advocacies with regards to the ocean we need
to be able to examine as many as possible
Key to Philosophical Diversity allows the Neg to introduce
both a critique and a counterplan in the same debate
Time and Strategy skews are inevitable one team is always
faster, and some teams will always have more resources
At worst, conditionality is not a reason we should lose the
debate just stick us with the critique [or counterplan]
AT: Eco-Managerialism Good

Their management good arguments assume the Earth is a
mechanistic system with linear, causal relationships already
pre-determined their mode of thinking places humans at the
center of the universe and relies on an anthropocentric
relation to nature. This destroys the value of human
experience and produces horrific environmental violence
Padrutt, 92 (Hanspeter, Member of the Daseinsanalytisches Institut in Zurich,
Heidegger and Ecology in Heidegger and the Earth ed. Ladelle McWhorter, pgs. 1921)
the "thinking
substance" of the "I think therefore I am," tyrannically brings objects before itself .
It stands in the center, surveys, and examines on all sides - sees in perspective - from its
own point of view. It is no accident that construction from a central perspective was discovered by two
The place of consciousness is the place of the objectifying Cartesian subject. This subject,
architects in the early Renaissance and soon took its place victoriously in painting. This perspectival relationship
of the primary (human) subject to the perspectivally observed world (a relationship that emerged in the
this perspectival "worldview" - is inextricably linked with the

emergence of the method of natural science grounded in mathematics . The selfcertain domination of the subject and the objectifying method that yields
certainty belong together; together they form what I would call 'objectifying subjectivism'. The
Renaissance) -
objectifying method - wanting to measure and calculate everything, for the sake of certainty - has to reduce
everything that is to measurable and calculable quantities. Weight, distance, and duration were most easily
the objectifying method reduced nature , too, to a

coherence of motions of a whole series of points in a three-dimensional,
geometric space, coursing in a one-dimensional time, thought as a 'time-axis' , and
reduced things to geometric substances with defined extension. Since this reduction robbed events
of their singularity, a repeatable reeling off of the same event became thinkable ;
available to exact measurement; but then
repeatable experimenting and engineering set forth on its triumphal procession, and along with it the
human beings see

themselves as "master and owner of nature" and the world as a large machine .
Finally, the objectifying turns back to the subject and , with the supremacy of the machine,
itself gets interpreted more and more exclusively as a functional, psychosomatic
apparatus. In order to get closer to the meaning of being, the meaning of the little word is which gets
interpretation of nature and the whole world as a machine. In objectifying subjectivism
said in manifold ways (Aristotle) and which also oscillates unsaid in everything that is and in all that happens
Heidegger in Being and Time in a certain sense beings where Descartes left off. I think, therefore I am; but what
does I am mean? In order to get closer to the everyday Dasein, which in any case has in its being a relation to
its being (and to being in general).
Dasein is in the world, not as an item of clothing is in the closet, but
rather - thrown into the world - it has the task of being its being as its own being. Dasein is "my own"
"thrown projection" in connection with what encounters it: care (Sorge). But Dasein is not a substance that is
Dasein is
also not merely a specimen of a living organism or of the species animal rationale, rational
animal. In Dasein there takes place a disclosure or opening of being - in the disclosure
merely at hand, not a thinking substance, and not a psychosomatic apparatus. And, respectively,
of self in singular manner as well as of the world. But this disclosure is through and through 'ec-static', outside
This being-outthere refers not only to the present, but also and equally to the world horizon of
the future and of the past. What Heidegger in Being and Time called the horizonal-existential
itself, not closed up in itself, but 'outside' - out there, as the Freiburg Cathedral earlier.
disclosure of being in Dasein - in the disclosure of self and of the world - later, after the so-called "turning" in his
thinking, he spoke of more and more as the indwelling opening-out of the clearing of being, as indwelling in the
temporal, threefold open and the opening-out of this indwelling through the whole of Dasein. Ex-sistenz then
The shifting from the objectifying

subject to the open expanse of the Da leads us away from the standpoint of the
subject which stands in the center of the world, to the mystery of the world itself ,
to the Ereignis of being and of time, which we do not have at our disposal, but into which we are let. This
shift is a re-thinking and a re-tuning all in one, a leap into the open expanse of the Da. The remeant indwelling opening-out of the open expanse of the Da.
tuning is nothing else but the re-tuning already mentioned, from the dreadful, shortsighted Uf3pl<; into the
And the re-thinking leads

away from objectifying calculating and measuring to phenomenological.
meditative thinking, from natural science's reduction of phenomena to the upholding of their fullness,
pain-filled, buoyant, spirited, released coming-forth holding-in-reserve.
from the perspectival worldview to a regard for the inseparable interconnectedness of thinking, world, human,
death, sky, earth, and language: to mindfulness of Ereignis of being and time, of Ereignis of the world-fourfold:
Rethinking leads away from progress to "overture :' This shift has many further consequences
that have varied significance for various disciplines. For ecology the following consequences seem to me to be
The world now is no longer the universe , 'all of the world', the
sum of everything, but rather the play of world" in which we are inseparably
connected co-players. What we call space and time also belong in this play of the world. However,
space is now no longer the three-dimensional, calculable. geometric space, but
rather the play of places, the playing together of the places of a region;" And time is no longer
a one-dimensional time-axis, but the play of time , which grants presence and absence in the
of fundamental importance:
three dimensions of future, past, and present.
Our alternative is the only approach capable of solving

geologic environmental shifts like climate change
Luke, 9 (Timothy, University Distinguished Professor of Political Science in the
College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences as well as Program Chair of the
Government and International Affairs Program, School of Public and International
Affairs at Virginia Polytechnic Institute
An Emergent Mangle of Practice: Global Climate Change as Vernacular
Geoengineering, 9/2009, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?
abstract_id=1450783)
The best path out of this crisis at this juncture, therefore, would appear more modest,
namely, sticking with the messy praxis of mangling . The negative path dependencies
in the technological momentum behind fossil fueled civilization might well be only
strengthened if formal geoengineering schema were put into place . In addition to not
amending the mistakes already made in fabricating the technoculture of the world since the eighteenth century,
new grander ecological messes with less hope of reversal or remediation very well
might arise out of emergency geoengineering measures. Finding multiple, resilient, micro-scale,
and reversible solutions to greenhouse gassing is already happening apace, and
these efforts should not be derailed. Holding out the hopes of some singular, brittle,
macro-scale, and possibly irreversible geoengineering projects being prototyped, and
then rapidly deployed, is vain. Most are still only in the talking stage, but their apparent
certainty of success might well aggravate the already widespread foot dragging one
sees in the struggle against global climate change.
Affirmative Answers
**Aff Answers**
Aff Permutation Do Both

Permute embrace the plan and the alternative. Its
impossible to change how people relate to nature. Political
action is necessary and can be de-coupled - only the
permutation solves
Lewis, 1992 (Martin W., Associate Research Professor of Geography at Duke University, Green Decisions: An
Environmentalist Critique of Radical Environmentalism, 22-23)
In marked contrast, the
decoupling perspective endorsed here seeks to separate human activities from nature
both in order to protect nature from humanity (for nature's sake) and to allow continued technological
progress (for humanity's sake). This entails acknowledging a profound division between humankind and the rest of nature, a
distinction that many greens allege is itself at the root of the ecological crisis. Yet the radical environmentalists who
condemn this example of dualistic thinking merely substitute for it their own parallel gulf, one separating
modern (or technologically oriented) human beings from nature. This in turn entails positing a radical
discontinuity in human development, a dualism of human nature separating moderns from primals (or
primitives). As I shall argue at length in this work's conclusion, such a division of humankind is, in the end, both bigoted
and empirically unsupportable. We would be better off admitting that while humankind is indeed of nature, intrinsically
creative human nature is a phenomenon not found in nature's other creations. In a Promethean environmental future,
humans would accentuate the gulf that sets us apart from the rest of the natural world--precisely in order to
preserve and enjoy nature at a somewhat distant remove. Our alternative is to continue to struggle within
nature, and in so doing to distort its forms by our inescapably unnatural presence. Finally, where radical
greens often emphasize philosophical (or even spiritual) purity, this work stresses pragmatic gains. Since the
anarchic utopianism that marks the dominant strains of radical environmentalism stands little chance of
gaining public acceptance, much less of creating a feasible alternative economy, an emphasis on the purity
of ideals can lead only to the frustration of goals. I would suggest that a pragmatic approach stands a much
better chance of accomplishing our shared ends. The prospect of humankind someday coexisting easily with the earth's
other inhabitants--a vision entertained by Arcadian and Promethean environmentalists alike--can best be achieved through
gradual steps that remain on the track of technological progress.
And The permutation solves and their alternative fails

rejection" only shields the status quo from criticism
Darby, 1997 (Phillip, Reader in International Relations @ U of Melbourne and CoDirector of the Institute of Postcolonial Studies, Australia, At the Edge of
International Relations: Postcolonialism, Gender and Dependency. P. 242-3)
There is one final thought which relates back to the title of the book, Why, it might be asked by those working In the
new discourses or basically engaged With the Third World attempt to bring disciplinary international relations into
the picture Would it not be better all round to leave international relations to its own concerns? After all, its evident
commitment to disciplinary boundaries and its lack of receptivity, even hostility, to many of the approaches
favoured by the new discourses hardly augurs well for productive exchange. Moreover, its links with established
power compound the constraints of disciplinary orthodoxy and give international relations' politics a very different
international relations'
capacity to co-opt, to appropriate contending perspectives to its own design , could
blunt the edge of alternative approaches to the situation of the Third World in global politics.
leaning from, say, post-colonialism or cultural studies. There is also a feeling that
Such, it might provocatively be claimed, has been the fate of feminism, which has been domesticated within the
discipline and has come increasingly to concern itself with established reference points such as the state and
security. The realist chorus seems to run 'We are all good feminists now.'
Such claims may well be overstated
are not without truth. Yet it is precisely international relations influence and its
assurance that it holds the keys to understanding global politics which makes
dialogue so necessary. Whatever its shortcomings, the discipline has highlighted
Many of the major impediments to the processes of global change, and they need to be
addressed if the radicalism of the new discourses is to bear directly on the problems of the
third world. In this respect, being at the edge should not constitute an end in itself, for such
a position is surely destined for continued marginalization and ineffectiveness .
Rather, the edge needs to engage the centre and draw it out it needs to inscribe its
perspectives and insights as no longer marginal to the prospects for social change
and global transformation. Merely ignoring the centre and the mainstream will
continue to shield people and experiences at the eduge from view.
but they
Aff Permutation Other Instances

Permute do the plan and reject eco-managerialism in all
other instances
If the alternative is so powerful that it can overcome the
deeply engrained managerial mindset of the status-quo, then
including the alternative in the permutation can overcome any
of their links to plan. Otherwise, the alternative isnt all that
powerful and you vote Aff anyways.
Aff Conditionality Illegitimate

Conditionality is illegitimate and a voting issue
Makes the 2AC impossible causes time and strategy skews
that ruin the Affs ability to keep up from the get go
Leads to Argumentative Irresponsibility which is guarantees
shallow and callous forms of education
Kills Clash and Genuine Topic Learning creates an incentive to
focus on the least covered arguments
Dispositionality is Better allows the Aff to choose whether or
not to stick the Neg with an advocacy
Reject the team its the appropriate remedy for this debate
and sets a precedent for all others
Aff Vague Alternatives Illegitimate

Vague Alternatives are a voting issue
Kills Fairness makes it impossible to generate offense
because when never know what the alternative actually does
Vagueness turns the Alt into a Moving Target allows the Neg
to conveniently morph their alternative throughout the debate
to evade Aff arguments
Aff Radical Environmentalism Bad

Their critique destroys the environment and crushes
environmental movements
Wapner, 2003 (Paul, Associate professor and Director of the Global Environmental Policy Program at American
University, Leftist Criticism of "Nature" Environmental Protection in a Postmodern Age, Dissent Magazine, Winter,
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/menutest/archives/2003/wi03/wapner.htm)
"[C]ertain contemporary forms of intellectual and social relativism can be

just as destructive to nature as bulldozers and chain saws." -Michael Soule and
Gary Lease Most of us are familiar with rightist attacks on environmentalism. For a long time, many people
on the right have faulted environmentalists for wanting to curtail free enterprise, limit private property, and abridge
We are less familiar with leftist criticism. Over

the past decade or so, however, some parts of the left have launched their own attacks on
environmentalism, and, although these are more philosophical in character, they threaten the movement
every bit as much as those coming from the right. Leftist environmental criticism is the work of a group
of postmodern intellectuals and professors. Postmodernists expose the constructed quality of those things we
individual freedom in the service of environmental well-being.
take for granted. They unmask the given and show that "what is" is not necessarily "meant to be," but rather is a
consequence of particular decisions and socio-historical conditions. Postmodernism is a natural ally of the left in
that it deconstructs existing conditions and shows that, although they may appear natural or necessary, they are
really contingent; they can be changed. This is a doctrine that has helped people look critically at their society and
consider the possibility of other arrangements. Leftist critiques of environmentalism start from this same premise.
They point out that our notions of nature-the nonhuman world that environmentalists care so much about-are
themselves social constructions and thus subject to various interpretations, none of which can provide absolute
guidance for environmental policy. We never experience nature directly but always through the lenses of our own
values and assumptions. "Nature" is thus not simply a physical entity that is "out there" or given; it is an idea that
takes on different meanings in different cultural contexts, a social construction that directs us to see mountains,
rivers, trees, and deserts in particular ways. Raymond Williams expressed this understanding when he wrote, "The
idea of nature contains, though often unnoticed, an extraordinary amount of human history." To postmodernists,
"nature" is not something the mind discovers but something that it makes. This understanding of "nature" is helpful
in guarding against insensitive environmentalist projects. We often assume that everyone concerned with a
particular environmental issue shares the same understanding of the problem. But this is far from being the case.
When it comes to preserving wilderness areas or protecting biological diversity, one person's wilderness is another
person's neighborhood. What one person values as an endangered species is potential income, a threat, or dinner
to someone else. Leftist criticism has been important in reminding us that "nature" is not a single realm with a
universalized meaning, but a canvas on which we project our sensibilities, our culture, and our ideas about what is
socially necessary. The postmodern argument also poses challenges for anyone concerned with environmental
Environmentalism is fundamentally about conserving and preserving nature. Whether one

worries about climate change, loss of biological diversity, dwindling resources, or overall degradation of
the earth's air, water, soil, and species, the nonhuman world is the backdrop of concern. What happens
when critics call this backdrop into question? What happens when they claim that one understanding of
"nature" is at odds with another and that there is no definitive way to judge which one is better? How can
a movement dedicated to protecting nature operate if the very identity of its concern is in doubt? These
protection.
may seem like academic questions, but they go to the heart of environmentalism and have begun to worry even the
After scholars such as William Cronon, Timothy Luke, and J. Baird Callicott
introduced "eco-criticism" to the scholarly and popular publics, various environmental activists and thinkers have
most committed environmentalists.
struggled to articulate a response. Their inability to do so in a decisive and persuasive manner has further damaged
now that the critique is out of the bag, it is being co-opted

by people on the right. Anti-environmentalists such as Charles Rubin and Alston Chase, for example, now
claim that, if there is no such thing as "real" nature, we need not treat the nonhuman world with
unqualified respect. If we think it is in our interest, we can freely choose to pave the rainforest, wipe out
the last panda bear, or pump high levels of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. What is critical to notice
in both cases is that criticisms of "nature," whether they come from the left or are co-opted by the right,
the environmentalist position. Even more troubling,
are playing an increasing role in structuring the confrontation between anti- and pro-environmentalists.
And they are re-setting the fault lines within the environmental movement itself.
Aff Environmental Managerialism Good

Our approach towards the environment is necessary to prevent
mass suffering and extinction their alternative collapses
civilization
Berliner, 2006 (Michael, the senior advisor to the Ayn Rand Archives, On earth Day, Remember: If
Environmentalism Succeeds, It Will Make Human Life Impossible http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=4643)
Earth Day approaches, and with it a grave danger faces mankind. The danger is not from acid rain, global warming, smog, or the
logging of rain forests, as environmentalists would have us believe. The danger to mankind is from environmentalism.
The fundamental goal of environmentalism is not clean air and clean water; rather, it is the demolition of
technological/industrial civilization. Environmentalism's goal is not the advancement of human health,
human happiness, and human life; rather, it is a subhuman world where "nature" is worshipped like the
totem of some primitive religion. In a nation founded on the pioneer spirit, environmentalists have made "development" an
evil word. They inhibit or prohibit the development of Alaskan oil, offshore drilling, nuclear power--and every other practical form of
energy. Housing, commerce, and jobs are sacrificed to spotted owls and snail darters. Medical research is sacrificed to the "rights" of
mice. Logging is sacrificed to the "rights" of trees. No instance of the progress that brought man out of the cave is safe from the
onslaught of those "protecting" the environment from man, whom they consider a rapist and despoiler by his very essence. Nature,
they insist, has "intrinsic value," to be revered for its own sake, irrespective of any benefit to man. As a
consequence, man is to be prohibited from using nature for his own ends. Since nature supposedly has value and
goodness in itself, any human action that changes the environment is necessarily immoral. Of course, environmentalists invoke the
doctrine of intrinsic value not against wolves that eat sheep or beavers that gnaw trees; they invoke it only against man, only when
man wants something. The ideal world of environmentalism is not twenty-first-century Western civilization; it is the Garden of Eden,
a world with no human intervention in nature, a world without innovation or change, a world without effort, a world where survival is
somehow guaranteed, a world where man has mystically merged with the "environment." Had the environmentalist mentality
prevailed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, we would have had no Industrial Revolution, a situation
that consistent environmentalists would cheer--at least those few who might have managed to survive without the life-saving benefits
of modern science and technology. The expressed goal of environmentalism is to prevent man from changing his environment, from
intruding on nature. That is why environmentalism is fundamentally anti-man. Intrusion is necessary for human
survival. Only by intrusion can man avoid pestilence and famine. Only by intrusion can man control his life
and project long-range goals. Intrusion improves the environment, if by "environment" one means the surroundings of
man--the external material conditions of human life. Intrusion is a requirement of human nature. But in the environmentalists' paean to
"Nature," human nature is omitted. For environmentalism, the "natural" world is a world without man. Man has no legitimate needs,
but trees, ponds, and bacteria somehow do. They don't mean it? Heed the words of the consistent environmentalists. "The ending of
the human epoch on Earth," writes philosopher Paul Taylor in Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics, "would most
likely be greeted with a hearty 'Good riddance!'" In a glowing review of Bill McKibben's The End of Nature, biologist David M.
Graber writes (Los Angeles Times, October 29, 1989): "Human happiness [is] not as important as a wild and healthy planet . . . . Until
such time as Homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along." Such is the
naked essence of environmentalism: it mourns the death of one whale or tree but actually welcomes the death of billions of people. A
more malevolent, man-hating philosophy is unimaginable. The guiding principle of environmentalism is self-sacrifice, the sacrifice of
longer lives, healthier lives, more prosperous lives, more enjoyable lives, i.e., the sacrifice of human lives. But an individual is not
born in servitude. He has a moral right to live his own life for his own sake. He has no duty to sacrifice it to the needs of others and
certainly not to the "needs" of the nonhuman. To save mankind from environmentalism, what's needed is not the appeasing,
compromising approach of those who urge a "balance" between the needs of man and the "needs" of the environment . To save
mankind requires the wholesale rejection of environmentalism as hatred of science, technology, progress,
and human life. To save mankind requires the return to a philosophy of reason and individualism, a philosophy that makes life on
earth possible.
Managerialism is key to prevent extinction the alternative simply

acquiesces to a destructive status-quo
Levy, 1999 (Dr. Neil, Fellow of the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at Charles Sturt University, Discourses of
the Environment, p. 215)
If the technological fix is unlikely to be more successful than strategies of limitation of our uses of resources, we
are
nevertheless uable to simply leave the environment as it is. There is a real and pressing need for more, and
more accurate, technical and scientific information about the non-human world. For we are faced with a situation
in which the processes we have already set in train will continue to impact upon that world, and therefore us, for
centuries. It is therefore necessary, not only to stop cutting down the rain forests, but to develop real, concrete
proposals for action, to reverse, or at least limit, the effects of our previous interventions. Moreover, there is
another reason why our behaviour towards the non-human cannot simply be a matter of leaving it as it is, at least in so far as our goals
are not only environmental but also involve social justice. For if we simply preserve what remains to us of wilderness, of the
countryside and of park land, we also preserve patterns of very unequal access to their resources and their consolations (Soper 1995:
207). In fact, we risk exacerbating these inequalities. It is no us, but the poor of Brazil, who will bear the brunt of the
misery which would result form a strictly enforced policy of leaving the Amazonian rain forest untouched, in the absence of
alternative means of providing for their livelihood. It is the development of policies to provide such ecologically
sustainable alternative which we require, as well as the development of technical means for replacing our current
greenhouse gas-emitting sources of energy. Such policies and proposals for concrete action must be formiulated by
ecologists, environmentalist, people with expertise concerning the functioning of ecosystems and the impacts which our actions have
upon them. Such proposals are, therefore, very much the province for Foucaults specific intellectual, the one who works within
specific sectors, at the precise points where their won conditions of life or work situate them (Foucault 1980g: 126). For who could
be more fittingly described as the strategists of life and death than these environmentalists? After the end of the Cold War, it is in
this sphere, more than any other, that mans politics places his existence as a living being in question (Foucault 1976: 143). For it
is in facing the consequences of our intervention in the non-human world that the fate of our species , and of
those with whone we share this planet, will be decided.
Aff Heideggerian Alternative Fails

The alternative fails
Dumain, 2003 (Ralph, Librarian, Archivist, Researcher-Scholar, Heideggers Jargon,
http://www.autodidactproject.org/my/jargon.html)
Bourdieu's book was quite fascinating, in that he focused on Heidegger's terminology from the perspective of its
covert dual functioning, within the demarcated field of "philosophy" and in the common ideological parlance of the
Heidegger sought to insulate his work from mere empirical criticism or

removing it to a plane of esoterism removed from profane
everyday understanding. Yet his success with the German intelligentsia was bolstered by the
day.
reference, always
resonances of his terminology with the reactionary ideological usages of his words in common parlance.
Heidegger's coded language, despite hieratic pretensions, is what makes his ontology political through and through,
calls into question Heidegger's

whole method, especially its way of insulating itself from any criticism or
even rational evaluation, but also its pretension to greater insight (why
should Heidegger's conceptions of seemingly ordinary concepts be any
more profound than their ordinary senses?). Bourdieu's approach is based on his
regardless of his actual affiliation with the Nazi party. Bourdieu
sociological concept of the "field". Adorno does not work on the same basis, though he invokes the concept of
division of labor to explain the philosophical specialist's proclivities. Adorno finds similar self-protective measures in
Adorno is concerned about the debasement of

languagejargonits emptiness of real content, now filled by catch
phrases of indefinite meaning which serve a duplicitous ideological function, in the manner of
Heidegger's work as Bourdieu does.
advertising slogans. Though Heidegger wanted to insulate his nostalgic retreat to Being (sentimentalizing preindustrial rural life in the process) the vulgar everyday world of the "They", his vacuous ideas are of the very
essence of capitalist exchange value. There is a fundamental paradox in trying to maintain the ethos of the mythic
Heidegger attempts to insulate himself in advance by

proving that his would-be interpreters must of necessity misunderstand
him, but Adorno finds him out. The most difficult aspect of reading Adorno's book is his references
in a demythologized world.
to German discourse of the time (presumably the early '60s). He refers to the abuse of language in everyday
political and social discourse and the resonance of same in Heidegger's work, but without acquaintance of the
former I get only a nebulous picture of what Adorno's allusions mean. Furthermore, I do not know the dominant
intellectual or specifically philosophical trends of the time, though it appears as if German existentialism is still
dominant or at least prevalent. Adorno dissects Heidegger's rural phoniness and use of
keywords and concepts such as commitment, curiosity, idle chatter, dignity, and death. Adorno intensively
finding
therein the sour fascist violence at the root of Heidegger's entire
philosophy. Adorno's quotations from Heidegger reveal the fraudulent,
empty claims of Heidegger's jargon. The only philosopher who comes off looking worse is
analyzes the relation between wholeness and death (involving also the "they" and exchange),
Jaspers. A comparison between Adorno and Georg Lukacs is also in order. Lukacs The Destruction of Reason has a
main theme the bogus notion of intellectual intuition, which gets its big boost historically from Schelling. My guess
then is that Lukacs' critique would go right to the main ontological and epistemological issues of subjective
idealism. While the argumentative basis between Lukacs and Adorno in aesthetics is well documented (I believe
the most relevant documents are collected in Aesthetics and Politics), I am only aware of a couple of sentences
Adorno wrote on Lukacs' Lukacs The Destruction of Reason. Adorno asserts that this book only amounts to
evidence of the destruction of Lukacs' own reason. Also, that Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, etc. were in their own way
protesting against reification. I find this extremely lame, pathetic really. Did Adorno write anything else on Lukacs'
book? And, as I've asked several times, is there any secondary literature that seriously compares the critiques of
Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Husserl, etc., on the part of Lukacs and Adorno, respectively? (Written 21 April 2003)
Adorno on Heidegger, Authenticity & Authority I think I know what Adorno is getting with respect to absolute
authority, but the point should be clarified. It's important and therefore we should guard against misinterpretation.
The metaphysical
assertions of yore are overthrowni.e. the authority of the absolutebut what
I take Adorno to contrast the new subjectivism with the old absolute idealism.
replaces them? A philosophy claiming to represent real being and

experience over abstraction, but with indefinite reference and content.
Adorno then wants to show how the Heideggerian template does not promote
authentic experience at all, but rather an ideology of power against which
there is no appeal because there is no determinate intellectual content to
support or oppose. Hence there is no ideal order to confirm or oppose, but a mere
subjective stance, which absolutizes authority as a power principle while
destroying it as an intellectual principle. And this is just what Nazism did.
The paradox is that Nazism was so opportunistic that, apart from its racial theory, it never established or accepted
any official philosophy! Neither Heidegger nor his rivals succeeded in getting the Nazis to endorse their
philosophies. If Adorno means anything like what I think he does, I would say his observation is very profound. As
for Adorno's objection to the authentic self, let's hope this was not motivated by the same animus that set him
Adorno is certainly correct to point out how the jargon

of authenticity serves as an ideological mask, first of all for Heidegger
himself, whose authenticity ended up as the fhrerprinzip. Heidegger was
a scumbag through and through, and the fact that people like Marcuse or
Sartre could be taken in to the extent that they were screams volumes
about the bankruptcy of bourgeois European civilization and its
intellectuals.
against Fromm. Either way,
Aff Ontology Bad

Ontology means nothing prefer our approach because theirs
is non-falsifiable and overly theoretical
Owen 02 David Owen, 2 Reader of Political Theory at the Univ. of
Southampton, Millennium Vol 31 No 3 2002 p. 655-7
Commenting on the philosophical turn in IR, Wver remarks that
[a] frenzy for words like
epistemology and ontology
often signals this philosophical turn, although he goes

on to comment that these terms are often used loosely.4 However, loosely deployed or not, it is clear that
debates concerning ontology and epistemology play a central role in the contemporary IR theory wars. In one
respect, this is unsurprising since it is a characteristic feature of the social sciences that periods of disciplinary
disorientation involve recourse to reflection on the philosophical commitments of different theoretical
approaches, and there is no doubt that such reflection can play a valuable role in making explicit the
commitments that characterise (and help individuate) diverse theoretical positions. Yet, such a philosophical
turn is not without its dangers and I will briefly mention three before turning to consider a confusion that has, I
will suggest, helped to promote the IR theory wars by motivating this philosophical turn. The first danger with
it has an inbuilt tendency to prioritise issues of ontology

and epistemology over explanatory and/or interpretive power as if the latter two
were merely a simple function of the former. But while the explanatory and/or
interpretive power of a theoretical account is not wholly independent of its ontological
the philosophical turn is that
and/or epistemological commitments (otherwise criticism of these features would not be a criticism that had
any value), it is by no means clear that it is, in contrast,
wholly dependent on these
philosophical commitments.
Thus, for example, one need not be sympathetic to rational choice

theory to recognise that it can provide powerful accounts of certain kinds of problems, such as the tragedy of
It may, of course, be the case

that the advocates of rational choice theory cannot give a good account of why
this type of theory is powerful in accounting for this class of problems (i.e., how it is that the
the commons in which dilemmas of collective action are foregrounded.
relevant actors come to exhibit features in these circumstances that approximate the assumptions of rational
choice theory) and, if
this is the case, it is a philosophical weaknessbut this does

not undermine the point that, for a certain class of problems, rational choice
theory may provide the best account available to us. In other words, while the
critical judgement of theoretical accounts in terms of their ontological and/or
epistemological sophistication is one kind of critical judgement, it is not the only
or even necessarily the most important kind. The second danger run by the philosophical
turn is that because prioritisation of ontology and epistemology promotes theoryconstruction from philosophical first principles, it cultivates a theory-driven rather
than problem-driven approach to IR. Paraphrasing Ian Shapiro, the point can be put like
this: since it is the case that there is always a plurality of possible true descriptions of a
given action, event or phenomenon, the challenge is to decide which is the most apt in
terms of getting a perspicuous grip on the action, event or phenomenon in question given
the purposes of the inquiry; yet, from this standpoint, theory-driven work is part of a
reductionist program in that it dictates always opting for the description
that calls for the explanation that flows from the preferred model or theory.5
The justification offered for this strategy rests on the mistaken belief that it is
necessary for social science because general explanations are required to
characterise the classes of phenomena studied in similar terms. However, as Shapiro
points out, this is to misunderstand the enterprise of science since whether
there are general explanations for classes of phenomena is a question for socialscientific inquiry, not to be prejudged before conducting that inquiry .6
Moreover, this strategy easily slips into the promotion of the pursuit of generality
over that of empirical validity. The third danger is that the preceding two combine to
encourage the formation of a particular image of disciplinary debate in IRwhat might be called
(only slightly tongue in cheek) the Highlander viewnamely, an image of warring
theoretical approaches with each, despite occasional temporary tactical alliances, dedicated to the
strategic achievement of sovereignty over the disciplinary field. It encourages this view because the turn to,
and prioritisation of, ontology and epistemology stimulates the idea that
there can only be one theoretical approach which gets things right ,
namely, the theoretical approach that gets its ontology and epistemology right. This image feeds back
into IR exacerbating the first and second dangers, and so a potentially vicious
circle arises.
Ontology is a smokescreen that has no connection to empirical

reality only purposeful political action has any hope of
alleviating social ills
McClean, 2001 (David, Philospher and Writer, Conducted Graduate Work in Philosophy at NYU, The
Cultural Left and the Limits on Social Hope, http://www.american
philosophy.org/archives/past_conference_programs/pc2001/Discussion%20papers/david_m cclean)
There is a lot of philosophical prose on the general subject of social justice. Some of this is quite good, and some of
it is quite bad. What distinguishes the good from the bad is not merely the level of erudition. Displays of high
erudition are gratuitously reflected in much of the writing by those, for example, still clinging to Marxian
ontology and is often just a useful smokescreen which shrouds a near total
disconnect from empirical reality. This kind of political writing likes to make a lot of
references to other obscure, jargon-laden essays and tedious books written by other
true believers - the crowd that takes the fusion of Marxian and Freudian private fantasies seriously. Nor is it the
lack of scholarship that makes this prose bad. Much of it is well "supported" by footnotes referencing a lode of other
what makes this prose bad is its utter lack of

relevance to extant and critical policy debates, the passage of actual laws, and the amendment of
existing regulations that might actually do some good for someone else. The writers of this
bad prose are too interested in our arrival at some social place wherein we will
finally emerge from our "inauthentic" state into something called "reality." Most of this
works, some of which are actually quite good. Rather,
stuff, of course, comes from those steeped in the Continental tradition (particularly post-Kant). While that tradition
it is anything but useful

when it comes to truly relevant philosophical analysis, and no self-respecting
Pragmatist can really take seriously the strong poetry of formations like
"authenticity looming on the ever remote horizons of fetishization." What
Pragmatists see instead is the hope that we can fix some of the social ills that face
us if we treat policy and reform as more important than Spirit and Utopia.
has much to offer and has helped shape my own philosophical sensibilities,
Aff Saving Life Good

Existence is a prerequisite to ontological investigation
Wapner, 2003 (Paul, Associate Professor and Director of the Global Environmental Policy Program at
American University, Dissent, Winter, http://www.dissentmagazine.org/menutest/articles/wi03/wapner.htm)
The third response to eco-criticism would require critics to acknowledge the ways in which they themselves silence
Postmodernism prides itself on

criticizing the urge toward mastery that characterizes modernity. But isn't mastery
exactly what postmodernism is exerting as it captures the nonhuman world within
its own conceptual domain? Doesn't postmodern cultural criticism deepen the modernist urge toward
mastery by eliminating the ontological weight of the nonhuman world? What else could it mean to
assert that there is no such thing as nature? I have already suggested the postmodernist response:
nature and then to respect the sheer otherness of the nonhuman world.
yes, recognizing the social construction of "nature" does deny the self-expression of the nonhuman world, but how
would we know what such self-expression means? Indeed, nature doesn't speak; rather, some person always speaks
on nature's behalf, and whatever that person says is, as we all know, a social construction. All attempts to listen to
Even the most radical postmodernist must acknowledge

the distinction between physical existence and non-existence. As I have said,
nature are social constructions-except one.
postmodernists accept that there is a physical substratum to the phenomenal world even if they argue about the
We can't ascribe
meaning to that which doesn't appear. What doesn't exist can manifest no
character. Put differently, yes, the postmodernist should rightly worry about interpreting nature's expressions.
different meanings we ascribe to it. This acknowledgment of physical existence is crucial.
And all of us should be wary of those who claim to speak on nature's behalf (including environmentalists who do
we need not doubt the simple idea that a prerequisite of expression is

existence. This in turn suggests that preserving the nonhuman world-in all its diverse embodiments-must be
that). But
seen by eco-critics as a fundamental good. Eco-critics must be supporters, in some fashion, of environmental
preservation.
Maximizing life allows people to decide their own values their

alternative is totalitarianism
Szacki, 1996 (Jerzy, Professor of Sociology at Warsaw University, Liberalism
After Communism, p. 197)
Liberalism does not say which of these different moralities is better than others. It is neutral on this question and
regards it neutrality as a virture. Liberalism as a political doctrine assumes that as Joseph Raz wrote there are
many worthwhile and valuable relationships, commitments and plans of life which are mutually incompatible. It
society is characterized not simply by a

by a pluralism of
incompatible yet reasonable comprehensive doctrines. What is more, for a liberal this is not
only a fact to take not of; he or she is ready to acknowledge that now this variety of conceptions of the
good is itself a good thing, that is, it is rational for members of a well-ordered society to want their plans
to be different. Thus, the task of politics cannot and should not be to resolve the dispute
among different conceptions of life. This is completely unattainable or attainable only by a
totalitarian enslavement of society in the name of some one conception. This being the
case, according to Dworkin, political decisions must be as far as possible independent of
conceptions of the good life, or what gives value to life. Since citizens of a society differ
in these conceptions, the government does not treat them as equals if it prefers one
conception to another.
recognizes that as John Rawls put it a modern democratic
pluralism of comprehensive religious, philosophical and moral doctrines but

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**First Negative Constructive**

1NC Environmental Ontology K (Development)

we now face the end of Nature,

And Development approaches, even when couched in terms

each of these wrinkles in the record of eco-managerialism

the newer iterations of eco-managerialism may only kick into a new

eco-managerialism fails miserably with regard to the political.

Those who do not benefit, in turn are left living on one

And the Alternative is to Reject their approach toward the

we may move past the mere

The call itself suggests that our drive for

1NC Environmental Ontology K (Exploration)

the various power/knowledge systems of instituting a Worldwatch

Worldwatching, in turn, refixes the moral specification of human roles

Their managerial approach is the mindset that lays the

each of these wrinkles in the record of eco-managerialism

the newer iterations of eco-managerialism may only kick into a new

eco-managerialism fails miserably with regard to the political.

Those who do not benefit, in turn are left living on one

And the Alternative is to Reject their approach toward the

we may move past the mere

The call itself suggests that our drive for

2NC Link Development

It is no wonder that we have "ethical problems" with our environment

the challenge of environmental ethics, the challenge of

Sustainable development, renewables, and conservation are

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

whether one looks at John Muir'spreservationist

resource managerialism casts corporate administrative frameworks over

the operational agendas of what

So the ethos of resourcification imagined nature as a vast input/output

2NC Link Exploration

the professional technical articulations of

Systemic survival of nature s

2NC Link Hegemony/Leadership/Competitiveness

Creating economic growth, and producing more of it than

geo-economic readings also have sparked new discourses of social

Clinton asserted "we know that abroad we have the responsibility

2NC Link State

Environments are spaces under police supervision, expert management, risk

Mobilizing biological power, then, accelerates

2NC Implication General

All attempts to reckon existing reality ... in terms of decline

The will to mastery

The "greatest danger" is that the approaching tide of technological

2NC Implication Serial Policy Failure

We live every day with the ugly, painful, and impoverishing

Their argument pre-supposes the importance of policy action

seldom have we seen honest attempts at

we must not respond to it simply by deploring our decadent life-styles

in the West, and in relatively modern times, we have

when we react to problems like

during the more hopeful

saw todays economy and society as very human constructs whose

With the swelling anxieties about the risks of global

human being is a product of interactions with the world, even as it acts

And All of our link arguments are Disads to the permutation

AT: Vague Alternatives Illegitimate

First Negative Constructive