Heidegger K - Northwestern 2014

2014 NDI 6WS – Fitzmier, Lundberg,
Abelkop
Heidegger Kritik
neg
notes
this file is an environmental managerialism/heidegger k – it’s an offshoot of heideggerian arguments
about environmental management and basically argues that when we try to manage/observe/control
the environment, we view it only as a resource to be exploited. that leads to things like exploitation,
environmental degradation, income inequality, and other impacts you’d typically associate with
something like cap on an environmental topic. i think the links are better, though, because it’s much
easier to spin links based off observation affs and things like that, since in heidegger/luke’s view that’s
still an instrumentalization of nature.
the important thing to recognize is that all the links are fundamentally based off a means-ends
instrumental rationality point of view. managerialism, control, etc. all stem from the idea that we can
identify problems and then, once they’re identified, either act or cease to act to change them. heidegger
critiques this idea, saying that it’s this idea that we have to act (or not) that is the root cause of our
enframing of the world and the environment.
in terms of the file itself, it should have what you need – there are links to most aff advantages, a choice
of a few directions to go with the impact and alt debates, and some basic blocks to get you started with
a 2nc.
there are two generic 1ncs, one for exploration and one for development affs, but you should feel free
to switch out anything you want to. some of the impact/alt combinations work better than others (for
example, the war impact and the war/IR alt or the environmentality impact and the localization alt), but
feel free to mix and match as you see fit.
a note about the alts: there are several different alts here, but there’s also the option of not reading an
alt in the 1nc with this kritik. if you choose to do that, you can read the “2nc vote neg – paradox” block
in the block. the idea is that voting neg rejects the idea of an action/inaction binary (proposing an alt in
the traditional sense, with this argument, would actually affirm that binary). if you don’t want to do that,
there are also a variety of alts, from localized politics stuff to the traditional mcwhorter “meditative
thought” alt – feel free to choose what you’re most comfortable with.
the 2nc blocks are written for the generic 1ncs, so if you’re switching them out you’ll probably want your
own blocks, but they’re there if you’re reading the generic one.
aff answers are at the bottom and should be fairly self-explanatory. they mostly fall into three
categories:
- internal link turns that say management is good

- perm cards
- alt fails cards
i hope that makes some sense. happy critiquing managerialism!
--anja beth and shanelle

1nc exploration
Observation turns the world into the environmental panopticon – controlling people
and environments, making them always available to serve the needs of “saving the
planet”
Luke 95 (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 ,
“On Environmentality: Geo-Power and Eco-Knowledge in the Discourses of Contemporary Environmentalism”, Cultural Critique 31, Autumn
1995, JSTOR)
Not surprisingly, then, thevarious 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, "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 composing Nature. 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 it s system of systems in
new disciplinary discourses to regulate population growth, economic development, and resource
exploitation on a global scale with continual managerial intervention.
1. Eco-managerialism drives reduction of nature to mere resource – it’s the root

cause of environmental exploitation and worldwide wage inequality
“Eco-Managerialism: Environmental Studies as a Power/Knowledge Formation”, Aurora Online, 2003,
http://aurora.icaap.org/index.php/aurora/article/view/79/91)
So to conclude, each of these wrinkles in the record of eco-managerialism should give its supporters pause .
The more adaptive and collaborative dimensions of eco-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 environments,
and indeed some are. Nonetheless, it would appear that the commitments
of eco-managerialism 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 managerial stance, as
much as they are instead proving to be a more attractive form of ecological exploitation. Therefore, 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 eco-
managerialism as stocks of manageable resources. Human beings, supposedly all human beings, can realize great material
goods for sizeable numbers of people if the eco-managerialists succeed. Nonetheless, 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 eco-managerialism lets those remarkable material benefits accrue at only a handful of highly developed regional municipal
and national sites. 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.
2. The alternative is a shift from the aff’s elite, scientific politics of the
environment to a loca, subpolitical one that refuses to support the
society/nature binary – only by acknowledging our individual complicity in
environmental degradation can we have a productive politics
Everybody has to come to their own conclusions about this. If you agree with me, that these have been problems and they have to be
addressed, I think one place to begin is to not accept the antinomies of nature/society and
economy/culture, state/society as they've come to us from the 19th century . The environmental
sciences and studies usually sort of say, "We're all about green stuff." Green stuff is in turn basically
about everything we haven't sullied. We want to protect the not yet built environment or reclaim
perhaps some of the built environment to be more like the not yet built environment. But there's
always this division between built environment and not yet built environment, or never to be built
environment. I think that's a mistake. They have to all be seen together . Why is what is done within society and economy
not natural? In some register, if you talk about, well whatever happens on the earth we say is natural, because nature is the earth. But
whatever human beings do on the earth is unnatural, because human beings do it. Does that make sense? Is that a lingering presence of the
kind of deistically inspired notion that man is the crown of creation, endowed or directed by God to do good things on the earth? If it is, then is
it time to either bring God back into it more, or to just forget
talking about it in that way at all and see everything as
natural. Which allows one then to talk about the green and the gray together. To crawl all the way
back up the pipes into the productive process . Why should environmental resistance stop where the
factory begins? Why should the fight be fought only out in the woods chaining yourself to trees? Why is
resource managerialism seen as a process whereby you try to prevent the over-exploitation of resources by preventing new mining, as opposed
to coming forward with highly rationalized ways of redoing engineering that would reduce the need to do that to begin with. There's a
need to crawl into the artificial ecologies, the industrial ecologies, in order to protect the natural
ecologies. Rather than saying, well that's engineering and that's not what I do. By the same token, there's a need politically to
politicize these processes that are often considered sub-political. Our political conception accepts Aristotelian
definitions of labour. The citizen is the free property, wharf making man, who has the leisure to do politics. He has the leisure to do that politics
because the metic, the mechanic, the slave and the woman stay at home or in the marketplace to produce the wealth that makes all that
happen. That's kind of a dumb division of labour that probably didn't exist in classical Hellenic civilization as cleanly as political theorists pretend
today. But now it's really kind of stupid. Many
important decisions are not taken by people sitting in Ottawa or
Washington. They're made in corporations or in design studios in the design construction creation of
goods and services. The sub-political decisions are where a lot of things that really affect our lives, are
made. Then out of the factory door they pollute, they degrade things. The state comes along and tries to bottle that up
with regulation, environmental controls, etc. It's kind of dumb. Getting into that sub-political level of
decision making, and politicizing what goes on behind the veil of expertise: "Oh you can't talk about
that, because you're not an engineer." Or behind the veil of property: "Oh, you can't talk about that,
because you don't have shares in the company or you don't own the business." That probably needs to
be changed. The affects of these sub-political decisions affect our public life. Recognizing that ecology is a public
enterprise that affects all of us is another thing that conceivably should be don e. Then I guess the last thing I'd
probably recommend that we think about, "is this nature that we think is so pristine and pure even around much anymore?" How much of it
has been degraded to the point where it is not protectable. As a result, many people are coming along and saying, "Well why don't we just have
artificial nature? What's wrong with pigs that grow human ears? What's wrong with strawberries that glow in the dark? This is better living
through science." So the genetic reengineering of animals and plants in the name of profit is again something I think a lot of environmental
programs are dealing with, but a lot of other ones are not dealing with, because it is not natural. Instead it's being consigned off to ethicists, or
it's not even being looked at, at all because it's considered to be not all that pervasive. When in fact it's becoming quite pervasive, because
these are new ways of making animal production and plant production more profitable. That's where I'd begin, right off the top of my head,
thinking about how the environment ought to be expanded, the
separation between environment and society maybe
ought to be torn down. It should look at the gray and the brown as much as the green. I think it needs
to be a lot more political than it's been. And much less focused on science . Because it's the scientific
that gets you into a monitoring, measuring, regulating regime, which is right now the best that we've
got, but I think there's more to it than that that can be done.
1nc development
1. Environmental “development” is a guise for technological denaturing and
dehumanization
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 is complete and Nature is gone for good.“l3 McKibben
agrees, 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 God-created (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 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.
2. [insert more aff-specific links here]

3. Eco-managerialism drives reduction of nature to mere resource – it’s the root
cause of environmental exploitation and worldwide wage inequality
So to conclude, each of these wrinkles in the record of eco-managerialism should give its supporters pause.
and indeed some are. Nonetheless, it would appear that the commitments of eco-managerialism to sustainability
encirclement of space and matter in national as well as global economies - to a system of systems,
managerialism as stocks of manageable resources. Human beings, supposedly all human beings, can realize great material
advanced national economies that basically have monopolized the use of the world's resources . This
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.
4. The alternative is to embrace meditative thought to break open new ways of

relating to the world
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 constitutio n (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 initially inspire and actually
examine the feasibility of response, 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. What is the origin of that drive? Is that drive itself really un-
der our control? Is it something we choose and will, or it is something whose origins and meanings transcend us? 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.
2nc topshelf
2nc impact o/v
The K outweighs and turns the case – their resource-oriented view of the environment
drives ecological destruction and massive worldwide inequality
- view this debate in terms of terminal uniqueness – ecological collapse is

inevitable in the world of the aff because their endless managerialism of nature
leads to untenable resourcification – they’ll extract every last drop of oil and
build technology in factories that devastate the environment with pollution –
outweighs on magnitude because they make the Earth quite literally unlivable –
that’s Luke
- and outweighs on probability – their war scenarios and environmental disasters

are far-fetched and near impossible to prevent even if there is a risk they
happen, but we’re seeing the dangerous effects of their managerialism now –
US managerialism ensures material benefit for its citizens at the expense of the
rest of the world, who live on a dollar or two a day and spend their lives in
sweatshop factories exploiting resources for the aff’s benefit – this is sure to
continue absent the alt – that’s Luke
2nc alt - exploration
The alt solves – localized, subpolitical solutions to the environment allow for
individual complicity in decisions that hurt the environment to be realized – large-
scale, technological solutions will inevitably continue our resource-minded frame, and
science doesn’t help – it’s been taken over by academics produced in universities
concerned about maintaining long-term economic growth, not the environment. A
shift to a localized politics is key – it recognizes the interconnectedness of
environmental systems and refuses to separate the “here” from the “out there” –
enables us to see the impact of our decisions and causes a mindset shift – that’s Luke
2nc alt – development
The alternative is meditative thought – McWhorter says we have to resist the
action/inaction binary the aff proposes and live in the paradox, recognizing that it is
our mode of thought and relation to the world that drives all the aff’s impacts. Only
the alt recognizes that there are alternative modes of being in the world – critical to
open up space to solve the aff impacts
2nc vote neg – paradox
We’re not proposing an alternative in the traditional sense because we don’t need
one – in showing you the status quo and then their method to fix it the aff has proved
the link and affirmed the binary between action and inaction. They believe that the
only possible ways of solving problems are either to take an action or stop some
current action. This is false. We need to recognize the paradox – that it is this mode of
thinking, in fact, that’s causing those impacts in the first place.
Vote neg to negate the action/inaction binary the aff proposes – only by recognizing
that it is false can we hope to stop calculating and enframing
only real purpose is to function as a prelude to action, in attempting to think we will only twist within
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 constitutio n (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 initially inspire and actually
examine the feasibility of response, 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. What is the origin of that drive? Is that drive itself really un-
der our control? Is it something we choose and will, or it is something whose origins and meanings transcend us? 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
2nc at: perm
1. the perm is severance – the link debate proves the very basis of the aff’s
justification for intervention in the ocean is based on environmental
managerialism and the drive for more resources – don’t allow them to sever
the fundamental justification of the plan, it makes them a moving target and
makes being neg impossible
2. inclusion of the plan is impossible until we change the way we do
environmental politics – the k is a prerequisite. our current frame of mind
ensures endless exploitation and destruction – there’s no way they can coexist
without the aff coopting the alt
3. [do your link work here]
2nc at: fw
1. Counter-interpretation: the aff must defend both the plan and its justifications
here are our reasons to prefer
a. neg ground – we should be able to test all parts of the aff – on a topic as
huge as this it’s key to neg generics because there are so many possible
aff mechanisms
b. fairness – they chose the 1AC and got infinite prep time to research it –
they should be prepared to defend it – there’s no offense for them – they
still get to weigh their advantages as long as they can justify them
c. education – critical education teaches us to be better, more informed
thinkers rather than just policy wonks who don’t know about anything
unless it’s under the purview of the USFG
2. A critical pedagogy surrounding the environment is critical – it is in educational

spaces that our attitudes toward nature are formed
Luke 01 (Timothy, University Distinguished Professor of Political Science in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences as well as
“Education, Environment and Sustainability: what are the issues, where to intervene, what must be done?”, Educational Philosophy and Theory,
33:2, 2001)
This paper contests the conventional understandings of `nature’ and `society’ in today’ s debates
about the environment and sustainability. Typically, environmentalists take their stand àt the end of
the pipe’ when and where horrendous ecological destruction, pollution or toxic events occur in
`nature’ . Yet, they rarely go back up those pipes into the realm of `society’ during those times when
there are no obvious environmental disasters. This reactive approach to environmental destruction has, in effect,
created a conceptual zoning code that keeps most environmentalists from investigating how society is
organised, how industrial metabolisms are fabricated and where ecological efficiencies might be realised before end of the
pipe disasters occur. This paper argues in favour of new types of environmental education that would begin
their struggle for a better environment in society’ s factories, economies and technologies . For better or
worse, we now mostly live in a processed world. Even wilderness is a place left wild by larger forces in the processed world
letting it be. While the quest to stop ecological destruction through direct action out in the wild should not cease, other battles along
another front must question how housing is built to reduce timbering, how food is grown to reduce
agrochemical use, how labour is performed to lower pollution, and how ownership is defined to
increase collective responsibility. These interventions in social and economic processes would have a
goal of changing work and social relations, and they offer another approach to the environmental
crisis that needs to be popularised at all levels of education . Environmental education is vitally
important. This is true, because, in and of itself, nature is essentially meaningless until particular human beings find significance in it by
interpreting its ambivalent signs as meaningful to them. Once this activity begins in the sciences, humanities and social sciences, however,
environmental educators play a critical role inasmuch as they often are the authorities that help to decode which signs are read, when they are
scanned and how they are interpreted. Because various human beings will observe natural patterns differently, choose to accentuate some,
while deciding to ignore others, nature’ s meanings always will be multiple and unfixed.1 Even
before scientific disciplines or
industrial technologies turn its matter and energy into products, nature already is beingtransformed
by discursive interpretation into many different types of `natural resources’ and once nature’ s
environmental properties are rendered intelligible through these discursive processes, they are used
to legitimise a variety of ethical, political, and social projects. One vital site for generating, accumulating and then
circulating such discursive knowledge about nature is the educational system of schools, colleges and universities. As
the primary institutions for credentialing individual learners and legitimating collective teachings , schools and universities do
much to construct our understanding of the natural world. Over the past generation, graduate programmes in
environmental science on many American university campuses have become a major source of collective representations of `the environment’
as well as the home base for those scientific disciplines used to study nature’ s meanings. At the same time, their research findings and
graduates filter into the lower levels of education in the teaching of environmental awareness. As a result, school
leavers at all levels
routinely now have a very specific set of knowledge (as it has been scientifically validated) and a quite
focused notion of power (as it is institutionally constructed) to understand `the environmental crisis’
as citizens or consumers armed with sound scientific and technical teachings . This study, however, questions
how such specialised discourses about nature, or `the environment’ , are constructed in many school programmes by professional± technical
experts. This
articulation of environmental knowledge often sets nature apart in special distant local es
and isolates nature’ s wild places from modern economies and societies. This move articulates a
complex epistemic code for environmentalists that externalises, authorises and centres, on one level,
the forces of nature by operationally internalising, mystifying and decentring complex economic and
social forces, on another level, in the practices of environmental education and management
links
biodiversity link
Preserving biodiversity leads to eco-colonialism wherein we declare ourselves to be
managers of the entire world, reimagined as an ecological investment fund – the aff
views biodiversity solely in terms of its benefit to humanity – turns the case
“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)
The WWF-US chapter in league with the WWF's global offices in Switzerland are intent upon preserving some segments
of the Earth's biodiversity through planned giving and high-powered finance, which aim to reconstruct
certain natural environments around the world as a green endowment from the past to provide
sustainable income streams of natural resources to present and future generations . As an endowment system,
the WWF-US is generating its own unique discourses of green governmentality for managing Nature and
its resources, as if its many campaigns to protect the rainforest, save tigers, preserve rhinos were an
interdependent family of mutual funds poised to capture continuously the charitable dollars of green
investors. Like most preservationist-minded ecology groups first inspired by IUCN habitat protection agendas, then, the WWF
essentially is devoted to "Nature preservation," or creating small reservations of select real estate
populated by rare wildlife species in expanses of undeveloped habitat. The ethos of its aristocratic founders with
their experiences as hunters of trophy animals on game preserves remains alive in the WWF's approach to Africa, Asia and Latin America as the
best sites to preserve big game animals. As WWF-US President Kathryn S. Fuller indicates, the WWF has helped "establish, fund or manage
nearly 450 parks and reserves world wide, from the Wolong Panda Reserve in China to Peru's spectacular Manu National Park. The protected
areas WWF-US has supported cover more than 260 million acres of wildlife habitat--an area twice the size of California."92 This achievement is
highly touted in WWF literature, underscoring how thoroughly the
organization has reimagined Nature as a
bioresources trust, an ecomutual fund, or an environmental endowment to be kept under its diligent
surveillance as loosely held inventories of land. The work of the WWF as a result is often ironically seen by its
American managers as a kind of "green man's burden" spreading the advances made by
conservationists in the United States abroad because, as Train notes, "there has been almost total
neglect of the problems outside our borders until the WWF came along." 93 Under the presidencies of Russell E.
Train, Bill Reilly and Kathryn Fuller, the WWF grew from 25,000 members with an annual budget of about $2 million in 1978 to a membership of
1.2 million and an annual budget of $79 million in the mid-1990s by pushing this ecocolonialist agenda.94 The WWF has specialized
in propagating its peculiar global vision in which experts from advanced industrial regions, like the
United States, Great Britain, or Switzerland, take gentle custody of biological diversity in less
advanced regions, like Third World nations, as benevolent scientific guardians by retraining the locals
to be reliable trustees of Earth's common endowments in their weak Third World nation-states. In many
ways, the WWF is one of the world's most systematic practitioners of eco-colonialism to reshape Nature
consumption. From its initial efforts to protect Africa's big fame trophy animals in the 1960s to the ivory ban campaigns of the 1990s,
WWF wildlife protection programs have been concocted by small committees composed mostly of
white, Western experts, using insights culled from analyses conducted by white, Western scientists
that were paid for by affluent, white, Western suburbanites. At the end of the day, many Africans and Asians, living
near those WWF parks where the endangered wildlife actually roam wild, are not entirely pleased by such ecological solitude. Indeed, these
Third World peoples see the WWF quite clearly for what it is: "white people are making rules to
protect animals that white people want to see in parks that white people visit." 95 At some sites, the WWF also
promotes sustainably harvesting animals for hides, meat, or other byproducts, but then again these goods are mostly for markets in affluent,
white, Western countries. As Train argues, these ecocolonial practices are an unavoidable imperative. The WWF came to understand that "the
great conservation challenges of today and of the future mostly lie in the tropics where the overwhelming preponderance of the Earth's
biological diversity is found, particularly in the moist tropical forests and primarily in the developing world. Although the problems may often
seem distance from our own shores and our own circumstances, we increasingly understand that the biological riches of this planet are part of
a seamless web of life where a threat to any part threatens the whole."96 In mobilizing such discursive understandings to legitimize its actions,
the WWF has empowered itself over the past thirty-five years to act as a transnational Environmental
Protection Agency for Wildlife Consumption to safeguard "the Earth's biological diversity,"
internationalizing its management of "the biological riches of this planet" where they are threatened
in territorialities with very weak sovereignty to protect their sustainable productivity for territories
with quite strong sovereignty as parts of "a seamless web of life where a threat to any part threatens
the whole."97 On one level, the American WWF frets over biodiversity, but many of its high Madison
Avenue activities actually aim at developing systems of "biocelebrity." From the adoption of the
panda bear as its official logo to its ceaseless fascination with high-profile, heavily symbolic animals , or
those which are most commonly on display in zoos or hunter's trophy rooms, the WWF-US has turned a small handful of
mediagenic mammals, sea creatures, and birds into zoological celebrities as part and parcel of
defending Nature. Whether it is giraffes, elephants, rhinos or kangaroos, ostriches, koalas or dolphins, humpbacks, seals, only a select
cross-section of wild animals with potent mediagenic properties anchor its defense of Nature. Special campaigns are always aimed at saving the
whales, rhinos or elephants, and not more obscure, but equally endangered fish, rodents, or insects. This mobilization of biodiversity, then, all
too often comes off like a stalking horse for its more entrenched vocations of defining, supplying, and defending biocelebrity. On a second level,
however, the WWF is increasingly devoted to defending biodiversity, because it is, as Edward O. Wilson
asserts, "a priceless product of millions of years of evolution, and it should be cherished and protected
for its own sake."98 Even though it should be saved for its own sake, it is no t. Wilson provides the key additional
justification, indicating implicitly how the World Wildlife Fund actually presumes to be the long-term worldwide
fund of Nature as the unassayed stock of biodiversity is saved "for other reasons," including "we need
the genetic diversity of wild plants to make our crops grow better and to provide new foods for the
future. We also need biodiversity to develop new medicines....a newly discovered insect or plant
might hold the cure for cancer or AIDS."99 Wilson argues, "you can think of biodiversity as a safety net that keeps ecosystems
functioning and maintaining life on Earth."100 But, as the organization operating as the green bank with the biggest deposits from a worldwide
fund of Nature, the WWF aspires to hold many of these bioplasmic assets in ecological banks as an enduring trust for all mankind. Fuller, is
quite explicit on this critical side of the association's mission. Because "the biological riches of the planet are part of a seamless web of life in
which a threat to any part weakens the whole," the WWF must ensure the integrity and well-being of the Earth's "web of life," giving it a most
vital mission: Because so much of the current biodiversity crisis is rooted in human need and desire for economic advancement, it is essential
that we work to bring human enterprise into greater harmony with nature. Short-sighted efforts at economic development that come at the
expense of biodiversity will impoverish everyone in the long run. That is why, in addition to establishing protected areas and preserving critical
wildlife populations, WWF uses field and policy work to promote more rational, efficient use of the world's precious natural resources."101
Faced by an extinction wave of greater pervasiveness than any confronted during recorded history,
the WWF-US mobilizes the assets of biocelebrity to leverage its limited guardianship over the planet's
biodiversity, because we may see as much as one quarter of the Earth's biodiversity going extinct in
twenty or thirty years. Even so, the WWF fails to realize how closely its defense of the rational,
efficient use of precious natural resources as third wave environmentalism may contribute to the
extinction of biodiversity. And, the conspicuous consternation of the WWF permits a focused fixation upon biocelebrities to occlude
this fact for those who truly care about Nature--as long as it is equated with rhinos, tigers, and elephants.
conservation link
Claims at saving the environment separate humanity from nature – instrumentalizes
the aff’s view of nature and flips solvency
“Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered: Devall and Sessions on Defending the Earth”, Organization Environment 15:178, 2002, Sage
Publications)
Arne Naess (1973) first expressed the logic for drawing a sharp distinction during1972 between
“shallow environmentalism” and “deep ecology,” which he published in a 1973 article, “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-
Range Ecology Movements: A Summary.” Naess claimed that most ecology groups are inadequate. Whether one works
at the conservation movements of the Progressive and New Deal eras, environmental pressure
groups, the Club of Rome “limits to growth” school, or animal rights activists, they all fail to challenge
the existing institutionalized worldview of advanced industrial society . Such “shallow” ecologies
instead allegedly adhere wrongly to an “anthropocentric” view of nature by taking a view that
separates humanity from nature, deadening the latter. By seeing nature as inanimate matter, humans
gain the power to dominate the Earth.Working with such values, shallow environmentalism allegedly is little
more than a handmaiden to the “enlightened despotism” of humanity over the environment . It only
eases, and never ends, the ravages of human domination over nature by eliminating its worst forms of
waste, or regulating its inefficiencies (Naess, 1989). Naess’s (1973) notion of a “deep ecology” accepts shallow
environmentalism’s intentions, but he then advanced past this limited approach to make a total critique of modern industrialism. In fact, he
stressed a postanthropocentric “biospherical egalitarianism” to create “an awareness of the equal
right (of all things) to live and blossom” (p. 100). Through his appeal to all for a conscious return to nature, Naess laid claim to a
normative role for deep ecologists in working out an ecosophical approach to nature.
The aff’s environmental protection is an unsustainable quick-fix solution to a problem

caused by their managerialism – they think they can control and box off the economy
and society, but their separation turns the case
33:2, 2001)
Many environmental educators accept this ontological momentum in ordinary language use and allow the reductionist
and dualist vision of the environment to infiltrate their visions of human concern for the Earth’ s
ecologies. Up to a point, this view works, but the limited advantage it provides culminate in resource, risk and recreationist managerialism.
When the world is divisible into environment and society, nature and community, ecology and
economics, environmental education’ s charge is to enlighten everyone about how to mitigate the
damage caused by the latter on the former. Hence, various environmental protection agencies, built ìn
here’ by society to safeguard what is òut there’ in nature, can mobilise agents and activities to reduce
resource use, mitigate risks, and contain recreational degradation in the environment. These
approaches `work’ , but their workability is short-term and limited. They overlook how resources are
misused, risks are avoidable and recreations are mutable. Black-boxing `the environment’ and
`society’ , letting them collide together destructively and then seeking managerial means to repair
damages that are believed to be inescapable is the fool’s errand of mainstream environmentalism.
Radical ecologists have pointed this out for years. Nonetheless, their ecocentric deep alternatives would have society forsake environmental
protection by choosing various fantastic forms of social implosion- a return to Neolithic hunting and gathering, zero population growth,
voluntary and/or coercive simplicity, reagrarianisation and deurbanisation. Such alternatives, are unpopular, unlikely and unworkable with the
Earth’s current level of human population (Luke, 1994). The ecocentrists would downsize the black box of `society’ , upgrade the `nature’ black
box, and then freeze them both in place to prevent any more damage. This outcome is both unlikely and undesirable. A more holistic
and dialectical approach to environmental education must abolish the artificial divisions between the
environment and economy/society/community by accepting fully Haeckel’ s claims about ecology: the
totality of the organic and inorganic environments must be acknowledged to accept humanity’ s
organic and inorganic presence in both. What surrounds all organisms now is the environment, economy, society and
community of humanity. Seeing economies, societies and communities as environments should force
environmentalists, ecologists and naturalists to come ìn here’ from òut there’ to explore how
everything works in unified dialectical terms of operation. Green zones òut there’ are being degraded by brown zones
ìn here’ . Accepting the boundaries of those green and brown zones as inalterable is the root of gradual environmental decline .
The aff’s claims of preservation are just rehabilitation managerialism – another in the
long line of projects to get nature back to a state where it can produce for us again
The acknowledgement of ecological degradation is not tremendously difficult. Indeed, the will to
manage environments arises from this wide-spread recognition back in the 19th century. One obvious
outcome of building and then living around the satanic mills of modern industrial capitalism was
pollution of the air, water, and land. As it continued and spread, the health of humans, plants, and
wildlife obviously suffered, while soils and waters were poisoned. Yet the imperatives of economic
growth typically drove these processes of degradation until markets fell, technologies changed, or the
ecosystem collapsed. At that juncture, business and government leaders, working at the local, regional, and national
level, were faced with hard choices about either relocating people and settlements in industry to start
these cycles of degradation anew, or maybe rehabilitating those existing economic and environmental
assets to revitalize their resource extractive or commodity producing potential. Rehabilitation
management then is about keeping production going in one way or another. Agricultural lands that
once produced wheat might be turned to dairy production or low-end fibre outputs. Polluted water
courses, poisoned soils, and poverty-stricken workers can all be remobilized in environmental
rehabilitation schemes to revive aquatic ecologies, renew soil productivity, and replenish bank
accounts. The engagements of rehabilitation management are to find a commodifiable or at least a
valuable possibility in the brown fields of agricultural excess and industrial exhaustion. Even after decades of
abuse, there are useful possibilities that always lie dormant in slag heaps, derelict factories, overused soil, polluted waterways, and rust belt
towns. Management must search for and then implement strategies for their rehabilitation .
Such operations can shift
agricultural uses, refocus industrial practices, turn lands into eco-preserves, and retrain workers. But
the goals here are not return ecosystems to some pristine natural state . On the contrary, its agendas
are those of sustaining the yields of production. Of course, what will be yielded and at what levels it is sustained and for
which environmental ends all remains to be determined. On the one hand, the motives of rehabilitation management are quite rational,
because these moves delay or even cancel the need to sacrifice other lands, air, and soil preserves at other sites. Thus nature is perhaps
protected elsewhere or at large by renewing industrial brown fields in agriculturalized domains for some ongoing project of industrial growth.
On the other hand, rehabilitation
managerialism may only shift the loci and the foci of damage ,
rehabilitating eco-systemic degradation caused in one commodity chain, while simply redirecting the
inhabitants of these sites to suffer new, albeit perhaps more regulated and rational levels, of
environmental contamination in other commodity chains. If one doesn't want to rehabilitate what has been ruined, one
can then perhaps get into restoring it.
coop/international norms link
International cooperation over the environment extends governmentality even
beyond the traditional boundaries of the state – ropes the world entire into its regime
of environmental “truth”
1995, JSTOR)
Many contemporary environmental movements, particularly those inspired by the Worldwatch Institute's analyses, push
gov-ernmentality to a global rather than a national level of control . The biosphere, atmosphere, and
ecosphere are all reintegrated into the truth regime of political economy to serve more ecological
ends, but they are also made to run along new economic tracks above and beyond the territorial
spaces created by nation-states. By tout-ing the necessity of recalibrating society's logics of governmentality This in new spatial
registers at the local and global level, the geo-power politics of environmentality aim to rewrite the geographies
of na-tional stratified space with new mappings of bioregional economies knitted into global
ecologies-complete with environmentalized zones of "dying forests," "regional desertification ,"
"endangered bays," or "depleted farmland." If Foucault's representation of governmentality accounts for the practices of
power mobilized by centered national sovereigns in the era of capitalist modernization and national state-building after 1648, the
Worldwatch Institute's approach to environmen-tality perhaps foreshadows the practices of power
being adduced by multicentric alliances of transnational capital or loose coalitions of highly
fragmented local sovereignties, following the collapse of the old Cold War competitions in the early 1990s. New spatial do-
mains are being created in the world today, on the one hand, by pollution, nuclear contamination,
and widespread rapid deforesta-tion, and, on the other, by telecommunications, jet transportation,
and cheap accessible computerization. Nation-states are not an-swering effectively the challenges posed within their borders by
these new spaces. But a variety of new organizations in the contem-porary environmental movement (Luke,
"Ecological Politics"), like the Worldwatch Institute, Earth First!, The World Wildlife Federa-tion, or Greenpeace, at least are addressing, if not
answering, how these spaces are developing, what impact they have in today's po-litical economy, and who should act to respond to the
challenge. In the bargain, they also are
interposing their own environmen-talizing conceptual map s, technical
disciplines, and organizational orders on these spaces as they urge local citizen's groups or global
supranational agencies to move beyond the constraints imposed by national sovereignty to construct
new sustainable spaces for human habitation.
development link
Grand narratives of development use a science that is no longer science – it’s become
performative, aimed at increasing the power of the dominant at all costs
“International or Interenvironmental Relations: Reassessing Nations and Niches in Global Ecosystems”, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political,
28:3, June-July 2003, Sage)
Along with Jean-Francois Lyotard we also can question modernity's grand narratives, which until recently have
framed (Western capitalist) humanity's and society's economic, political, scientific, social, and technological
practices in the fables of reason and freedom. Those fables, however, have not delivered much progress
to either individuals or societies in the unfolding of history; instead, with the transition through postindustrialism during
the 1960s and 1970s, Lyotard finds a condition in which "development continues to take place without leading to the
realization of any of these dreams of emancipation."35 With this deepening realization about technical progress,
Lyotard admits how science and technology have fallen under the sway of another language game, in
which the goal is no longer truth, but performativity - that is, the best possible input/output equation.
Such turns force us to probe past the political dimensions of human inequality into the technical,
economic, and cultural realms beneath politics by looking at interenvironmental relations between
different collectives of people and things. There one finds new inequalities - human and nonhuman - becoming
frozen and expressive in the material conditions of many different environmental niches.
Environmental “development” is a guise for technological denaturing and

dehumanization
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 is complete and Nature is gone for good.“l3 McKibben
agrees, 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 God-created (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 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.
econ link
Their econ impact proves the link – resource managerialists view nature as something
to be controlled and dominated to service the economy whenever it’s needed –
everything natural becomes standing reserve
33:2, 2001)
The fundamental premise of resource managerialism in environmental education has not changed significantly
over the past nine decades. At best, it only has become more formalised in its bureaucratic applications and legal interpretations .
Keying off of the managerial logic of the Second Industrial Revolution, which empowered technical
experts, or engineers and scientists, on the shop floor and professional managers, or corporate
executives and financial officers, in the main office, resource managerialism imposes corporate frameworks
upon nature in order to supply the economy and provision society through centralised expert
guidance (Noble, 1977). These frameworks assume that the national economy, like the interacting capitalist firm and
household, must avoid both overproduction (excessive resource use coupled with inadequate demand) and
underproduction (inefficient resource use coming with excessive demand) on the supply-side as well as over-
consumption (excessive resource exploitation coming with excessive demand) and under-consumption (inefficient resource
exploitation coupled with inadequate demand) on the demand side. To imagine the managerial problem in this
manner, nature is reduced- through the encirclement of space and matter by national as well as global
economies- to an elaborate system that can be dismantled, redesigned and assembled anew on
demand to produce `resources’ efficiently and when and where needed in the modern marketplace. As
a cybernetic system of biophysical systems, nature’ s energies, materials and sites are redefined by the eco-
knowledge of resource managerialism as manageable resources . With them, environmental education
teaches that human beings can realise great material `goods’ for sizeable numbers of some people,
even though greater material and immaterial `bads’ also might be inflicted upon even larger numbers
of other people, who do not reside in or benefit from the advanced national economies that
essentially monopolise the use of world resources at a comparative handful of highly developed
regional and municipal sites.
The market’s overarching machine logic processes and packages the environment for
human consumption – simultaneously distances it and makes consumption of it
essential – there can be no productive theory of interenvironmental relations without
first a critical analysis of the economy
Environments, then, are omnipolitanized world constructs. What, for example, surrounds and impinges
upon California - say, an electrical power grid that on a typical January day delivers more than 32,000
megawatts of electricity - is not what surrounds Chad - a country that, per day, uses less electricity
than a few large office buildings in Los Angeles . Moreover, California's many megawatts pollute the
atmosphere and warm the globe for Chadi- ans struggling to produce and use their few kilowatts . Such
spatialized relations of extraction and utilization between the rich and the poor , across national, regional, and
local boundaries, are not well explained solely in national-humanist terms. Alternative environmental-
nonhumanist terms of analysis must be found to reinterpret these relations. As the focus of power and
the locus of subjectivity in world markets, the environment basically is being built and made already
always accessible in the apparently almost accidental anarchy of markets. William Greider, for example,
asks us to imagine a wondrous new machine, strong and supple, a machine that reaps as it destroys. It is huge
and mobile, something like the machines of modern agriculture but vastly more complicated and powerful. Think of this awesome
machine running over open terrain and ignoring familiar boundaries. It plows across fields and
fencerows with a fierce momentum that is exhilarating to behold and also frightening . As it goes, the
machine throws off enormous mows of wealth and bounty while it leaves behind great furrows of
wreckage. Greider's summations of many anxieties about global capitalism as "a wondrous new
machine" focuses upon these environizing mechanisms getting closer to spinning entirely out of
control. Still, he suggests that "before the machine can be understood, one must first be able to see it ."52
Haraway claims that "a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of the joint kinship with
animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints."53 Nevertheless, the world's most pervasive
and powerful structure for cyborganization is the market that Greider describes. What
else, so continuously, thoroughly, and
finally, crafts hybrids of machine and organism - human/animal, human/plant, human/mineral,
human/machine - as lived social realities? What other world-changing fiction can melt all that is solid into thin air and then
conjure, once more, a solid abundance out of thin air? The market's environizing power to generate new
environments, which are neither seen nor understood in all of their entirety, must be considered
more closely. Environments contain various ecological niches that are not nature, as such, but rather
denatured swaths of Creation recon- structed artificially and deliberately by machinic ensembles . After
nature disappears into the practices of performativity wrought by vast new fishing machines, farming
machines, mining machines, timbering machines, and ranching machines, its materials and energies flow through
transport machines and communication machines to manufacturing machines, managing machines, and
military machines, as well as through living machines, leisure machines, and labor machines. Their cycles of growth and
reproduction extrude environizing nonhuman domains in the substance and space of global capitalist
exchange, where many hybridized sorts of human and nonhuman beings feed off ecological carrying
capacities in all the niches tied to larger machinic ensembles . These preserves of "deep technology," rather than
"the political," propound, in turn, the rarely disclosed technoscience practices of the contemporary empire
anchoring modern nation-states and markets to their national and transnational environmental
niches.55
The aff casts the environment in terms of the economic growth it can provide them –
reinforces environmental dominance and quantitative risk calculations that justify
environmental destruction in the name of economics
By becoming an agency of environmental protection on a global level, the United States sees itself reasserting its world leadership after the
Cold War. As
the world's leader, in turn, America stipulates that it cannot advance economic prosperity and
ecological preservation without erasing the dividing lines between domestic and foreign policy . In the
blur of the coming Information Age and its global villages, the United States cannot separate America's common good from the common goods
of the larger world. To be truly secure in the 21st century, each American's personal, family, and national stake in their collective future must be
served through the nation's environmental policies. Secretary of State Christopher confirmed President Clinton's engagement with the
environment through domestic statecraft and diplomatic action: "protecting our fragile environment also has profound long-range importance
for our country, and in 1996 we will strive to fully integrate our environmental goals into our diplomacy--something that has never been done
before."12 These efforts
to connect economic growth with ecological responsibility , however, are stated
most systematically in Vice President Al Gore's environmental musings. To ground his green geo-
politics, Gore argues that "the task of restoring the natural balance of the Earth's ecological system"
could reaffirm America's longstanding "interest in social justice, democratic government, and free
market economics."13 The geo-powers unlocked by this official ecology might even be seen as bringing "a renewed dedication to what
Jefferson believed were not merely American but universal inalienable rights: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."14 At another level,
however, Gore argues that America's global strategies after the Cold War must reestablish "a natural and healthy relationship between human
beings and the earth," replacing the brutal exploitation of Nature with an "environmentalism of the spirit."15 Gore's
program for
earth stewardship takes a unique geoeconomic turn when he calls for a Global Marshall Plan to
embed sustainable development at the heart of his green geo-politics. In that historic post-WWII program, as
Gore notes, several nations joined together "to reorganize an entire region of the world and change
its way of life."16 Like the Marshall Plan, his new Global Marshall Plan would "focus on strategic goals and
emphasize actions and programs that are likely to remove the bottlenecks presently inhibiting the
healthy functioning of the global economy...to serve human needs and promote sustained economic
progress."17 In other words, the green geo-politics of this Global Marshall Plan provides a justification for
advancing Strategic Environmental Initiatives. That is, the U.S. should be "embarking on an all-out effort to use every policy
and program, every law and institution, every treaty and alliance, every tactic and strategy, every plan and course of action--to use, in short,
every means to halt the destruction of the environment and to preserve and nurture our ecological system."18 At the end of the Cold War, we
cannot simply show interventionist state bureaucracies to the door nor can we allow them to remobilize society around dangerous geo-
economic programs of mindless material development. On the contrary, wemust bring the state back in to manage
production and consumption by being mindful of "the e-factor," or "ecology" as efficiency and
economy.19 The ecological sustainability of consumption is remolded here into an economic growth
ideology. Sustaining Nature by preserving consumption from it ecosystems in this green geopolitics
becomes now one essential goal among many in his Strategic Environmental Initiative , which will focus on
"the development of environmentally appropriate technologies."20 Unsustainable development is largely caused, Gore
suggests, by older, inappropriate, anti-environmental technologies. A global campaign is needed to
find substitutes for them, and the United States must lead this mobilization to heal its economy and,
of course, the environment. Gore says the right things about changing our economic assumptions about mindless consumerism, but
his bottom line for sustainable development is found in sustaining American business, industry and science through more mindful forms of
consumption. As the world's leading capitalist economy, Gore concludes "the United States has a special obligation to discover effective ways of
using the power of market forces to help save the global environment."2 In the final analysis, ecologically
sustainable
development, as Makower observes, boils down to another expression economic rationality . It is "a search
for the lowest-cost method of reducing the greatest amount of pollution" in the continued turnover of consumer-centered production
processes.22 Almost magically, sustainable development can become primarily an economic, and not
merely an environmental, calculation. The initiatives taken by some businesses to prevent pollution, reduce waste, and maximize
energy efficiencies are to be supported. Ecology can win, but only if it can reaffirm on a higher, more perfect
register most of fast capitalism's existing premises of technology utilization, managerial centralization,
and profit generation now driving advanced corporate capitalism. These maneuvers are not taken
simply to preserve Nature, mollify green consumers, or respect Mother Earth; they are done to
enhance corporate profits, national productivity, and state power , because "the e-factor" is not
simply ecology--it also is efficiency, excellence , education, empowerment, enforcement, and
economics. As long as realizing ecological changes in business means implementing an alternative array of instrumentally rational policies,
such as finding lower-cost methods of energy use, supply management, labor utilization, corporate communication, product generation or
pollution abatement, sustainable development also will maintain the economy. Gore's new stewardship through sustainable development may
not be strictly ecological, but his green geopolitics cultivates the image, at least, of being environmentally responsible.23 This compromise
allows one to work "deliberately and carefully, with an aim toward long-term cultural change, always with an eye toward the bottom line, lest
you get frustrated and discouraged in the process" so that these "environmentally responsible businesses can be both possible and
profitable."2
The aff’s focus on the economy applies a “green” lens to a practice that only extends
consummation of the environment – allows increased planning and control of natural
systems
The Worldwatch Institute provides a very curious instantiation of how a

regime of consummation might be seen at work in
the processes of global industrial production and consumption. Seeing the path of untrammeled consumptive
development as the cause of today's environmental crises, a recent Worldwatch Institute book by Brown, Flavin and Postel
attributes the prevailing faith in more consumptive growth to "a narrow economic view of the
world."72 Any constraints on further growth are cast by conventional economics "in terms of inadequate demand growth rather than limits
imposed by the earth's resources."73 Ecologists, however, should push beyond technosphere to study the
complex changing relationships of organisms with their environments, and, for them, "growth is
confined by the parameters of the biosphere."74 For Brown, Flavin, and Postel, economists ironically
regard ecologists' concerns as "a minor subdiscipline of economics--to be 'internalized' in economic
models and dealt with at the margins of economic planning," while "to an ecologist, the economy is a
narrow subset of the global ecosystem."75 To end this schism, the discourse of dangers propagated by the
Worldwatch Institute pushes to merge ecology with economics to infuse environmental studies with
economic instrumental rationality and defuse economics with ecological systems reasoning. Once this is
done, economic growth no longer can be divorced from "the natural systems and resources from which they ultimately derive," and any
economic process that "undermines the global ecosystem cannot continue indefinitely,"76 which
permits the Worldwatch
Institute to give consummation a green tint. With this rhetorical maneuver, the Worldwatch Institute
articulates its visions of consummational economics as the instrumental rationality of resource
managerialism, working on a global scale in transnationalized registers of application in order to
perfect the wastefulness of consumptive societies . Nature is terra(re)formed by Worldwatch as a
cybernetic system of biophysical systems, whose terraformations reappear among today's nation-states in "four biological
systems--forests, grasslands, fisheries, and croplands--which supply all of our food and much of the raw materials for industry, with the notable
exceptions of fossil fuels and minerals."77 The
performance of these systems should be monitored in analytical
spreadsheets written in bioeconomic terms, and then judged in consummational equations balancing
constantly increasing human population, constantly running base ecosystem outputs, and highly
constrained possibilities for increasing ecosystem output given inflexible limits on throughput and
input. When looking at these four systems, one must recognize that Nature merely is a system of energy-conversion systems.
ecocatastrophe link (oil spills, etc.)
Focus on environmental catastrophe produces a relation to the environment that
views it as controllable and manageable if only we can predict it – leads to
containment of nature within the quantitative and turns the case – they’ll always
anticipate the wrong one
33:2, 2001)
As Beck suggests, risk managerialism is now an integral part of the self-critical production and reproduction
of globally thinking, but locally acting, capitalism.7 Environmental educators train students to
conceptually contain, actuarially assess and cautiously calculate various dimensions of ecological risk
in their eco-toxicology, environmental assessment, or eco-remediation courses. Risk management presumes its calculations
àre based on a (spatially, temporally and socially circumscribed) accident definition’ or that its
analyses truly do èstimate and legitimate the potential for catastrophe of modern large-scale
technologies and industries’ .8 Superfund site after supertanker spill after superstack bubble , however,
suggest that this degree of managerial knowledge is precisely what the risk management sciences at
schools of environmental studies fail to produce, ànd so they are falsifications, and can be criticised and
reformed in accordance with their own claims to rationality’ (Beck, 1996). Nonetheless, this trend toward
developing fully self-conscious risk managerialism grounded in economistic trade-offs is taking over
many curricula for higher environmental education, because such risk assessment methods can produce models
of most social and political factors that bureaucratic experience believes to be true to effective
resource management.
The aff’s risk framing of environmental impacts comes from a deeper resource
managerialism that tries to predict and contain the impacts of unrestrained
technological exploitation while leaving the source intact – ensures continuation of
their impacts
Luke 96 (Timothy, , University Distinguished Professor of Political Science in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences as well as
“Generating Green Governmentality: A Cultural Critique of Environmental Studies as a Power/Knowledge Formation”, Unpublished,
http://www.cddc.vt.edu/tim/tims/Tim514a.PDF, 1996)
As Beck suggests, this risk

managerialism is now an integral part of the self-critical production and
reproduction of globally thinking, but locally acting, capitalism.28 Schools of environmental studies
train students to conceptually contain, actuarially assess, and cautiously calculate the many
dimensions of ecological risk in their ecotoxiology, environmental assessment, or ecoremediation courses. Yet, the fictive
assumptions of such modelling techniques only constitute a scientized first take for the sweep of
reflexivity. They do not, and indeed cannot, capture the depth, scope, duration, or intensity of the
damage they pretend to measure.29 Colorado State's Department of Fishery and Wildlife Biology, for example, casts itself as an
international leader in the areas of risk assessment and analysis. Combining practical laboratory experiences and field studies, it suggests that
areas of growing emphasis are risk analysis-centered concerns, like integrated resource management, conservation biology, and environmental
risk analysis.30 This
quantitative surveillance and evaluation focus in risk analysis also can be found in the
other graduate programs' curricula. Yale's graduate course, Ecological Resource Risk Assessment and Management, for example,
hints that related course work in statistics, ecotoxicology, and environmental chemistry will help its enrollees to understand the impact of
pollution, disease, and ecological management practices on the health of ecosystems. However, "assessment of risk of an adverse impact on an
ecological resource caused by one or more chemical, biological, or physical stressors, and monitoring the status and trends of an ecological
resource are priority needs of contemporary environmental management."31 Likewise, Duke's
highly economistic reading of
environmental studies stresses the benefits and costs of policies relating to sustaining resource
productivity and maintaining environmental quality in its risk analyses . Its graduate course, Survey of
Environmental Health and Safety, directs the attention of students toward "environmental risks from the perspective of global ecology, biology,
chemistry, and radiation" such that "the nature and scope of environmental hazards" might be addressed by its understanding of "risk
assessment and management strategies,"32 the economics and ecologies of risk, then, create tremendous new opportunities for cadres of
educated professionals to work productively as better resource managers.
Risk management at colleges of natural
resources presumes its 11 calculations "are based on a (spatially, temporally, and socially
circumscribed) accident definition" or that its analyses truly do "estimate and legitimate the potential
for catastrophe of modern large-scale technologies and industries." 33 Superfund site after supertanker
spill after superstack bubble, however, indicate that this degree of managerial knowledge is precisely
what risk management sciences at schools of environmental studies fail to produce , "and so they are
falsifications, and can be criticized and reformed in accordance with their own claims to rationality."34 This trend toward developing a fully self-
conscious risk managerialism grounded in economistic trade-offs also surfaces fully in the curriculum of the Yale School of Forestry and
Environmental Studies, whose recent strategic restructuring commits it fully to risk assessment methods because these techniques are
"redefining forestry to encompass all of the social and political factors which we know from experience to be fundamental to good forest
management."35 Thesevisions of environmental science recapitulate the logic of technical networks as
they already are given in the states and markets of the existing world-system. Rather than the
environment surrounding humanity, the friction-free global marketplace of transnational capital is
what envelopes Nature. Out of its metabolisms are produced ecotoxins, biohazards,
hydrocontaminants, aeroparticulates, and enviropoisons whose impacts generate inexorable risks .
These policy problematics unfold now on the global scale, because fast capitalism has colonized so
many more sites on the planet as part and parcel of its own unique regime for sustainable
development. As Yale's Dean Cohon asserts: The challenge we all face now, as you know, is not limited to one resource in one nation, but
extends to the protection of the environment worldwide. The fabric of natural and human communities is currently torn or tattered in many
places. There is hardly a place on earth where human activity does not influence the environment's current condition or its prospects for the
future.36In turn, well-trained environmental professionals must measure, monitor or manage these
risks, leaving the rational operations of global fast capitalism wholly intact as "risks won" for their
owners and beneficiaries, while risk analyses performed by each environmental school's practitioners
and programs deal with the victims of "risks lost."
The aff’s preoccupation with environmental catastrophe is a form of risk

managerialism that seeks (and fails) to prevent the worst catastrophes while allowing
resourcification and exploitation of nature to continue
As Ulrich Beck suggests, this is now an integral part of the self-critical projection and reproduction of globally thinking but locally acting
capitalism. Environmental science trains experts to conceptually contain, actuarially assess, and then
cautiously calculate the many dimensions of ecological risk in the disciplines of eco-toxicology,
environmental assessment, or eco-remediation . The assumptions of such modeling techniques only
constitute a scientized first take for the sweep of such corporate reflexivity, but nonetheless it is done .
Combining practical laboratory experiences and field studies, risk managerialism suggests that all areas of ecological
oversight must become risk analysis centred concerns: like integrated resource management, conservation biology, and
environmental risk analysis. A more
quantitative approach to surveillance and evaluation focuses risk analysis
on probabilistic models of our most preferred futures, outcomes, or practices. Risk management
presumes its calculations are based upon a spatially, temporally, and socially circumscribed accident
definition, or that its analyses truly do estimate and legitimate the potential for catastrophe of
modern large-scale technologies and industries. Super Fund site after super tanker spill after super stacked bubble,
however, indicate that this degree of scientific knowledge is precisely what risk management studies fail to advance so they are often
falsifications. They can be criticized and reformed in accordance, however to their own claims or rationality, which makes risk managerialism so
exciting for so many. This
trend of developing a fully self-conscious risk managerialism grounded in
economistic tradeoffs, also surfaces in new kinds of ecological management. Such visions of
environmental science recapitulate the logic of technical networks as they work for the world's states
and markets. Rather than an environment surrounding humanity, it is now the friction-free global
marketplace of trans-national capital that envelops nature. From its metabolism, humanity produces eco-toxins,
biohazards, hydro-contaminants, aero-particulates, and enviro-poisons, whose impacts generate inexorably lots of risks. The policy problematic
that enfolds here is on a global scale, because trans-national markets have colonized so many more sites on the planet as part and parcel of
global business's vision of sustainable development. Well
trained environmental professionals must go out there to
measure, monitor, or manage these risks, and leave the rational operations of fast capitalism wholly
intact as risks accepted for their owners and beneficiaries, while risk analysis performed by
environmental practitioners cope with all of the victims of risk denied.
environmentalism link
The attempt to fix ecological crises with better management policy assumes we had
the power to manage the Earth in the first place – they fail to recognize that we can
never be in complete control.
Management Technology: A Call to Heideggerian Reflection,” p. 15)
It is probably quite true that in many different cultures, times, and places human beings have asked this question: How shall I best live my life?
But 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 neighbours do the same? Alongside
technologies of the earth have grown up technologies of the soul , theories of human behavioural
control of which current ethical theories are a significant subset. Ethics - in the modern world at least -
very often functions as just another field of scientific study yielding just another set of engineering
goals. Therefore, when we react to problems like ecological crisis 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 and songbirds, the destruction of the ozone layer, the rainforests, the glaciers, 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 behaviour better in the first
place we could have avoided this mess. In other words, when we respond to Heidegger's 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 warns.
Environmentalism creates a human/nature binary that is the precondition for

enframing
Davis 09 (Steven Davis, Heidegger and the Earth: Essays in Environmental Philosophy 2nd, expanded edition, “The Path of Thinking,
Poeticizing Building: The Strange Uncanniness of Human Being on Earth,’”)
The question is whether any other response is possible. Must we continue to respond as the Greeks did? Is it possible to remain the breach for
being without being violent? Without shattering on being as the overpowering? Technology is surely not the answer, for it is the most extreme
such that it no longer is a mere extension of techne but something radically different in the way it opens up the being of beings.
Technology would have the earth as a stockpile of resources at its disposal, would rule over
everything, and thereby would no longer shatter against the overpowering, which it itself would
become. And the attitude behind technology is the same as that behind many ecologists and
environmentalists, for they would manage the environment - that is, hold sway over it just as the
technocrat would. They would simply perpetuate the classical picture of the human and natural
worlds, wherein we would remain somehow divorced from the natural world as the earthly and
thereby be able to manage it. Here we find the true presumption and arrogance that we are not actually
of this earth, for only that assumption, hidden or otherwise, could legitimate the idea that we are in a
position to be managers of the earth - or, to put it more bluntly, its rulers.
Both reform and radical environmentalism subscribe to Cartesian divisions of

human/nature – this is the root cause of ecological destruction, turns the case
DeLuca 05 (Kevin Michael, Environmental Humanities Research Professor at the University of Utah, “THINKING WITH
HEIDEGGER RETHINKING ENVIRONMENTAL THEORY AND PRACTICE”, Ethics & The Environment 10:1, Spring 2005, MUSE)
The first stasis point revolves around humanity’s relation to nature. To put it plainly, in
environmental circles it is still a
Cartesian world, wherein the founding act is human thinking (cogito ergo sum) and the earth is object to
humanity’s subject. This position is clear in mainstream environmentalism, where humans act to save
the object earth and, fundamentally, this action is motivated by the subject’s self-interest. So, we must
save the rain forests because they contain potential medical resources and because they alleviate
global warming. Now certainly this base anthropocentrism has come under attack from various radical
environmentalisms that posit biocentrism or ecocentrism. I would argue, however, that these anti-anthropocentric
positions have not escaped the gravity of Cartesianism. This is evident at both theoretical and practical levels.
Theoretically, in the effort to avoid the stain of anthropocentrism all beings are posited as having
equal intrinsic worth/value and difference is leveled. The banana slug is equal to homo sapiens. There
are problems with this. Most obviously, the concept of intrinsic worth/value is philosophically
incoherent—worth/value by definition is always relational. More significantly for this discussion, to posit
intrinsic worth/value is to deny the ecological insight that all beings are constituted in relation to
other beings and their environment . Further, to deny difference is to blunt analysis of our current situation and to deny the
differential levels of effects different species have. Homo sapiens is not another type of slug and must be analyzed with that awareness.
In practice, radical groups, most notably Earth First!, often demonize humans as a cancer on the planet. As
the metaphor suggests, humans are seen as somehow different from all other forms of life , an alien other,
not a part but apart. Even more significantly, the metaphor of cancer suggests humans to be active subjects
preying on the object earth. Indeed, the problem with humanity, as with the cancer cell, is that it is too active. Although
radical groups offer a different valuation, note that this position does not trouble the terms of
Cartesianism. The dichotomies subjectobject, human-animal, culture-nature, civilization-wilderness,
remain intact. The active subject humanity threatens the object earth. The statsis point in actual environmental debates revolves
around reform and radical environmental groups dismissing each other’s seemingly oppositional positions as, respectively,
anthropocentic and compromised versus misanthropic and unrealistic, while remaining oblivious to the underlying Cartesian
presuppositions they both share. In other words, reform environmentalists privilege humanity while radical environmentalists demonize
humanity. In
this morality play on the fate of the planet, humanity, whether hero or villain, is the actor.
Heidegger’s thinking on the subject-object dichotomy, Descartes, and the phenomenology of the
structure of reality offer a useful lever with which to displace these dichotomies and challenge the
traditional ontology that undergirds and girdles environmental thinking. Citing the Cartesian ontology of the
world as dominant, Heidegger in Being and Time works to “demonstrate explicitly not only that Descartes’ conception of the world is
ontologically defective, but that his Interpretation and the foundations on which it is based have led him to pass over both the
phenomenon of the world and the Being of those entities withinthe- world which are proximally ready-to-hand” (1962, 128). Briefly,
Heidegger critiques Descartes for positing a “bare subject without a world” (1962, 192) and for relying on mathematics, which produces
the sort of Reality it can grasp, thus “the kind of Being which belongs to sensuous perception is obliterated, and so is any possibility that
the entities encountered in such perception should be grasped in their Being” (1962, 130 ).
Descartes’ ontology presumes the
dynamic of an isolated subject grasping mathematically world as object . Arguably, it is this
perspective that is at the root of the environmental crisis, for the world is reduced to an object laid
out before me and I am reduced to a detached subject that has only a use-relation to a dead world.
ethics link
Don’t buy their ethics claims – ethical systems are based on technological theories of
human and environmental control
It is probably quite true that in many different cultures, times, and places human beings have asked this question: How shall I best live my life?
But 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 neighbours do the same? Alongside
technologies of the earth have grown up technologies of the soul, theories of human behavioural
control of which current ethical theories are a significant subset. Ethics - in the modern world at least -
very often functions as just another field of scientific study yielding just another set of engineering
goals. Therefore, when we react to problems like ecological crisis 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 and songbirds, the destruction of the ozone layer, the rainforests, the glaciers, 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 behaviour better in the first
place we could have avoided this mess. In other words, when we respond to Heidegger's 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 warns.
fear of death link
The aff’s fear of death guarantees environmental enframing and control – they justify
anything in the name of avoiding death – turns the case, causes anxiety and
environmental destruction
Stenstad 09(Gail Stenstad, Heidegger and the Earth: Essays in Environmental Philosophy 2nd, expanded edition, “Singing the Earth,” p.
66)
However, the movement of saying/showing does not automatically compel our responsive saying-after,
or our caring for things. As Maly puts it, there are two ways to live with this call: the way of disconnectedness and contraction, or the
way of connectedness and expansion. It is possible to feel so disconnected from the earth that one has a sense of
not be-longing. It is then that the fear of the draw and call of the earth is at work, especially when what is within awareness is everything
that is carried within the imagery of the earth as dark. We are mortals, who die and know we die, ever changing,
living and dying things of this earth. To attend to what remains silent in all saying is to acknowledge
the impossibility of pure disclosure; it is to acknowledge our own limits as earthy beings. To heed the
ringing of stillness points to our mortality, which, when coupled with no sense of be-longing, can
evoke deep fear. Such fear sparks a shrinking back, a movement away from rather than towards the
earth and earthy things, contrary to our root longing. This contraction pulls one back from heeding the
revealing and concealing of things, cutting off the possibility of saying-after saying. The consequences
of such a contrary movement are a speaking that is not saying (because it is not a saying-after saying)
and a flight from thinking. It is also a refusal of dwelling, of be-longing with things in such a way that
one attentively heeds and cares for them, sheltering them in their revealing and concealing. Such a
refusal of dwelling is conducive to a violent, destructive way to be on the earth , with results we are all
too well aware of: This type of thinking is about to abandon the earth as earth ... [It] is already the
explosion of a power that could blast everything to nothingness. All the rest that follows from such a
thinking, the technical processes in the function of the doomsday machinery [or the manifold ways in
which we are bit by bit destroying this earth], would merely be the final sinister dispatch of madness
into senselessness. (US 189-90; WL 84) Such are the ways of disconnectedness and contraction, unfolding from a refusal of belonging
that tends, finally, towards contraction into nothing. Fleeing our mortality, we flee from what we really are : mortal
earth-dwellers, caretakers of earth and what rises from it. This is a blind flight from the dark into
ultimate darkness, from death towards death, denying death only to bring death to everything earthy
and alive.
food security link
Food security is premised upon the notion that we can control and regulate the supply
of our food – leads to domination and manipulation of Nature
Mcwhorter and Stenstad 09(Ladelle McWhorter and Gail Stenstad, Heidegger and the Earth: Essays in Environmental
Philosophy 2nd, expanded edition, “Eating Eregnis,”)
The Ontological Risk and Integrating Spaces Heidegger has Gail: This raises another big issue - the nature and
control of what is called 'our' food supply - and from where or what or whom is it really threatened? So
we are, as you say, told that weeds are a threat. Exterminating weeds is most often done how? Using Roundup,
Monsanto's spin-off from Agent Orange. When the Vietnam War ended, Monsanto was about to lose
the major customer for their most profitable product. So they turned it into something that could be
promoted for, at first, agricultural use, and then for home lawn and garden use. That led eventually to
the first genetically engineered crops, such as Roundup-ready soybeans, as well as corn and potatoes
and canola. There are now even genetically engineered animal 'crops,' such as farmed Atlantic
salmon. Just a few of the documented consequences of genetically engineered food crops are
antibiotic resistance, due to the technology used to track and verify the insertion of genes from one
species into another; increased use of toxic pesticides; genetic drift - that is, biological pollution, the
spread of the engineered genetics into adjacent fields or populations; and superweeds and
superpests. Monsanto, Novartis, ConAgra, DuPont, and a few other huge multinational corporations are trying not only to force the use of
genetic engineering in agriculture, but also to control the spread of information by resisting the labelling of foods that contain genetically
engineered material. Nowthat the patenting of life forms is legal, some of these corporations are trying to
patent the ancient foods of traditional peoples, such as basmati rice (India) and quinoa (South
America). Since nearly 1.4 billion people in the less-developed world depend on their own saved
seeds, it is a good thing that the governments of India, Peru, and other countries have so far resisted
the most blatant attempts of multinational corporations to take control of traditional foods. And
that is not all that is taking place. There have been several megamergers among seed-producing
companies, biotech companies, chemical companies, and food producers and distributors , and that
has led to a rather startling concentration of control over 'our food supply .' Not to belabour the point, but here
are just a few readily available statistics (as of 2002): 'Forty percent of U.S. vegetable seeds come from a single source. The top five vegetable
seed companies control 75 percent of the global vegetable seed market. DuPont and Monsanto together control 73 percent of the U.S. seed
corn market. Just four companies (Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta, Dow) control at least 47 percent of the commercial soybean seed market.'3
So, the remaining peoples who do possess subsistence skills are facing tremendous pressures, partly from governments but largely from
multinational corporations, to adapt to market economies - that is, money economies. For
these multinational corporations,
that oft-used word 'globalization' means controlling the world's food and water supply , all the way
from breeding - or patenting - food plants and animals, whether by traditional means or through
genetically engineering them, and on to controlling their cultivation , including selling the means to
control 'pests' and 'weeds' - which, as you point out, are often traditional edibles - right down to
selling the results. Now that Wal-Mart, the world's largest employer, has also entered the food chain
to take control of the distribution and sale of food using their own vertical-control model, it is not in
the least an exaggeration to say that it is a very real possibility that a few large corporations could
indeed take global control of food. The water supply is also coming under some of the same pressures, but we have no space to
open up that topic here. Wendell Berry talks about corporate agribusiness of a relatively lower-tech kind as bringing about the 'unsettling of
America.' We are here looking at such unsettling - non-dwelling - as a truly global phenomenon. Our localized ignorance and helplessness is only
the merest hint of immense sociopolitical structures and their movements. Del: I want to go back to the joke about the child who thinks her
milk comes from Food Lion. You said it isn't a funny joke any more because it isn't just inexperienced children who think that way: in most
people's minds, food just is something you buy. When you made that comment I immediately thought, 'or something you steal.' And what that
means -both the buying and the stealing - is that food is something somebody always already owns, holds legitimate title to, and can regulate -
and perhaps deny - access to. The
issue with Monsanto and ConAgra and others is not that they are changing
the status of our food - turning it into property that can be owned and circulated for profit in a market
economy - but that they are monopolizing it. As frightening as that prospect is - and it truly is - what
strikes me as more upsetting is that we think of food fundamentally as property in the first place. And
we think of living things that are not owned as not food.
Absent the alt food becomes a means to an end of control – alt connects humanity
with production and solves the impact
Gail: Without embodied living, thinking and dwelling don't amount to the proverbial hill of beans. One
thing that makes thinking of dwelling hard is that right now it's about an absence. It's a longing for
dwelling, an imagining or re-membering - for some people. You can't look at dwelling. You can't do a
phenomenology of dwelling. We can find bits and pieces of information or memory that spark our
imagination and enable our thinking to go forward or deeper. You have said that we don't know the
first thing about living in this place, namely, how to feed ourselves from it. This not knowing is lived
out as an ignorance that fosters helpless dependence on corporate agribusiness and the oil and
chemical industries. I recently read that 'about 90 percent of the money that Americans spend on food is used to buy processed food,'
almost all of which lists 'natural flavour' or 'artificial flavour' as an ingredient. (The natural flavours are chemicals derived from more or less
natural substances, such as burning sawdust, in the case of 'smoke flavour.') We
think the food tastes good, but we aren't
even tasting the food. We are enjoying the taste of chemicals made in factories just off the New Jersey
turnpike (where about two-thirds of the flavour additives are manufactured).5 And many people - in
fact perhaps in our society most people - are ignorant of this ignorance, utterly unaware that there
might be something important about it or that this dependence is indeed a dangerous helplessness.
Even many reasonably well-informed people may have only the illusion of possessing knowledge that
gives them some control over their relationship with food. Think of all the studies published in the
popular media, telling us: eat blue- berries for their antioxidant benefits; coffee may cause breast
cancer; studies have shown that L-camitine aids weight loss; eat more fibre to prevent colon cancer,
and on and on. Food is seen as a means of internalizing self-discipline or control , deflecting
responsibility to us, convincing us to fearfully scurry about buying and consuming this or that to avoid
cancer or some other dire fate. Large-scale environmental pollution, or a toxic food supply, can be
ignored, while we do as we are told.
geoengineering link
Geoengineering is domination of both nature and society in order to try to undo our
own exploitation of Nature – this means-ends solution will only end in more
destruction
“An Emergent Mangle of Practice: Global Climate Change as Vernacular Geoengineering”, Presented at the annual meeting of the American
Political Science Association, September 2-6, 2009, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1450783)
To discuss more expert/formal/ordered geoengineering in some future conditional sense, however,

expresses a disturbing ideological blindness (Cascio, 2009). The technofixes being discussed in that
geoengineering schema are responses to a concerted, distributed, and intensive use of fossil fuels to
advance economic development. Perhaps it would be more correct to regard vernacular geoengineering as “ecotinkering,” or
“geoputtering,” or “enviromeddling,” but this vernacular geoengineering effort has been at work, and understood as having
the effects it is creating since the nineteenth century, the sixteenth century or even the Neolithic Age,
depending upon who one relies upon for scientific support. This on-going DIY experiment in
terraformative change should neither be dismissed nor ignored. Nevertheless, today‟s would-be
expert geoengineers ignore what is, in fact, at stake. It is not to geoengineer the Earth or not; it is
instead how it could, should or would be moved out of its current unfocused vernacular registers of
execution into some more formal mode of planned implementation? All of the elaborate discussion of
implementing this or that technological approach at some unknown moment of ecological crisis or
emergency consensus is a ruse for the rationalization of either continued inaction or immediate
intervention. Yet, there is little consideration of the actual politics of such action. Instead one is too often left dangling in these
debates about geoengineering with the usual default settings in policymaking more commonly drive
by ordinary technological momentum: a)it might need to be done, b) it can be done, so at some point,
c) it probably will be done. In view of today‟s ominous climate change trends, however, there now are many experts and interests at
work trying to build some consensus around what “must be done.” Much of the conflict here is no longer over “whether or not,” but rather
what must be done by whom, where, when, what, and how? Individuals and/or groups; states and/or societies; bureaucratic regulators and/or
market mechanisms, manufacturers plus networks of consumers, designers, users, scientific experts and/or ordinary laypersons: the complexity
of the players to be invited to address the problems further complicates the solutions. Yet, the
ruse of rationality still positions
the policy problematic as one of pure geoengineering in order to occlude , as capitalist systems of
exchange as well as authoritarian modes of governance always have, the degree to which
geoengineering implicitly but also inescapably, is much more, namely, socioengineering,
ethnoengineering or archiengineering (Luke, 2005a). That is, any new twists in the modes of dominating
nature necessarily imply fresh approaches to dominating men and women by reorganizing society ,
reconfiguring culture or reconstituting rulership. These two dynamics cannot be divided, and each
presumes the other. Whether one looks at Rousseau, Smith, Marx or Polanyi, one insight about social power seems constant: a few
men and women do tend to dominate most other human and nonhuman beings by perfecting the domination of nature (Luke, forthcoming
2010).
Geoengineering is a techno-fix that ensures the problem will be recreated in the

future – and causes socioengineering along with it – dominates both Nature and
humanity
The problem with the techno-fix is that it rarely fixes what it was meant to improve and the
technological systems deployed as the fix bring their own values, practices, and dynamics into the
situation to be corrected without being always corrective (Bala, 2009). As Hughes (2004: 14) notes,
“consequently, the problems are usually not solved, but often made more intractable.” Recalling Robock‟s
thoughts about these realities should be quite sobering. Petroski (1992: 62) notes that “no one wants to learn by mistakes, but we cannot learn
enough from successes to go beyond the state of the art.” This insight is fruitful with regard to vernacular geoengineering inasmuch as its
conduct has entailed a rich heritage of mistakes from which much can be learned. Indeed, the banal ecologism of green design, industrial
ecology or cradle-2-cradle production are all efforts that systematically seek out inefficiencies, irrationalities, and inefficacies of conventional
engineering and design on many levels of reevaluation. As
early as the 1970s, and clearly since the 1990s, the adverse
impact of misengineering in causing climate change has been a growing concern. With regard to
formal geoengineering, however, this insight from Petroski provides a stern warning. Since there are
no successes yet from such experiments, there should be considerable apprehension about the
mistakes that could be made. What could be learned by a formal geoengineering failure might come too late for any successes to
ever be realized. Hence, enthusiasms for “the state of art” in the barely emergent fields of formal geoengineering must be contrasted to its the
on-going forms of unplanned learning from its vernacular varieties, which still proceed apace in many different realms and regions of endeavor.
The human-built world is an old established fact, and today‟s touts of formal geoengineering are
proposing little that is new, promising or trustworthy as such, even as they assume their project
would be a wholly de novo affair. Nothing could be further from the truth, and the tacit
socioengineering agenda at the play in the details of geoengineering are in nuce the most immediate
ideological threat as well as the least progressive political promise for making any effective advances
in combating adverse climate changes. Conditional speculations in elite policy outlets and more mass market,
lay reader publications about “geoengineering: could or should we do it?,” “the incredible economics of geoengineering,” or “re-engineering
the Earth,” are,
in fact, all intentional programs that imply bigger agenda, like “could or should we do
socioengineering?,” “socioengineering‟s incredible economics,” and “could or should we do
socioengineering?” while moving ahead to operate under a green state of emergency.
heg link
Pursuit of hegemony entails commodification of nature-as-resource – makes
everything into standing reserve exploitable for maintaining the US’s status on the
world stage
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. Partly a response to global economic competition, and partly a response to global ecological scarcities,
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 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. These geo-economic
readings also have sparked new discourses of
social responsibility into life, such as the green geopolitics of the Clinton administration with 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 global village," President 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 one in the same if we are to be truly secure in the world of the 21st century."11
mapping
Mapping the ocean transforms the world into standing reserve, always available for
manipulation and control
Skocz 09 (Dennis Skocz, Heidegger and the Earth: Essays in Environmental Philosophy 2nd, expanded edition, “Environmental
Management in the ‘Age of the World Picture,’” p. 124)
GIS technology maps a very different kind of space than what is constituted by animal species themselves. Indeed, the two spaces seem to be at
opposite ends of a spectrum. GIS is a 'whole earth' technology. It enables the geographer not only to map and track phenomena on any part of
the planet but also to link vast amounts of data - layers and layers of data - to geographic coordinates. In
principle, then, GIS makes
it possible to configure the entire planet as both map and databank . GIS mapping technology
transforms the world into a representation; and more than that, that representation 'contains' an
open-ended fund of information - information that is available on demand to researchers , who can
tap into this standing reserve of data whenever they like. The entire planet becomes representation, a
representation that harbours beneath its image-surface a storehouse of info-resources, waiting to be
mined by researchers in much the same way the earth itself is mined for its mineral and fuel wealth.
Unlike the animal confined in and defined by the narrow limits of its territory, GIS geographers have the world at their disposal. From a
position outside and above the earth, GIS researchers can bring the entire world within the GIS
template. The GIS space is constructed 'from on high.' Many of the data, including those found to be
of greatest use, are derived from near-outer space, from satellite sensors that record data and beam
them down to earth. A program then stores and aggregates the data, mapping them onto a geospatial
grid whose coordinates are secured by the GPS. To repeat, satellites in geostationary orbit around the
earth allow anyone anywhere to map and track anything anywhere using latitude and longitude. The
African Elephant Monitoring Project in Cameroon offers an example of how GIS works and attests to its purposes. Transmitters are attached to
high-ranking female elephants, whose movements represent those of the herd. Data that include latitude, longitude, time of day, and other
information are beamed up to NOAA weather satellites several times a day. Those data are then beamed down to a facility in France, where
they are collected.and processed to produce GIS maps representing the movements of herds over time and in the context of other data
embedded in and overlaid on the electronic map.8 All of this monitoring is meant to both manage and protect elephants in their habitat. At
first glance, GIS technology is simply another means for mapping a territory. The relationship between a
conventional map and actual territory is largely the same as the one between a GIS map-database and what it represents.9 The map is not a
duplicate of the mapped. As a mere representation of a territory, one that uses icons and symbols and geometric markings, the map does not
represent everything. A map selectively represents features of its representation, the territory. Mapping, fundamentally a cognitive
undertaking, is linked pragmatically to a purpose exterior to the cognition. GIS mapping goes beyond traditional mapping in a way that sets it
apart from all earlier cartography.
The essence of GIS lies in how it fuses two-dimensional mapping as we know
it from maps printed on paper with the computerized storage and processing of data by database soft -
ware.10 GIS enables the map maker and the map user to link to a map of a territory those data they consider pertinent. GIS data are
structured on the same map grid, but the resulting grid will contain different kinds of data, which can be overlaid so as to present a composite
11
showing the relationship in space between various sets of 'spatialized' data (e.g., wetlands areas and duck population distribution). Of course,
a single one-to-one comparison on a map of two data sets does not require sophisticated software; indeed, it does not require a computer at
all. The 'value added' of GIS rises as the amount of data to be integrated rises or when users want to consider first the overlay of x and y, then x
and z, then the overlay of the intersection of x and z with v. Data already collected and stored can be called up immediately in response to suc-
cessive display requirements and projected onto the map grid to show or establish patterns (or their lack). Furthermore, the automatic sensing,
collection, storage, and aggregation of data obviously enhances the advantage of a computerized map-production system. Likewise, the
12
Heidegger tells us that the 'essence of modern
distribution of any given map via the Internet multiplies its utility.
technology lies in Enframing' - a mode of disclosure that aptly describes GIS (QT 25). Because data, not
necessarily geographical in themselves, are stored on the GIS map, GIS users can summon on demand
the data they deem important. The database underlying the map amounts to a standing reserve
(Bestand) in the sense that Heidegger uses the term: 'Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to
be immediately at hand ... so that it may be on call for a further ordering.' Standing reserve designates
'the way in which everything presences' in response to the 'challenging revealing' that is definitive of
modern technoscience (QT 17). What Heidegger says of modern physics applies here: 'Nature reports herself ... through calculation
and ... it remains orderable as a system of information' (QT 23). Heidegger sees a constructivism in technoscience that applies to GIS. Indeed,
GIS may count as the perfect example of Enframing. Heidegger contends that when we reduce the plenitude of nature to a standing reserve,
when we configure it as information 'on call,' 'the impression comes to prevail that everything man encounters exists only insofar as it is his
construct' (QT 27). We may interpolate Heidegger's words: with
the construction - and, we should add, use - of GIS
mapping systems, the impression comes to prevail that everything the researcher encounters through
the optics and operations of GIS technology exists as the researcher's construct. In still other words,
the planet itself - in its totality - offers itself as a construct. GIS mapping marks the decisive passage
from a geography of places to a geometry of space, indeed to a full mathematization of the earth
habitat. GIS space is a mathematical space, a space whose elements are geometrical: points, lines,
areas. The space and reality built upon this space (the mapped territory, representation) is
constructed, artificial. It is both the product and the function of a deliberate operation of relating, a
product that takes the form of an ensemble of relations among entries in the database. Reality, as
represented by GIS, is an aggregate of data constructed by establishing one-to-one correspondences
between entities in the territory and representations in the map/database and then repeating this
pairing process again and again until the database/map is 'full.' The result is a closed system that nonetheless allows
for seemingly unlimited variations as data are accessed to give this and then that image of the territory. What is common to all imagings of the
data (and, it follows, to the territorial referents of those data) is precisely their availability for imaging. Reality
is no longer what the
human experiences in its everyday being-in-the-world or what the non-human animal experiences in
its Umwelt, but rather the re-presentable of the re-presented, the recallable that which answers to
the map user's commands to display. Neither the aggregate character of the reality addressed nor its re-presentability in
innumerable displays should distract us from recognizing the essential unity and uniformity of the spatial reality in question. The aggregate is a
function of an aggregating that begins axiomatically and proceeds methodically by virtue of an a priori determination made about what will
count as real for the purposes of the map. Likewise, successive imagings and maps made possible by GIS issue from a common fund of data that
are essentially uniform in their specifications, and successive map variations are guaranteed to converge because they are designed from the
start to fit the same grid. No
ontological surprises. Here we would do well to recall what Heidegger says in 'The Age of the World
Picture.' 'World picture' does not refer simply to a particular representation of the world. Rather, it is meant to
suggest that in modern technoscience, the very being of the world is given in its represent-edness - that the world 'becomes picture ...
distinguishes the essence of the modem age [die Neuzeit]' (QT 130). The world denoted by 'world picture' is the world in its entirety, not just
the physical world or nature but history as well (QT 129). For its part, 'picture' signifies much more than an image or a
copy of what is pictured. Heidegger tells us that 'where the world becomes picture, what is, in its
entirety is juxtaposed as that for which man is prepared and which, correspondingly, he intends to
bring before himself and have before himself, and intends in a decisive sense to set in place before
himself' (QT 129). I have italicized 'to set in place' because it anticipates what Heidegger says later about the 'production' of the world as
picture: 'The fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture. The word picture [Bild] now means the structured
image [Gebild] which is the creature of man's producing which represents and sets before' (QT 134). Such
a producing means that
knowledge will be understood as procedure (QT 118), one that operates within and to constitute a
'standing-together,' which Heidegger calls 'system.' It should be apparent that the essential purpose
of GIS is precisely to give us the natural environment as something represented - that is, in its
representedness or its representability - not as it gives itself in the everyday being-in-the-world of
humans or in the Umwelt of non-human animals, but insofar as it conforms to the geometrical-
mathematical grid that underlies GIS technology.
Technology’s instrumental rationality guarantees that it fulfils its proposed ends –
their methodology is corrupt – turns the case
Management in the ‘Age of the World Picture,’”)
The Ontological Risk and Integrating Spaces Heidegger has helped us see that technology is not just a
tool employed by humans (QT 4-5), one that is neutral with respect to the things it addresses; rather,
it is deeply and essentially a way in which beings come to disclose - and conceal - themselves (QT 12).
As such, technology harbours within itself the possibility and (ontological) risk of covering over the
being of the things it deals with (QT 27). I would add that precisely because GIS succeeds so well at its stated aims, it presents a
special risk of covering over the phenomena it deals with. The analysis of defective tools from Being and Time is pertinent here. It is the tool's
failing to lend itself to its purposes as something ready-to-hand that makes us aware of the instrumental totality of which the tool is part (BT-M
104). As long as everything functions well within that totality, we are not explicitly aware of that instrumental totality or readiness-to-hand as
something thematic. The
argument here is that GIS technology succeeds so well at its purposes that its own
nature remains inconspicuous and it ends up validating its own premise (that reality =
representedness via mathematization). Every validation of specific results within the project ends up
progressively validating the premises and methodology of the project itself. It is significant, too, that
GIS technology is an information technology. As such, it belongs to the realm of signs. GIS, because it is
a form of geospatial information technology, and by virtue of its extreme removal from the things it
deals with (it collects its information from near-outer space), is more susceptible to confounding its
constructs than either (a) an information technology that brings us closer to the scene of action (e.g.,
television coverage of a forest fire) or (b) a more basic (non-infor mation) technology (e.g., earth-
moving equipment for building a dam) of the sort that places its user in proximity with the things it
would shape and control. The key word is 'risk.' On the one hand, risk implies possible danger, a threat,
and attendant fear. It is not a forgone conclusion that environmental management of the type discussed
here necessarily endangers the animal or the wild. The risk spoken of here is onto-epistemological - that
is, it has to do with how environmental things (the things of the animal's lived environment) present
themselves and are known. To be sure, highly specific 'real world' or ontic dangers can arise or persist,
if our understanding of the natural environment and its non-human animal inhabitants is distorted or
deficient. We may miss 'seeing' threats at all because our data do not include - nor can they include -
the lived experience of what is threatening . A technology that privileges the visual and the
mathematical can devalue experience that is tactile or auditory, for example, or overrate what is
measurable and miss what cannot be expressed mathematically. Factors bearing on the health of an
ecosystem or the well-being of its non-human inhabitants can be down played, leaving issues
unaddressed or improperly dealt with. When we operate on the environment as if it were merely a
cognitive construct, we risk undermining the very environmental awareness that motivates
environmental concern in the first place. This problem is especially significant when the technology is
intended to promote environmental awareness.
monitoring/observation link
The aff’s observation of the natural world is symptomatic of a resource-oriented view
of the world – they see the environment as worth protecting only insofar as it is useful
to humans – means “brown zones” gets ignored and turns the case
33:2, 2001)
There are many different alternatives to what prevails, and changing ways of thought can revolutionise the practices of policy. In environmental
education, 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 race’s ècological 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 ècosystem 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 `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 associated biota), and other natural amenities’ (Cairns, 1995, p. 6).
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 .
mpas/protected areas link
Protected areas are environmental managerialism, maintaining one pristine area to be
observed, controlled, and viewed while the rest of nature is destroyed by industrial
pollution
33:2, 2001)
Environmental education also prepares students for more tertiary uses of nature as recreational resources. As the USDA says about
its managed public lands, the natural environment is à land of many uses’ , and mass tourism,
commercial recreation, or park administration all require special knowledge and powers to be
conducted successfully. Instead of appraising nature’ s resources as industrial production resource
reserves, recreationist managerialism frames them as resource preserves for recurring consumption
as positional goods, scenic assets, or leisure sites. The idea behind national parks or protected areas is to park a
number of unique sites or undeveloped domains outside of the continuous turnover of industrial
exploitation for primary products or agricultural produce, and then the recreational pursuits of getting to, using and
appreciating such ecological assets can be mass produced there through highly organised sets of
practices. These goals for the green zones of nature are crucial. The pressures of living in the brown zones of society are such that many
official studies suggest tourism will be the world’ s largest industry by 2000. Hence, environmental education must pitch
managerial knowledge at those sectors of the tourism industry that depend upon valuable natural
resources whether they are `park and recreation concessionaires, adventure and tour guide companies, private campgrounds and
hunting/fishing preserves, destination resorts, ecotourism establishments, and tourism development boards and advertising companies’
(Department of Natural Resource, Recreation and Tourism, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, 19 96, p. 1) to prepare students for these
private sector pursuits. As
these guideposts for contemporary environmental education indicate, its
discursive practices frequently have a shallow/instrumental/managerialist understanding of `the
environment’ . Yet, from these curricula and their professional degree granting capabilities, the discourse of resource
managerialism/risk assessment/recreationist administration become, as Foucault argues, èmbodied
in technical processes, in institutions, in patterns for general behavior, in forms of transmission and
diffusion, and in pedagogical forms which, at once, impose and maintain them’ (Foucault, 1977).
Protected areas implicitly sanction endless development of the rest of the Earth –
separates it into spheres of green and brown that justify and extend the reach of fast
capitalism and its environmental exploitation
Nonetheless, one must admit the Nature Conservancy's achievements are perhaps seriously flawed, even though these flaws reveal much more
about the consumption of public goods through a private property system and free enterprise economy than they show about
environmentalism. Because
of what has happened to Nature, how capital operates, and where resources
for change must be solicited, the Nature Conservancy does what it does: consume land to be held "in
trust: for Nature. As a result, the tenets and tenor of the Conservancy's operations as "an
environmentalist organization" are those of almost complete compliance , and not those of radical
resistance to the fast capitalist global economy . In the Nature Conservancy's operational codes of land consumption, a
triage system comes into play. Some lands of Nature are more "ecologically significant ," some regions
are much more "natural areas," but some grounds are far less "protectable" than others. The methods of
the Conservancy show how it implicitly sees Nature as real estate properties inasmuch as its chapters must
constantly grade the acreages they receive-- labelling some as truly ecologically significant, some as
plainly natural areas, some as merely "trade lands."85 The latter are sold, like old horses for glue or worn-out cattle for
dogfood, and the proceeds can used elsewhere to promote conservation. In seeking to preserve Nature, the Nature
Conservancy strangely oversees its final transformation into pure real estate , allowing even hitherto
unsalable or undeveloped lands to become transubstantiated into "natural areas" to green belt
human settlements and recharge their scenic visits with ecological significance. When it asks for land
to protect wildlife and create sanctuary for ecosystems . However, the Nature Conservancy tends not to
detail the ultimate cause of its concern. Protect it from what? Create sanctuary from what? The
answer is, of course, the same consumeristic economy that is allowing its members to accumulate
stock, mail in donations, buy and sell land. In many ways, the Conservancy is disingenuous in its designation of only some of its
lands as trade lands. Actually, all of its protected lands are trade lands, trading sanctuary and protection here (where it is commercially possible
or aesthetically imperative) to forsake sanctuary and protection there (where it is commercially unviable or aesthetically dispensable). It
extracts a title for partial permanence from a constant turnover of economic destruction anchored in
total impermanence.86 The Conservancy ironically fights a perpetually losing battle, protecting rare
species from what makes them rare and building sanctuary from what devastates everything on the
land elsewhere with the proceeds of its members' successful capitalist rarification and despoliation.
The Nature Conservancy necessarily embraces the key counterintuitive quality of all markets, namely, a dynamic in which the pursuit of private
vices can advance public virtues. This appears contradictory, but it has nonetheless a very valid basis .
It agrees to sacrifice almost
all land in general to development, because it knows that all land will not, in fact, be developed. On the
one hand, excessive environmental regulations might destroy this delicate balance in land use patterns. In accepting the universal premise of
development, on the other hand, it constantly can undercut economic development's specific enactments at sites where it is no longer or not
yet profitable. Some
land will be saved and can be saved, in fact, by allowing, in principle, all land to be
liable to development. Hence, it needs trade lands to do land trades to isolate some land from any more trading. In allowing all to
pursue their individual vices and desires in the market, one permits a differently motivated actor, like the Nature Conservancy, to trade for
land, like any other speculator, and develop it to suit its selfish individual taste, which is in this case is "unselfish nondevelopment." This
perversely anti-market outcome satisfies the Conservancy's desires and ends, while perhaps also advancing the collective good through market
mechanisms. Over the past two decades, The Nature Conservancy has grown by leaps and bounds by sticking to the operational objectives of
"preserving biodiversity."87 As
powerful anthropogenic actions have recontoured the Earth to suit the basic
material needs of corporate modes of production, these artificial contours now define new ecologies
for all life forms caught within their "economy" and "environment." The "economy" becomes a world
political economy's interior spaces defined by technoscience processes devoted to production and
consumption, while "the environment," in this sense, becomes a planetary political economy's
exterior spaces oriented to resource-creation, sceneryprovision, and waste-reception. Natural
resources exist, but Nature does not. Economic survival is imperative, but the commodity logics driving it need to be grounded in
sound ecological common sense lest the limitless dynamism of commodification be permitted to submit everything to exchange logics
immediately. Time is now what is scarce and centrally important in the highly compressed timespace continua of contemporary commodity
chains. It is no longer a question of jobs versus the environment, because fewer jobs will not resurrect Nature. Nature is dead, and the
environment generating global production assumes that jobs are necessary to define it as the space of natural resources. Doing jobs irrationally
and too rapidly, however, is what destroys these environments, making jobs done rationally and at an apt pace ecologically acceptable.
Consequently, the agendas of environmental protection must center on the "question of the short-term vs. the long-term," and this is "what
the Conservancy is all about."88 Nature,
in all of its wild mystery and awesome totality, is not being preserved
by the Nature Conservancy. It is, in fact, dead, as McKibben and Merchant tell us.89 Nonetheless, its memory might be kept
alive by the Nature Conservancy at numerous burial parks all over the nation where glimpses of its spirit should be remembered by human
beings in a whiff of wild fight, the scent of a stream, or the aroma of surf. This goal may be a very well-intentioned one; but, in many ways
all that the Nature Conservancy does boils down to serving as a burial society dedicated to giving
perpetual maintenance and loving care at a variety of Nature cemeteries: Forest Glen, Mountain Meadow, Virgin
River, Jade Jungle, Prairie View, Harmony Bay, Sunny Savannah, Brilliant Beach, Desert Vista, Happy Hollow, Crystal Spring. As Nature's
death is acknowledged, more and more plots are needed to bury the best bits of its body in gardens of
eternal life. Thus, the call for members, funds, and donations always will grow and grow.
observation link
Observation turns the world into the environmental panopticon – controlling people
and environments, making them always available to serve the needs of “saving the
planet”
1995, JSTOR)
Not surprisingly, then, thevarious 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, "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 composing Nature. 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.
The effect of observation is to render Nature a manageable, controllable object –

enframes the entire planet
The wild autogenic otherness or settled theogenic certainty of "Nature" is being replaced by the denatured
anthropogenic systems of "the environment ." The World Commission of Environment and Development admits humanity is
unable to fit "its doings" into the "pattern of clouds, oceans, greenery, and soils" that is the Earth. The hazards of this new reality
cannot be escaped, but they "must be recognized--and managed." 26 Through astropanoptic
technoscience, "we can see and study the Earth as an organism whose health depends on the health
of all its parts," which gives us "the power to reconcile human affairs with natural laws and to thrive
in the process."27 This reconciliation rests upon understanding "natural systems," expanding "the
environmental resource base," managing "environmental decay," or controlling "environmental
trends."27 As the Rio Declaration asserts, Earth's "integral and interdependent nature" can be, and then is, redefined as "the global
environmental and developmental system" in which what was once God's wild Nature becomes technoscientific managerialists' tame
ecosystems.28 The
hazards of living on Earth cannot be avoided or escaped, but Earth itself can be
escaped in rededicating human production and consumption to hazard avoidance by reimagining
Nature as terrestrial infrastructure. The astropanopticon's epiphany of seeing the Earth from space --
remember the Brundtland Report's opening line, "In the middle of the 20th century, we saw our planet from space for the first time" has
ironically become a self-fulfilling prophecy by exerting "a greater impact on thought than did the Copernican revolution of the 16th century."29
Like those humans of our spacefaring future who will not let Mars, be Mars, Luna, be Luna, or some other off-world, be a world-off, Earth no
longer can be allowed to just be the Earth. Instead Terra is being terra(re)formed by seeing for the first time from space its "natural
ecosystems" and "environmental resource base" which humans can see, study and manage in their quest to optimize the processes of surviving
and thriving. The Preamble to Agenda 21 reverberates the impact of these thoughts for the Brundtland Report's future historians: 'Humanity
stands at a defining moment in history. We are confronted with a perpetuation of disparities between and within nations, a worsening of
poverty, hunger, ill health and illiteracy, and the continuing deterioration of the ecosystems on which we depend for our well-being. However,
integration of environment and development concerns and greater attention to them will lead to the fulfillment of basic needs, improved living
standards for all, better protected and managed ecosystems and a safer, more prosperous future. No nation can achieve this on its own; but
together we can - in a global partnership for sustainable development.'30 Plainly, the
Preamble to Agenda 21 could as easily
be named the Terraforming Compact inasmuch as its basic sentiments sum up "humanity's"
managerial imperatives in the Earth's infrastructuralization, integrating environmental and
developmental systems in "global partnership" to better protect all ecosystems and improve living
standards for all through technoscientic terraforming.
regulations link
Environmental regulations are thinly veiled consumer campaigns, attempts to regulate
and manage the environment in order to maximize profit and individual gain
The "domination of nature" is not so much the total control of natural events in the environment as
much as it is the willful disregard of such localized ecological conditions in building human
settlements.38 The abstract "technoregions" constructed within the human fabrications of "second nature," or the always emergent
technosphere of the planet, within which modernizing human communities are now mostly embedded, operate by virtue of environmental
transactions that often are over, beyond, or outside of rough equilibria of their natural habitats. These transactions create new
anthropogenic ecological contexts, which typically generate an artificial hyperecology of an ultimately
unsustainable type.39 A great deal of time and energy might be expended in core capitalist countries
upon environmental regulations, resource surveys, ecological studies, and conservation policies, but
these initiatives almost always are consumerist campaigns, aiming to reform the costs and regulate
the benefits of these unsustainable flows of goods and services through the hyperecologies of second
nature.40 Consumer society constitutes an entirely new system of objects out on the terrains of second
nature. Baudrillard shrewdly aspires to be recognized as second nature's Linneaus, asserting that second nature plainly has a fecundity or
vitality of its own: Could we classify the luxuriant growth of objects as we do a flora or fauna, complete with tropical and glacial species, sudden
mutations, and varieties threatened by extinction? Our urban civilization is witness to an ever-accelerating procession of generations of
products, appliances and gadgets by comparison with which mankind appears to be a remarkably stable species. This pollulation of objects is no
odder, when we come to think about it, than that to be observed in countless natural species.41 Finding a rationality and systematicity in this
quickening procession of products, Baudrillard believes his new technified taxonomies for every object (products, goods, appliances, gadgets,
etc.) of the system permits us to plumb the system of objects propounded by contemporary economies of mass production/mass consumption.
To do so, however, one
must push past the silences of the silent majorities, and decipher the meanings of
mass consumption as the consuming masses reveal them. Exploring consumption of objects in particular might disclose
"the processes whereby people relate to them and with the systems of human behavior and relationships that result thereform," and thereby
allowing anyone to reach "an understanding of what happens to objects by virtue of their being produced and consumed, possessed and
personalized."42 Here is where habitus emerges from the systems of objects and objects of systems compounded with the technosphere.
Bourdieu asserts habitus emerges out of "the capacity to produce classifiable practices and works, and the capacity to differentiate and
appreciate these practices and products (taste), that the represented social world, i.e., the space of life-styles, is constituted."43 Yet, the dual
dimensionality of habitus as a structured and structuring structure parallels the properties of habitat, which when taken in environmental
terms, provides a scheme of systems generating classifiable practices and products as well as a scheme for systems of appreciating and
comprehending within and amidst specific settings. Consequently, the habitats of second nature out on the technoregionalized ranges of
anthropogenic technospheres are formed out of habitus, or the system of distinctive signs in practices and works driving 14 lives styled by the
system of objects. In these new spaces, terraformative hyperecologies can be monitored to judge their
relative success or failure in terms of abstract mathematical measures of consumption , surveying
national gains or losses by the density, velocity, intensity, and quantity of goods and services being
exchanged for mass consumption. Here one finds geo-economists pushing for wiser uses of all biotic assets in all anthropogenic
exchanges. Consumption is outsourced from many different planetary sites by using varying levels of
standardized energy, natural resources, food, water and labor inputs drawn from all over the Earth
through transnational commodity, energy, and labor markets.44 Geo-economic forms of state power and/or market
clout, in turn, allegedly will provide the requisite force needed to impose these costs on the many outside for the benefit of the few inside. By
substituting "Earth Days" for real ecological transformation , the hyperecologies of transnational
exchange are successfully repacking themselves in green wrappers of ecological concern; but, they still
often involve the profligate waste of energy, resources, and time to maintain the abstract aggregate
subjectivity of "an average consumers" enjoying "the typical standard of living" in the developed
world's cities and suburbs. Yet, if this is indeed happening, then how did these patterns develop?
relations/coop link
The aff’s theory of international relations can’t capture the modern cyborganization of
global capitalism – their logic turns us into machines incapable of exiting the cycle of
environmental management and international dominance
To assess these shifts, we need to implode liberal-humanist notions of agency and structure in search of the
hybridizing influences at play in actually existing democratic consumer capitalism . Nye's feeble visions about
the "diffusion of power" pale before more astute recognitions such as Donna Haraway's, which provide insights into the state's
policy obligations, domestic and foreign, dissipating in the informatics of domination .28 Five years before
Rosenau's sightings of turbulence, Haraway was mapping its disruptive emergence in the environizing patterns
of "cyborganization": continued erosion of the welfare state; decentralizations with increased
surveillance and control; citizenship by telematics; imperialism and political power broadly in the
form of information rich/information poor differentiation; increased high-tech militarization increasingly
opposed by many social groups; reduction of civil service jobs as a result of the growing capital intensification of office work, with implications
for occupational mobility for women of colour; growing privatization of material and ideological life and culture;
close integration of privatization and militarization, the high-tech forms of bourgeois capitalist per-
sonal and public life; invisibility of different social groups to each other, linked to psychological mechanisms of
belief in abstract enemies. Haraway, in her approach to cyborganization, began scrutinizing the omnipolitanization of
the world's international and interenvironmental relations .30 She also brings us a better sense of the
conflicts along today's borders between international politics and domestic policy, globalism and
ecologism, world affairs and local environmentalism - the places where the monstrous realities of
intermestic crises, antiglobal ecological movements, and anti- ecological global counterrevolutions
flash and rumble. Little of this action fits into the older comfortable tropes of IR theory . In fact, the
traditional stock of social theories for international politics miss almost of these movements on both
a foundational level and a second-order level in their methodological myopia: state- centric and
reflexive idealist theories do not travel well in these environment s.31 Living in today's omnipolitan order should
move us to see how we are all "theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we
are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics." 32 Such shifts are quite far-reaching, but we also
must accept Jameson's assignment "to name the system" at work in the wondrous new machine and
thereby begin "systematizing something that is resolutely unsystematic, and historicizing something
that is resolutely ahistorical."33 Not everyone may yet understand the historicity or systematicity of
global capitalism, but its cyborganizing powers over the human and nonhuman body does reshape
space, reconstitute power, and rediagram territoriality in new environized patterns rooted in deep biology,
deep sociology, deep technology.
renewables link
Renewable energy is not a turn away from managerialism but a resourcified view of
nature – it recognizes the finitude of natural resources but refuses to give up on its
endless desire for energy and production
Once you've got that "carrying capacity" then maybe you have to realize that environments can be
almost entirely destroyed. Which means that special efforts to rehabilitate them for continuing productive use or restoring them to
some idealized condition of pre-existing stability are not enough. Older images of nature as a storehouse of goods that can
be exhausted, and therefore one must manage their exhaustion for maintaining the greatest good for
the greatest number at the maximum duration, begin to drift towards other less static and more
dynamic images. For renewables management, nature becomes a more open-ended, self-renewing
source of benefits, which comes with the vision of nature as a vast cybernetic system. This brings the
engagement with renewability. The sustained yield metaphors of nature as a static depletable
storehouse now shift towards a dynamic, self-regulating system. Recognizing these responsibilities
and then mastering their macro management for optimal performance, both as the producers of raw material
and conservers of systemic services, becomes the engagement of renewables managerialism . These
commitments have pushed the thoughts and actions of many people away from sustained yield and more
toward sustainability in the overall management of natural resource s. Here the root commitment to
resourcification has not been abandoned in the renewables project. Instead, it simply has been re-
specified to meet other long-range, larger scale requirements. That is, sustained yield focuses on outputs, and views
resource conditions as constraints on maximum production. Sustainability, however, makes resource conditions the goal and the pre-condition
for meeting human needs over time. Outputs then are interest on resource capital. Three integrated themes begin to
emerge: a concern for the health of ecosystems, a preference for a landscape scale and decentralized management, and a new kind of public
participation that might integrate some civic discourse into decision making. These changes often are positive. The resourcification - in outline
and tone - does not break all of its' links with meeting output goals, but still this is an interesting development. Renewables
managerialism moves towards monitoring the level of outputs, the rate of meeting the goals, and the
scale of sustainable use. In many ways, it transforms sustainability into another style of sustained
yield, so that the evolution from the original vision of sustained yield into today's notion of
sustainability is a "win-win situation," both for economic and ecological interests. Renewables
management only departs perhaps modestly from the original credo of sustained yiel d as it was spun up in
the early 20th century. Nonetheless, there are some enlightened qualities of eco-managerialism, yet it is not a radical revolutionary reinvention
of everything. Instead, what one then often sees is risk managerialism in the eco-managerial project.
Alternative energy sources are just the latest form of resource managerialism –
attempting to extract energy from nature in an input/output frame of mind to keep an
unsustainable society going just a little bit longer
Resource managerialism can be read as the essence of today's enviro-mentalit y. 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 the closing of the western frontier. And 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 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 together, 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, and mineral extraction took hold in the U.S. during this era, an ethos
of battling scarcity guided professional training, corporate profit making, and government policy. As a result, 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 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 resources. 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.
The aff reduces energy to monetary benefit and production capacity for human
consumption – they hold energy in standing reserve for humanity
Padrutt 09(Hanspeter Padrutt, Heidegger and the Earth: Essays in Environmental Philosophy 2nd, expanded edition, “Heidegger and
Ecology,” p. 24)
A few years after the Americans landed on the moon, the

Club of Rome published its famous computer predictions,
titled 'The Limits of Growth,' which showed that if things continued the way they had been, 'spaceship
earth' would, in effect, die. Better researched and even more depressing was the study commissioned by President Jimmy Carter,
which appeared in 1980 under the title Global 2000 Study. Both studies are honest appraisals whose predictions, however cautious, are
deeply unsettling. However, since they take the basic approach of constructing 'world-models ' or 'spaceship
earth,' they also give weight to perceptions that the world is a machine . Spaceship earth and the
world model correspond to a world view that objectifies subjectivism and are snares along the
descent from the throne of master and owner of nature. Should we not be questioning this sort of
objectifying reductionism? Which, by the way, can be detected in many ideas held by the ecological
movement. For example, however sensible it is to conserve energy, the very concept of energy is
reductionist and ambiguous, because it reduces the light and warmth of the sun, the waterfall along
the mountain stream, the roaring of the wind, the burning of wood, and the power of the horse ...
reduces this whole world to kilowatt hours. It is worth noting that the word energy - which was coined
in the eighteenth century - has its roots in the Aristotelian term energeia, that is, the 'work-character
of beings.' Just as problematic is the economic reduction of all beings to monetary values. Certainly the proposals for economic
decentralization and for the development of a 'gentler' technology made by the British economist E.F. Schumacher (author of Small is Beautiful)
are as relevant today as ever. Certainly the provocative theses of an Ivan Illich are in many ways highly pertinent. And probably an ecological
economy will some day develop, presumably in the direction of James Robertson's 'alternatives worth living. '
Despite all this, one
cannot overlook that an ecological accounting still reduces things to monetary values and that many
of these authors' concepts are characterized by the economy of objectifying subjectivism, by the
world view of the shopowners - as, for example, with the concept of 'qualitative growth.'
restoration link
The aff attempts to restore nature from a resource-oriented viewpoint aimed at
increasing carrying and production capacity – frames the Earth as only ever valuable
when it can protect us or produce for us
So a restoration managerialism is a recognition that lies at the root of many environmental problems
that has sparked a reaction so intense that many called for going beyond rehabilitation and returning
to some status quo anti. The call is first stop exploiting nature's endowments, and then move towards
restoring those sites in systems that have been most abused . Ecological restoration, however, is a very tricky
proposition, because what is to be restored? How will it be reclaimed? Who must revive what has been
damaged, and exactly which prior state of existence is to be privileged as the state of restoration? Most appeals for
restoration are made on aesthetic grounds. But restoration management has also developed more macrological
engagements for maintaining the integrity of the earth's carrying capacity. In this respect, restoration
managerialism focuses upon mobilizing all of the biological, physical, and social sciences to address
the major economic and political effects of current environmental problems. Their resourcifications
allow ecosystem managers to infrastructuralize all of the earth's ecologies in the name of an almost
complete restoration for some biomes, bioregions or biosystems. The earth becomes, if only in terms of
contemporary technoscience, an immense terrestrial engine. Serving as the human race's ecological support
system, it has, with only the occasional localized failures (as restorationists like to say), provided services upon which
human society depends consistently and without charge . As the environmental infrastructure of technoscientific
production, the earth then can continue to generate these ecosystem services or their derivative products of natural
systems, but only if they are restored. So this complex system of systems is what must survive , and its
outputs include of course what we know: the generation of soils, the regeneration of plant nutrients,
the capture of solar energy, the conversion of that solar energy into biomass, the accumulation, purification and distribution of
water, the control of pests, the provision of a genetic library, the maintenance of breathable air, the control of micro and
macro climates, pollination of plants, diversification of animal species , development of buffering
mechanisms in eco-catastrophes. And, at the end of the day, some aesthetic enrichment to make it all
seem worthwhile. Because it is the true capital stock of trans-national enterprise, the planet's ecology
requires such highly disciplined treatment in order to restore some of its original capacitie s, and then guide
perhaps its subsequent sustainable use. Restoring as much or as many as possible of these ecosystems is very
important, because it might even bring back some almost extinct ecosystems to enlarge our existing
carrying capacity. That in turn leads to another engagement, which is renewables managerialism.
risk management link
The aff’s management of environmental risks is instrumental rationality – renders the
government the all-powerful mediators of Nature, which can now be taken apart and
put back together to service the needs of humanity
This is our time's Copernican revolution: the

anthropogenic demands of terraforming require a biocentric
worldview in which the alienated objectivity of natural subjectivity resurfaces objectively in
managerial theory and practice as "ecosystem" and "resource base" in "the environment."
Terraforming the Earth environmentalizes a once wild piece of the cosmos, domesticating it as
"humanity's home" or "our environment." From narratives of world pandemics, global warming, or
planetary pollution, global governance from the astropanopticon now runs its risk analyses and threat
scenarios to protect Mother Earth from home-grown and foreign threats, as the latest security panics over
asteroid impacts or X-File extraterrestrials in the United States express in the domains of popular culture. Whether it is space locusts from
Independence Day or space rocks snuffing out Dallas in Asteroid, new security threats are casting their shadows over our the astropanopticon.
From such sites of supervision, environmentalists see from above and from without , like the NASA-
eyed view of Earth from Apollo spacecraft, through the enveloping astropanoptic designs of
administratively controllable terraformed systems.35 Encircled by enclosures of alarm, environments
can be disassembled, recombined, and subjected to expert managers' disciplinary designs. Beset and
beleaguered by these allencompassing interventions, environments as ecosystems and
terraformations can be redirected to fulfill the ends of new economic scripts, managerial directives or
administrative writs.36 How various environmentalists might embed different instrumental
rationalities into the policing of ecosystems is an intriguing question , which will be explored below.
satellites link
Satellites observe and render the entire Earth manageable and controllable – it’s the
condition of possibility for total control and enframing of the environment
1995, JSTOR)
In many ways, these contemporary maneuvers to construct an eco-panopticon which re-envisions Nature
by environmentaliz-ing its workings as a system of systems can be traced back to the
power/knowledge provided in a photographic image (captured initially by the Apollo 8 astronauts) of the Earth in
space as it was seen from a NASA spacecraft traveling to the Moon. From its pop-ularization in the 1960s to its banalization in
the 1990s, many have put the image to pernicious uses . The dust jacket of another world-watching
manifesto, Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit (1992) by Vice President Al Gore, continues
this practice with its iconic presentation of a composite photograph of a cloudless earth reduced to crystalline perfection by digital
photography. In-side the book, Gore walks down many of the Worldwatch Insti-tute's paths in touting the
merits of an "eco-nomics" to underpin his visions for a Global Marshall Plan to save "the
environment" with carefully targeted Strategic Environmental Initiatives oper-ated by post-Cold War Washington
bureaucracies. Framing the planet in computer-controlled photography serves as his rhetorical pretext for
saving the planet through the operations of the green power/knowledge of Gore's "eco-nomic"
environmentality. The pretense of human agency actually engaging in some sort of worldwatch
becomes a credible possibility, technologically and administratively, only with this image.
Technological power is now so great that even Nature can be reduced to an eco-panoptic snap-shot.
Armed with the first photos of the earth in space, many people began rethinking their foundational images of the
planet in the late 1960s. As the Earth was enveloped for the first time in photography, bringing it
under control, into focus, and within reach for ordinary human beings , mythologies changed. For some,
the image conveyed the precious fragility of a tiny planet in the immense cosmos. For others , it provided a compelling
representa-tion of the world's biggest managerial challenge-generating geo-power via eco-knowledge.
Humanity's role must become one of watching over or policing all of the natural systems at work in
the skies, oceans, and continents depicted by such photographs as en-circled manageable space . Once
one can watch the world in eco-panoptic videotapes and photographs , the worldwatching project begins,
turning photographic images into political practices and ideological ideals aimed at environing Nature
by disciplining its spaces.
Satellite imaging creates its own reality of nature in line with what is “best” for
humanity – furthers the human/nature divide that allows for enframing
Management in the ‘Age of the World Picture,’”)
The Ontological Risk and Integrating Spaces Heidegger has helped us see that technology is not just a
tool employed by humans (QT 4-5), one that is neutral with respect to the things it addresses; rather,
it is deeply and essentially a way in which beings come to disclose - and conceal - themselves (QT 12).
As such, technology harbours within itself the possibility and (ontological) risk of covering over the
being of the things it deals with (QT 27). I would add that precisely because GIS succeeds so well at its stated aims, it presents a
special risk of covering over the phenomena it deals with. The analysis of defective tools from Being and Time is pertinent here. It is the tool's
failing to lend itself to its purposes as something ready-to-hand that makes us aware of the instrumental totality of which the tool is part (BT-M
104). As long as everything functions well within that totality, we are not explicitly aware of that instrumental totality or readiness-to-hand as
something thematic. The
argument here is that GIS technology succeeds so well at its purposes that its own
nature remains inconspicuous and it ends up validating its own premise (that reality =
representedness via mathematization). Every validation of specific results within the project ends up
progressively validating the premises and methodology of the project itself. It is significant, too, that
GIS technology is an information technology. As such, it belongs to the realm of signs. GIS, because it is
a form of geospatial information technology, and by virtue of its extreme removal from the things it
deals with (it collects its information from near-outer space), is more susceptible to confounding its
constructs than either (a) an information technology that brings us closer to the scene of action (e.g.,
television coverage of a forest fire) or (b) a more basic (non-infor mation) technology (e.g., earth-
moving equipment for building a dam) of the sort that places its user in proximity with the things it
would shape and control. The key word is 'risk.' On the one hand, risk implies possible danger, a threat,
and attendant fear. It is not a forgone conclusion that environmental management of the type discussed
here necessarily endangers the animal or the wild. The risk spoken of here is onto-epistemological - that
is, it has to do with how environmental things (the things of the animal's lived environment) present
themselves and are known. To be sure, highly specific 'real world' or ontic dangers can arise or persist,
if our understanding of the natural environment and its non-human animal inhabitants is distorted or
deficient. We may miss 'seeing' threats at all because our data do not include - nor can they include -
the lived experience of what is threatening . A technology that privileges the visual and the
mathematical can devalue experience that is tactile or auditory, for example, or overrate what is
measurable and miss what cannot be expressed mathematically. Factors bearing on the health of an
ecosystem or the well-being of its non-human inhabitants can be down played, leaving issues
unaddressed or improperly dealt with. When we operate on the environment as if it were merely a
cognitive construct, we risk undermining the very environmental awareness that motivates
environmental concern in the first place. This problem is especially significant when the technology is
intended to promote environmental awareness.
Attempts to grasp the environment through images create Nature as only image,
something separate from humanity and to be viewed – renders it controllable
DeLuca 05 (Kevin Michael, Environmental Humanities Research Professor at the University of Utah, “THINKING WITH HEIDEGGER
RETHINKING ENVIRONMENTAL THEORY AND PRACTICE”, Ethics & The Environment 10:1, Spring 2005, MUSE)
In pursuing a strategy that represents the wilderness through picture s, that grasps wilderness as picture, that
frames nature as picture, environmental groups have clearly if unwittingly been participating in the
construction of the world as picture. There have been real benefits to this strategy. As mentioned, environmental groups
have achieved specific legislative victories. On a more general level, this imagistic strategy has helped foster a wilderness vision so that
every year millions of Americans travel to see wilderness in the national parks and in poll after poll a substantial majority (usually over
70%) of Americans identify themselves as environmentalists .
If Heidegger is right about the dangers of the age of the
world picture, however, these very successes paradoxically also contribute to environmentalism’s
crisis. That is, grasping the world as picture, representing the wilderness in pictures, results in a fundamental
alienation of humanity from nature and an objectifying of the latter . “Wherever we have the world picture, an
essential decision takes place regarding what is, in its entirety. . . . What is, in its entirety, is now taken in such a way that it first is in
being and only is in being to the extent that it is set up by man, who represents and sets forth” (1977, 130, 129–30). That
Americans
now grasp wilderness, nature, and even earth as picture, an understanding that fatefully separates
them from what they grasp, is clear in their practices . An early viewer of Watkins’s Yosemite pictures wrote of his
photographic views, “without crossing the continent by the overland route in dread of scalping Indians and waterless plains; without
braving the dangers of the sea by the Chagres and Panama route; nay, without even the trouble of the brief land trip from San Francisco,
we are able to step, as it were, from our study into the wonders of the wondrous valley, and gaze at our leisure on its amazing features”
(Morton 1886, 337). The pictures are Yosemite and Yosemite is the pictures.
science link
The aff’s insistence on scientific expertise reveals a deeper divide in their view of
nature – they suppose that only quantitative “science” and “experts” can maintain the
environment, when it’s the opposite – only transforming education and thought
around the environment can prevent this technological takeover
33:2, 2001)
In the ecological upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, some schools of the environment and colleges of natural
resources went beyond this conservationist project by beginning to train specialised experts in
environmental science. This ill-defined discipline, ranging in scope from ecotoxiology to national park administration,
wasneeded to define, develop and deploy new varieties of knowledge for society about nature in
many practical dimensions of everyday work and play.4 The entire planet, then, can be reduced by
such environmental science at research universities to a complex system of interrelated systems , whose
constituent ecological processes are essentially humanised. In turn, two different spatial systems- nature and society-
are left in such environmental education for humanity to operate- efficiently or inefficiently- as vast
terrestrial infrastructures. Yet, one is zoned as `green’ space where wild nature survives and the other
becomes `brown’ space where society’s industrialisation, pollution and contamination occur . The
rational imperatives for inserting natural and artificial bodies into the machinery of global production pushes
environmental education to assume that the green spaces are what environmental professionals’
work must be about and the brown zones are largely ignored except as the realm from which global
threats to pristine green places originate. More importantly, this strain of environmental education
suggests that `the environment’ is a very complex domain of phenomena far beyond the full
comprehension of ordinary citizens or traditional naturalists.5 It is elevated into something that
should be managed by professional experts armed with coherent clusters of technical acumen and
administrative practice.6 As an awe-inspiring realm outside the economy and society, but also central to economic and social
development, the environment is turned by many educators into that which must be managed . To serve this
end, schools are invited to prepare their students to master the ìns-and-outs’ of resource
managerialism, risk assessment and/or recreationist management in the environment. In fact, resources,
risks and recreationists become `the three Rs’ of higher environmental education. This gives students and faculty some very specific new foci
for their studies and grants a specialised managerial power to experts in either the government or big business to control. Because acting
on the behalf of nature has shifted from the avocational register of belle-letteristic naturalist writings
into the professional± technical knowledge codes of environmental science , larger public discourses
about ecological degradation, resource waste or environmental remediation also have changed
significantly. On the one hand, many see this shift as progressive: scientific personnel with positivistic technical knowledge allegedly now
can identify ecological problems objectively as well as design efficient solutions for the most pressing ones. On the other hand, this change is
regarded by others with suspicion: a spirit of `shallowness’ occludes the enchantments of nature in the dark shadows of anthropocentrism,
capitalism and statism, leaving `the environment’ to be treated as little more than terrestrial infrastructure for global capital (see Nash, 1989;
Devall & Sessions, 1985; Fox, 1990). Parts
of it must be maintained in pristine condition as parks, but other
larger pieces must be turned over either to mines, agriculture and ranches or sacrificed to dumps,
sewers and wasteland. The trick is to keep these zones far enough apart to prevent severe
contamination, degration, or loss. Because this understanding of `the environment’ is shared by most
government bureaus, major corporations and interest groups today, most environmental education
buys into this same spatial vision: ènvironments’ are out there and society/economy/community are
ìn here’ . Environmental lessons drawnfrom these schools of environmental studies and colleges of natural resources now provide the key
intellectual lessons by which productive power shapes the categories of knowledge and value. The authority of such expertise, as
Foucault notes, `traverses and produces things ¼ as a productive network which runs through the
whole social body, much more than a negative instance whose function is repression’ (Foucault, 1980, p.
119). In accord with this prevailing regime of truth in ecological science, environmental policies will not change until
environmental educators circulate new bodies of practice and types of discourse in their teaching ,
which top executive personnel in contemporary state and social institutions would regard as
òbjective’ , `valid’ , or ùseful’ .
Science has been corrupted – the aff’s focus on science and technology to save the
environment relies on a university system that churns out scientists bent on
dominating and managing the natural world for the benefit of the economy
In and of itself, Nature is meaningless unless or until particular human beings assign significance to it by interpreting some of its many
ambivalent signs as meaningful to them. The outcomes of this activity, however, are inescapably indeterminate, or at least, they are a culturally
contingent function of who decodes which signs when and how they find decisive meaning there. Because human beings will
observe natural patterns differently, choose to accentuate some, while deciding to ignore others,
Nature's meanings always will be multiple and unfixed.1 Such interpretive acts only construct
contestable textual fields, which are read on various levels of expression for their manifest and latent meanings. Before
scientific disciplines or industrial technologies turn its matter and energy into products, Nature
already is being transformed by discursive interpretation into "natural resources ." And, once Nature is
rendered intelligible through these discursive processes, it can be used to legitimize many political
projects. One vital site for generating, accumulating and then circulating such discursive knowledge
about Nature, as well as determining which particular human beings will be empowered to interpret Nature to society, is the modern
research university. As the primary structure for credentialling individual learners and legitimating collective teachings, graduate
programs at such universities do much to construct our understanding of the natural world. Over the past generation, graduate
programs in environmental science on many American university campuses have become the main source of new
representations of "the environment" as well as the home base for those scientific disciplines that
study Nature's meanings. Indeed, a new environmental episteme has evolved over the past three
decades, allowing new schools of environmental studies either to be established de novo or to be reorganized out of existing bits and pieces
of agriculture, forestry, science or policy studies programs. In turn, these educational operations now routinely produce
professional-technical workers with the specific knowledge--as it has been scientifically validated--and
the operational power--as it is institutionally constructed--to cope with "the environmental crisis" on
what are believed to be sound scientific and technical grounds. Still, graduate teaching in schools of the
environment has little room for other social objectives beyond the rationalizing performativity norms
embedded at the core of the current economic regime . To understand the norms used by this regulatory regime, as
Lyotard asserts, "the State and/or company must abandon the idealist and humanist narratives of
legitimation in order to justify the new goals: in the discourse of today's financial backers of research,
the only credible goal is power. Scientists, technicians, and instruments are purchased not to find
truth, but to augment power."2This chapter asks how specialized discourses about Nature, or "the environment,"
are constructed by American university programs in graduatelevel teaching and research by professional-technical
experts as disciplinary articulations of "eco-knowledge" to generate performative disciplinary systems
of "geo-power" over, but also within and through, Nature in the managerial structures of modern
economies and societies. The critical project of Michel Foucault--particularly his account of how discursively formed disciplines
operate inside regimes of truth as systems of governmentality--provides a basis for advancing this critical reinterpretation. These
continuously institutionalized attempts to capture and contain the forces of Nature by operationally
deploying advanced technologies, and thereby linking many of Nature's apparently intrinsic structures
and processes to strategies of highly rationalized environmental management as geo-power, develops
out of university-level "environmental studies" as a strategic supplement to various modes of bio-
power defined by existing academic "human studies" in promoting the growth of modern urban-industrial populations. 3 Moreover,
the rules of economic performativity now count far more materially in these interventions than do
those of ecological preservation.
“Science” as environmental management is corrupt – programs focus on marketability

and profitability, which encourages resouce-oriented views of the environment –
turns the case
The discursive reconstruction of the environment around these "three Rs" as an ensemble of technocratic sites for
managerialist intervention, according to such graduate schools, is quite significant, because, as Yale's Dean of
Forestry and Environmental Studies suggests, their faculties have a long history of socializing
"generations of leaders of government agencies, university faculties, and private forest products
companies."44 Moreover, such training purports to engage "the broad range of issues of environmental conservation and protection"
through "the inclusion of biological, physical, and social science perspectives to provide basis for realistic, effective approaches to what are
often subtle and complex issues."45 One sees the performativity agenda operating at each one of these graduate schools of the environment.
Berkeley's now allegedly much more performative Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management was formed from a merger
of five pre-existing, and much less performative, academic units: Conservation and Resource Studies, Entomological Sciences, Forestry and
Resource Management, Plant Pathology, and Soil Science. The rhetoric of its recruitment claims "each former department had world
recognized expertise in disciplines relevant to natural resource and environmental issues," but that now, united as one, the Berkeley operation
creates "a single academic unit which combines both disciplinary and interdisciplinary graduate education" capable of integrating "the
biological, social, and physical sciences to provide advanced education in basic and applied environmental sciences" as well as conducting
"research into the structure and function of ecosystems at the molecular through the ecosystem levels and their interlinked human social
systems."46 Such discursive framing of the environment as an integrated system of systems has, like those used by Berkeley's distinguished
faculty, the multidisciplinary scope to help "raise 14 the environmental and scientific literacy of all students on the Berkeley campus" as well as
to develop among its graduate classes "the intellectual leadership required to conserve and wisely manage the earth's resources."47 To
certify the "diversity of its programs and employability of its graduates," the Nicholas School of the
Environment at Duke also openly discloses "the placements and activities of Environment graduates"
as that prospective professionals might assess "the effectiveness and marketability" of its programs .48
Like California-Berkeley, Yale, and Colorado State, Duke wants to prove how
resource/risk/recreationist managerialism pay off for rising new professionals . Because professional-
technical employment is the key validation of such preparation for managing terrestrial infrastructures, the
Nicholas School takes great pains to show how avidly its graduates are sought by public, private and
non-profit organizations as "environmental professionals." Despite a very competitive labor market, Duke asserts
"ninety percent of the graduates secured a position directly or closely related to their environmental training following graduation," while it
also found 73 different organizations hiring first-year students as summer interns."49 Those
who continue to imagine all
environmentalists as some sort of countercultural resistance fighters only need to consult the
Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke to get a sense of where academic environmental studies
actually lead. While some of its graduates--only 16 percent--end up working for advocacy nonprofits, like the Rain Forest Alliance, World
Wildlife Fund, or Chesapeake Bay Foundation, many also find positions with staid groups like Worldwatch, the Nature Conservancy or the
National Geographic Society. Another 32 percent work for federal and state governments, and 42 percent work for private consulting and
industrial firms, like ABT Association, ERM, Inc., ICF Kaiser International, General Motors, Texaco, or Westvaco Corporation.50 The
key
validation of academic environmental studies at Duke is wholly careerist: good placement and
respectable salaries for newly graduated natural resource professionals. Marketability of their labor
equals effectiveness for their education. The performative truths such schools impart must be valid;
otherwise, big business, federal agencies, and global NGOs would not drop by to recruit their
graduates. Their training in Ecotoxicology and Risk Assessment, Resource Economics or Forest Resource Management does not stress post-
anthropocentric deep ecology; likewise, the Nicholas School will not count holistic New Age Deep Ecology Studies among its in-house graduate
programs.
Technoscientific truths are those tied to reproducing environmental studies as the coda of
careerist knowledge and professional power.
The aff’s claims of scientific knowledge are the product of a university system that
resourcifies Nature, turning it into standing reserve for the purpose of economic
growth, all while maintaining the façade of preservation – don’t believe their claims to
absolute truth
Before scientific disciplines and industrial technologies turn its' matter and energy into products,
nature must be transformed by discursive processes into natural resources . Once nature is rendered
intelligible through such practices, it is used to legitimize many political projects . I think one site for generating,
accumulating, and circulating such knowledge about nature, as well as determining which human beings will be to society, is the modern
research university, where we sit. As a primary structure for credentialing individual learners and legitimating
collective teaching, universities help to construct our understanding of the natural world. Over the past
generation, advanced study in environmental sciences on many university campuses , especially in the United
States, has become a key source of key representations for the environment , as well as the home base of those
scientific disciplines that generate analyses of nature's meanings. These educational operations also produce eco-
managerialists, or those professional technical workers with specific knowledge as it has been
scientifically or organizationally validated, and the operational power as it is institutionally
constructed in governments at various levels, to cope with "environmental problems" on what are
believed to be sound scientific and technical grounds . Professional technical experts working on and off campus create
disciplinary articulations of various knowledge to generate performative techniques of power over, but also within and through, what is worked
up as nature in the managerial structures of modern economies and societies .
These institutionalized attempts to capture
and contain the forces of nature underpin the strategies of eco-managerialism. Techno-scientific
knowledge about the environment, however, is and always has been evolving with changing
interpretive fashions, shifting political agendas, developing scientific advances . Such variations, as Foucault
asserts designate a will to knowledge that is anonymous, polymorphous, and susceptible to regular transformations, and determined by the
play of identifiable dependencies. What are some of these dependencies and perhaps some of these transformations? In this polymorphous
combination of anonymous scientific environmental knowledge, with organized market and state power, as Foucault indicates, we find that it
traverses and produces things. It needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through the whole social body, much more than a
negative instance, whose function is repression. Schools of environmental studies and colleges of natural resources
often provide the networks in which the relations of this productive power set the categories of
knowledge and the limits of professional practice through the training of eco-managerialism . In accord
with the prevailing regimes of truth within science, academic centres of environmental studies reproduce these
bodies of practice and types of discourse, which in turn the executive personnel managing
contemporary state and social institutions, what they regard as objective, valid, or useful, to facilitate
economic growth. From these discourses, one can define, as Foucault suggests, the way in which individuals or groups represent words
to themselves, utilize their forms and meanings, compose real discourse, reveal and conceal it in what they are thinking or saying, perhaps
unknown to themselves, more or less than they wish, but in any case leaving massive verbal traces of those thoughts which must be deciphered
and restored as far as possible in their representative vivacity. So given these tendencies, might we look at the workings of eco-managerialism?
Where life, labour, and language can join in a discourse of environmental studies, one finds another formation of power knowledge which
shows how man and his being can be concerned with the things he knows, and know the things that in positivity determine his mode of being in
highly vocalized academic constructions of "the environment." Instead, the
environment emerges in part as a historical
artifact of expert management that is constructed by these kinds of scientific interventions . And in
this network of interventions, there is a simulation of spaces and intensification of resources and
incitement of discoveries, and a formation of special knowledges that strengthen the control that can
be linked to one another as the impericities of nature for academic environmental sciences and
studies. And probably in many ways, the key impericity here I would say, is the process of what I call the
resourcification of nature. How does nature get turned into resources? The new impericities behind
eco-managerialism more or less presumes that the role of nature is one of a rough and ready
resourcification for the global economy and national society . That is, the earth must be re-imagined to
be little more than a standing reserve, a resource supply centre, a waste reception site . Once presented in
this fashion, nature then provides human markets with many different environmental sites for the
productive use of resourcified flows of energy, information, and matter, as well as the sinks, dumps,
and wastelands for all of the by-products that commercial products leave behind. Nature then is
always a political asset. Still, its fungiblization, its liquidification, its capitalization, and eco-
managerialism cannot occur without the work of experts whose resourcifying activities prep it,
produce it, and then provide it in the global marketplace . The trick in natural resources or
environmental affairs education is to appear to be conservationist, while moving in fact, many times,
very fast to help fungiblize, liquefy, or capitalize natural resources for a more thorough, rapid, and
perhaps intensive utilization.
Science’s self-representation as exact predetermines its own answers – turns the

world into always already measurable standing reserve
Heidegger 54 (Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, Chapter 1: “The Question Concerning
Technology,” http://simondon.ocular-witness.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/question_concerning_technology.pdf, p.10-11)
It remains true, nonetheless, thatman in the technological age is, in a particularly striking way, challenged forth into
revealing. That revealing concerns nature, above all, as the chief storehouse of the standing energy reserve.
Accordingly, man’s ordering attitude and behavior display themselves first in the rise of modern physics
as an exact science. Modern science’s way of representing pursues and entraps nature as a calculable
coherence of forces. Modern physics i by7hys not experimental physics because it applies apparatus to the questioning of nature.
Rather the reverse is true. Because physics, indeed already as pure theory, sets nature up to exhibit itself as a
coherence of forces calculable in advance , it therefore orders its experiments precisely for the
purpose of asking whether and how nature reports itself when set up in this way. But after all, mathematical
physics arose almost two centuries before technology. How, then, could it have already been set upon by modern technology and placed in its
service? The facts testify to the contrary. Surely technology got under way only when it could be supported by exact physical science. Reckoned
chronologically, this is correct. Thought historically, it does not hit upon the truth. The
modern physical theory of nature
prepares the way first not simply for technology but for the essence of modern technology. For
already in physics the challenging gathering-together into ordering revealing holds sway . But in it that
gathering does not yet come expressly to appearance. Modern physics is the herald of Enframing , a herald whose origin is still
unknown. The essence of modern technology has for a long time been concealing itself, even where power machinery has been invented,
where electrical technology is in full swing, and where atomic technology is well under way. All coming to presence, not only modern
technology, keeps itself everywhere concealed to the last.19
Science reduces everything to the calculable – things that aren’t quantifiable for
human benefit become nonreal, and measurement allows for control
Padrutt 09(Hanspeter Padrutt, Heidegger and the Earth: Essays in Environmental Philosophy 2nd, expanded edition, “Heidegger and
Ecology,” p. 24)
Shifting from the Objectifying Subject to Dasein and Its Connection to Ecology In the Zahringen Seminar of 1973, Heidegger said that the basic
thrust in Being and Time is a shifting, whereby what philosophy up to now has displaced into the self-enclosed place of consciousness is shifted
into the open expanse of the Da (S 385).9 For example, if I now think of the Freiburg Cathedral - an example often used by Heidegger - then
what is given to me in this imaging is the cathedral itself, out there on the cathedral grounds, and not a representation of it in my consciousness
or in my brain. The place of consciousness is the place of the objectifying Cartesian subject. This subject,
the 'thinking substance' of the 'I think therefore I am,' tyrannically brings objects before itself . It
stands in the centre, 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 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 during the Renaissance) - this perspectival
'world view' - is inextricably linked with the emergence of the method of natural science grounded in
mathematics. The self-certain domination of the subject and the objectifying method that yields
certainty belong together; together they form what I would call 'objectifying subjectivism.' The
objectifying method - wanting to measure and calculate everything, for the sake of certainty - yearns
to reduce everything that exists to measurable and calculable quantities . Weight, distance, and
duration were most amenable to exact measurement; but then 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 one-dimensional time, thought of 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; repeatable experimenting and
engineering set forth on its triumphal procession, accompanied by the interpretation of nature and
the whole world as a machine. In objectifying subjectivism, human beings see themselves as 'masters
and owners of nature' and the world as a gigantic machine . Finally, the objectifying turns back to the
subject and, with the machine now supreme, itself is interpreted more and more exclusively as a
functional, psychosomatic apparatus.
science leadership/stem link
The aff’s obsession with international leadership is a form of technological machine
domination – the machine of their nationalism colonizes and enframes other
populations and environments in service of the almighty nation
As Liah Greenfeld asserts, "nationalism is a form of social consciousness, a way of cognitive and moral
organization of reality. As such it represents the foundation of the moral order of modern society , the
source of its values, the framework of its characteristic national-identity, and the basis of social integration in it."56 Once nationalism is
accorded this critical status, either explicitly or implicitly, its
sources of social integration, frameworks of identity, and
premises of moral order become embedded in its social systems and most of its technical artifacts . As
the social consciousness of a national human population fuses with nonhuman material artifacts, a
"machination" begins to roll alongside the nation. Machinations can be seen as machinic collectives of
humans and nonhumans colonizing the territorial spaces of countries with the rational design of
artificial contrivances, creating both new environmental niches and social networks through the
subpolitical systems underpinning contemporary life.57 Every machinational network deliberately
reshapes the random motion of bodies in space into a more intentional assemblage of parts capable
of transmitting forces, motions, and energies from one to another in some predetermined matter
capable of serving some desired end.58 Machines, as Lewis Mumford claims, are "combinations of resistant bodies arranged so
that the forces of nature can be put to work through determinant motions."59 The machination develops its own dynamics
out of the complex coexistence of subject/object in the agencies and structures of human societies,
whose history, economic, and culture are reshaped by the machinic ends and means used "for
converting energy, for performing work, for enlarging the mechanical or sensory capacities of the
human body, or for reducing to a measurable order and regularity the processes of life." 6
Machinations, following David Nye, are not simply systems of technics with particular functions; they are integral parts of a
social world that shapes, and in turn is shaped by, these larger techno- systemic processes . As Nye claims,
"each technology is an extension of human lives: someone makes it, someone owns it, some oppose it, many use it, and all interpret it."61 At
the same time, each human life rests upon the iterations of each given mechanical extension as its action makes someone, possesses someone,
resists someone, and translates someone within its determinant motions and design.
"Nature" and "Culture" coevolve in
environments of power and knowledge, while humanity fashions nonhumanity to frame its work and
leisure in communities of machinically enabled beings. Creation's waters and lands, once gripped in
modernity's environizing exchanges, were harnessed for a more narrow and definite purpose: to
move wheels and multiply society's capacity for work. To live was to work: what other life indeed do
machines know? Faith had at last found a new object, not the moving of mountains, but the moving of engines and machines. Power:
the application of power to motion, and the application of motion to production, and of production to money-making, and so the further
increase of power this was the worthiest object that a mechanical habit of mind and a mechanic mode of action put before men. The
ultimate motive force behind many interenvironmental conflicts can be explained only by examining
machinational dynamics, like the anxieties of car-loving Canadians fearing a world in which the
Chinese could enjoy automobile ownership at per- capita levels approaching those now found in
North America. Even with these fears, parts suppliers and assembly plants in Canada plan to grow with the car builders of Japan and
North America who are still intent upon putting China on wheels. So the big picture for machinationalists of many stripes
always is revealing new plans and mechanisms for environmental transformation as they employ the
motion of people in the design of machines in search of power, profit, and prestige .63
sustainable development link
The logic of sustainable development is rooted in economic growth – the aff frames
the environment as a resource only worth preserving insofar as it is beneficial to them
A political, economic, and technical incitement to talk about ecology , environments, and Nature, first
surfaced as the social project of "environmentalism" during the 1960s in the United States, but it plainly has become far more
pronounced in the 1990s. Not much of this takes the form of general theory, because most of its practices have been instead steered
toward analysis, stock taking, and classification in quantitative, causal, and humanistic studies. Nonetheless, one can follow Foucault by
exploring how mainstream environmentalism in the United States operates as "a whole series of different
tactics that combined in varying proportions the objective of disciplining the body and that of
regulating populations."3 The project of "sustainability," whether one speaks of sustainable
development, growth or use in relation to Earth's ecologies, embodies this new responsibility for the
life processes in the American state's rationalized harmonization of political economy with global
ecology as a form of green geo-politics. These interconnections become even more intriguing in the aftermath of the Cold War.
Having won the long twilight struggle against communist totalitarianism, the United States is governed by leaders who now
see "Earth in the balance," arguing that global ecologies incarnate what is best and worst in the
human spirit. On the one hand, economists, industrialists, and political leaders increasingly tend to
represent the strategic terrain of the post-1991 world system as one on which all nations must compete
ruthlessly to control the future development of the world economy by developing new technologies, dominating
more markets, and exploiting every national economic asset. However, the phenomenon of "failed states," ranging
from basket cases like Rwanda, Somalia or Angola to crippled entities like Ukraine, Afghanistan or
Kazakhstan, often is attributed to the severe environmental frictions associated with the (un)wise
(ab)use of Nature by ineffective strategies for creating economic growth.4 Consequently, environmental
protection issues--ranging from resource conservation to sustainable development to ecosystem restoration--are getting greater
consideration in the name of creating jobs, maintaining growth, or advancing technological
development. Taking "ecology" into account, then, creates discourses on "the environment" that
derive not only from morality, but from rationality as well. As humanity has faced "the limits of growth" and heard "the
population bomb" ticking away, ecologies and environments became something more than what one must judge morally; they
became things that state must administer. Ecology has evolved into "a public potential; it called for management procedures;
it had to be taken charge of by analytical discourses," as it was recognized in its environmentalized manifestations to be "a police matter"--"not
the repression of disorder, but an ordered maximization of collective and individual forces."5
The logic of sustainability puts the observers in charge of managing and packaging the
entire world into controllable systems – drives enframing of Nature around humanity
and biopolitical control of populations
To avoid this collapse of ecological throughput, consummativity as consumptiveness must end. Human
beings must slow their
increasing mass populations, halt wasteful resource-intensive modes of production, and limit
excessive levels of material consumption. All of these ends, in turn, require a measure of surveillance
and degree of navigational steering beyond the powers of modern nation-states , but perhaps not
beyond those exercised by some postmodern worldwatch engaged in the disciplinary tasks of
equilibriating the "net primary production" of solar energy fixed by photosynthesis in the four
systems to global consummativity as consummation . Natural resources in the total solar economy of food stocks,
fisheries, forest preserves, and grass lands are rhetorically ripped from Nature only to be returned as
consummationally-framed environmental resources, enveloped in accounting procedures and
encircled by managerial programs. Worldwatching presumes to know all of this, and in knowing it, to
have mastered all of its economic/ecological implications through its authoritative technical analysis
to perfect consumption as the would-be warden of this planetary solar economy . By questioning the old truth
regime of mere consumptive growth, a new regime of consummation for a much more sophisticated ecological
economy stands ready to reintegrate human production and consumption in balance with the four
biological systems. No longer Nature, not merely ecosystem, the terraforming of our world under this kind of
watch truly reduces it to strategic spaces. As "an environment," ringed by many ecological knowledge centers dedicated to the
rational management of its assets, the global ecosystem is to be understood through the disciplinary codes of
green operational planning. The health of global populations as well as the survival of the planet itself
allegedly necessitate that a bioeconomic spreadsheet be draped over consummativity on Earth,
generating an elaborate set of accounts for a terraforming economy of global reach and local scope .
Hovering over the world in their scientifically-centered astropanopticon of green surveillance, the
disciplinary grids of efficiency and waste, health and disease, poverty and wealth as well as
employment and unemployment. Fusing geo-economics with geo-politics, Brown, Flavin and Postel declare "the once separate
issues of environment and development are now inextricably linked."80 Indeed, they are, at least, in the discourses of Worldwatch Institute as
its experts survey Nature-in-crisis by auditing levels of topsoil depletion, air pollution, acid rain, global
warming, ozone destruction, water pollution, forest reduction, and species extinction brought on by
excessive mass consumption. Worldwatch terraforming would govern through things, and the ends things
serve, by restructuring today's ecologically unsound system of objects through elaborate managerial
designs to realize tomorrow's environmentally sustainable economy in the ecologically perfected
objects of that environmentalized system. The shape of an environmental economy would emerge from a reengineered
economy of environmentalizing practices vetted by worldwatching codes. The individual human subject of today, and all of
his or her things with their unsustainable practices, would be reshaped through a consummational
environmentality, redirected by practices, discourses, and ensembles of administration that more
efficiently synchronize the bio-powers of populations with the geo-powers of environments . To police
global carrying capacity, in turn, this environmentalizing logic would direct each human subject to assume the much less capacious carriage of
disciplinary frugality instead of affluent suburban abundance. All
of the world must come under this watch, and the
global watch would police its human charges to dispose of their things and arrange their ends--in
reengineered spaces using new energies at new jobs and leisures--around these post-consumptive
agendas. Sustainability, like sexuality, would become another expert discourse about exerting power over
life.81 What the biopower strategies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries helped fabricate in terms of human sexuality now must be
reimagined for humanity in worsening global conditions of survival as a perfected consummative survivalism. How development might "invest
life through and through" becomes a new sustainability challenge, once biopolitical relations are established, in making these investments
permanently profitable as consummational systems of objects.82 Thus, theWorldwatch Institute issues pamphlet after
monograph after book on the supreme virtues of bicycles, solar power, windmills, urban planning, or
organic agriculture to reveal the higher forms of consumer goods perfection attainable by the system
of objects. Moreover, sustainability more or less presumes that some level of material and cultural existence has been attained that is
indeed worth sustaining. This formation, then, constitutes "a new distribution of pleasures, discourses, truths, and powers; it has to be seen as
the self-affirmation of one class rather than the enslavement of another: a defense, a protection, a strengthening, and an exaltation...as a
means of social control and political subjugation."83 Sustainable
development means developing new consummative
powers through defining a new model of green subjectivity organized around sustaining both new
object worlds in a more survivable second nature and new consummational systems for their
surviving subjects. B.
state link
Putting environmental policy in the hands of the state turns it into the ultimate police
state – regulates and controls environmental processes and human beings alike
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 enviro-discipline, eco-knowledge,
geo-power.120 Few sites in the system of objects unify these forces as thoroughly as the purchase of objects from the system of purchases.
Mobilizing biological power, then, accelerates exponentially after 1970 along with global fast
capitalism. Ecology becomes one more 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
technology link
Science is the root cause of environmental degradation. By providing the theoretical
justifications for environmental extraction, science has become a tool of political
power whose main purpose is to maintain political stability.
Luke 2k (Timothy Luke, “One-Dimensional Man: a Systematic Critique of Human Domination and Nature-Society Relations,” Organization
& Environment V13 N1)
Seeing how our existing economy and society is only one possible project among many potential projects for living, Marcuse (1964) is disturbed
deeply by how fully “advanced industrial society is a political universe, the latest stage in the realization of
a specific historical project-—namely, the experience, transformation, and organization of nature as
the mere stuff of domination” (p. xlviii). The productivity of this global order now stabilizes social
contradictions and political conflicts by exhausting the Earth’s environments (Commoner, 1971). “In
the medium of technology,” Marcuse (1964) claims, “culture, politics, and the economy merge into an
omnipresent system which shallows up or repulses all alternatives . . . technological rationality has
become political rationality” (p. xlviii). For Marcuse, nature itself, as it suffers under ever more
effective technological controls, has become another tool for the control of humanity . Thus, ecologies
are, ironically, an extended arm of society and its power. When one talks about the question of revolutionary
transformation, seeking the radical transformation of nature becomes an integral part of working toward
the same transformation of society (Luke, 1999). Marcuse approaches these questions with real sophistication. Very simple
oppositions too often divide nature from society (Manes, 1990). One either must side entirely with the agendas of social rationalization and the
cynical conservation of nature to promote economic production or one must push for wildness, greenness, and other sorts of authentic natural
the complex confusion of nature and society mediates
qualities. Marcuse looks past these divisions and shows how
both the domination of nature and the domination of people. Marcuse’s reading of science and technology in One-
Dimensional Man turns these forces into basic environmental features. Ultimately, Marcuse (1964) believes science, as it operates in
contemporary, advanced industrial society, is the decisive source of those theories and practices that
mediate human domination through nature's domination. The procedures of operational science
anchor “the internal instrumentalist character of this scientific rationality by virtue of which it is a priori
technology, and the a priori of a specific technology-—namely, technology as a form of social control and domination”
(pp. 157-158). As it developed with modern entrepreneurial capitalism and nationalistic statism across
Western Europe, the inherent technological instrumentalism of science absorbed many destructive
social ends into its operations. As Marcuse (1964) suggests, The principles of modern science were a
priori structured in such a way that they could serve as conceptual instruments for a universe of self-
propelling, productive control; theoretical operationalism came to correspond to practical operational-
ism. The scientific method which led to the ever-more-effective domination of nature thus came to
provide the pure concepts as well as the instrumentalities for the ever-more-effective domination of
man by man through the domination of nature. Theoretical reason, remaining pure and neutral,
entered into the service of practical reason. The merger proved beneficial to both. Today, domination
perpetuates and extends itself not only through technology but as technology, and the latter provides
the great legitimation of the expanding political power, which absorbs all spheres of culture, (p. 158)
Captured within these operational constraints and goals, Marcuse (1964) sees science now developing
such that “the liberating force of technology—the instru-mentalization of things—turns into a fetter of
liberation; the instrumentalization of man” (p. 159).
Technology and its use for political ends have become a mutually reinforcing cycle,
subordinating reason and science for the instrumentalization of the Earth. Nature
becomes part of the technical apparatus that only supports the further development
of science.
Luke 2k (Timothy Luke, “One-Dimensional Man: a Systematic Critique of Human Domination and Nature-Society Relations,” Organization
& Environment V13 N1)
Arguing in a fashion that still surpasses many contemporary academic debates about the nature/society divide, Marcuse suggests that our
understanding of natural and social environments are wholly a product of our cultural, political, and technological means of organization within
domination of humanity and the Earth unfold in the
the capitalist mode of production. For Marcuse (1964), the
technified economies of science that provide the pure concepts as well as the instrumentalities for the
ever-more-effective domination of man by man through the domination of nature. Theoretical reason,
remaining pure and neutral, entered into the service of practical reason. . . . Today, domination
perpetuates and extends itself not only through technology but as technology, and the latter provides
the great legitimation of the expanding political power, which absorbs all spheres of culture. As Latour
(1987) suggests, nature now is difficult to untangle from science, and science mostly generates a nature
that can be dominated. In this trade-off, humanity can be better controlled through the one-dimensional
comfort of consumption. Nature does not die (Merchant, 1980) so much as it is reincarnated as part and parcel of
“the technical apparatus of production and destructio n which sustains and improves the life of
individuals while subordinating them to the masters of the apparatus”.
warming link
Warming was caused by an inauthentic being in the world, but the affirmative’s
technological solutions will only further it – human geoengineering supposes Nature is
something rational and controllable
Ironically, as Pickering would have it, one could argue that the history of industrialization already has ridden “the flows of becoming” as “the
detached dualism between men and nature” has been first thrown askew and then next knit again together as rising levels of greenhouse gases
spew forth from humans, animals, plants, and machines without “any Mondrianesque superstructure” (Pickering and Guzik, 2008: 10). Hence ,
is humanity in some sense already “being de Kooning” in a decentered, diffuse, and dispersed manner
that accelerates global warming in one dance of agency. Now, and with perhaps more irony, however,
this anarchic effort to dominate Nature through burning fossil fuels behind decentered ontologies for
becoming richer with more carbon-intensive energy systems is now prompting fresh calls for more
rational planning, technological innovation, and big science to be used in a dominating, detached, and
disciplining mobilization of geoengineers. Until now, these efforts probably have mistaken, as Heidegger
puts it, “the correct for the true” (Pickering and Guzik, 2008: 9), but these trends are deeply embedded in social practices. One can
wonder about Pickering‟s slightly contorted rhetorical offerings. At times, they might not seem to be worth the effort, but he still does have a
point. The dilemmas here are many. Neither Mondrian nor de Kooning has been truly hegemonic as allegorical markers of technics-in-action,
but devotees in the technosciences of both of them have united various counter-hegemonic alliances intent upon producing ecological disaster.
Even though today‟s complex petroleum-powered technologies are all co-producing their powers and
plans together, they show that the tactics we have for “being in the world” as greenhouse gassers
mostly are failing. Certainly, at times, “it can indeed be better to go with the flow” (Pickering and Guzik, 2008: 11), but the past six or
seven decades of energy use call this position into question. Even so, the history of fossil fuel combustion, which is being
done with more and more Mondrianesque detachment and domination, also apparently is a failed
one. Now, at times, it might indeed be worse to impose on the Earth‟s unstable atmosphere with its rising
levels of greenhouse gases “a dualist Mondrian-styleimpulse” for geoengineering some grand
“detached and timeless human conception of how it should be” (Pickering and Guzik, 2008: 6). Abstract expressionism
in both its nomadic vernaculars and royal formalisms perhaps is spinning up too many double binds when the dance of agency needs to find
quickly other answers in the mangle of practices. Pickering urges us to break “the spell of Mondrian” and embrace “a politics of experiment”
(Pickering and Guzik, 2008: 13), but industrial civilization actually has been in such a mode for nearly three centuries as carbon dioxide and
other greenhouse gases continue to accumulate at dangerously high levels with many adverse ecological effects. More problematically ,
to
correct this situation, would-be expert geoengineers invite us to return to recast the spell of Mondrian
in a bid to control the world, which is might not, in fact, be easily controllable due to its intrinsically
complex qualities. After centuries of being otherwise, can this new vision of technics become pace de Kooning, “a kind of engineering in
the thick of things--the development of technologies that would be light on their feet; a form of adaptive engineering based upon open-ended,
forward-looking searches through spaces of possibility that could not be exhaustively foreseen” (Pickering and Guzik, 2008: 12). And, pace
Mondrian, rapid climate change 18 might seem to dictate that “we need to remake the world again, materially as well as representationally” in
ways that will “inevitably lead to shifts in our ways of conducting ourselves in the world.” Vernacular geoengineering amid the anarchy of
capitalist markets, however, already does lead at local levels to a Mondrianesque modernity of rationalized carbon-intensive development. Can
formalist geoengineering from the centers of authority, on more national or global levels, now lead to a “de Kooninged” remodernization of
balanced decarbonizing developmentalism that can “imaginatively and critically explore the open-ended spaces of the world‟s possibility”
(Pickering and Guzik, 2008: 13)? The state of exception now apparently upon us perhaps allows for no other options, and it is fair enough to say
there are no guarantees. Maybe Pickering‟s allegories are useful. What begins as Mondrian soon will be de Kooning, and one perhaps must
trust that de Kooning-like “becoming” for technoscience can be survived so that all might thrive with more Mondrian-like order? They are open
questions, but everyone must be cautious about coming to closure about them soon.
The aff’s technological solutions to warming create a state of emergency that justifies
total state control and management of the environment - creates unprecedented
levels of environmental management
Without recourse to citing William James, today‟s

responses to global warming , as Al Gore and so many others have intimated,
is quite frequently regarded as being the moral equivalent of war. Indeed, Michaelson asserts
“Developing technology to affect the climate directly--a Climate Change Manhattan Project--can work
(1998: 79). Declaring climate change to constitute an extreme state of emergency, in turn, becomes their
rhetorical basis for redirecting government to operate at the edge of emergency state extremism. As
Graeme Wood (2009) notes with regard to many geoengineering proposals that have been floated as trial balloons, and they appear to be
surviving the trial: “just a decade ago, every one of these schemes was considered outlandish. Some still seem that way. But what sounded
crankish only 10 years ago is now becoming mainstream thinking” [http://www.theatlantic.com.prx.bewoopi.com/200907/climate-
engineering]. The ever-present willingness in society to even listen to enviro cranks or heed such
ecological managers is attended by a constant evocation of continual uncertainty and great risk in
launching of any geoengineering strategy. As the Committee on Science, Engineering and Public Policy (COSEPUP)
records in a tepid disclosure of such activities: “engineered countermeasures need to be evaluated
but should not be implemented without broad understanding of the direct effects and potential side
effects, the ethical issues, and the risks” [http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=1605&page=433]. The banality of this
forewarning is disturbing inasmuch as it would apply to practically any response to any engineering
problem; but, what is more, given the state of the knowledge about climate change, countermeasures
to check it and the nested ethical conundrums at issue here are quite sketchy . Hence, one finds all sorts
of wild proposals with ultimately unknown risks and tremendous uncertainty being touted as worthy
options being advanced behind the thin shield of these “ethical concerns.” Mainstreaming the
thinking of apparent cranks accentuates this tendency towards slipping into emergency state
extremism. In a fairly matter-of-fact account, for example, COSEPUP once outlined succinctly a set of ecological
equivalent of war planning scenarios for combating global warming that included massive crash programs for:
 Storing carbon in trees  Increasing ocean absorption of carbon dioxide  Screening out some
sunlight  Atmospheric chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) removal All of these actions seem fairly benign, but
the political strategies and economic tactics for attaining their objectives then become almost unreal .
With regard to reforestation, for example, COSEPUP argues terrestrial biota and soils store 2,280,000 megatons (Mt) by drawing down “carbon
in the atmosphere” (1992: 437). By 1990, the USA had lost 25 percent of its forest cover since 1492, so COSEPUP outlines a crash program for
urban and rural reforestation using plantation pines, hybrid cottonwoods or American sycamores on intensively cultivated plots. They might be
able “to sequester up to 720 Mt of carbon “on economically marginal and environmentally sensitive pasture and croplands and nonfederal
forestlands” (COSEPUP, 1992: 440). Such a CO2 campaign might have sequestered over 55 percent of the USA‟s emissions in the 1990s with
many positive secondary effects; but, this effort essentially would also require the creation of a “sivicultural
state” to plant, plant, and program millions of trees pulled into these mass mobilizations of
siviculturalized CO2 sinks. Where the land, water, labor, capital, and energy for making this move will
come from is never made evident. It seems that it will just happen. More recent, and almost incredible,
proposals call for building millions of solar-powered CO2 capturing “artificial trees,” also could be
done. There short-run advantages are legion. Such bionic biota could be “planted” or “placed” in any built or unbuilt
environment, and often closer to points of carbon dioxide production like freeways, power plants or suburban housing tracts. Yet, the
various qualities of the new government agency needed to serve such forests truly boggle the mind
(Luke, 2009), and they are never discussed (the market supposedly will provide a solution).
Large-scale warming solutions normalize the everyday decisions that cause warming
and prevent solvency – their attempted management will inevitably fail and lead to a
“green governmentality” of control
At one level, the

contemporary effort to organize a geoengineering consensus around the endorsement of
various grand strategies for mitigating the apparently worsening effects of GHG emissions can be seen
a fascinating exercise in ideological mystification (Schelling, 1996). It deflects recognition of the fact that
geoengineering designs are, in fact, planned intentional efforts at (re)geoengineering a planetary
system already being engineering in a vernacular fashion out of the unplanned, unintended neglect of
millions of design and market decisions embedded in the fossil fuel cycle. At minimum, modern industrial
pollutants started building up today‟s global greenhouse effect in the eighteenth century, which scientists soon detected, named, and
measured throughout in the 19th century (Roberts, 1998). Global
warming via these anthropogenic sources of GHG is a
style of geoengineering, which works at the vernacular level. However, calling only current expert/formal/ordered
responses to these ill-effects of GHG “geoengineering” naturalizes and normalizes phenomena that
already always are at work in a fabricated mangle of anthropogenic by-products . On a second level,
treating these naturalized and normalized mangles of nature and society as a recombinant terra
incognita and terra nullis demanding greater technoscientific intervention and politico-economic
management in some kind of new enlightenment project distracts attention of fixing the crisis at the top of the
system via lay/informal/disorderly responses. Finding answers in solutions resorting to smaller-scale
conservation, resource non-use, and technical reengineering instead of seeking dramatic interventions
dependent upon larger-scale mitigation strategies, continued resource profligacy, and dodgy engineering might be the
best way to go. On a third level, most contemporary geoengineering plans appear to freeze today‟s time
and space as operational constants. In turn, they call for theoretical schemes from a panoply of tinkering
technicians whose only solutions are technical ones adduced in very short-run historical time (Lövbrand,
Stripple, and, Wima, 2008). Changing existing behaviors through conservation, redesign, reuse, and
reorganization, which would lower GHG emissions at all sources, is just not on the table. In fact,
nonanthropogenic events, ranging from volcanoes to asteroid impacts to massive fires or subtle shifts in solar radiation also can affect
considerable changes in climate at any given time on Earth, as they have repeatedly in geological time, these coincidences, should they occur,
could make any serious geoengineering program much less effective, far more invasive or essentially moot (Schneider, 1996). None of these
nonartificial events are well-understood or predictable, but it is known they have had comparable cooling effects on the Earth‟s climate when
looking back at the planet‟s geophysical past. In
too many troubling ways, geoengineering represents a path-
dependent response to a major crisis by turning to big science, big government, and big business for
legitimating an ecological state of emergency, authorizing a green mass mobilization or enabling a
new mode of governance in response to a conjectural challenge (Victor, Morgan, Granger, Apt, Steinbrunner, and
Ricke, 2009). Instead of rethinking all the way down the millions of distributed decisions , vernacular sources, and
everyday origins of greenhouse gassing, “the facts” of GHG emissions and global warming become a single
totalized challenge that only a super-sized and sustained technoscientific counter-offensive is likely to
check (Homer-Dixon, 2006). All of this might be true, but then who decides, when it will be decided, what
must be done, where the action should be started, and how it all will be directed? All of these worries
are key 33 political questions worthy of extended deliberation, but never really taken up very seriously by
geoengineering proponents. Doubt is, in fact, avoided, ignored or suppressed in the rapid reaction of
debating only the response in terms of our basic technoscientific expertise and capability. This skews the
debate in very perverse directions that empower once fringe area scientists and technologists to become the core of some new expertarchy to
combat global warming.
Whatever doubts arise about global warming‟s various causes and effects get
suspended in a rush to find the first, least expensive, and most effective counter-measures to respond
to GHG sources identified as the greatest threat at whatever moment some technoscientific
intervention is plausible and practicable . This entire of mangle of practice may well become tangles of malpractice, since the
perceived momentum in favor of some definite decision or mass mobilization take on a political life of their own--once these empowered
parties of experts define and expand their sphere of discretion and sense of determination. This rapid decarbonization agenda, in turn, can
distort costs associated with palliatives proposed by geoengineers. Real
complexity has to be modeled down to decision-
ready simplicity, but such explanatory exercises do not necessarily provide any secure grounds for
engineering responses with much certainty that a technical intervention will deliver workable, stable
and enduring solutions without their own unintended negative consequences. The systems being
stressed by GHG mitigation teams are coupled, complex, and chaotic, so advancing discrete, simple,
and mechanistic technics as the foundations for successful geoengineering promise to be a disastrous
counter-move.
war/realism link
The aff’s conception of war as something external to the state normalizes a theory of
IR that “environmentalizes” places and populations, making them capturable and
controllable for human benefit
Neorealist discourses of international relations fashion human sovereignty as the essential element
for overcoming international anarchy. Modern man becomes "the ideal of well-bounded rational identity, who would assert his
master over history and who would occupy the attentions of modern social science."9 Contemporary social scientists , working in
the neorealist realm, in turn, inno- cently tout the enduring imperatives of para helium in the state of nature.
Indeed, the figurations of war still counterbalance the figure of man: war continues as "an aleatory
domain of history that escapes the controlling influence of man's reasoned narratives and what is
known as dangerous, violent, and, therefore, anarchic."10 Along these lines of conceptual adhesion for man/war,
as Ashley notes, "is the sign of the state: the state as the modern focus of violence, with its back to the domestic space of man who legitimates
it by willingly submitting to the limitations it legislates and enforces, and turned to face the residual zone of historical indeterminacy still to be
forcefully brought under control in the name of reasoning man."11 Consequently, man
and the state accept the constraints
of a cohesive "inside" in order to survive the enduring anarchies prevailing "outside" every domestic
society's borders.12 This acceptance allegedly constitutes the autonomous always already active
imperative of "internationality," which compels any domestic society to submit to its state, directs
every state to organize its society to nurture rational men as its citizens, and empowers rational men
to control anarchy through war, or preparing for war, amid anarchy- avoiding domestic society .13 While
Kenneth Waltz's early Man, the State, and War privileges the identity of "man" over the historicity of "war," his later Theory of International
Politics seems to reverse this polarity to exalt "war" over "man" by showing the ways in which "the texture of international politics remains
highly constant, patterns recur, and events repeat themselves endlessly."14 To do this, Ashley maintains that Waltz ignores the unstable but
constant elements of transversality that eventuate so much of what international and domestic politics really are. This move can be made only
outside of history, so the identity of the agency involved cannot be easily detected, much less questioned. Man, the State, and War connected
its lineage to the originary foundationalism of the Enlightenment, whose rational identity for "man" existed separate from, prior to, and
deeper than "war."15 Waltz's Theory of International Politics turns "man" into "a scriptableobject" who is
"from the very outset introduced and preserved as a site, an object, and, in its determinable
paradigmatic content, an effect of 'war.'"16 All of this is done to reposition indeterminate forces and
struggles within decidable boundaries between "inside" and "outside," the "domestic" and the
"international," the "social" and the "state," "sovereignty" and "anarchy." To assess the relations of nations
globally, we have been directed by IR discourse to study the division of humanity into nations and then
explain the causes of human conflict and cooperation by looking into these dynamics of national action.17
To comprehend interenvironmental relations, however, we must understand why the world's
territory is divided by humanity into nations, countries, and states as well as how nonhumanity is
being separated into many distinct artificial and natural environments, which then tend to be,
strangely enough, nationally articulated, exploited, and managed. Smith accurately documents the division of labor,
but he ignored the attendant ongoing "labor of division," such as these foundational oppositions, that it instantiates. The labors of such
division, however, account for many of today's environmental crises and contradictions. Reassessing
the global market's environizing powers helps explain how nonhuman forces and structures become
entangled in a national/postnational/sub- national/supranational pattern of global transformation .
Even though the structures of human nationality are working to capture and control the environment
as nonhuman nationality, their good, or ill, ecological effects are mostly registered internationally.
impact
subjugation
The managerial view of the environment endlessly creates new environments for
humans to control – leads to hierarchies of dominance that maintain both the
environment and other people in a state of subjugation
I want to assess the implications of this rising inequality by concentrating upon its environmental dimensions, but I also want
to
approach what is regarded as "the environment" quite differently by mobilizing ideas from science
and technology studies. These alternative notions can help frame the outlines of this new inequality as
both an object of knowledge and subject of struggle. Such moves must be made because most
analytical tools in the disciplines of both international relations and environmental studies are not
adequate for the tasks of interpreting what is now developing around the world in the realms of
technoscience and the environment. In fact, our existing tools often occlude what needs to be analyzed,
who needs to be criticized, and what must be done to oppose powerlessness and inequality . To anchor my
claims, I take Fredric Jameson's point about the postmodern condition as a point of departure. That is, it is what remains "when the
modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good." It is a more fully human world than the older one, but one in which "culture"
has become a veritable "second nature."1 Ironically, as Jameson suggests, this more fully human world is one that also rests
upon the creation, maintenance, and suppression of a more fully nonhuman world. As Bruno Latour
suggests, Modernity is often defined in terms of humanism, either as a way of saluting the birth of "man," or as a way of
announcing his death. But this habit itself is modern, because it remains asymmetrical. It overlooks the
simultaneous birth of "nonhumanity" things, or objects, or beasts and the equally strange beginning
of a crossed-out God, relegated to the sidelines . This realm of nonhumanity is, in large part, what we
know as "the environment," but it increasingly is occupied by things and systems as well as plants and
animals. Sitting on the sidelines, hiding amid the action, and working behind the scenes with "modern man," there are all the objects and
subjects or plants, things, beasts, places, systems, and spaces that sustain modernity and its inequalities as they now surround everybody and
everything in their workings. The Enlightenment's national progressive order of human actors male and female
seeking liberty, equality, and fraternity persists. Yet it unfolds amid many other asymmetrical
transnational networks and unbalanced national niches for nonhumanity that materially advance or
retard human struggles for national progress. In many ways, the modern world system for commodity production and
consumption generates its own artificial and natural environments. An environment is what surrounds something, and
the sweep of global exchange now is "environizing" itself a terraformative power at the most
fundamental level of operation by putting everything that exists in built and unbuilt environments
under human control. The idea is to put life itself into conformity with commodification, subjecting objects and subjects to exchange
and forcing everyone and everything to perform within the ways of the market. Whether it is bioengineering new life forms,
remixing the composition of the planet's atmosphere, or crowding out most other organisms within
Earth's carrying capacity, human economic exchanges are now a key environizing power that
encircles, contains, and envelopes living and nonliving things in the human nations and environmental
niches that now constitute the world's ecosystems . The domination of "Nature" by "Society" creates a
second nature, a processed world, or a postmodern condition in which those who own and control the
material and mental means of enforcing asymmetries between different populations of humanity and
aggregations of nonhumanity are continuously forced to concretize new inequalities on this
environmental scale. Far too many people and their things, in turn, become relegated to second, third,
fourth, fifth, or other developing worlds, while only a few people and their things in the developed
"first world" benefit from the costs incurred elsewhere by these world-making, or "terraformative,"
powers.z
inequality
Eco-managerialism drives reduction of nature to mere resource – it’s the root cause of
environmental exploitation and worldwide wage inequality
So to conclude, each of these wrinkles in the record of eco-managerialism should give its supporters pause .
and indeed some are. Nonetheless, it would appear that the commitments of eco-managerialism to sustainability
encirclement of space and matter in national as well as global economies to a system of systems,
managerialism as stocks of manageable resources . Human beings, supposedly all human beings, can realize great material
advanced national economies that basically have monopolized the use of the world's resources . This
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.
cap
Their pretended environmentalism is a guise for the extension of capitalism – drives
environmental destruction and worldwide inequality
All of these
environmentalizing initiatives reveal different aspects of Nature's infrastructuralization in
the disorganized and incomplete transnational campaigns of environmentalized capital's terraforming
programs. The actions of the Worldwatch Institute, the Nature Conservancy, or the World Wildlife Fund, or the Sierra Club are frameworks
within which a new habitus with its own environmentalized social relations of production and consumption can come alive by guarding habitat
as the supremely perfect site of habitus. As Baudrillard observes, "the great signified, the great referent Nature is dead, replaced by
environment, which simultaneously designates and designs its death and the restoration of nature as simulation model....we enter a social
environment of synthesis in which a total abstract communication and an immanent manipulation no longer leave any point exterior to the
system."115 Rendering wildlife, air, water, habitat, or Nature into complex new systems of rare goods in
the name of environmental protection, and then regulating the social consumption of them through
ecological activism shows how mainstream environmentalists are serving as agents of social control or
factors in political economy to reintegrate the intractable equations of (un)wise (ab)use along
consummational rather than consumptive lines. Putting earth first only establishes ecological capital
as the ultimate basis of life. Infrastructuralizing Nature renders everything on Earth, or "humanity's
home," into capital--land, labor, animals, plants, air, water, genes, ecosystems . And, mainstream
environmentalism often becomes a very special kind of "home eco nomics" to manage humanity's indoors and outdoors household accounts.
Household consumption is always home consumption, because human economics rests upon terrestrial ecologics. Here the
roots of
ecology and economics intertwine through "sustainable development," revealing its truest double
significance: sustainably managing the planet is the same thing as reproducing terrestrial stocks of
infrastructorialized green capital. Whether or not environmentalists prevent the unwise abuse or
promote wise use of natural resources is immaterial; everything they do optimizes the sign value of
green goods and serves to reproduce global capital as environmentalized sites, stocks or spaces- -an
outcome that every Worldwatch Institute State of the World report or Club Sierra ecotour easily confirms. Likewise, the scarcity measures of
Nature Conservancy or World Wildlife Fund scare
campaigns show how everything now has a price, including
wildlife preservation or ecological degradation, which global markets will mark and meet in their
(un)wise (ab)use of environmentalized resources . Newer ecological discourses about total cost accounting, lifecycle
management, or environmental justice may simply articulate more refined efforts to sustainably develop these bigger global processes of
universal capitalization by accepting small correctives against particular capitalist interests. Admitting
that poor people have
been treated unjustly in siting decisions for environmental bads lets rich people redistribute these
ecological costs across more sites so that they might benefit from the material and symbolic goods
created by being just so environmental . Environmental justice movements perhaps are not so much
about attaining environmental justice as they are about moving injustices more freely around in the
environment, assuring the birth of new consumerisms for increased efficiency at risk management
and broader participation ecological degradation in our terraformed Nature.
vtl
Enframing the earth leads to nihilism – loss of relation to Being means we lose
everything we are
Barbaza 09 (Remmon E. Barbaza, Heidegger and the Earth: Essays in Environmental Philosophy 2nd, expanded edition, “There Where
Nothing Happens’”)
When we have fallen into a 'forgetfulness of being'6 and are engaged solely in beings as objectively
present, it is not only works of art that are objectified according to our whims, but also every other
thing that we encounter or use for our own purposes. Is it any wonder that ours is an age
characterized by man's technological subjugation and mastery of nature? Are not we human beings
the greatest threat to the continued existence of life on earth? Do we not indeed sense something
monstrous behind the whole question of human cloning? Is not even God objectified? We are thus
brought before the very profound mystery of being itself. Since being and nothing are one, as we saw
earlier, and since it is the nothing that grants us access to being, the rejection of the nothing is itself
what leads to annihilation. It is the very denial and the very refusal to come face to face with the
nothing that gives rise to the horror of nihilism. The rejection of the nothing is nihilism. And as we
reject the nothing, and therefore being itself, and are merely preoccupied with beings as objectively
present, in the end we are left with absolute nothing, for beings can never be truly experienced as
they are except in their being. But when we pay heed to the nothing, we are thrust back into the
world and see beings precisely in their beings, perhaps for the first time, and in each case ever
anew.
The aff’s machination reduces the world – and thus nature and humanity – to mere
calculability – removes all value that is not measurable in terms of benefit to
humanity and kills value to life
Machination is unconditional controllability, the domination of all beings, the world, and earth
through calculation, acceleration, technicity, and giganticism. Calculation represents a reduction of
knowing to mathematics and science and a reduction of the world and earth to what is calculable , a step
taken decisively by Descartes (1999, 84–96). Machination is the “pattern of generally calculable explainability, by which everything
draws nearer to everything else equally and becomes completely alien to itself” (1999, 92). The
unrestrained domination of
machination produces a totalizing worldview that enchants: “When machination finally dominates
and permeates everything, then there are no longer any conditions by which still actually to detect
the enchantment and to protect oneself from it. The bewitchment by technicity and its constantly self-surpassing progress are only
one sign of this enchantment, by virtue of which everything presses forth into calculation, usage, breeding,
manageability, and regulation” (1999, 86–87). Heidegger prophetically predicts that machination will
produce “a gigantic progress of sciences in the future. These advancements will bring exploitation and
usage of the earth as well as rearing and training of humans into conditions that are still inconceivable
today” (1999, 108). Animals and plants are reduced to various forms of use value and, more significantly,
are banished from Being-in-the-world with us: “What is a plant and an animal to us anymore, when we take away use,
embellishment, and entertainment” (1999, 194). “Nature” suffers a similar fate: “What happens to nature in technicity, when nature is
separated out from beings by the natural sciences? The growing—or better, the simple rolling unto its end—destruction of ‘nature’. . . .
And finally what was left was only ‘scenery’ and recreational opportunity and even this still calculated into the gigantic and arranged for
the masses” (1999, 195). Under
the unrestrained domination of machination, humans suffer a “hollowing
out” (1999, 91, 348) and Being-in-the-world is replaced by “adventures.” (I am here translating Erlebnis as
adventure. Others translate it as lived-experience.) Heidegger really perceives the domination of machination as total and suggests
resistance is futile. Instead, while waiting for the unfolding of Being, he tends to offer up despairing cries, as when he plaintively asks,
“Who ordered the scale of the market? And who demands that everything be weighed on it alone?” (1999, 168). Now I do not think we
need accept Heidegger’s mantra “Resistance is futile,” but we do need to seriously consider which strategies of environmental groups are
implicated in machination. Some are obvious, but others are not so clear. The question moves, then, from asking whether a strategy is
effective or moral, to asking, “Does a strategy contribute to machination?” As our discussion should have made clear, machination
is
about a logic, not a particular machine. (This same point is true of Heidegger’s later critique of technology.) Heidegger’s
critique of the logic of machination has the advantage of being able to be clearly distinguished from
any particular machine or technology. Machination, to reiterate, is a logic characterized by calculation,
giganticism, acceleration, and technicity wherein animals, plants, and the earth become objects, mere
resources, and humans, also, are reduced to the service of a ravenous progress.
Enframing of nature enframes humanity – we come to exist only to fulfill ordered

technological desires – kills value to life
DeLuca 05 (Kevin Michael, Environmental Humanities Research Professor at the University of Utah, “THINKING WITH
HEIDEGGER RETHINKING ENVIRONMENTAL THEORY AND PRACTICE”, Ethics & The Environment 10:1, Spring 2005, MUSE)
The practice of enframing also has deleterious effects on humanity. In connection with erasure, it
blinkers humanity’s vision of the earth. “Thus when man, investigating, observing, pursues nature as an area of his own
conceiving, he has already been claimed by a way of revealing that challenges him to approach nature as an object of research, until even
the object disappears into the objectlessness of standing-reserve” (1993, 324). Further,
enframing reduces humanity itself
as the orderer of the standingreserve: “As soon as what is unconcealed no longer concerns man even
as object, but exclusively as standing-reserve, and man in the midst of objectlessness is nothing but
the orderer of the standing-reserve, then he comes to the very brink of a precipitous fall; that is, he
comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve . Meanwhile, man, precisely as
the one so threatened, exalts himself and postures as lord of the earth. In this way the illusion comes to prevail that everything man
encounters exists only insofar as it is his construct. This illusion gives rise in turn to one final delusion: it seems as though man
everywhere and always encounters only himself.“(1993, 332) The ensuing decades have elaborated on Heidegger’s insight. The worst
tendencies in postmodern theory can be read as illustrating the illusion that everything humanity encounters exists only insofar as it is a
human construct. More significant is how this conceit of humanity as lord of the earth manifests itself in
environmental discourses, so, in a common example , humans need to save the rainforests because
unknown cures for human diseases may be found in them . How this dangerous dynamic reduces
humans to standing-reserve plays itself out in the example of the forester: “The forester who
measures the felled timber in the woods and who to all appearances walks the forest path in the
same way his grandfather did is today ordered by the industry that produces commercial woods,
whether he knows it or not. He is made subordinate to the orderability of cellulose, which for its part
is challenged forth by the need for paper, which is then delivered to newspapers and illustrated
magazines. The latter, in their turn, set public opinion to swallowing what is printed, so that a set configuration of opinion becomes
available on demand. “(1993, 323) This example is useful in its exposure of how modern technology’s ordering of nature is
also an ordering of humanity and a reduction of both to standing-reserve. The example is further noteworthy
for its illustration of how modern technology is a system or regime, not a particular device. Modern technology is not the
chainsaw. Rather, it is the chainsaw and forestry science and the transportation system and the
profession of journalism and printing presses and public relations and mass communication
technologies and the machinery of politics and. . . . It is this system that enframes/ensnares/produces a
particular version of nature and a particular type of humanity.
loss of the world
Ordering and calculability leads to the loss of the world – we become incapable of
seeing things as anything other than images and representations to be manipulated an
in doing so lose our very selves
Joronen 11 (Mikko, School of Management at the University of Tampere, “The Age of Planetary Space On Heidegger, Being, and
Metaphysics of Globalization”, TURUN YLIOPISTON JULKAISUJA ANNALES UNIVERSITATIS TURKUENSIS,
http://www.doria.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/66733/AnnalesAII257Joronen.pdf)
It is the rise of the systems of ordering that eventually generated a world framed into a single uniform
and quantifiable sphere of extension, into a globe, where every-thing can be undifferentiated,
transformed, explained, controlled, and hence brought equally under the command of further
orderings. Eventually in such an "ãge of planetary space' the whole of the earth become moulded under the drive
that increasingly subjugates things under the controllable frame of uniform distancelessness . It is precisely
through such a drive of technologically organized "˜Frameworks` of ordering Heidegger calls the Grrtell (translated also as ènframing') that
things are no more remote nor brought near: everything
is rather brought into presence in terms of
undifferentiated picture, equivalently framed as orderable and calculable reserve . By framing everything into
representable, such Frameworks of ordering, operative in terms of technological calculations, do not just involve a certain disappearance of
spatial distance, but also constitute a revealing without sense of nearness peculiar to things.
The abolition of distance, thus, is
also an abolishment of nearness: when things become mere orderable nodes in the networks of
ordering, their places (as sites of unfolding) change into mere positions in the networked spatial
arrangements. In other words, by changing the difference of thing into a mere difference of position in the useable spatial array, into dots
in systems of orderings, such "˜enframing ` apparently prevents the places (as the sites of the Event) to appear. In a sense, as
Fell writes (l979:204, 246), such a Framework of Gestell tums place into a space, so preventing the originary place of the Event, the `thinging of
thing' that is capable of letting the intelligibility from which such a Framework appropriated its own ground in the first place, to come forth.
Accordingly even though such a world of organized uniformity, the "˜cyber/command-world' of calculation, orders things equally controllable
through the flexible networks of orderings it casts upon the space of the earth, by undifferentiating things into controllable frame of uniform
abolition of distance it also averts the original nearness that allows things to appear as things. Eventually
such unfolding of
"enframing” covers up the finite happening of earth-sites out of which such techno-calculative
enframing of planetary space emerged in the first place, thus presenting an outcome of the
metaphysical rationality in terms of total malleability of things through the calculative ordering
capable of measuring, using, calculating, and optimizing all things whatsoever . Therefore, such abolition
of distance and the annihilation of the place of thing is not merely an spatial issues, but part of the
last stage of the metaphysical legacy of oblivion and loss of be-ing, hence also signifying a loss of the
world "the darkening of the world", as Heidegger puts it (195958) through a grounding unfolding where things are replaced by
mere images and representations. In other words, such final gathering of metaphysics in planetary
unfolding presents an oblivion of be-ing and its fourfold Event by creating an "˜un-world of picture' that
changes the "˜earth' of things as well as the shifting patterns of climate and season of "˜sky' into a transparent and
calculable planetary ball in which `mortals' dwell as technical animals reduced to manage things
through an intelligibility of mere calculative ordering and organization, and where all other `gods'
default except the veiled god of calculation and efficient handling. Such technological power operates by calculating
and arranging things as functions according to its own orderings, thereby defining the fundamental outcome of the metaphysical rationality in
terms of planetary revealing of space in terms of uniform capturing and positioning of spatial relations into a Framework of total orderings.
o/w nuke war
Loss of being that results from technological Enframing outweighs nuclear war
Kinsella 07 (William J Kinsella, “Heidegger and Being at the Hanford Reservation: Standing Reserve,Enframing, and Environmental
Communication Theory,” Environmental Communcation V1 N2 Nov 2007 p194-217)
Enframing and Standing Reserve Heidegger’s concept of projection indicates that nature is always
disclosed in light of its usefulness for Dasein’s practical activities. This characteristic of disclosure is
fundamental and inevitable, and Heidegger is not critical of this basic human propensity to utilize
the world. The technological attitude that he calls enframing, however, is a problematic mode of
utilization in which nature becomes a ‘‘standing reserve’’ (Heidegger, 1977a) or a ‘‘gigantic gasoline
station, an energy source for modern technology and industry’’ (Heidegger, 1966, p. 50). Heidegger
(1977a) illustrates this concept with a series of poignant examples, which I quote here at length in
order to preserve their cumulative, poetic effect: The revealing that rules in modern technology is a
challenging . . . which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be
extracted and stored as such. But does this not hold true for the old windmill as well? No. Its sails
do indeed turn in the wind . . . But the windmill does not unlock energy from the air currents in
order to store it. In contrast, a tract of land is challenged into the putting out of coal and ore. The
earth now reveals itself as a coal mining district, the soil as a mineral deposit . . . Agriculture is now
the mechanized food industry. Air is set upon to yield nitrogen, the earth to yield ore, ore to yield
uranium, for example; uranium is set upon to yield atomic energy . . . . . . The coal that has been
hauled out in some mining district has not been supplied in order that it may simply be present
somewhere or other. It is stockpiled; that is, it is on call, ready to deliver the sun’s warmth that is
stored in it. The sun’s warmth is challenged forth for heat, which in turn is ordered to deliver steam
whose pressure turns the wheels that keep a factory running. The hydroelectric plant is set into the
current of the Rhine . . . In the context of the interlocking processes pertaining to the orderly
disposition of electrical energy, even the Rhine appears as something at our command . . . What the
river is now, namely, a water power supplier, derives from out of the essence of the power station . .
. But, it will be replied, the Rhine is still a river in the landscape, is it not? Perhaps. But how? In no
other way than as an object on call for inspection by a tour group ordered there by the vacation
industry. (Heidegger, 1977a, pp. 14􏰀16)12 These examples do not reflect mere nostalgia. Instead,
they illustrate a radical break in Dasein’s relationship with the earth. The primacy of that
relationship is now replaced by calculation, control, and deliberate disruption of the natural order.
Indeed, in the last two of these examples the natural order is displaced when steam and a tour group
are ‘‘ordered,’’ and ambiguously, this ordering can be understood both as a calculated physical
arrangement and as an imperative command. Another aspect of enframing is the loss of poetry, which
for Heidegger is a mode of language crucial to Dasein. In his example of the appropriation of the
Rhine as a power source, he laments: In order that we may even remotely consider the
monstrousness that reigns here, let us ponder for a moment the contrast that speaks out of the two
titles, ‘‘The Rhine’’ as dammed up into the power works, and ‘‘The Rhine’’ as uttered out of the art
work, in Ho ̈lderlin’s hymn by that name. (Heidegger, 1977a, p. 16, emphasis in original) Here,
technological control replaces poetic response, as ‘‘language surrenders itself to our mere willing and
trafficking as an instrument of domination over things’’ (Heidegger, 1977b, p. 199).13 When
enframing fully displaces ‘‘poetic dwelling’’ as the prevailing mode of human being, human beings are
threatened with a fatal blindness, as mastery of the world blocks the fullness of being in the world.
Heidegger (1966) concludes that ‘‘an attack with technological means is being prepared upon the life
and nature of man compared with which the explosion of the hydrogen bomb means little . For
precisely if the hydrogen bombs do not explode and human life is preserved, an uncanny change in
the world moves upon us’’ (p. 52, emphasis in original).
root cause of war
Environmental managerialism drives war – conflict over resources is caused by the
endless drive for increased domination over nature – only the alt can solve
Possibly. On the one hand, I think, and I'm probably not standing with a lot of other people in saying this, but in many ways its useful to think
about the political in fairly stark Schmidtian terms. The political is who are your friends and who are your enemies. What creates those
associations and disassociation, disengagements and engagements? Increasingly it would appear, if you look at carrying capacity calculations
which I think are always rough and largely based upon modeling, but let's say we let them have some quiddity Some people would say that
carrying capacity of the earth has been pretty much exceeded, probably as early as 1978. If
you want to look at ecological
footprint analysis, it takes about one hectare to support one relatively low consuming person in a
developing country. Again, these are models, but it gives you some comparison whereas it takes maybe 10 hectares to
support somebody in the United States. Somebody who lives on 10 hectares lives a long time, lives a
lot better, and lives. Someone who lives on one hectare lives very shortly, lives worse, and dies. In
many ways, the environment is a veil over life chances. If carrying capacity is exceeded, then who is
carried first and who is carried best is a highly political question. Reaching a point perhaps of being
made a military question by states, because wars are only engaged in by states. Your friends or foes, enemies or
allies within states. About one fifth of humanity lives in one state, China. A lot of what China is doing
is having tremendous ecological impact. Maybe two or three percent of humanity lives in another
state, the United States. That has tremendous ecological impact. Lots of other societies are having to
deal with that. We are perhaps beginning to see ecological conflicts going to be militarized in a way
we haven't seen before. The political re-emerges in the ecological. Some people would argue the reason why
we're so upset about Saddam Hussein is not because of Saddam Hussein, but because it's the oil,
stupid. That's what it's always been about. Global oil production has probably peaked in the '90s. We're using
more oil than we're finding. The Cornucopians would say, "Don't worry, cool out, it'll be fine. We'll discover more oil somewhere."
Perhaps. But right now we're not. In the meantime, transnational enterprise has been much more successful selling cars and trucks to all kinds
of people, and that's creating resource scarcity and causing resource problems. So the political, who's friend and who's enemy, re-emerges in
the ecological. A lot of what has been going on in environmental affairs has been the tradition liberal confusion of that. How can you overlay
the economic, the social, the cultural, and aesthetic over these kinds of conflicts? That's one thing that I think is emerging in
the dynamics of the ecological that very few people talk about. If resources are getting scarce, then
that leads to conflict. And conflict may lead to military problems, or at least lead to all kinds of quasi
neo para crypto imperialist acts. The last great superpower of the world is going around poking his nose in everybody's business,
with the purpose of "fight terrorism", or is it doing other things? That's one worry people have. Another worry that gets at the
managerial question is to not accept managerialism and, in fact, to popularize or socialize the
processes of production. Did things begin to go wrong when we surrendered control over your everyday economic and ecological
activities to large corporations and experts? Experts who told you what to do, corporations who provided the goods to do what you'd been told
to do by experts. So, relocalizing, repopularizing ecological processes, which would be less energy intensive, less material intensive, less
ecologically destructive, but at the same time non-consumerist, more craft oriented, is another way of getting at the environmental problem.
The difficulty with that is how many people remember that kind of life? How can one survive not going to the mall? How can one survive not
relying upon corporations? About the only example that you've seen lately for doing that sort of thing that's become widely known around the
country is Ted Kushinsky. Move up to the woods, build a hut, and then design bombs. That's not an option for a lot of people. It's a craft
oriented way of life, but it's not a very attractive one. What
is the alternative that one would follow to create and live
in a more green fashion? Developing that vision of the environment or ecological action is also critical .
In the meantime, most people just sort of satisfy us. The corporations give us the goodies, they can redesign a lot of what they do and make it
less destructive. I personally think there's tremendous space here for more corporations to improve what they do. The natural capitalists have a
lot to contribute in this regard. There's an incredible amount of waste and still an incredible amount of inefficiency in engineering because
engineers are not often enjoined to optimize for environmental impact. They're asked to optimize for economic impact, or they just want to get
out of work on Friday so they just throw any slap doodle thing down, and that becomes a product. Improving things in that way, there's also a
space of change. But short of that, the
managerial problem is very difficult because, as you were alluding, we
don't have a real experience with nature. We don't have perhaps a real sense of what its utility is. So
in that inability to know it and in that under appreciation of what it is, we accept what the eco-
managerialists give us. So there's all kinds of things to do that are not tied to eco-managerialism, that
largely haven't been done but remain to be done. In that respect, I think there's room for quite a bit of
hope. With the recognition, however, that if the global modelers are right, and carrying capacity has
been exceeded. Then things are going to get pretty nasty pretty soon in a lot of dimensions.
turns case
The aff’s managerialism makes their impacts inevitable – technological thought is the
root cause of their impacts
The noted physicist Stephen Hawking, in A Brief History of Time (1988, 10), writes that 'the
eventual goal of science is to provide a single theory that describes the whole universe.' Such a
theory, many people would assert, would be a systematic arrangement of all knowledge both already
acquired and theoretically possible. It would be a theory to end all theories, outside of which no
information, no revelation, could or would need to occur. And the advent of such a theory would be
as the shining of a light into every corner of being. Nothing would remain concealed. This dream of
Hawking's is a dream of power; indeed, it is a dream of absolute power, absolute control. It is a dream
of the ultimate managerial utopia. And of course it is not Hawking's dream alone. This, Heidegger
would contend, is the dream of technological thought in the modern age. As a people, as a culture, as
an age, we dream of knowing, grasping everything, for then we can control, then we can manage,
everything. But it is only a dream, Heidegger warns us. And it itself is predicated, ironically enough,
on concealment, the self-concealing of the mystery. We can never control or manage or even grasp
the mystery, the belonging together of revealing and concealing. In order to approach the world in a
manner exclusively technological, calculative, mathematical, scientific , we must already have given up
(or lost, or been expelled by, or perhaps ways of being such as we are even impossible within) other
approaches or modes of revealing that would unfold into knowledges of other sorts. Those other
approaches or paths of thinking must already have been obliterated or at least totally obscured; those
other knowledges must already have concealed themselves in order for technological or scientific
revelation to occur. The danger of a managerial approach to the world lies not, then, in what it knows
not in its penetration into the secrets of galactic emergence or nuclear fission but in what it forgets,
what it itself conceals. It forgets that any other truths are possible, and it forgets that the belonging
together of revealing with concealing is forever beyond the power of human management. We can
never have, or know, it all; we can never manage everything. What is now especially dangerous
about this sense of our own managerial power, born of forgetfulness, is that it results in our viewing
the world as mere resources to be stored or consumed. Managerial or technological thinkers,
Heidegger says, view the earth, the world, all things, as mere Bestand, standing-reserve. All is here
simply for human use. No plant, no animal, no ecosystem has a life of its own, has any significance,
outside the bounds of human desire and need. Nothing, we say, other than human beings, has any
intrinsic value. All things are instruments for the working out of human will. Whether we believe
that God gave Man dominion or simply that human might (sometimes called intelligence or
rationality) in the face of ecological fragility makes us always right, we managerial, techno¬logical
thinkers tend to believe that the earth is only a stockpile or a set of commodities to be inventoried,
developed, marketed, and sold. The forest is timber; the river, a power source. Even people have
become resources, human resources, personnel to be managed, or populations to be controlled . This
managerial, technological mode of thinking, Heidegger says, is embedded in and constitutive of
Western culture and has been gathering strength for centuries. Now it is well on its way to
extinguishing all other modes of revealing, all other ways of being human and being earth. It will
take tremendous courage and resolve to allow thought of the mystery to come forth; thought of the
inevitability, along with re¬vealing, of concealment, of loss, of ignorance; thought of the occurring of
things and their passage as events not ultimately under human juris¬diction and authority. And of
course even the call to allow this thinking couched as it so often must be in a grammatical
imperative appealing to an agent is itself a paradox, the first (but only the first) that must be faced
and allowed to speak to us and to shatter us as it scatters thinking in new directions, directions of
which we have not yet dreamed, direc¬tions of which we may never be able to dream.
biopower/environmentality
Environmentality is the modern version of Foucault’s governmentality – population
control via creation and maintenance of “truths” about the environment
1995, JSTOR)
Environments then emerged with bio-power as part and par-cel of the regulation of life via biopolitics,
and, for nearly a century, ecology apparently remained another ancillary correlate of bio-power, inhabiting
discourses about species extinction, resource conservation, and overpopulation . Until the productive regime of
biopolitics became fully globalized (because Nature itself is not en-tirely encircled), ecology was a fairly minor voice in the disciplinary chorus
organizing development and growth. Things changed, however, once the extensive expansionist strategies of
develop-ment and growth employed in the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-turies collapsed around
1914, promoting conservationist ethics in Europe and North America that fretted over conserving
resources for resource-driven intensive modes of production . And, as new mediations of development and growth
were constructed after 1945, the geo-power/eco-knowledge nexus of environmentaliza-tion came to
comfortably supplement the high technology, capital intensive development strategies that have
since been imple-mented. Thus, the environment, if one follows Foucault's line of rea-soning (105-06), must not be
understood as the naturally given sphere of ecological processes which human powers try to keep
under control, nor should it be viewed as a mysterious domain of obscure terrestrial events which
human knowledge works to ex-plain. Instead, it emerges as a historical artifact that is openly con-
structed, not an occluded reality that is difficult to comprehend. In this great network, the simulation of spaces, the intensification
of resources, the incitement of discoveries, the formation of special knowledges, the strengthening of
controls, and the provocation of resistances can all be linked to one another. The immanent designs of
Nature, when and where they are "discovered" in environments, closely parallel the arts of govern-
ment. One might ask if the two are not inseparable in geo-power/ eco-knowledge systems. As Foucault sees the arts of government, they
essentially are concerned with how to introduce economy into the political practices of the state. Government becomes in the eighteenth
century the designation of a "level of reality, a field of intervention, through a series of complex processes" in which "government is the right
disposition of things" ("Governmentality" 93). Governmentality
applies techniques of instrumental rational-ity to
the arts of everyday management. It evolves as an elaborate social formation, or "a triangle,
sovereignty-discipline-govern-ment, which has as its primary target the population and as its essential
mechanism the apparatuses of security" (102). Most significantly, Foucault sees rulers and authorities mobi-
lizing governmentality to bring about "the emergence of popula-tion as a datum, as a field of
intervention and as an objective of governmental techniques" (102) so that now "the population is the object that
government must take into account in all its observa-tions and savoir, in order to be able to govern effectively in a ratio-nal and conscious
manner" (100). The networks of continuous, multiple, and complex interaction between populations (their increase, longevity, health), territory
(its expanse, resources, con-trol), and wealth (its creation, productivity, distribution) are sites of governmentalizing rationality to manage the
productive interac-tion of these forces. Foucault invites social theorists not to reduce all ensembles of modernizing development to the
"statalization" of society wherein "the state" becomes an expansive set of managerial functions, dis-charging its effects in the development of
productive forces, the reproduction of relations of production, or the organization of ideological superstructures. Instead
he argues in
favor of investi-gating the "governmentalization" of the economy and society whereby individuals and
groups are enmeshed within the tactics and strategies of a complex form of power whose institutions,
pro-cedures, analyses, and techniques loosely manage mass popula-tions and their surroundings in a
highly politicized symbolic and material economy (103). Because governmental techniques are the central focus of political
struggle and contestation, the interactions of populations with their natural surroundings in highly politi-cized
economies compel states constantly to redefine what is within their competence throughout the
modernizing process. To survive after the 1960s in a world marked by decolonization, global indus-trialization, and nuclear military
confrontation, it is not enough for states merely to maintain legal jurisdiction over their allegedly
sovereign territories. As ecological limits to growth are either dis-covered or defined, states are forced
to guarantee their pop-ulations' fecundity and productivity in the total setting of the glo-bal political
economy by becoming "environmental protection agencies ." Governmental discourses methodically
mobilize particular as-sumptions, codes, and procedures in enforcing specific under-standings about
the economy and society. As a result, they generate "truths" or "knowledges" that also constitute
forms of power with significant reserves of legitimacy and effectiveness. Inasmuch as they classify, organize, and
vet larger understandings of reality, such discourses can authorize or invalidate the possibilities for con-structing particular institutions,
practices, or concepts in society at large. They simultaneously frame the emergence of collective subjectivities (nations as dynamic populations)
and collections of subjects (individuals) as units in such nations. Individual subjects as well as collective subjects can be reevaluated as "the
element in which are articulated the effects of a certain type of power and the reference of a certain type of knowledge, the machinery by
which the power relations give rise to a possible corpus of knowledge, and knowledge extends and reinforces the effects of this power"
(Foucault, Discipline and Punish 29). Therefore,
an environmen-talizing regime must advance eco-knowledges to
activate its com-mand over geo-power as well as to re-operationalize many of its notions of
governmentality as environmentality. Like governmen-tality, the disciplinary articulations of
environmentality must cen-ter upon establishing and enforcing "the right disposition of things.”
Environmental managerialism turns into biopolitical population control – everyone’s

decisions are policed and controlled in the name of “sustainability” that is a guise for
maintaining capitalism
1995, JSTOR)
Environmentality, then, would govern by restructuring to-day's ecologically unsound society through
elaborate managerial designs to realize tomorrow's environmentally sustainable econ-omy . The shape of
an environmental economy would emerge from a reengineered economy of environmentalizing
shapes vetted by worldwatching codes. The individual human subject of today, and all of his or her unsustainable
practices, would be reshaped through this environmentality, redirected by practices, discourses, and
ensembles of administration that more efficiently synchronize the bio-powers of populations with the
geo-powers of environ-ments. Traditional codes defining human identity and difference would be
reframed by systems of environmentality in new equa-tions for making comprehensive global
sustainability calculations as the bio-power of populations merges with the ecopower of envi-
ronments. To police global carrying capacity, in turn, this environ-mentalizing logic bids each human subject to assume the much less
capacious carriage of disciplinary frugality instead of affluent sub-urban consumerism. All of the world will come under watch,
and the global watch will police its human charges to dispose of their things and arrange their ends- in
reengineered spaces using new energies at new jobs and leisures-around these environing agendas.
Sustainability, however, cuts both ways. On the one hand, it can articulate a rationale for preserving Nature's biotic diversity in
order to maintain the sustainability of the biosphere. But, on the other hand, it also can represent an effort to reinforce the
prevail-ing order of capitalistic development by transforming sustainabil-ity into an economic project .
To the degree that modern subjectiv-ity is a two-sided power/knowledge relation, scientific-professional declarations about
sustainability essentially describe a new mode of environmentalized subjectivity . In becoming
enmeshed in a worldwatched environ, the individual subject of a sustainable soci-ety could become
simultaneously "subject to someone else by con-trol and dependence," where environmentalizing
global and local state agencies enforce their codes of sustainability, and police a self-directed
ecological subject "tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge" (Foucault, "Afterword" 12). In
both manifesta-tions, the truth regime of ecological sustainability draws up criteria for what sort of "selfness" will be privileged with political
identity and social self-knowledge. Sustainability, like sexuality, becomes a discourse about ex-erting power
over life. How power might "invest life through and through" (Foucault, History of Sexuality I 139) becomes a new chal-lenge, once
biopolitical relations are established as environmen-talized systems. Moreover, sustainability more or less presumes that some level of material
and cultural existence has been attained that is indeed worth sustaining. This formation, then, constitutes "a new distribution of pleasures,
discourses, truths, and powers; it has to be seen as the self-affirmation of one class rather than the enslavement of another: a defense, a
protection, a strengthen-ing, and an exaltation ... as a means of social control and political subjugation" (123). The
global bio-
accounting systems of the Worldwatch Insti-tute conceptually and practically exemplify the project of
environ-mentality with their rhetorics of scientific surveillance . How Na-ture should be governed is
not a purely administrative question turning upon the technicalities of scientific "know-how." Rather,
it is essentially and inescapably political. The discourses of World-watching that rhetorically construct
Nature also assign powers to new global governors and governments, who are granted writs of
authority and made centers of organization in the Worldwatchers' environmentalized specifications of
managerial "who-can" and po-litical "how-to."
liberalism/cyborgs
Technological control of nature produces cyborganized, machinic “de-humans” that
exist only to produce and consume – the aff’s logic of environmental domination
removes any value not associated with production of resources
Sage)
In keeping with Commoner’s second law of ecology, “everything has to go somewhere,”22 and it
does, inasmuch as both city and country are architecturally integrated, technologically linked, and
institutionally managed to function in corporately administered shelter/ diet/energy/dress/labor
megamachines for cyborg clients. These business-based apparatuses source their inputs globally and deliver their outputs locally-
albeit in extremely inequalitarian levels of concentration and rates of production-to promote the daily survival of six billion dehuman beings.23
Most of these habitats are to be found in vast cities, which are not nature’s metropolis, but rather nature’s necropolis.24 High
performance engines of speed, light, power, comfort, security, choice, and fun become accessible as
commodities, realizing their intrinsic ideological ends through each dehuman individual’s use of them
in their everyday lifeworlds. Separate and apart from this environment, very few human organisms
live any kind of satisfying existence as their basic criteria of personal “satisfaction” are now specified .
Without access to their ordinary habitats in the mall or familiar ranges in the supermarket, modern hunter-gatherer dehumans will wither and
perish.The third law of ecology is “nature knows best,” and the logics of consummativity affirm that
second nature also knows best.25 To paraphrase McLuhan, who saw all technologies as media providing “extensions of man”
psychically and physically,26 men and women as cyborg beings become the psychic and physical media for this
second nature, im-personating as human subjects various extensions of technologies . The nonliving
devices of industrial economies , as mechanisms of power, depend upon cultivating the body, which allows, in
turn, megamachines to extract time, energy, and labor in production and consumption. Through
commodified freedoms, cyborg subjects can "increase subjected forces" and "improve force and
efficacy of that which subjects them"27 in the circulation of their commodified artifacts. Does subjection, if it is
subjection, to these megamachines constitute the spaces of a humanistic subjectivity where liberal
life, liberty, and property are attained? Are commodities the capillary conduits of disciplinary expectations and discursive codes,
awaiting enactment with their confluence in individual and group agents, individual forms of being? commodity engineers freely mingle surreal
imagery and real engineering in concrete works of "imagineering" for cyborganized dehumans. Such material enterprises interoperate in the
mass media and through the personal sphere, inviting subjects simultaneously to play at imagineering and at being imagineered. The
operationality of consumption runs through circuits of seers and seen, judges and judged, appraisers and appraised as active and passive poIes
in megamachinic power transfers.28 Insocieties of bureaucratically controlled consumption, even the most
confirmed liberals might begin to recognize how human beings cyborganize each other with dehuman
expectations. In this information flow, the operational whitewash of goods works to make cyborgs speak and
reason in terms set by the megamachinery's environmental operations of production and
consumption. As servomechanisms of megamachineries, commercial artifacts exert ideological influences
"through social production and social service" as each commodified product "becomes a matter of
obtaining productive service from individuals in their concrete lives. "29
warming-specific
Top-level warming management like the aff leads to an endless cycle of
socioengineering that legitimates total societal control
The imperatives of geoengineering sound decisive and definite. Yet, they also can strike one as deluded, if not dangerous. What
prevents
such blueprints to reorganize the planet‟s biosphere from becoming diktats for the many from the
few? Who will be entitled or enabled to act collectively to impose their geoengineering schemes as
imperative solutions for many, if not any, threats seem to be more pressing . Again, here is a rough-and-
ready socioengineering standing in reserve to answer any problem large or small (Keith, 2000). When the
conditions apparently so deeply in need of correction are so deeply contested and dimly
comprehended, it would appear quite difficult to advance massive, costly, and aggressive responses
that might or might not work as geoengineering technics. Yet, this is where public discussions seem to stand today.
Once initiated and then implemented, they could very well remain in place as techniques of
technocratic direction, they are just as useful as the means of socioengineering under expertarchic
domination. Therefore, the most interesting quality of expert/formal/orderly geoengineering discourses
is neither their feasibility nor utility, but rather their guile. Every discussion of possible future uses or probable
current feasibilities of geoengineering techniques will work on some level as socioengineering techniques in the
present for the geoengineers invoking these daunting futures to empower themselves in new
networks of governance. Whether it is a United Nations process, a superpower unilateralist act or
consortial alliance of affected countries (Virgoe, 2009: 112-118), those in the know here anticipate that a
“geoengineering regime” will be needed. And, its interventions must be, as expertarchy would have it, “appropriately
calibrated and managed within a portfolio of climate change mitigation and adaptation measures, while attempting to minimize the moral
hazard problem” (Virgoe, 2009: 107). Without any irony, these plans also anticipate granting rock-solid job security to
the degree that many possible interventions, like the release of iron compounds into the oceans, releasing sulfate aerosols,
particulates and mere water vapor into the atmosphere, or boosting massive solar shields into space, are technoscientific interventions that will
involve an institutional commitment of a few decades, if not several centuries (Bengtsson, 2006: 229-234). Enduring
such governance
as well as making it durable will be a challenge, but those acting as advocates for formal
geoengineering seem eager to get to it. As the would-be magistrates for say a planetarian “Climate and
Atmosphere Systems Administration” (CASA), these experts stand ready to staff “a facility for dynamic
management and timely decision-making” (Virgoe, 2009: 109) for several hundred years.
alt
meditative thought alt
The alternative is to embrace meditative thought to break open new ways of relating
to the world
only real purpose is to function as a prelude to action , in attempting to think we will only twist within
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 initially inspire and actually examine the feasibility of response, 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. What is the origin of that drive? Is that drive itself really under our control? Is it
something we choose and will, or it is something whose origins and meanings transcend us? 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.
The alt opens us up to rethink managerialism – solves the case

Philosophy 2nd, expanded edition, Editor’s Introduction ix-x)
When we attempt to think ecological concerns within the field of thinking opened for us by Martin
Heidegger, the paradoxical unfolds at the site of the question of human action. Thinking ecologically
that is, thinking the earth in our time means thinking death; it means thinking catastrophe; it means
thinking the possibility of utter annihilation not just for human being but for all that lives on this
planet and for the living planet itself. Thinking the earth in our time means thinking what presents
itself as that which must not be allowed to go on, as that which must be controlled, as that which
must be stopped. Such thinking seems to call for immediate action. There is no time to lose. We must
work for change, seek solutions, curb appetites, reduce expectations, find cures now, before the
problems become greater than anyone's ability to solve them if they have not already done so.
However, in the midst of this urgency, thinking ecologically, thinking Heideggerly, means rethinking
the very notion of human action. It means placing in question the typical Western managerial
approach to problems, our propensity for technological intervention, our belief in human cognitive
power, our commitment to a metaphysics that places active human being over and against passive
nature. For it is the thoughtless deployment of these approaches and notions that has brought us to
the point of ecological catastrophe in the first place . Thinking with and after Heidegger, thinking
Heideggerly and ecologically, means, paradoxically, acting to place in question the acting subject,
willing a displacement of our will to action; it means calling ourselves as selves to rethink our very
selves, insofar as selfhood in the West is constituted as agent, as actor, as calculatively controlling
ego, as knowing consciousness. Heidegger's work calls us not to rush in with quick solutions, not to
act decisively to put an end to deliberation, but rather to think, to tarry with thinking unfolding itself,
to release ourselves to thinking without provision or predetermined aim . Such thinking moves
paradoxically, within and at the edge of the tension and the play of calculation and reflection , logos
and poesis, and urgency that can yet abide in stillness.
Meditative thought is key – understanding of the ever-changing and unknowable

nature of Earth is a prerequisite to solving
Philosophy 2nd, expanded edition, Editor’s Introduction xi)
In 'Earth-Thinking and Transformation,' Kenneth Maly shows ways in which Heideggerian reflection on
the fact of our being earth-dwellers can be transformative of our thinking at its very core and
therefore transformative of our world. Maly believes that our culture’s insistence on a divorce
between rationality and other ways of thinking and knowing has resulted in an impoverishment of our
being and a destructive distancing from the earth that gives rise to, shelters, and sustains us. When
we take ourselves and the earth as fixed entities to be comprehended by rational observation and
theoretical constructs, we lose sight of the earth and being-human as process, as forever un-fixed, as
changing, growing, outgrowing, as living and therefore dying. It is only when we begin to think human
being and earth as unfixed, as always undergoing transformation in a living unfolding of our/ being,
that a new, less destructive understanding of humanity-in/on-earth can come into being, with the
possibility of a way of living that unfolds within the dynamic paradox of relatedness-as-such . And such
understanding, Maly would argue, is absolutely necessary if we are avoid destroying the earth.
Meditative thought solves – opens itself up to infinite possibilities and the chance of
being wrong
Philosophy 2nd, expanded edition, Editor’s Introduction xvi-xvii)
In 'Down-to-Earth Mystery,' Gail Stenstad takes up the question of how we can be empowered in a
situation in which our thinking and actions seem futile, compelling us to witness helplessly the
destruction of earth and world. Coming to grips with the ungrounding of thinking opened up in
Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy brings an awareness of the an-archic character of thinking,
in which all the traditional dualistic touchstones and fixations (such as objectivity, territoriality, and in
general all theoretical aims) fall aside. This is a way to begin to open up the depths of what Heidegger
means by releasement towards things, enabling the openness to mystery that embodies in us the
groundless grounding from which we are then empowered to respond to the situation in which we
actually find ourselves. This is no abstraction, nor yet wordplay. It is this an-archic thinking that can,
for example, enable environmental philosophers and other concerned people to work or play with the
best insights of any theory, fostering action without the hindrance of the useless expectation of
uniform agreement. So there is the possibility of practical empowerment . But even if we see no
clearly apparent results of that kind, going deeper yet into the matter awakens us to the magnetic
quality of genuine thinking. 'We are the pointers,' Heidegger says. Releasing the old expectations,
opening to mystery without aiming to resolve it, responding to things in the ongoing ungrounded
dance of dynamic relationality, enables us first of all to be who we are. Only then may we begin to
imagine what it is to dwell on this earth, and act accordingly.
Only a grassroots approach solves – individual mindset is ket
Mcwhorter and Stenstad 09
(Ladelle McWhorter and Gail Stenstad, Heidegger and the Earth: Essays in Environmental
An-archic thinking makes our caring for earth and all live things a springboard to creative thinking,
which is what is most needed now, if we are not going to destroy the life on and of this planet. This is
not just 'preaching to the choir' (environmental philosophers). Anyone who cares about the earth
has to start someplace. We can, right from where we are, whoever we are, unlearn (and release)
hindering philosophical-theoretical fixations and learn to think, which also, along the way, releases
those dualisms that are contrary to a healthy earth (and us!). According to Heidegger (almost)
anyone can learn to think in this way (DT 47). This isn't just 'ivory tower' philosophizing. Yes, it
is for philosophers, but also for gardeners, farmers, cooks, mothers, road workers, and anyone
else at all who cares. This is a crucial matter. By all the evidence currently available to us, it is a
fact that environmentally necessary institutional and structural change is not going to come
from the top down, from politicians, corporate CEOs, the WTO, and so on. Nor is it likely that
we will persuade them to think and act differently through our theoretical brilliance, truly
though we may speak. Grassroots action, whether by groups or individuals, is the only viable
possibility. One by one and group by group, perhaps we can attain a critical mass that will bring about
widespread transformation.
localization alt
The alternative is a shift from the aff’s elite, scientific politics of the environment to a
loca, subpolitical one that refuses to support the society/nature binary – only by
acknowledging our individual complicity in environmental degradation can we have a
productive politics
Everybody has to come to their own conclusions about this. If you agree with me, that these have been problems and they have to be
addressed, I think one place to begin is to not accept the antinomies of nature/society and
economy/culture, state/society as they've come to us from the 19th century . The environmental
sciences and studies usually sort of say, "We're all about green stuff." Green stuff is in turn basically
about everything we haven't sullied. We want to protect the not yet built environment or reclaim
perhaps some of the built environment to be more like the not yet built environment. But there's
always this division between built environment and not yet built environment , or never to be built
environment. I think that's a mistake. They have to all be seen together. Why is what is done within society and economy
not natural? In some register, if you talk about, well whatever happens on the earth we say is natural, because nature is the earth. But
whatever human beings do on the earth is unnatural, because human beings do it. Does that make sense? Is that a lingering presence of the
kind of deistically inspired notion that man is the crown of creation, endowed or directed by God to do good things on the earth? If it is, then is
it time to either bring God back into it more, or to just forget
talking about it in that way at all and see everything as
natural. Which allows one then to talk about the green and the gray together. To crawl all the way
back up the pipes into the productive process. Why should environmental resistance stop where the
factory begins? Why should the fight be fought only out in the woods chaining yourself to trees? Why is
resource managerialism seen as a process whereby you try to prevent the over-exploitation of resources by preventing new mining, as opposed
to coming forward with highly rationalized ways of redoing engineering that would reduce the need to do that to begin with. There's
a
need to crawl into the artificial ecologies, the industrial ecologies, in order to protect the natural
ecologies. Rather than saying, well that's engineering and that's not what I do. By the same token, there's a need politically to
politicize these processes that are often considered sub-political . Our political conception accepts Aristotelian
definitions of labour. The citizen is the free property, wharf making man, who has the leisure to do politics. He has the leisure to do that politics
because the metic, the mechanic, the slave and the woman stay at home or in the marketplace to produce the wealth that makes all that
happen. That's kind of a dumb division of labour that probably didn't exist in classical Hellenic civilization as cleanly as political theorists pretend
today. But now it's really kind of stupid. Many
important decisions are not taken by people sitting in Ottawa or
Washington. They're made in corporations or in design studios in the design construction creation of
goods and services. The sub-political decisions are where a lot of things that really affect our lives, are
made. Then out of the factory door they pollute, they degrade things. The state comes along and tries to bottle that up
with regulation, environmental controls, etc. It's kind of dumb. Getting into that sub-political level of
decision making, and politicizing what goes on behind the veil of expertise: "Oh you can't talk about
that, because you're not an engineer." Or behind the veil of property: "Oh, you can't talk about that,
because you don't have shares in the company or you don't own the business." That probably needs to
be changed. The affects of these sub-political decisions affect our public life. Recognizing that ecology is a public
enterprise that affects all of us is another thing that conceivably should be don e. Then I guess the last thing I'd
probably recommend that we think about, "is this nature that we think is so pristine and pure even around much anymore?" How much of it
has been degraded to the point where it is not protectable. As a result, many people are coming along and saying, "Well why don't we just have
artificial nature? What's wrong with pigs that grow human ears? What's wrong with strawberries that glow in the dark? This is better living
through science." So the genetic reengineering of animals and plants in the name of profit is again something I think a lot of environmental
programs are dealing with, but a lot of other ones are not dealing with, because it is not natural. Instead it's being consigned off to ethicists, or
it's not even being looked at, at all because it's considered to be not all that pervasive. When in fact it's becoming quite pervasive, because
these are new ways of making animal production and plant production more profitable. That's where I'd begin, right off the top of my head,
thinking about how the environment ought to be expanded, the
separation between environment and society maybe
ought to be torn down. It should look at the gray and the brown as much as the green. I think it needs
to be a lot more political than it's been. And much less focused on science. Because it's the scientific
that gets you into a monitoring, measuring, regulating regime, which is right now the best that we've
got, but I think there's more to it than that that can be done.
Only a reconceptualization of the society/nature binary can cause a shift in the way
we value nature – it’s the only hope for escaping managerialism
I don't know about that. I think we can get out of it. The question is, how do you get out of it? You could have a nuclear war.
You could have a big bio-terrorist accident or attack. You could have an asteroid hit things and mess it up. There's a lot of ways to disrupt the
global economy globally, which would get you out of it. You'd have to start back at some previous state. But making a conscious
choice to get from where we're at now to whatever would seem to be a more "rational, ecological"
way of doing things, will basically require, sadly enough, a value change. People have to value doing things
differently. I think over time, in the past what, 50 years there has been a radical value change in terms of how we deal with the
environment. There's far more environmental awareness now than there was 50 years ago. Are things better environmentally now than they
were 50 years ago? In some ways they are. So in some sense, keeping on this general track of self-reflection and change
is not an inconsiderable development. But what really needs to be done i s, as we probably know, a complete
new reconstitution of the way we live. Which gets us back to not thinking about environmental issues
solely as environment. In many ways, the problems with how we live are right there in front of you
with the urban structure of this city. It's miles across, and to do things in your day you might have to
consume a lot of hydrocarbon energy to do things. You buy stuff that comes here from all over the
world, much of which could maybe be made or produced pretty much closer to here. But that doesn't
happen, because all of us are encouraged not to make or produce things close to where you live,
because that's what losers do. You don't want to be a loser, you want to be a winner. The whole script and package of
everyday life contains the environmental crisis within it. How do you get people to see that and then
decide to live differently, and make it their problem , not somebody else's problem, i.e. "Oh that's good for somebody else
to do, but not for me. I've got mine jack and stick it where the sun don't shine for you, because I'm not going to change." Which has been
the traditional problem of environmental change. I'm on top and I'm going stay there. Maybe my children or your children
can live a life where everybody rides a bicycle, eats granola, and has no TV. But right now, this is pretty good. So that's a big problem. It's a
value change and if it's going to start it starts here, it starts in North America .
interenvironmenal relations alt
The alternative is a reconceptualization of international politics in terms of
interenvironmental relations – only this can investigate the questions of inequality
and control that are the root cause of our environmental and political problems
Such sociotechnical formations have real, material significance. For example, one
decisively significant way in which our
fossil-fuel-burning, automobile-building, commodity-buying culture has become "a veritable second
nature" in the Group of Eight can be traced through the planet's atmosphere, oceans, soils, and climate . As the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported in Shanghai in January 2001, "most of the global warming of the last 50
years is attributable to human activities."37 Not surprisingly, the people most involved in such activity
reside in niches occupied by Group of Eight states: the effluence of their affluence is the major
destructive influence on Earth's atmosphere (though it may be noted that in 2002 China was recognized as the world's
fastest-growing automobile market) . First nature, or the planet's environments before or apart from human activities, has not seen our current
levels of CO2 concentration (increases that have occurred over the 250 years of the απ ' industrial revolution) in 420,000 years. Second
nature, or the planet's environments with all of their current human activities, is putting that first
nature away for good and creating an entirely new ecological order with its own energy flows,
material exchanges, and habitat niches. The United States , for example, with not quite 5 percent of the
world's population, produces one-quarter of the greenhouse gases . While the United States is the most
powerful nation in the international system, this national power simultaneously reveals and occludes something
more profound about its occupation of the prime niche in the global ecosystems of fossilfuel use , which
is much more expansive and destructive than that found in its bordered national space. On the one hand, many collectives
(people and things) in the United States are powerful enough and wealthy enough to generate tremendous
production and use of oil, gas, and coal; on the other hand, the production-and-consumption
inequalities registered in the ledgers of other nations permit the United States to off-load its
greenhouse-gas by-production onto terrains, spaces, and niches worldwide. Second nature now has so
many builtenvironmental niches nested within it that the modernization process has mostly ended: nature
has gone for good. Much of what appears to be international relations is, in fact, also an elaborate
network of interenvironmental relations as the occupants and beneficiaries of one small cluster of
niches occupied by very successful political economies (like the Group of Eight and other major OECD countries)
compete with the residents and refugees of other, much-less-high-tech blocs of humans and
nonhumans (like those occupying the Group of Seventy-seven countries) . We cannot understand inequality in the so-
called new world order without reexamining how international relations express complex
interenvironmental relations between divergent, differing assemblies of humanity and nonhumanity,
recognizing that these relations are largely omnipolitan in their depth and direction. Who controls the
creation of new environmental conditions? Who and what suffers from this capability of control? How
do such inequalities express themselves? These are essential questions that must be explored more
fully.
This reconceptualization of the international sphere as interenvironmental relations is
critical to address ecological devastation – current IR theories are doomed to further
exploitation and extinction
The omnipolitan subpolis evolves in the reified dictates of industrial ecologies , whose machinic
metabolisms, in turn, entail the planned and unintended destruction of nonhuman and human lives in
many different national environments. Those interenvironmental relations then become a new means to organize "the conduct
of conduct" for citizens and consumers.105 International relations as a discipline is unlikely to critically and
comprehensively address how all of the contradictions in the subpolis bring their disruptive influence
into our public life. These concerns have not been present in its discursive DNA for reasons going back to the ancient Greek city-states .
An interenvironmental approach, however, begins to disclose how deep technology predetermines
collective ends without much, if any, ethical discussion or political deliberation. This occurs because those
who "know how," as well as those who "own how" in the subpolis are permitted to prejudge
everyone's actions in the polis. Their expert knowledge and private ownership give them some
capability to decide for all. Democracy, in turn, finds dictatorial administrative rationalities turned into
collective ends in themselves without much, if any, ethical debate or political discussion .
Environmentalism is one of the last remaining discourses available for us to provide some ethical
consideration or political reflection about the effects of the subpolis on the overall civic life of society
as privileged millions still benefit environmentally from the international misery of billions .106 As we stand
perhaps at the end of nature in the first years of the twenty-first century, we cannot continue on this track if Earth's
ecologies are ever to be mended.107 To conclude, my analysis has developed two major points. First, I have argued broadly about
how human nations and nonhuman niches are fabricated, but then fit into what "the environment" is by positioning this understanding in the
twenty-first century a time, for many, coming at "the end" of nature by raising the specter of new environized agencies and structures: cyborgs,
hybrids, machinations, the subpolis. Second, I have indicated why most thinking
about international relations does not
reexamine how the uneven globalization of technoscience has created a now all-pervasive subpolitical
domain beneath, beyond, and beside the sphere of politics. The imperatives of subpolitics give a
broader perspective on the environmental crisis than thinking simply about how the incomplete
globalization of civic activism in the political sphere, as many others have claimed, limits ecological
improvements. Ultimately, international relations cannot come to complete closure with "the
environment," and what are now environized inequalities in many human societies, until or unless its
practitioners carefully reconsider how the subpolitical domain constrains and confounds initiatives for
change in the political sphere by running them down the box canyons of property rights and the dead
ends of expertise.
relational ontology alt (at: anthropocentric)
A relational ontology towards Nature allows for Heideggerian reflection on our
relationship to it – solves anthropocentrism
Malette 10 (Sebastien, PhD in Philosophy at the University of Victoria, “Green Governmentality and its Closeted Metaphysics:
Toward an Ontological Relationality”, http://dspace.library.uvic.ca:8080/bitstream/handle/1828/3165/Dissert_Malette_Final.pdf?
sequence=1&isAllowed=y)
Several scholars are now examining the emergence of ecology as a means for achieving tighter governmental regulations under the label
of what they call green or eco-governmentality. Adopting Michel Foucault‘s historical ontology, one of their critiques consists in
problematizing the notion of Nature at the core of environmental debates as a political construct modulated by the historical conditions
in which it finds itself. One implication of this is that ―Nature‖ has no normative implications except the ones we collectively fantasize
about. Such a critique is often perceived as a threat by many environmentalists who are struggling to develop a global and intercultural
perspective on environmental destruction. This dissertation suggests that Foucault‘s critical project should be examined
from a more thoroughly ecological standpoint, leading toward the adoption of a broader, less
ethnocentric and anthropocentric ontology. It explores the possibility of rethinking the concept of Nature at
the core of political ecology from the standpoint of a relational ontology rather than an historical
ontology. It argues that a relational ontology offers a possible alternative to historical ontology by posing
our relations to ―Nature‖ not through the metaphysic of will and temporality assumed by Foucault (by which
he asserts a universal state of contingency and finitude to deploy his critical project), but through a holistic understanding
of Nature in terms of inter-constitutive relations. By being relational instead of historical, a relational ontology
contributes to the formulation of open-ended and dynamic worldviews that do not operate against
the backdrop of a homogenizing form of temporal universalism or constructivism, but rather poses
the immanent differences and processes of diversification we are experiencing as the unifying and
harmonizing principle by which we can rethink a more thorough egalitarian and non-anthropocentric
standpoint for ecological thinking. Such a differential—yet shared—understanding of Nature could
facilitate the development of an intercultural and non anthropocentric perspective on environmental
destruction.
war/IR aff alt
The alternative is a reimaging of the IR sphere in terms of interenvironmental
relations – only by abandoning traditional ideas of the nation, the economy, and
management, can we hope to confront modern environmental problems
Rethinking world politics as a form of interenvironmental relations requires us, like Latour, to jump off
the familiar tracks that liberal humanism has laid down for understanding "the environment" to
reinterpret, for example, how "the economy" or "the state" works. Environmental problems are real,
and most of them cannot be addressed adequately, much less effectively solved, without coming to terms with the
social purposes of those who misconstruct political economy and the environment around the
mystified terms that are most commonly used today. Environmental discourse must be broadened as
widely as possible so that the built environment of society and its production processes in "second
nature" are recognized as pervasive influences that should not be separated from the unbuilt
environments, or nature, or "first nature," and its damage from by-production processes .19 Because states
and economies both try to capture and contain these social forces, who and/or what defines, directs, and develops that built environment and
its products clearly must be a central concern of international relations.20 Their
interventions, however, rarely are decisive
enough to succeed, even though entire academic disciplines, like environmental studies, green
management, and applied ecology, are dedicated to guiding their efforts .21 To address these questions, we
need to think about the constructions of interenvironmental relation s as much as or even more than
the constructs of international relations.22 At this juncture, there are so many quantitatively new, rapidly
expanding environmental trends that we face many qualitatively new conditions. Inequalities are no
longer simply international in scope and national by method; they essentially are interenvironmental
in their breadth and depth. Accounting for these shifts may require mobilizing new terms and conditions beyond those traditionally
accepted in the chronicles of men, and sometimes women, for coping with modernity. G iven these goals, this analysis is imperfect, incomplete,
and unfinished. At this stage of these discursive developments, it cannot be otherwise.
warming-specific alt
The alternative solves warming – large-scale technological solutions exacerbate
human damage – micro-scale solutions solve
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.
cyborg alt
The alternative is a cyborg reading of the aff’s liberalism – key to expose the
contradictions and machine relations of domination inherent in their worldview
Sage)
This discussion playfully rereads liberalism as perversely as possible. Unless one takes this
interpretative stance, the strange narratives and bizarre propositions of ordinary liberal reasoning
play their usual tricks. In languages of objective value neutrality, liberal precepts begin lulling us into solemn
acceptance of their alleged self-evidence; we are cast into the nebulous fogs of rational self-interest
and left with little to say about their actual, proven, worth . A straight-up reading-meaning an interpretative stance
acceptable perhaps to faithful readers of arcane scientific literatures in the American Political Science Review or American Journal of Political
Science-all too often buys into what Latour decries as the dubious Enlightenmentera infraphysics of Nature/Culture, Subject/Object,
Humanity/Technology, Being/Nonbeing embedded deeply in the languages of this liberal tradition.1 However, a more offbeat
approach-meaning one that these same serious readers of APSR or AJPS might snort over as neoMarxist, normative or, worst of all,
postmodern, may evade such defenses by problematizing the accepted Ianguages of rationality,
indi.viduality, or agency as they are used by liberalism to reproduce itself culturally, economically, and
politically. So this discussion perversely searches the economy and society of the United States for the
presence of other agencies and structures -places in which, we have been told, only humane, rational individuals are to be
found, acting happily through free contracts in markets or states. There it asks if perhaps cyborgs, not human beings,
and mechanical assemblies, not free exchange, are at play on the range of liberal democratic society.
This article suggests a cyborg reading of liberalism might more thoroughly reveal the workings of liberal
regimes with all of their contradictions and conflicts than might some faithful adherence to categories
and concepts grounded in the liberal tradition itself. Radical ecologists, feminists, and intellectual historians
frequently criticize liberalism for its mechanistic theoretical infraphysics, which recasts nature as a
vast machine driven by mechanical cycles, forces, and structures .* "Man the machine"; markets as
"economic mechanisms"; society operating as "complex mechanical structures"-this strange ontology
underpins classic liberal thought. Few critics have explored how this devotion to abstract machines in liberal
metatheory actually might affect the concrete mechanisms of liberal practice in the present . Therefore, a
cyborg rereading of human/machine interactions, radically reframing how humanness and
machineness can be understood, provides a unique opportunity to explore how the Enlightenment
infraphysics of liberalism can be reinterpreted against the late modern politics of environments,
bodies, and societies.
A cyborg reading allows us to reveal the machine nature of capitalism that is driving
environmental degradation and population control – only once we recognize it can we
do something about it
Sage)
Seeing “denature” in “nature,” recognizing the “dehuman” in “humanity,” also leads us perversely to
challenge the color scheme in green politics, as environmentalists still fetishize green wild zones in our
autochthonous existence over gray tame zones. To take our cyborg ontology entirely to heart, one
must admit that increasingly our immediate everyday ecosystem, or “our environment,” is composed mostly of
commercialized artifacts, mediating the metabolism of immense megamachines of production and
consumption thriving in technogenic habitats of elaborate, artificially built ecologies.19 “Human
beings” are the cyborganized products/producers of the machinic products that produce these
environments: supermarket foods, mall fashions, suburban housing, automotive transport, electronic
telecommunication, petrochemical energy, and corporate entertainment . Only cyborg (human) beings exist there.
Liberals believe we can exist, as we are now, even when we are not there, but this claim is
increasingly incredible. More then must be made of the politics of environments, bodies and nature in
the cyborg ecologies of contemporary global capitalism . This dehuman vision of cyborganization would suggest that
what was nature has been integrated, like the former Soviet Union and China, into the megamachines of
transnational corporate capitalism. Denature is a plural formation, creating a plural politics of “first
nature” in the green outside and a “second nature” of the manufactured inside, which promises, in
turn, a “third nature” of the cybernetic simulacra beyond all sides .20 Either way, second and third nature, with their
megamachineries, are where the basic ecosystems of dehumanized cyborg environments are centered. The acts and artifacts of this
global system are charged with significant conventional understandings about accepting as well as
resisting this totalitarian monoculture; namely, its megamachines, and the commodities they produce
to reproduce their order. Almost everyone on the planet now depends exclusively upon the artifacts
produced by these megamachinesas commodified forms of shelter, food supplies, dress, climate control, work, social control,
entertainment-to live both “developed” and ”underdeveloped” forms of life. When easy access to this environment is
interrupted by war, weather disasters, crime, or international sanctions, survival itself is imperiled.
Without the megamachines, life turns into the solitary, nasty, brutish, and short kind of existence
endured in Sarajevo, Coma, Port-au-Prince, Grozny, or Beirut. Popular resistance against shallow
green movements like “sustainable development” or ”voluntary simplicity,” which aim only at modifying slightly these
environments, follows from cyborg beings recognizing how radically even these mild ideas of change could
alter the social conditions of their cyborganization . Nonliving devices would not be unified with living
beings in the same ways, returning many of us as unsustainably developed and coercively complex
high-tech cyborganisms to more low-tech cyborganic states.
fw
ontology first
Ontology comes first—affects every mode of policymaking
Dillon 99 [Michael Dillon; Moral Spaces: Rethinking Ethics and World Politics; 97-99]
As Heidegger—himself an especially revealing figure of the deep and mutual implication of the
philosophical and the political4 — never tired of pointing out, the relevance of ontology to all other
kinds of thinking is fundamental and inescapable. For one cannot say anything about anything that is,
without always already having made assumptions about the is as such. Any mode of thought , in short,
always already carries an ontology sequestered within it. What this ontological turn does to other—
regional—modes of thought is to challenge the ontology within which they operate. The implications
of that review reverberate throughout the entire mode of thought, demanding a reappraisal as
fundamental as the reappraisal ontology has demanded of philosophy. With ontology at issue, the
entire foundations or underpinnings of any mode of thought are rendered problematic. This applies as
much to any modern discipline of thought as it does to the question of modernity as such, with the
exception, it seems, of science, which, having long ago given up the ontological questioning of when it
called itself natural philosophy, appears now, in its industrialized and corporatized form, to be
invulnerable to ontological perturbation. With its foundations at issue, the very authority of a mode
of thought and the ways in which it characterizes the critical issues of freedom and judgment (of what
kind of universe human beings inhabit, how they inhabit it, and what counts as reliable knowledge for
them in it) is also put in question. The very ways in which Nietzsche, Heidegger, and other continental
philosophers challenged Western ontology, simultaneously, therefore reposed the fundamental and
inescapable difficulty, or aporia, for human being of decision and judgment. In other words, whatever
ontology you subscribe to, knowingly or unknowingly, as a human being you still have to act. Whether
or not you know or acknowledge it, the ontology you subscribe to will construe the problem of action
for you in one way rather than another. You may think ontology is some arcane question of
philosophy, but Nietzsche and Heidegger showed that it intimately shapes not only a way of thinking,
but a way of being, a form of life. Decision, a fortiori political decision, in short, is no mere technique.
It is instead a way of being that bears an understanding of Being, and of the fundaments of the human
way of being within it. This applies, indeed applies most, to those mockinnocent political slaves who
claim only to be technocrats of decision making. While certain continental thinkers like Blumenberg
and Lowith, for example, were prompted to interrogate or challenge the modern s claim to being
distinctively “modern,” and others such as Adorno questioned its enlightened credentials, philosophers
like Derrida and Levinas pursued the metaphysical implications (or rather the implications for meta-
physics) of the thinking initiated by Kierkegaard, as well as by Nietzsche and Heidegger. The violence of
metaphysics, together with another way of thinking about the question of the ethical, emerged as the
defining theme of their work.5 Others, notably Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard, Baudrillard, and Bataille
turned the thinking of Nietzsche and Heidegger into a novel kind of social and political critique of both
the regimes and the effects of power that have come to distinguish late modern times; they
concentrated, in detail, upon how the violence identified by these other thinkers manifested itself not
only in the mundane practices of modern life, but also in those areas that claimed to be most free of it,
especially the freedom and security of the subject as well as its allied will to truth and knowledge.
Questioning the appeal to the secure selfgrounding common to both its epistemic structures and its
political imagination, and in the course of reinterrogating both the political character of the modern
and the modern character of the political, this problematization of modernity has begun to prompt an
ontopolitically driven reappraisal of modern political thought. This means that the ontological
constitution of politics itself—its legislating categories of time, space, understanding, and action, and
of what it is to be — prompted by the politics of the specific (ontological) constitutional order of
political modernity, has begun to come under sustained scrutiny.
Serial policy failure
The aff’s quick-fix mindset guarantees serial policy failure – their means-ends
rationality is the root cause of environmental destruction
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 vehicular effluent. 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 atmosphe re; 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 where does that leave us? If we cannot act to
solve our problems, what should we do?
at:
at: our epistemology is sound
Environmental science is beholden to the capitalist system that views Nature as
domething to be dominated, controlled, and preserved only so far as it does not
decrease profitability – their evidence comes out of the university complex that
produces managerialism as the only truth
The "three Rs" of environmental studies now implicitly acknowledge how thoroughly most human
ecologies on Earth are "a sociotechnical order." As Law suggests, the networks of humans and machines, animals and plants,
economies and ecologies, which now constitute our environment, are mixed media of power and knowledge: "what appears to be social is
partly technical. What we usually call technical is partly social. In practice nothing is purely technical. Neither is anything purely social."54
Approaching the environment as terrestrial infrastructure, at the same time, admits that the
professionaltechnical graduates of environmental studies programs are in many ways trained to
operate as "heterogeneous engineers ." That is, he/she must work "not only on inanimate physical materials, but on and
through people, texts, devices, city councils, architectures, economics, and all the rest," such that if his/her designs are to work as a system,
then he/she always must travel effectively "between these different domains, weaving an emergent web which constituted and reconstituted
bits and pieces that it brought together."55 Too
few articulations of environmental studies acknowledge these
basic operational conditions, but they form the sociotechnical terrains upon which environmental
studies experts must negotiate their professional worklives through in order to heterogeneously
engineer Earth's ecologies as the infrastructures of anthropogenic environments . Transforming the
raw stuff of Nature into natural resources, while minimizing the associated risks of such processing
and maximizing the aggregate access of recreationists to yet-to-be or never-to-be transformed
Nature, is a constant challenge for heterogeneous engineers from the environmental science
disciplines to pull off with any aplomb. The green fixations of so many conventional environmentalists makes it difficult, if not
impossible, for environmental studies to recognize all of the natural/artificial networks that its practitioners must tend as essential parts with a
complex system for their projects of heterogeneous engineering. Owning
up to full immensity of these tasks, however,
leads those who would be the tenders of Nature to the project of "terraforming," or reshaping the
Earth so completely that it obviously becomes an essentially sociotechnical planetary order . The Earth,
then, no longer is allowed to exist or evolve as such; instead it is consigned to the hands of terraforming
professionals with graduate training in the environmental sciences . Duke University asserts "the mission of the
School of the Environment is education, research and service to understand basic environmental processes and to protect and enhance the
environment and its natural resources for future generations."56 This
engagement at "protecting" and "enhancing" the
environment to transmit its natural resources to future generations is seconded by California-
Berkeley, whose Ecosystem Sciences mission statement virtually writes the job description of
terraforming technicians: "Ecosystem Sciences are concerned with quantitative understanding of
ecosystem properties and processes, and the controls on these features. Central to this mission is a
full partnership between physical and biological scientists, leading to an integrated understanding of
ecosystem structure and function, and the extension of these findings in modeling and
implementation activities."57 The labor of environmental studies professionals must be dedicated to
protecting and enhancing the performativity of our environments. Whatever surrounds our increasing
performative global economy must also become as operationally adaptable, flexible, and productive,
as Colorado State labels them, through the problem-solving knowledges of riparian management, land rehabilitation, habitat evaluation, range
economics, biotelemetric surveillance, wood engineering, resource interpretation, or visitor strategies. While students may enter schools of
environmental studies and colleges of natural resources in search of wisdom from Aldo Leopold or John Muir, they mostly leave as
adept practitioners of ecosystem management /analysis, ecological risk analysis, and recreation
resource administration.58 Forests, range lands, waters, game animals, and soils all are integral
components in terrestrial infrastructures for the vast machineries of commodity production,
circulation, consumption, and accumulation, which are, in turn, terraforming the unruly ecologies of
Earth to suit their mainly commercial requirements. Because, as the Dean of Yale's School argues, "there is hardly a place
on Earth where human activity does not influence the environment's current condition or its prospects for the future," environmental
studies and colleges of natural resources produce technoscientific experts, or those new "cadres of
educated professionals," or who truly believe "that the best hope for developing sound knowledge
and workable management solution for environmental problems is to bring science and policy
together."59 Truths about ecology are not objective timeless verities, but rather are the
operationalized findings of continuously evolving practices for heterogeneous engineering as they
have been constructed by major research universities . These institutions are sites where "truth," or "a
system of order procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation, and operation of statements,"60 arises from
knowledge formations, like the disciplines of environmental science, to help steer power formations,
like the decision-making bureaux of liberal democratic states and capitalist firms . As Foucault asserts, "there
are manifold relations of power which permeate, characterize and constitute the social body, and these relations of power cannot themselves
be established, consolidated nor implemented without the production, accumulation, circulation and functioning of a discourse. There can be
no possible exercise of power without a certain economy of discourses of truth which operates through and on the basis of this association." 61
Environmental science, then, should reveal multiple traces of this vital cycle of cogeneration by which
power charges truthful knowledges even as truthful knowledges mediate power in the scope and
substance of its discursive construction at schools of environmental studies and colleges of natural
resources.
at: alt is romanticism
The alt is not romanticization of an earlier time – Heidegger specifically critiques that,
it’s simply a reorientation of our thinking
Of course,
the all-too-immediate reaction to such an example is to charge Heidegger with a dangerous
romanticism. With the benefit of a few decades experience around the world with the products of the mechanized food industry,
from tasteless food, soil erosion, and ubiquitous pesticides to emptied communities, alienated consumers, and green imperialism, in
retrospect Heidegger’s critique seems understated. More
significantly, though, the question is not a moral one of
good or bad but an exploration of what possible ways of relating to nature are opened and foreclosed
with different practices of revealing. Heidegger himself dismisses the possibility of romanticism in
response to the giganticism and the progress of science , “whose onset can neither be hindered nor
even held up in any way, by any romantic remembering of what was earlier and different” (1999, 108).
Indeed, Heidegger’s fundamental critique of modern technology is not directed at the world it reveals
but the world it erases: “Where this ordering holds sway, it drives out every other possibility of revealing. Above all, enframing
conceals that revealing which, in the sense of poiesis, lets what presences come forth into appearance. As compared with that other
revealing, the setting-upon that challenges forth thrusts man into a relation to whatever is that is at once antithetical and rigorously
ordered. Where enframing holds sway, regulating and securing of the standing-reserve mark all revealing.” (1993, 332) The
problem, then, is not that nature is seen as “standing-reserve,” a “calculable coherence of forces,” but
that that is all it can be seen as.
at: quals/empirics
Ignore aff appeals to quals or statistics – it’s a product of their endless search for
efficiency and control – constant individual reflection is the only way to solve
Mcwhorter 09 (Ladelle McWhorter, Heidegger and the Earth: Essays in Environmental Philosophy 2nd, expanded edition, “Guilt as
Heidegger calls us to give thought to or give ourselves over to thought of the strangeness of our
technological being within the world. His works resound with calls for human beings to grow more
thoughtful, to take heed, to notice and reflect upon where we are and what we are doing, lest human
possibility and the most beautiful of possibilities for thought be lost irretrievably in forces we do not
understand and perhaps only imagine and pretend we can control. Heidegger's admonitions are
sometimes somewhat harsh: 'Let us not fool ourselves,' he wrote in 1955. 'All of us, including those
who think professionally, as it were, are often enough thought-poor; we all are far too easily thought-
less. Thoughtlessness is an uncanny visitor who comes and goes everywhere in today's world. For
nowadays we take in everything in the quickest and cheapest way, only to forget it just as quickly,
instantly' (DT 44-5). To some ears this assertion might sound unnecessarily harsh. We academicians
in particular might want to contest his claim. Surely we, who think for a living, cannot be fairly
accused of having no thoughts. Look at all we have accomplished; witness all the problems we have
solved. We are productive thinkers, and our curricula vitae attest to the fact. But Heidegger had no
respect for that or any other kind of defensiveness or for dismissive complacency. The thinking he saw
as essential is no more likely, perhaps unfortunately, to be found in universities and among
philosophers than anywhere else. For the thinking he saw as essential is not the simple amassing and
digesting of facts or even the mastering of complex relationships or the producing of ever more
powerful and inclusive theories. The thinking Heidegger saw as essential, the thinking his works call us
to, is not a thinking that seeks to master anything, not a thinking that results from a drive to grasp and
know and shape the world; it is a thinking that disciplines itself first of all to allow the world the earth,
things to show themselves on their own terms. Heidegger called this kind of thinking 'reflection.' In
1936 he wrote, 'Reflection is 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' (QT 116).
Reflection is thinking that never rests complacently in the conclusions reached yesterday; it is thinking
that continues to think, that never stops with a satisfied smile and announces: We can cease; we have
the right answer now. On the contrary, it is thinking that loves its own life, its own occurring, that
does not quickly put a stop to itself, as thinking intent on a finding a fast and efficient solution always
tries to do.
aff
FW and stuff
Framework—focus of the debate should be on the material implications of the plan—
key to AFF ground—their framework allows them to skirt the question of the necessity
of the government taking action
Academic debate over energy policy in the face of environmental destruction is critical
to shape the direction of change and create a public consciousness shift---the K’s
esoteric abstractions allow for extinction---action now is key
Crist 4 (Eileen, Professor at Virginia Tech in the Department of Science and Technology, “Against the
social construction of nature and wilderness”, Environmental Ethics 26;1, p 13-6,
http://www.sts.vt.edu/faculty/crist/againstsocialconstruction.pdf)
Yet, constructivist analyses of "nature" favor remaining in the comfort zone of
zestless agnosticism and noncommittal meta-discourse . As David Kidner suggests, this
intellectual stance may function as a mechanism against facing the
devastation of the biosphere—an undertaking long underway but gathering momentum with the imminent
bottlenecking of a triumphant global consumerism and unprecedented population levels. Human-driven extinction—
in the ballpark of Wilson's estimated 27,000 species per year— is so unthinkable a fact that choosing to
ignore it may well be the psychologically risk-free option. Nevertheless, this is the
opportune historical moment for intellectuals in the humanities and social
sciences to join forces with conservation scientists in order to help create the
consciousness shift and policy changes to stop this irreversible destruction.
Given this outlook, how students in the human sciences are trained to regard
scientific knowledge, and what kind of messages percolate to the public
from the academy about the nature of scientific findings, matter
immensely . The "agnostic stance" of constructivism toward "scientific claims" about
the environment—a stance supposedly mandatory for discerning how scientific knowledge is "socially
assembled"[32]—is, to borrow a legendary one-liner, striving to interpret the world at an hour
that is pressingly calling us to change it.
Prioritization claims are counter-productive---you should evaluate the veracity of the

1ac’s claims about the world while embracing a plurality of (methods / ontologies)
Andrew Bennett 13, government prof at Georgetown, The mother of all isms: Causal mechanisms and
structured pluralism in International Relations theory, European Journal of International Relations 2013
19:459
The political science subfield of International Relations (IR) continues to undergo debates on whether and in what sense it is a 'science,1 how it should organize its inquiry into international
an 'inter-paradigm' debate, while less prominent than during the 1990s, has continued
politics, and how it should build and justify its theories. On one level,
to limp along among researchers who identify their work as fitting within the research agenda of a
grand school of thought, or 'ism,' and the scholar most closely associated with it, including neorealism (Waltz, 1979), neoliberalism (Keohane,
constructivism (Wendt, 1992), or occasionally Marxism (Wallerstein, 1974) or feminism (Tickner, 1992). Scholars participating in this debate
1984),
have often acted as if their preferred 4 ism' and its competitors were either "paradigms" (following Kuhn, 1962) or
"research programs' (as defined by Lakatos, 19701. and some have explicitly framed their approach as paradigmatic or programmatic (Hopf, 1998).¶ A second
level of the debate involves post-positivist critiques of IR as a "scientific' enterprise (Lapid, 1989). While the vague label "post-positivist,
encompasses a diverse group of scholars, frequent post-positivist themes include arguments that observation is theory-laden (Kuhn, 1962), that knowledge claims are always part of
mechanisms of power and that meaning is always social (Foucault, 1978), and that individual agents and social structures are mutually constitutive (Wendt, 1992). Taken together, these
A third axis of contestation has been

arguments indicate that the social sciences face even more daunting challenges than the physical sciences.¶
methodological, involving claims regarding the strengths and limits of statistical, formal, experimental, qualitative case study, narrative, and other methods. In the last two
decades the argument that there is 'one logic of inference1 and that this logic is 'explicated and formalized clearly in discussions of quantitative research methods' (King et al., 1994: 3) has
generated a useful debate that has clarified the similarities, differences, uses, and limits of alternative methods ( Brady and Collier, 2010; George and Bennett, 2005; Goertz and Mahoney,
These debates have each in their own way proved fruitful, increasing the theoretical, epistemological, and methodological diversity
2006).¶
of the field (Jordan el al., 2009). The IR subfield has also achieved considerable progress in the last few decades
in its theoretical and empirical understanding of important policy-relevant issues, including the inter-democratic peace,
terrorism, peacekeeping, international trade, human rights, international law, international organizations, global environmental politics, economic sanctions, nuclear proliteration, military
Yet there is a widespread sense that this progress has arisen in spite of
intervention, civil and ethnic conflicts, and many other topics.¶
interparadigmatic debates rather than because of them. Several prominent scholars, including Rudra Sil and Peter Katzenstein, have argued
that although research cast within the framework of paradigmatic debates has contributed useful concepts and findings, framing the IR field around inter-
paradigmatic debates is ultimately distracting and even counterproductive (Sil and Katzenstein, 2010; see also David Lake, 2011,
and in this special issue, and Patrick Thaddeus Jackson and Daniel Nexon, 2009, and in this special issue). These scholars agree that IR researchers have misapplied
Kuhn's notion of paradigms in ways that imply that grand theories of tightly connected ideas — the isms —
are the central focus of IR theorizing, and that such isms should compete until one wins general
consensus. Sil and Katzenstein argue that the remedy for this is to draw on pragmatist philosophers and build upon
an 'eclectic' mix of theories and methods to better understand the world (Sil and Katzenstein, 2010). In this view,
no single grand theory can capture the complexities of political life, and the real explanatory weight is
carried by more fine-grained theories about 'causal mechanisms ."¶ In this article I argue that those urging a
pragmatic turn in IR are correct in their diagnosis of the drawbacks of paradigms and their prescription tor using theories about causal mechanisms as the basis for
explanatory progress in IR. Yet scholars are understandably reluctant to jettison the "isms' and the inter-paradigmatic
debate not only because they fear losing the theoretical and empirical contributions made in the name of the isms, but because framing the field around the isms has proven a useful
shorthand for classroom teaching and field-wide discourse. The 'eclectic' label that Sil and Katzenstein propose can easily be misinterpreted in this regard, as the Merriam-Webster online
dictionary defines 'eclectic* as 'selecting what appears to be best in various doctrines, methods, or styles,' as Sil and Katzenstein clearly intend, but it also includes as synonyms
"indiscriminate" and 'ragtag.'1 By using the term 'eclecticism' and eschewing any analytic structure for situating and translating among different examples of IR research, Sil and Katzenstein
miss an opportunity to enable a discourse that is structured as well as pluralistic, and that reaches beyond IR to the rest of the social sciences.¶ I maintain that in order to sustain the genuine
contributions made under the guise of the inter-paradigmatic debate and at the same time get beyond it to focus on causal mechanisms rather than grand theoretical isms, four additional
moves are necessary. First, given that mechanism-based approaches are generally embedded within a scientific realist philosophy of science, it is essential to clarify the philosophical and
definitional issues associated with scientific realism, as well as the benefits — and costs — of making hypothesized causal mechanisms the locus of explanatory theories. As Christian Reus-Smit
IR theory cannot sidestep metatheoretical debates . Second, it is important to take post-

argues in this special issue,
positivist critiques seriously and to articulate standards for theoretical progress , other than paradigmatic revolutions,
that are defensible even if they are fallible. Third, achieving a shift toward mechanismic explanations requires outlining the contributions that diverse
methods can make to the study of causal mechanisms. Finally, it is vital to demonstrate that a focus on mechanisms can serve two key functional roles that paradigms played for the IR
subfield: first, providing a framework for cumulative theoretical progress; and, second, constituting a useful, vivid, and structured vocabulary for communicating findings to fellow scholars,
'structured pluralism' best captures this last move, as it

students, political actors, and the public (see also Stefano Guzzini's article in this special issue). I argue that the term
conveys the sense that IR scholars can borrow the best ideas from different theoretical traditions and
social science disciplines in ways that allow both intelligible discourse and cumulative progress .¶ Alter briefly
outlining the problems associated with organizing the IR field around the "isms/ this article addresses each of these four tasks in turn. First, it takes on the challenges of defining "causal
mechanisms' and using them as the basis of theoretical explanations. Second, it acknowledges the relevance and importance of post-positivist critiques of causal explanation, yet it argues that
scientific realism and some approaches to interpretivism are compatible, and that there are standards upon which they can agree forjudging
explanatory progress. Third, it very briefly clarifies the complementary roles that alternative methods can play in elucidating theories about causal mechanisms. Finally, the article presents a
taxonomy of theories about social mechanisms to provide a pluralistic but structured framework for cumulative theorizing about politics. This taxonomy provides a platform for developing
typological theories — or what others in this special issue, following Robert Merton, have called middle-range theories — on the ways in which combinations of mechanisms interact to
produce outcomes. Here, I join Lake in this special issue in urging that IR theorizing be centered around middle-range
theories, and I take issue with Jackson and Nexon's suggestion herein that such theorizing privileges correlational evidence, and their assertion that statistical evidence is inherently
associated with Humean notions of causation. I argue that my taxonomy of mechanisms offers a conceptual bridge to the
paradigmatic isms in IR. adopting and organizing their theoretical insights while leaving behind their
paradigmatic pretensions. The article concludes that, among its other virtues, this taxonomy can help reinvigorate dialogues
between IR theory and the fields of comparative and American politics, economics, sociology, psychology, and
history, stimulating cross-disciplinary discourses that have been inhibited by the scholasticism of IR's
ingrown 'isms.'
i/l debate
turn management good
Turn – environmental management is the only ethical form of politics – maintains VTL
and ecological sustainability
Kilbert et al. 11 (Charles J. Kibert, Director of the Powell Center for Construction and Environment and a Professor in the M.E. Rinker,
Sr., School of Building Construction at the University of Florida, Martha C. Monroe, Professor and extension specialist in the School of Forest
Resources and Conservation at the University of Florida, Anna L. Peterson is professor in the Department of Religion and affiliated professor in
the School of Natural Resources and Environment and the center of Latin American Studies at the University of Florida, Richard R. Plate is a
postdoctoral researcher in the School of Forest Resources and Conservation at the University of Florida, and Leslie Paul Thiele, Director
Sustainability Studies at the University of Florida, “Working Toward Sustainability: Ethical Decision-Making in a Technological World”, Wiley,
11/1/11, http://books.google.com/books ?id=Kgbcfg_4a9cC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false)
New technologies abound. and they are being developed at an ever-increasing pace, Rapid technological advances sweeping
through society have become the norm. Much of the technology that has reshaped society in the last century has become so
commonplace that many hardly recognize it as technology at all. Cars, computers, and cell phones have become such
integral parts of day-to-day life that their absence in a given situation is often more remarkable than
their presence. As a result, it is easy to overlook the profound impact technology has had on the global
community. Through technology, human beings have reached a larger population size and had a greater impact on global environmental
systems than could have been imagined just a mere century ago, when urban travel for the majority was limited to a horsedrawn carriage and
communiques between continents were sent by ship. This
book is about making good decisions about the
development and use of technology. More specifically, it is about making decisions that promote
sustainability. a concept that has achieved broad support, yet remains difficult to implement . In this book
we define sustainability as the balanced pursuit of three goods: ecological health, social equity, and
economic welfare. It is grounded in an ethical commitment to the welfare of contemporary
populations as well as the well-being and enhanced opportunities of future generations . The scientific
and technical professions have a special responsibility in this regard because the knowledge and
technologies they develop and employ have immense impacts on natural environments, economies,
and the empowerment of citizens and societies . Moreover, their efforts and achievements can continue
to produce effects, for good or ill, well into the future. Sustainability is inherently ethical, as it requires
decisions to be rooted in moral principles, rather than based solely on economic calculation or
convenience. Broadly speaking, sustainability requires that we do not undermine opportunities for others as
we strive to meet our own needs. The others whom we must take into account include future human generations and the least
well off contemporary citizens and societies, as well as natural creatures and place. This book prcr vides natural and social scientists, engineers,
architects, builders, and other professionals with a clear description of the meaning of sustainability and a practical guide to the ethical
challenges involved in its promotion and achievement.
Sustainable environmental management is critical to the survival of future generations

– only a policy of careful, balanced management can avoid irreversible ecological and
societal damage
Kilbert et al. 11 (Charles J. Kibert, Director of the Powell Center for Construction and Environment and a Professor in the M.E. Rinker,
Sr., School of Building Construction at the University of Florida, Martha C. Monroe, Professor and extension specialist in the School of Forest
Resources and Conservation at the University of Florida, Anna L. Peterson is professor in the Department of Religion and affiliated professor in
the School of Natural Resources and Environment and the center of Latin American Studies at the University of Florida, Richard R. Plate is a
postdoctoral researcher in the School of Forest Resources and Conservation at the University of Florida, and Leslie Paul Thiele, Director
Sustainability Studies at the University of Florida, “Working Toward Sustainability: Ethical Decision-Making in a Technological World”, Wiley,
11/1/11, http://books.google.com/books ?id=Kgbcfg_4a9cC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false)
The directive of the Brundtland Commission to meet "the needs of the present without compromising
the ability of future generations to meet their own needs" proposes a novel ethical concept. It frames
the rights of both present and future peoples , juxtaposes the rights of future versus present
generations, and suggests that everyone's needs should be fulfilled before the wants of some are
addressed. This view raises several questions. For example, can future individuals have rights? How is it possible to address the needs of
future peoples when the needs of the vast majority of the world's present population are not being met? What exactly are the "needs" that
must be met, and how might these be prioritized? Another lens through which to view the issue of future generations is that our ancestors
have greatly benefited us and that we have a similar obligation to the future. The Japanese concept of On is close to that of obligation, On
requires that one make past payment to one's ancestors by giving equally good or better conditions or things to posterity. Future persons may
be thought of as proxies for past generations to whom present people owe debts. These debts are repaid by providing as much or more to
future generations as our ancestors did for us," In
addition to the positive benefits that must be passed on to
future generations, harmful consequences must not be passed on. Many of the present day's
technologies are likely to pose ominous threats to future generations: genetic engineering,
nanotechnology, chemicals, antibiotics, pesticides, and nuclear reactors and their fuel cycles, to name
but a few. The resources we take, the products we make, and the resulting waste streams pose
enormous challenges for future generations. Consequently if sustainability suggests an obligation to
the well-being of future generations, how to deal with technology development and application must
be an issue of great concern, It should be clear by now that sustainability is a broad term encompassing a
number of ditferent concepts and goals. While the key to sustainability is integrating all of these concepts and goals, the
concepts must first be understood before they can be integrated. To facilitate that process, we have divided them into three sets of
interconnected concepts: social, ecological, and economic. Social
sustainability generally refers to the consequences of
a process to the social fabric of a community , It involves culture, justice, decision-making opportunities, and equity,
Ecological sustainability focuses on the health of the ecosystems that support both human and
nonhuman life. Economic sustainability focuses on the economic viability of a process, project,
enterprise, or community. Sustainability can be considered on a wide range of scales, from a single development to multinational or
global policies. To better understand these three ISQS, consider a proposed tourism development in a developing country. To assess the
development's social sustainability, one would look into the impacts of tourism on the local community. How will the influx of tourists disrupt
or enhance local traditions and values? What are the social costs associated with the development, and who will have to bear those costs? Will
the wealth generated be distributed so as to foster social justice? Who will run the businesses, and will the community have decision-
makinq_power? To assess the developments ecological sustainability, one would focus on the impacts of the development on the local
ecosystem. How will new construction and added visitors affect the quality of the ecosystems that support local life? How will such a develop
ment affect nonhuman species in the area? Changes in water, air, noise, lights, soil composition, or migration routes could have direct and local
impacts as well as indirect and regional impacts. To assess the economic sustainability, one would focus on the economic viability and impact of
the project. Will the enterprise be profitable in the long term? Will these profits be secured without externalizing costs to local, regional, or
global stakeholders? What types of jobs and business opportunities will be created, and what will their long-term impacts be? For
sustainability to be the outcome, these three systems must be balanced. Hence the popular depiction of
sustainability as a three-legged stool: to serve its function well, the three legs of the sustainability stool must be roughly of equal length (see
Figure 1.6).
Responsibility and management are key to preventing total ecological destruction –

only management gives people a sense of individual responsibility – turns the alt’s
localized politics
NACEPT 08 (National Advisory Council for Environmental Policy and Technology, “Everyone’s Business: Working Towards Sustainability
Through Environmental Stewardship and Collaboration”, March 2008,
http://permanent.access.gpo.gov/LPS118226/LPS118226/www.epa.gov/ocem/nacept/reports/pdf/2008-0328-everyones-business-final.pdf)
The idea of taking responsibility is central to stewardship . In its 2(D6-201 T Strategic Plan. for example. EPA refers to
environmental stewardship as "the sense of responsibility and ownership that goes with not only
meeting, but exceeding, existing regulatory requirements.'" According to Everyday Choices. "˜stewardship means
taking responsibility for our cholces."2 NACEPT endorses this definition. But what does taking responsibility mean? Because responsibility is so
central to the idea of environmental stewardship, it is worth stepping back to consider this question. Philosophers since the time of Aristotle
have grappled to define taking responsibility. Shifting through this long and extensive literature. three themes emerge. First, taking
responsibility requires that people see themselves as agents whose choices and actions make a
difference in the world. They are "˜response-able," that is, able to respond and bring about a response." EPA touches upon this idea
ln its 2(D6-201 T Strategic Plan when it writes of stewardship as a sense of ownership. Taking responsibility means owning the
consequences of one's actions. Second. those who take responsibility acknowledge that they may be
blamed or praised for their actions; that they may fairly be held responsible. Part of taking responsibility ls
accepting that it is appropriate for others to expect certain behaviors. Those who take responsibility understand that their actions are the "˜fair
target" of the reactions of others." The third condition for taking responsibility is that the first two conditions
be based on evidence."˜Â° People must see that their actions have an impact ln the world. People must
experience blame or praise for their actions. Taking responsibility must be based on actual experience, not some
theoretical concept. These three conditions for taking responsibility help clarify the meaning of environmental stewardship.
Environmental stewardship implies that people take ownership of the environmental consequences
of their actions. They acknowledge that others have the right to review and evaluate the impact of
their actions upon environmental quality. In addition. they experience direct evidence of the
consequences of their actions. both in terms of the environmental harms and benefits they cause as well as the judgments of
others. Stewardship thus polnts to the central role of information ln informing choices. assessing
consequences, and changing behavior. Stewardship and sustainability are related concepts, but quite different ln meaning.
Stewardship ls an ethic and practice of shared responsibility for envlronmental protection. EPA is on a journey from pollution
control, to pollution prevention, to stewardship. to sustainability . Stewardship can be seen as the
foundation of a bridge that takes us into the realm of sustainability . The process of taking responsibility for the
environmental consequences of our actions through ownership, acknowledgement, and change contributes to sustainability. Stewardship
focuses on a set of environmental behaviors and the role of evidence in informing our choices. It
is fundamental to sustainability,
but sustainability encompasses a broader set of ideas and actions. Sustainability is a characteristic of
living systems that embodies "˜the possibility of flourishing forever."
turn k --> tech domination
The K removes the element of social choice from technology – ensures further
technological domination
Feenberg 92 (Andrew, Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Technology in the School of Communication, Simon Fraser University,
“Subversive Rationalization: Technology, Power, and Democracy”, Inquiry 35, 1992,
http://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/books/Subversive_Rationalization_Technology_Power_Democracy.pdf)
Functional rationality, like scientific-technical rationality in general, isolates objects from their original
context in order to incorporate them into theoretical or functional systems . The institutions that
support this procedure-such as laboratories and research centers-themselves form a special context with
their own practices and links to various social agencies and powers. The notion of 'pure' rationality
arises when the work of decontextualization is not itself grasped as a social activity reflecting social
interests. Technologies are selected by these interests from among many possible configurations.
Guiding the selection process are social codes established by the cultural and political struggles that define the horizon under
which the technology will fall. Once introduced, technology offers a material validation of the cultural horizon
to which it has been preformed . I call this the 'bias' of technology: apparently neutral, functional rationality is enlisted
in support of a hegemony. The more technology society employs, the more significant is this support. As Foucault argues in his theory
of "˜power knowledge', modern forms of oppression are not so much based on false ideologies as on
effective techniques 'encoded' by the dominant hegemony to reproduce the system ." So long as that
act of choice remains hidden, the deterministic image of a technically justified social order is
projected. The legitimating effectiveness of technology depends on unconsciousness of the cultural-political horizon under which it was
designed. A recontextualizing critique of technology can uncover that horizon, demystify the illusion of
technical necessity, and expose the relativity of the prevailing technical choices.
Heidegger’s essentialist view of technology refuses to view its social context and
prevents both fixing its damage and recognizing its potential – turns the k
This critique gains force from the actual perils with which modern technology threatens the world today. But my
suspicions are
aroused by Heidegger's famous contrast between a dam on the Rhine and a Greek chalice. It would be
difficult to find a more tendentious comparison. No doubt modern technology is immensely more
destructive than any other. And Heidegger is right to argue that means are not truly neutral, that their substantive content affects
society independent ofthe goals they serve. But this content is not essenliallv destructive; rather, it is a matter of
design and social insertion. In another text, Heidegger shows us a jug 'gathering' the contexts in which it
was created and functions. There is no reason why modern technology cannot also 'gather' its
multiple contexts, albeit with less romantic pathos. This is in fact one way of interpreting
contemporary demands for such things as environmentally sound technology, applications of medical
technology that respect human freedom and dignity, urban designs that create humane living spaces,
production methods that protect workers' health and offer scope for their intelligence, and so on . What
are these demands if not a call to reconstruct modem technology, so that it gathers a wider range of contexts to itself rather than reducing its
natural, human, and social environment to mere resources? Heidegger
would not take these alternatives very seriously,
because he reifies modern technology as something separate from society, as an inherently
contextless force aiming at pure power. If this is the 'essence' of technology, reform would be merely extrinsic. But at this
point Heidegger's position converges with the very Prometheanism he rejects . Both depend on the
narrow definition of technology that, at least since Bacon and Descartes, has emphasized its destiny to control
the world to the exclusion of its equally essential contextual embeddedness . I believe that this definition
reflects the capitalist environment in which modern technology first developed . The exemplary modem master
of technology is the entrepreneur, singlemindedly focused on production and profit. The enterprise is a radically decontextualized platform for
action, without the traditional responsibilities for persons and places that went with technical power in the past. lt is the autonomy of the
enterprise that makes it possible to distinguish so sharply between intended and unintended consequences, between goals and contextual
effects, and to ignore the latter. The
narrow focus of modern technology meets the needs of a particular
hegemony; it is not a metaphysical condition. Under that hegemony technological design is unusually
decontextualized and destructive. It is that hegemony that is called to account, not technology per se,
when we point out that today technical means form an increasingly threatening lifeenvironment . It is
that hegemony, as it has embodied itself in technology, that must be challenged in the struggle for technological reform.
defense – case solves the impact
Sustainability management is opposed to capitalistic exploitation – environmental
management solves the impact
Thiele 2K (Leslie Paul, Director of Sustainability Studies at the University of Florida, “Limiting Risks: Environmental Ethics as a Policy
Primer”, Policy Studies Journal 28:3, 2000, EBSCOHost)
The science of ecology is a vast and continually expanding body of knowledge . Environmentalists
attempt to capture its essence under the rubric of three laws. The first law is that the social and natural
worlds are chiefly characterized by complex interdependence. The second law follows from the first: every
human action has an ecological effect or cost. Since these effects or costs ramify across time and space, the full ecological
impact of our actions will remain unknown to us. The third law is that the security, stability. and resilience of
ecological systems derive largely from their diversity and complexity. Preserving the health of the
natural environment therefore requires that limits be placed on those human activities that threaten
its integrity (List, 1993). These ecological laws underline the connectedness that characterizes the natural world. They express the scientific
import of ecological interdependence. When taken together, they generate two normative implications: an imperative
of sustainability and a precautionary principle. The imperative of sustainability is a future-focused
sensibility that is intrinsic to contemporary environmentalism . Environmentalists embrace an expanded time horizon.
They act with the welfare of future generations in mind and insist that our practices should not undermine themselves if continued over the
long term. The precautionary principle identifies the practical means of living under an expanded time horizon within nature's vast web of
interdependence. It dictates that humans advance with circumspection and act with restraint. To
be ecologically oriented is to be
future-focused and risk-averse. As interpreted by environmentalists, the three laws of ecology dictate
that we operate with an expanded time horizon and that we err on the side of caution whenever we
are in doubt as to the precise, long-term effects of our actions . The imperative of sustainability and the
precautionary principle stand in marked contrast to the powerful cultural forces currently fostering
unrestrained economic aid technological growth. To understand the normative priority of the imperative of sustainability
and the precautionary principle. it will be useful to examine how and why environmentalists embrace the aforementioned ecological laws.
perm
perm do both
Only a combination of critical reflection on technology and management and
recognition of their potential benefit can avoid essentialism and the impact of the K –
perm solves best
“From Essentialism to Constructivism: Philosophy of Technology at the Crossroads”, Questioning Technology, London Routledge, 1999,
http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/feenberg/talk4.html)
Heidegger, Habermas, and Borgmann have undoubtedly put their fingers on significant aspects of the technical phenomenon, but have they
identified its "essence?" They seem to believe that technical action has a kind of unity that defies the
complexity and diversity, the profound socio-cultural embeddedness, that twenty years of
increasingly critical history and sociology of technology have discovered in its various forms . Yet to
dissolve it into the variety of its manifestations , as constructivists sometimes demand, would effectively block
philosophical reflection on modernity. The problem is to find a way of incorporating these latter
advances into a conception of technology's essence, rather than dismissing them, as philosophers tend to do,
as merely contingent social "influences" on a reified technology "in itself" conceived apart from
society (9). The solution to this problem I propose is a radical redefinition of technology that crosses the
usual line between artifacts and social relations assumed by common sense and philosophers alike.
The chief obstacle to this solution is the unhistorical understanding of essence to which most philosophers
are committed. I propose, therefore, a kind of compromise between the philosophical and the social scientific perspective. In what
follows, I will attempt to construct a concept of the essence of technology that provides a systematic
locus for the socio-cultural variables that actually diversify its historical realizations . On these terms, the
"essence" of technology is not simply those few distinguishing features shared by all types of technical practice that are identified in Heidegger,
Habermas, and Borgmann. Those constant determinations are not an essence prior to history, but are merely abstractions from the various
historically concrete stages of a process of development (10). In the remainder of this paper, I will attempt to work out this alternative concept
of essence as it applies to technology. Is the result still sufficiently "philosophical" to qualify as philosophy? In claiming that it is, I realize that I
am challenging a certain prejudice against the concrete that is an occupational hazard of philosophy.
Plato is usually blamed for this prejudice, but in a late dialogue Parmenides mocks the young Socrates' reluctance to admit that there are ideal
forms of "hair or mud or dirt or any other trivial and undignified objects" (Cornford, 1957: 130C-E) (11). Surely
the time has come to
let the social dimension of technology into the charmed circle of philosophical reflection . Let me now offer,
if only schematically, a way of achieving this.
Permutation solves-Engaging with science and technology is essential to breaking

open new modes of thinking –the alternative divorces itself from the reality of
Enframing
Gilliland 02(Rex Gilliland, Heidegger Studies V18 (2002) p.115-128, “The Destiny of Technology: Modern Science and Human Freedom in
the Later Heidegger,”)
Ultimately, the question of the free relationship to destiny is a question for us. The only appropriate response to this
question is to seek a free relationship to destiny, i.e., to take part in the revealing of the destiny of
technology through engaging with its essence as enframing. By doing this, we prepare for the
possibility that destiny will reveal itself in a more originary way. Similarly, the question whether
modern science and technology have a destiny is a question that can be broached only through an
engagement with science and technology in their current form. To determine whether modern
science and technology contain possibilities that lead outside the domain of machination is something
that can only be carried out by engaging with and unfolding their possibilities. Since the attempt to establish a
free relationship to modern science is really a topic for another essay, we will conclude with a brief look at some of Heidegger’s remarks on this
matter. For Heidegger, does modern science have a destiny? Rorty’s claim that Heidegger had “considerable contempt for the natural sciences”
would suggest not. However, Heidegger’s critical remarks on many issues are frequently read in a merely negative sense. These readers do not
consider whether Heidegger’s response to what he is criticizing is more subtle than a simple rejection of it. This is not only the case with
Heidegger’s remarks on modern science and technology, but also with his criticisms of causality, the will, and metaphysics. Heidegger has these
sorts of readings in mind when he writes in the Letter on ‘Humanism’, “Because we are speaking against ‘humanism’ people fear a defense of
the inhuman and a glorification of barbaric brutality. For what is more ‘logical’ than that for somebody who rejects humanism, nothing remains
but the affirmation of inhumanity?” (W 176-177/LH 263; see W 177-179/LH 264-265). That Heidegger’s critique of
modern science does not entail a rejection of science can be seen in various aspects of our discussion
of The Question Concerning Technology. Though Heidegger argues that the essence of modern technology does not arise out
of modern physics, his discussion of the latter is hardly contemptuous or dismissive. In fact, he acknowledges the historical importance of
modern physics in the initial emergence of enframing (see GA 7:22-23/QCT 21-22). On the question of the destiny of modern science, it is
possible to draw parallels from Heidegger’s treatment of technology. As we have seen, Heidegger distinguishes the free relationship to modern
technology from the common rejection of the latter “as the work of the devil” (GA 7:7, 26/QCT 4, 26) .
If Heidegger is not
recommending that we abandon modern technology, it is likely that he is not recommending this
about modern science either. Where would we experience enframing if not in modern science and
technology? And if we can only engage with destiny through a relationship to enframing, does this
not suggest that enframing – and that through which we experience enframing – are essential to the
possibility that destiny will reveal itself in a more originary way? In The Question Concerning
Technology, Heidegger argues that modern science, like modern technology, is grounded in
enframing. The claim that science is grounded in something more originary, that science is a derivative discipline incapable of conceiving its
own essence, goes back at least as far as Being and Time (see SZ 11-13) and is a constant theme in Heidegger’s thought. However , this
claim is not a contemptuous rejection of the sciences but an attempt to identify their limits and to
trace the relationship of the sciences to philosophical thinking. Although Heidegger is critical of claims
made about the sciences and their discoveries that display an ignorance of these limits, as seen in his
discussions of machination and enframing, he also leaves open the possibility of a free relationship to
science. In the Beiträge (1936-1938), Heidegger discusses reflection (Besinnung) on science, a form of thinking similar to the
responsiveness to destiny discussed above. According to Heidegger, reflection on science is only possible today by means of grasping science
historically as one possibility of unfolding grounded in the truth of being, and considering the impulses that determine the essence of modern
science in its present form (GA 65:144/CP 100). In reflection, science is not conceived as something present at hand, whose essence can be
captured in representation. Rather, science is thought in terms of its grounding in the truth of being, as something that continues to unfold
from out of this ground.Heidegger takes this issue up again in the 1953 lecture Science and Reflection, a lecture that is closely related to The
Question Concerning Technology. In this lecture, Heidegger examines in detail how the various sciences reduce nature into standing reserve
and why the essence of science is inaccessible to the sciences (see GA 7:53-62/SR 171-179). But what is most interesting for us is what
Heidegger suggests about the possibility of a free relationship to science. Heidegger describes reflection as “releasement [Gelassenheit] into
what is worthy of question” (GA 7:63/SR 180), and he writes, at the end of the lecture, “Even if the sciences, precisely in
following their ways and using their means, can never press forward to the essence of science, every
researcher and teacher of the sciences, every human being pursuing a way through a science, can
indeed move, as a thinking being [Wesen], on various levels of reflection and can keep reflection
vigilant” (GA 7:65/SR 181-182; see also GA 65:96-97/CP 66-67). According to Heidegger, although
science is not the highest form of reflection, it is still possible for those involved with the sciences to
remain open to what is worthy of question in science. Scientists might not engage with the essence of
science as enframing or reflect on the possibility that destiny will reveal itself in a more originary way in
science. However, by keeping in mind that the essence of science is not itself scientific and that
science emerges through impulses that arise from a more originary ground , one can sustain an
openness to the non-machinational possibilities of science and preserve the wonder of what science
can reveal to us about beings. Ultimately, the question whether these possibilities will unfold
themselves or whether science will myopically turn its back upon its destiny is a question for us. For
only if we raise the question of the essence of science will we prepare the way for a free relationship
to science, a relationship that helps to preserve and unfold science’s destiny. Only by engaging with
the essential possibilities of science can we experience its destiny in the transformation to another
beginning, and not by turning our backs on science or naively trumpeting its advancement.
perm – eco-pragmatism
The perm is an eco-pragmatic approach that removes the worst of absolutist
management policies while recognizing true environmental threats
Angelo 06 (Mary Jane, University of Florida Levin College of Law, “University of Florida Levin College of Law”, UF Law Scholarship
Repository, 2006, http://scholarship.law.ufl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1033&context=facultypub)
For years, environmental legal scholars have sought a middle ground between absolutist risk-based
approaches to environmental regulation and cost/benefit analysis approaches . In the past several years,
scholars have begun exploring the emerging field of eco-pragmatismframework for environmental
decision-making developed by Professor Daniel Farber-to achieve a workable middle ground. At the same time, scholars
have begun to look at environmental law through the lens of ecological science. Common themes of complexity, uncertainty,
and change pemieate both eco-pragmatism and ecological science . Science has only scratched the
surface of understanding complex ecological systems . What little is understood about ecological
science teaches us that ecological systems are extremely complex and ever changing. Ecopragmatism
seeks to address concems with complexity, uncertainty and change . By incorporating ecological science into eco-
pragmatism, these challenging issues can be addressed more effectively. Accordingly, an integrated
approach drawing on the discipline of ecology-the study of the interactions of living organisms and
their environments-and ecopragmatism can provide a comprehensive framework to protect ecological
resources through environmental regulation. To date, no significant attempts have been made to analyze FIFRA," and only a
few attempts have been made to comprehensively analyze any other traditional pollution control law, under eco-pragmatism or principles of
ecological science."
An eco-pragmatic approach like the perm is best – recognizes the limitations of

scientific knowledge without the pitfalls of absolutist criticism like the K
Angelo 06 (Mary Jane, University of Florida Levin College of Law, “University of Florida Levin College of Law”, UF Law Scholarship
Repository, 2006, http://scholarship.law.ufl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1033&context=facultypub)
The roots of eco-pragmatism can be traced to early twentieth century philosophical pragmatism ." In its
broadest sense, pragmatism is a philosophy that relies on action, experimentation, and workable
solutions, rather than theoretical constructs." An aspect of philosophical pragmatism particularly relevant to integrating
ecological principles into environmental law is pragmatism's flexibility, which is rooted in acceptance of indeterminacy and the limitations of
human understanding. 12 Pragmatists embrace the idea that as more knowledge becomes available and as
society evolves ethical concerns also evolve. This philosophical acceptance of indeterminacy and
change complements the ecological principles of uncertainty and change , discussed in greater detail below.
Pragmatists also recognize that communities may hold many conflicting values. Pragmatic methodology is designed to
resolve conflicts in the way that best serves the community.1' Conflicts over environmental policy and
law are born of the conflicting values held by those who seek to reduce environmental risks as
opposed to those whose primary concern is economic efficiency . 4 Thus, pragmatism can serve as a
useful tool to reconcile the inevitable conflicts, which environmental policy must address .15 Professor
Daniel Farber's 1999 book, Ecopragmatism,16 paved the way for the recent flurry of scholarship attempting to use pragmatism as a guiding
principle for environmental regulation.17 Many environmental Professor Daniel Farber's 1999 book, Ecopragmatism,16 paved the way for the
recent flurry of scholarship attempting to use pragmatism as a guiding principle for environmental regulation.17 Many environmental
information, raising the related issues of whether precautionary approaches should be used in environmental decision-making and how to
incorporate adaptive management ideas into environmental laws. Farber answers these questions within a pragmatic framework, finding that
the pragmatic answers to the four questions are: 1) economics should be utilized in a hybrid approach
bridging the gap between pure risk-based and cost/benefit approaches; 2) environmental law should
presumptively favor the environment-an environmental baseline; 3) a low discount rate should be
employed in the valuation of long-term environmental benefits; and 4) flexible, adaptive approaches
are necessary to allow regulation to adapt as new information becomes available . Despite the strengths of
eco-pragmatism, as described more fully below, the theory is strengthened considerably by more consciously
incorporating principles of ecological science.
no impact
no impact – essentializing
The K essentializes technology and environmental management – ignores its positive
impacts and turns the K – ensures the worst forms of technology continue
The new picture emerging from social studies of science and technology gives us excellent reasons for
believing that rationality is a dimension of social life more similar than different from other cultural
phenomena. Nevertheless, it is implausible to dismiss it as merely a Western myth and to flatten all the distinctions which so obviously
differentiate modern from premodern societies (2). There is something distinctive about modern societies captured in notions such as
modernization, rationalization, and reification. Without such concepts, derived ultimately from Marx and Weber, we can make no sense of the
historical process of the last few hundred years. Yet
these are "totalizing" concepts that seem to lead back to a
deterministic view we are supposed to have transcended from our new culturalist perspective. Is
there no way out of this dilemma? Must we choose between universal rationality and cultural
variety? Or more accurately, can we choose between these two dialectically correlated concepts that are each unthinkable without the
other? That is the underlying question I hope to address in this paper through a critique of the account of technical action in Heidegger,
Habermas, and, as an instance of contemporary philosophy of technology, Albert Borgmann. Despite important differences I will discuss further
on, for
these thinkers modernity is characterized by a unique form of technical action and thought
which threatens non-technical values as it extends itself ever deeper into social life. They propose
substantive theories of technology in the sense that they attribute a more than instrumental , a
substantive, content to technical mediation. According to these theories, technology is not neutral. The
tools we use shape our way of life in modern societies where technique has become all pervasive. In this situation, means and ends cannot be
separated. How we do things determines who and what we are. Technological development transforms what it is to be human. Something like
this view is implied in Max Weber's pessimistic conception of an "iron cage" of rationalization, although he did not specifically connect it to
technology. Jacque Ellul, another major substantive theorist, makes that link explicit, arguing that the "technical phenomenon" has become the
defining characteristic of all modern societies regardless of political ideology. "Technique," he asserts, "has become autonomous" (Ellul, 1964:
6). Or, in Marshall McLuhan's more dramatic phrase: technology has reduced us to the "sex organs of the machine world" (McLuhan, 1964: 46).
Recognition of the central importance of technical phenomena in the philosophies of Heidegger and Habermas promises a much more concrete
social theory than anything possible in the past. However, neither
fulfills the initial promise of their breakthrough.
Both offer essentialist theories that fail to discriminate significantly different realizations of technical
principles. As a result, technology rigidifies into destiny in their thought and the prospects for reform
are narrowed to adjustments on the boundaries of the technical sphere. They hope that something —
albeit a very different something—can be preserved from the homogenizing effects of the radical extension of
technical systems, but they give us little reason to share their hope. In this talk I will attempt to preserve these
thinkers' advance toward the critical integration of technical themes to philosophy without losing the conceptual space for imagining a radical
reconstruction of modernity.
no impact to technological thinking
The K’s position on technology is overly simplistic – technological thought does not
necessitate control
This is a controversial position. The common-sense view of technology limits democracy to the state. By contrast, I believe that unless
democracy can be extended beyond its traditional bounds into the technically mediated domains of
social life, its use-value will continue to decline , participation will wither, and the institutions we identify with a free society
will gradually disappear. Let me tum now to the background to my argument. I will begin by presenting an overview of various theories
that claim that in so far as modern societies depend on technology, they require authoritarian
hierarchy. These theories presuppose a form of technological determinism which is refuted by
historical and sociological arguments I will briefly summarize. I will then present a sketch of a non-deterministic
theory of modem society I call 'critical theory of technology'. This alternative approach emphasizes contextual aspects
of technology ignored by the dominant view. I will argue that technology is not just the rational control of nature; both
its development and impact are intrinsically social. I will then show that this view undermines the
customary reliance on efficiency as a criterion of technological development. That conclusion, in turn,
opens broad possibilities of change foreclosed by the usual understanding of technology.
no envt impact
There’s no environment/benefit tradeoff – only technology and increased efficiency
can benefit both at once
The trade-off model confronts us with dilemmas -environmentally sound technology vs. prosperity,
workers' satisfaction and control vs. productivity, etc.-where what we need are syntheses. Unless the
problems of modern industrialism can be solved in ways that both enhance public welfare and win
public support, there is little reason to hope that they will ever be solved. But how can technological reform be
reconciled with prosperity when it places a variety of new limits on the economy? The child-labor case shows how apparent dilemmas arise on
the boundaries of cultural change, specifically where the social definition of major technologies is in transition. ln such situations, social groups
excluded from the original design network articulate their unrepresented interests politically. New values which the outsiders believe would
enhance their welfare appear as mere ideology to insiders who are adequately represented by the existing designs. This is a difference of
perspective, not of nature. Yet theillusion of essential conflict is renewed whenever major social changes
affect technology. At first, satisfying the demands of new groups after the fact has visible costs and,
if it is done clumsily, will indeed reduce efficiency until better designs are found. But, usually, better
designs can be found and what appeared to be an insuperable barrier to growth dissolves in the face
of technological change. This situation indicates the essential difference between economic exchange and technique. Exchange is
all about trade-offs: more of A means less of B. But the aim of technical advance is precisely to avoid
such dilemmas by elegant designs that optimize several variables at once. A single cleverly conceived mechanism
may correspond to many different social demands, one structure to many functions." Design is not a zero- sum economic
game but an ambivalent cultural process that serves a multiplicity of values and social groups without
necessarily sacrificing efficiency.
no root cause
Heidegger ignores the social context and meaning of technology – means-ends is an
oversimplification and not the root cause of the impact
ln the remainder of this paper I would like to present several major themes of a non-determinist approach to technology. The picture sketched
so far implies a significant change in our definition of technology. It can no longer be considered as a collection of
devices, nor, more generally, as the sum of rational means. These are tendentious definitions that
make technology seem more functional and less social than in fact it is. As a social object, technology ought
to be subject to interpretation like any other cultural artifact , but it is generally excluded from humanistic study. We
are assured that its essence lies in a technically explainable function rather than a hermeneutically
interpretable meaning. Ai most, humanistic methods might illuminate extrinsic aspects of technology, such as packaging and
advertising, or popular reactions to controversial inno- vations such as nuclear power or surrogate motherhood. Technological
determinism draws its force from this attitude. If one ignores most of the connections between
technology and society, it is no wonder that technology then appears to be self-generating. Technical
objects have two hermeneutic dimensions that I call their social meaning and their cullural horizon ." The role of social meaning is
clear in the case ofthe bicycle introduced above. We have seen that the construction of the bicycle
was controlled in the first instance by a contest of interpretations: was it to be a sportsman's toy or a
means of transportation? Design features such as wheel size also served to signify it as one or another type of object." lt might be
objected that this is merely an initial disagreement over goals with no hermeneutic significance. Once the object is stabilized, the engineer has
the last word on its nature, and the humanist interpreter is out of luck. This is the view of most engineers and managers; they readily grasp the
concept of 'goal' but they have no place for 'meaning"˜. In fact the dichotomy of goal and meaning is a product of functionalist professional
culture, which is itself rooted in the structure of the modern economy. The
concept of 'goal' strips technology bare of
social contexts, focusing engineers and managers on just what they need to know to do their job. A
fuller picture is conveyed, however, by studying the social role of the technical object and the
lifestyles it makes possible. That picture places the abstract notion of 'goal' in its concrete social context. It makes
technology's contextual causes and consequences visible rather than obscuring them behind an
impoverished functionalism. The functionalist point of view yields a decontextualized temporal cross- section in the life of the
object. As we have seen, determinism claims implausibly to be able to get from one such momentary configuration of the object to the next on
purely technical terms. But
in the real world all sorts of unpredictable attitudes crystallize around technical
objects and influence later design changes. The engineer may think these are extrinsic to the device he or she is working on,
but they are its very substance as a historically evolving phenomenon.
link debate
no link
No link - Heidegger conflates technological domination with its social causes –
instrumental rationality is not universal to technological thought
But the most powerful critiques of modern technological society follow directly in Weber's footsteps in rejecting this possibility. I am
thinking of Heidegger's formulation of 'the question of technology' and Ellul's theory of "˜the technical
phenomenon"˜." According to these theories, we have become little more than objects of technique,
incorporated into the mechanism we have created. As Marshall McLuhan once put it, technology has reduced us to the
'sex organs of machines"˜. The only hope is a vaguely evoked spiritual renewal that is too abstract to inform a new technical practice. These are
interesting theories, but I have time to do little more than pay tribute to their contribution to opening a space of reflection on modem
technology. Instead, to advance my own argument, I
will concentrate on their principal flaw, the identification of
technology in general with the specific technologies that have developed in the last century in the
West. These are technologies of conquest that pretend to an unprecedented autonomy; their social
sources and impacts are hidden. I will argue that this type of technology is a particular feature of our
society and not a universal dimension of 'modernity' as such.
alt
alt fails - scholarship
Luke’s alt misses the point – he critiques from an academic armchair rather than
engaging political institutions and his scholarship is shoddy at best – means the alt
fails
Thiele 98 (Leslie Paul, Director of Sustainability Studies at the University of Florida, “Ecocritique: Contesting the Politics of Nature,
Economy, and Culture (review)”, The American Political Science Review 92:3, Sept. 1998, Proquest)
For Luke, nature has been denatured through the commodification of life that accompanies corporate
hegemony. Instead of directly taking on the institutions of translational capitalism, however, he
criticizes environmentalists for being insufficiently radical in their own struggles against these institutions. There is,
of course, a long tradition of armchair philosophers haranguing social activists for their compromises. Still,
the irony is pungent. It is heightened by the fact that Luke's critique of too-timid, business-friendly
environmentalism has been accompanied by the standard academic practice of producing a resource-
consuming literary commodity of dubious recyclable value. The connections to corporate capitalism of many of the
mainstream environmental organizations certainly deserves criticism. Yet, Luke might have given due to those
environmental groups that assail-in word and deed-the ecological irresponsibility of corporate powe r,
such as the Center for Health, Environment and Justice (formerly Citizens Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste), Earth
Island Institute, Friends of the Earth, and Greenpeace, to name but a few. Luke picks easier targets. He focuses
on The Nature Conservancy (TNC), a wealthy, business-like organization that purchases ecologically rich land and sets it aside for preservation.
Luke questions whether these efforts to preserve biologically diverse tracts of land actually undermines the "cause of Nature preservation"
because it reduces "Nature to real estate" (p. 58). This reduction should never be accepted, Luke insists, though he does not address whether
all forms of land ownership are equally illegitimate. To acquire its land, TNC needs lots of money. Like many other environmental organizations,
it engages in endless fundraising. For good reason, this focus on revenue worries Luke. For many, environmentalism has primarily become a
business enterprise. But Luke is wrong to assume that TNC does not also solicit from its members and patrons the
"more messy contributions [of] time, labor, or moral witness" (p. 61). Like most environmental organizations in America, it
relies heavily on volunteer efforts. While paid staff at TNC number a few hundred, about 25,000 of its
members contribute 300,000 hours yearly doing the messy volunteer work of ecological preservation
and restoration.
alt fails – utopian
Luke fails to offer a coherent vision of a possible alternative – dooms the K from the
start
Thiele 98 (Leslie Paul, Director of Sustainability Studies at the University of Florida, “Ecocritique: Contesting the Politics of Nature,
Economy, and Culture (review)”, The American Political Science Review 92:3, Sept. 1998, Proquest)
Luke rejects "ecosocialist millenarianism." He also dismisses the "utopian ecologism" of deep
ecologists because it fails to outline the practicable means for realizing its moral vision and, like most other
revolutionary programs, lacks "a theory of the transition" (pp. 24-5). This is clearly a case of the pot calling the kettle
black. Notwithstanding a fine chapter on Murray Bookchin's environmental philosophy and Luke's insistence that all environmental advocacy
must be "workable and realistic" (p. 203), Ecocritique remains divorced from practicality and is a stranger to
transitional strategy. The "ecological populism" promoted by Luke would entail "rebuilding the
contemporary city and society from the ground up around new aesthetic sensibilities ." It would
require "equal participation by every community member in shared action to make collective
decisions," such that, in the end, everyone will hold "equitable shares of property, power, and
privilege in the community commonwealth" (pp. 200-1). Luke's unwillingness to suggest any viable means
of achieving these ends is troubling. It is particularly suspect owing to his disparagement of those who
take the small steps that might slowly move individuals and societies down the road to ecological
responsibility. Luke insists that "only the actions of a very small handful of the humans that are now living, namely those in significant
positions of decisive managerial power in business or central executive authority in government, can truly do something to determine the
future" (p. 126). That conviction is what most separates environmental activists from those who write books about environmental activists.
Reflecting on Plato's idealism, Aristotle observed that the best often becomes the enemy of the good. One
senses that Luke's
diatribe against environmental reformism gains its fire from a vision of the ecological and
sociopolitical best. This alluring vision will never come closer to realization, however, if yearnings for
what is best undermine all concrete efforts to achieve what is good . Luke's ideal of a global confederation of
ecologically benign and fully egalitarian communities is infatuating. Yet, in the end, Luke's unwillingness to addres s the
practical means of its achievement leaves the reader forlorn. One is reminded of the traveler who
asked a resident for directions to a small town in the region. "Ah, yes, that's quite a few turns in the
road. If I were you, I wouldn't start from here!"
alt fails – vague
Heideggerian critiques of technology in the environment can’t discriminate between
different instances of technology because of their vagueness – alt can never solve any
of them
So far so good. But there are significant ambiguities in Heidegger's approach. He warns us that the essence
of technology is nothing technological , that is to say, technology cannot be understood through its
functionality, but only through our specifically technological engagement with the world. But is that
engagement merely an attitude or is it embedded in the actual design of modern technological
devices? In the former case, we could achieve the free relation to technology which Heidegger demands
without changing technology itself. But that is an idealistic solution in the bad sense, and one which a
generation of environmental action would seem decisively to refute. Heidegger's defenders point out
that his critique of technology is not merely concerned with human attitudes but with the way being reveals itself.
This means, roughly translated again out of Heidegger's language, that the modern world has a technological form in
something like the way in which, for example, the medieval world had a religious form . Form in this sense is
no mere question of attitude but takes on a material and institutional life of its own: power plants are the gothic cathedrals of our time . But
this interpretation of Heidegger's thought raises the expectation that criteria for a reform of
technology as a material and institutional reality might be found in his critique. For example, his analysis of the
tendency of modern technology to accumulate and store up nature's powers suggests the superiority of another technology
that would not challenge nature in Promethean fashion. Unfortunately, Heidegger's argument is
developed at such a high level of abstraction he literally cannot discriminate between electricity and
atom bombs, agricultural techniques and the Holocaust. All are merely different expressions of the identical
enframing, which we are called to transcend through the recovery of a deeper relation to being. And since he rejects technical
regression while leaving no room for a modern alternative, it is difficult to see in what that relation
would consist beyond a mere change of attitude. Surely these ambiguities indicate problems in his
approach
Heidegger’s alternative is impossible – he offers no alternative way of living, only a

universal condemnation of technology
On the one hand, his defenders have to admit that the

highway bridge passage is the one and only instance in his
whole corpus of a positive evaluation of a modem technology. Alongside this passage, there are dozens of
others that reek of volkisch nostalgia for the good old days of thatch roofed huts, silver chalices, quill
pens, humble jugs, wooden shoes, and suchlike trappings of the elitist anti-modernism of right-wing
German intellectuals in the Weimar and Hitler period . There is even an amusing passage in the Parmenides
lectures where Heidegger attacks the typewriter for alienating the hand from the word , apparently to the
amusement of his students whom he asks for forebearance. (Thomson discusses this passage and tries to tind in it an anticipatory critique of
word processing. I am not persuaded.) I believe that this is not merely a nervous tic of an old mandarin, but theoretically significant. Its
significance lies in the fact that one
finds no criteria for the transformation of modem technology anywhere in
Heidegger. Despite all the efforts to complicate the picture with learned reflections on the word
Wesen, the fact is that Heidegger envisages only three ways of making things, art, craft, and modem
technology, and his critique of the latter for challenging nature and storing up its powers implies that
almost everything we associate with industrial society is bad. This was a common view in Heidegger's conservative
academic milieu, as Hans Sluga convincingly argues, and Heidegger fits right in (Sluga [1993]). This is not to reject out of hand attempts of
Heideggerians such as Thomson to develop a philosophy of technology based on Heidegger, but it does suggest that they
ought to
admit the extent of their own originality with respect to the master. What they would lose in
borrowed authority, they would more than regain in plausibility.
alt turn – risk management key
Risk management according to ecological principles is key – the alternative allows
worse forms of technological risk management to fill in and continue ecological
destruction via economic exploitation – turns the K
Thiele 2K (Leslie Paul, Director of Sustainability Studies at the University of Florida, “Limiting Risks: Environmental Ethics as a Policy
Primer”, Policy Studies Journal 28:3, 2000, EBSCOHost)
Reducing environmental risks is certainly a laudable goal, but it is seldom cost or risk free. Ideally,
the effort to reduce risk
would constitute a scientifically and ethically informed exercise in implementing favorable "risk trade-
offs." The goal would be to minimize overall risk while ensuring equity in the distribution of risks and
compensation for inequitable distributions. One also would have to account for the tolerance levels of the general pubiic for
various forms of involuntary, environmental risks. ln a democratic society. presumably, risks targeted for reduction should be those that an
informed public is least willing to accept (Graham & Wiener, 1995). Certain environmentalists refuse to engage in any
form of risk assessment and risk management. They have reason to be wary. As currently practiced, risk assessment and risk
management are prone to misuse and often serve the interests of the producers of involuntary environmental risks rather than their victims.
Yet abstaining from scientific or ethical criticism of risk assessment and management is unwise. [thas the
effect of maintaining status quo values and practices (Patton, 1993; Shrader-Frechette, 1985, p. 81). If we forego critical
engagement, the likelihood is that risk assessment and risk management will continue to be employed
in ways that undenfalue or ignore ecological and ethical concerns {Sl1rader-Frechette, 1985, p. 200). For this reason,
risk assessment and risk management require close monitoring and informed criticism. Currently, risk assessment and risk
management operate within a culture driven by technoiogical, economic. and political forces that are
seldom environmentally benign, 'Die imperative of technology might be summarized by the dictum: "If we can do it, we should do
it." Economic practices are grounded in business efforts to maximize profits and in the marketing logic
that supply creates demand. Politics, notwithstanding its enduring ideals, often reduces itself to a
pandering to the powerful. These technological, economic, and political forces form a dangerous
liaison. The politicians, ultimately responsible for managing the environmental risks we face. often follow the path of least resistance laid out
by business interests that, now more than ever. find their profit margins widened by technological innovation and the stimulation of mass
consumption. Operating together in advanced industrial nations, these technological, economic, and
political forces degrade natural habitats, pollute air, land. and water . create toxic waste, deplete
natural resources, and overproduce synthetic goods and chemically altered foodstuffs . In short. this coalition
of forces produces most of the anthropogenic, involuntary environmental risks that we currently face. Environmentalists marshal
scientific knowledge and ethical conviction in their struggle against the technological. economic and
political forces generating environmental risks, Facts and values supplement each other Indeed. environmentalists argue
that scientific knowledge and normative values coalesce in certain ecological laws. These ecological laws allow
environmentalists to ground risk assessment and risk management upon a scientifically sound. and
morally informed, foundation.
alt turn – alt links
Heidegger’s reflective thinking allows for technological thought to fill in in even more
subversive forms – the alt links
Haynes 08 (John D., Professorial Visiting Fellow School of Information Systems, Technology and Management University of New South
Wales, “Calculative Thinking and Essential Thinking in Heidegger’s Phenomenology”, March 2008,
http://wwwdocs.fce.unsw.edu.au/sistm/staff/Heidegger_calculation_essential_March08.pdf)
I have been speaking of care of the other and kindling the other as one’s own as a by-product of
essential thinking. The question inevitably arises, how are we to know that such caring is a genuine
care? How are we to know that the care comes from a ground of genuine essential thinking? If the (purported) essential
thinking is not genuine, that is, if it has not reached a stage of self-consciousness and is, for example,
trapped in self-awareness or spuriously elevated above it, then there is a danger of spurious care of
the other. Hence there is a danger of self-awareness attempting to evolve itself, but lacking the necessary development of care to do so. I
take as an example of non genuine essential thinking (calculative thinking in disguise) Don Ihde’s case
of the technofact, namely technology as alterity or the “other”, where one’s thinking embraces -
spuriously cares for as one’s own - technology. Consider the following quotations from Ihde (Ihde 1988, p 255): These
romanticizations are the alterity counterparts to .. dreams which wish for total embodiment. Were the technofact to be genuinely other it
would both be and not be technology. But even as quasi-other, the technology falls short of such totalization. It retains its unique role in the
human-technology continuum of relations, as the medium of transformation but as a recognizable medium. (Ihde 1988, p 256): The existential
relations humans experience may also be found within the realm of their own inventiveness, in those technologies which are made, but which,
once made, take on the characteristics of the other. Those
technologies, referred to above, do take on the
characteristics of the other, but that does not mean that we should be fooled into seeing them as
genuine others. Were we fooled then this would be a case of spurious essential thinking, t hat thinking
of ourselves as wise in this respect, we are really fools to our own appearance and do nothing more
than give away our own power to care for both ourselves and “others”!

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2014 NDI 6WS – Fitzmier, Lundberg,

- internal link turns that say management is good

i hope that makes some sense. happy critiquing managerialism!

--anja beth and shanelle

Not surprisingly, then, thevarious power/knowledge systems of instituting a Worldwatch environmentality

1. Eco-managerialism drives reduction of nature to mere resource – it’s the root

2. [insert more aff-specific links here]

4. The alternative is to embrace meditative thought to break open new ways of

- view this debate in terms of terminal uniqueness – ecological collapse is

- and outweighs on probability – their war scenarios and environmental disasters

2. A critical pedagogy surrounding the environment is critical – it is in educational

The aff’s environmental protection is an unsustainable quick-fix solution to a problem

Environmental “development” is a guise for technological denaturing and

The Worldwatch Institute provides a very curious instantiation of how a

As Beck suggests, this risk

The aff’s preoccupation with environmental catastrophe is a form of risk

Environmentalism creates a human/nature binary that is the precondition for

Both reform and radical environmentalism subscribe to Cartesian divisions of

To discuss more expert/formal/ordered geoengineering in some future conditional sense, however,

Geoengineering is a techno-fix that ensures the problem will be recreated in the

Not surprisingly, then, thevarious power/knowledge systems of instituting a Worldwatch environmentality

The effect of observation is to render Nature a manageable, controllable object –

A few years after the Americans landed on the moon, the

This is our time's Copernican revolution: the

“Science” as environmental management is corrupt – programs focus on marketability

Science’s self-representation as exact predetermines its own answers – turns the

Without recourse to citing William James, today‟s

At one level, the

Enframing of nature enframes humanity – we come to exist only to fulfill ordered

Environmental managerialism turns into biopolitical population control – everyone’s

The alt opens us up to rethink managerialism – solves the case

Meditative thought is key – understanding of the ever-changing and unknowable

Only a grassroots approach solves – individual mindset is ket

Mcwhorter and Stenstad 09

Prioritization claims are counter-productive---you should evaluate the veracity of the

A third axis of contestation has been

IR theory cannot sidestep metatheoretical debates . Second, it is important to take post-

'structured pluralism' best captures this last move, as it

Sustainable environmental management is critical to the survival of future generations

Responsibility and management are key to preventing total ecological destruction –

Permutation solves-Engaging with science and technology is essential to breaking

An eco-pragmatic approach like the perm is best – recognizes the limitations of

Heidegger’s alternative is impossible – he offers no alternative way of living, only a

On the one hand, his defenders have to admit that the

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